The Charismatic Structure of the Church: Priesthood and Religious Life at Vatican Ii and Beyond

By Michael McGuckian S.J.

This book is a thorough analysis and interpretation of chapters 5 and 6 of Lumen gentium. It begins with ‘The Long Background,’ the story of the religious life from the beginning, focussing on the tension between the Religious and the Secular clergy that became the dominant source of tension in the debate over these two chapters at the Council. There were irresolvable differences between the two groups at the Council and the documents had to leave them unsettled. The book sets out to solve the problems on the universal call to holiness, the theology of the religious life, and the charismatic structure of the Church, which refers to the role of the Bishops and the Secular Clergy in the pursuit of holiness in the Church. The answers came as complete surprise to the author and propose novel approaches to all three issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664168954

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Copyright © 2021 by Michael McGuckian, S.J.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Rev. date: 04/23/2021

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CONTENTS

Introduction

PART 1: THE LONG BACKGROUND

Chapter 1 The Early History of the Religious Life

Chapter 2 The Tension between the Secular and the Regular Clergy

Chapter 3 Tension Within the Secular Clergy

Chapter 4 The Debate at the University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century

Chapter 5 Post-Tridentine Developments

Chapter 6 The Louvain School of Clerical Spirituality

Chapter 7 The Role of the Jesuits

Chapter 8 The Belgian Debate between the Seculars and the Jesuits

PART 2: THE COUNCIL

Chapter 1 The Council Fathers, the Periti, and the ‘Factories’

Chapter 2 The Preparatory Schemas

Chapter 3 The Religious Life in the Document on the Church?

Chapter 4 The Place of the Religious Life in the Church

Chapter 5 The Path to Schema II

Chapter 6 Schema II on the Evangelical Counsels

Chapter 7 The Jesuit Reaction

Chapter 8 The Final Phase

PART 3: THE UNIVERSAL CALL TO HOLINESS

Chapter 1 The Same Holiness for All?

Chapter 2 The Obligation to Holiness

Chapter 3 The Pelagian Controversy

Chapter 4 St Augustine’s Reaction

Chapter 5 The Universal Obligation to Holiness

Chapter 6 The New Law

Chapter 7 The Content of the New Law

Chapter 8 Reviewing the ‘Revolutionary’ Theory of the New Law

Chapter 9 The Christian Vocation

PART 4: THE THEOLOGY OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Two Theologies at the Council and Afterwards

Chapter 2 The Rebuttal of the Holocaust Theory

Chapter 3 The Vow of Obedience

Chapter 4 The Counsels as Means to Holiness

Chapter 5 Evangelical Poverty

Chapter 6 The Counsel of Sexual Abstinence

Chapter 7 The Superiority of Abstinence

Chapter 8 The Superiority of Evangelical Poverty

PART 5 THE CHARISMATIC STRUCTURE

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Clerical State of Perfection

Chapter 2 Is the Religious Life a Separate State in the Church?

Chapter 3 The Vita Apostolica

Chapter 4 The Charismatic Structure

Conclusion

Abbreviations

Bibliography

Introduction

According to Karl Rahner, researching a Council is ‘like the mining of radium. A ton of ore has to be sifted in order to get 0.14 grams of radium; and it is still worth it.’¹ It is to be hoped that this book will verify Rahner’s view. There is certainly no doubt about the amount of material involved. The book presents an account of one small part of what happened at Vatican II; being the story of the process that led to the final redaction of chapters 5 and 6 of Lumen Gentium, on the universal call to holiness and the religious life. According to Gérard Philips, the overall redactor of Lumen Gentium, there is a complicated story behind these chapters,² and he also tells us that this section on holiness was the most difficult of all.³ The amount of work involved is very great, for, as one commentator remarked thirty years ago, ‘an accurate grasp of the facts, of the complex iter which led to the formulation of the texts definitively approved, is absolutely necessary to understand the true value of the conciliar teaching.’⁴ The records of the debate are all, or nearly all, in the published Acta of the Council.⁵ The editor of the official record makes the interesting comment that ‘with all the documents available, it is possible to know what happened better even than those who were there, for one has access now to documents unavailable to most of the participants.’⁶

It is commonly understood that the major novelty in this area has been the re-discovery of the universal call to holiness. John O’Malley has suggested that:

[p]erhaps the most remarkable aspect of Lumen Gentium is chapter five, The Call to Holiness. Lumen Gentium thus set the agenda, leading the way for the call to holiness to become one of the great themes running through the Council. … Holiness, the council thus said, is what the church is all about. This is an old truth, of course, and in itself not remarkable. Yet no previous council had ever explicitly asserted this idea and certainly never developed it so repeatedly and at length.⁷ … [Chapter five] imbued Lumen Gentium with its finality by saying explicitly, forcefully, and for the first time ever in a council that holiness is what the church is all about, what human life is all about.⁸

This would be coherent with comments made by the two popes of the Council, John XXIII and Paul VI. Pope John XXIII, in his programmatic address to the Council, said that the greatest concern of the Ecumenical Council is that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously. He then went on:

This doctrine embraces the whole human being, composed of body and soul, and it commands us, who are residents of this earth, to hasten as pilgrims towards the heavenly homeland. It also demonstrates how our mortal life is to be ordered in such a way as to fulfil our duties as citizens of earth and of heaven, and thus to attain the end established by God. That is, all humans, whether taken singly or as united in society, have the duty of ceaselessly pursuing heavenly goods while this life lasts, and in order to achieve this, their use of earthly things should be such that the use of temporal goods will not put their eternal beatitude at risk.⁹

It is clear from this that, for Pope John, the primary aspect of Christian doctrine which the Council was to guard and teach is its doctrine about how we should live our lives on earth, i.e. holiness. And after the Council, Pope Paul VI said that he considered that ‘this call to holiness is held to be the most special task of the conciliar magisterium and its ultimate goal.’¹⁰

This issue of the universal call to holiness and the ‘two ways’ of reaching it has been presented as the primary issue involved in these two chapters of Lumen Gentium, even by those who were most closely involved in the whole process, Philips, Wulf, Thils – Clearly the issue is of fundamental importance. A full examination of the evidence now available, however, demands that a major qualification be made to this interpretation. The universal call was indeed part of the discussion, but only a part. It was not an issue at all during the preparatory phase and only emerged during the process as one of the principles that had to be examined in order to understand the underlying issue that was being addressed.

That issue was what Karl Rahner named at the time, the ‘charismatic structure’ of the Church. As Rahner points out, that there should be a chapter on the religious life at all is not a self-evident proposition, and he recalls that the schema on the Church prepared for the First Vatican Council did not contain anything on the religious life. At the Second Vatican Council there was a desire for a realistic presentation of the Church, one that does not merely describe its abstract juridical structure but a treatment which also takes into account the inward mystery of grace in the Church.¹¹ The desire was to perceive, in addition to the institutional and juridical structures in the Church, the ‘charismatic structure’ as well.¹² Rahner made this suggestion in a submission to the German Bishops during the Council:

It is to be kept in mind that this chapter forms part of a schema on the Church. It follows therefore that what is said about the evangelical counsels deals with them, not as something merely private concerning individuals, but as an element in the constitution of a state in the Church. Hence the relationship of the counsels to the Church and their special function in the Church as such should be brought out.¹³

The over-arching theme of the Council as a whole was the theology of the Church. In his allocution opening the second session of the Council, Pope Paul VI declared that the goal of the Council was to deal with the Church, her understanding of herself, her renewal, and the two key tasks of ecumenism and dialogue with the world.¹⁴ The primary goal, therefore, was that the Church would ‘say to herself what she thinks about herself,’¹⁵ and it was in this context that the question was raised as to the position and status of the religious life within the Church. The matter had already been under consideration during the 1950s before the Council was called. The second of two large congresses of religious superiors which took place in 1950 and 1957 was organized for this purpose, to bring about the complete insertion of the religious life into the Church.¹⁶ And shortly after this a large theological symposium was held to tackle the issue.¹⁷ This was the issue being addressed at the Council. When the chapter on the religious life in the first schema De Ecclesia came before the Central Commission for examination, Cardinal Ottaviani, in his relatio presenting the document, explained that the effort was to explain how the evangelical counsels belong to the Mystical Body of Christ.¹⁸

This effort to discern the charismatic structure of the Church brought to the surface a tension which is not well known. There were many disputed issues at the Council and some made more headlines than others. We are all familiar with the major ones such as religious liberty, ecumenism, other religions, but as one of the few commentators to mention the matter has pointed out,

[s]ubmerged beneath the focus of publicity on these … subjects was the perennially delicate question of the relationship of the diocesan and religious clergy. Like a scandal within the family, the internal ruptures between religious orders, Bishops, and diocesan clergy have been matters discussed privately at rectories or in the common rooms of religious orders, but hostility, competition and family embarrassment plainly were not matters digestible in public.¹⁹

This was not simply a matter of tension and mutual irritation. There were serious theological issues involved and these must be borne in mind in order to understand what was going on. Fitting the religious life into the Church necessarily involves clarifying its relationship to the clergy, the primary group in the Church of divine institution, and this raised serious structural questions. The matters in dispute turned out to have roots going back a long way indeed. John O’Malley, in his book on the Council, says that the first context to which one must attend is ‘to la longue durée, to the ongoing impact of events that happened centuries ago.’²⁰ And that is certainly true in this case, and for that reason a ‘long background’ section is required in order to understand what happened in this small part of Vatican II.

Part 1

The Long Background

Chapter 1

The Early History of the Religious Life

The story begins with the vita apostolica in its second form, the way of life of the Apostles and the early Church in Jerusalem described in the Acts of the Apostles. This idyllic experience of Christian life right at the very beginning has been taken as the ideal to be sought in every generation, and theoreticians of the religious life, in its various forms, have ever taken this original form of the ‘apostolic life’ as their model, but it is significant that throughout the first two centuries of the Church’s life, this community ideal was part of the catechesis taught to all without distinction.²¹ Within the community, alms was taken to be the rule, those who had goods and property would share with those who didn’t, and this characteristic was always taken as central to the ‘apostolic life,’ the vita apostolica.²² Celibacy was also an intimate part of the early Christian teaching. So much so, indeed, that after St Paul had spent 18 months with the Corinthians they wrote to ask if marriage was permitted at all (1 Cor. 7)!

The committed celibate life began immediately, and right from the start ascetics, continents and virgins were an integral part of the Christian community and were recognised as having a special role within it.²³ Already in the Acts of the Apostles (6:1; 9:39, 41), the widows are recognised as a separate group within the community, and in 1 Tim. 5:3-16, St Paul gives guidelines as to the organisation of the state of consecrated widowhood. It was not long before single people also, both men and women, began to follow St Paul’s counsel in 1 Cor. 7:25 to remain unmarried for the Lord’s sake, and they were first of all known as ‘virgins,’ for the women, and ‘continents,’ for the men. Later they could also be called ‘ascetics,’ and later still apotaktikoi (renouncers), depending upon which aspect of the life was being highlighted. The fundamental distinguishing mark, however, has always been celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. These celibates began to receive special mention in the liturgy after the clergy and before the laity, and on Good Friday up until the recent reform, the liturgy prayed ‘for all the Bishops, priests, deacons, subdeacons, doorkeepers, confessors, virgins, widows and for the whole people of God.’²⁴ As Pope Pius XII put it in Provida Mater Ecclesia: ‘In the Apostolic Fathers and the older Christian writers there is abundant evidence that in the various local churches the profession of a life of perfection had developed to a stage where it had begun to constitute an order or social class (‘ascetics’, ‘continents’, ‘virgins’) widely accepted, approved and esteemed.’ ²⁵ These celibates who were pursuing holiness with a particular zeal continued to live in the heart of the community and there was as yet no separation. The Church was the assembly, the ‘communion of saints,’ the one body of holiness, in which every Christian receives and lives the divine life. ²⁶ The same Christian morality with its full demands was proclaimed to all together at the same time, so that the universal call to perfection was the basis of the common teaching, as is the case in the letters of St Paul.²⁷

At this stage, the vita apostolica was fully linked to the persons of the Apostles, and then to their successors, the Bishops. These continued to live the apostolic life so that through them the whole community was impregnated with the same ideal,²⁸ and the development of the celibate life in these early centuries was guided at every stage by the Bishops. The virgins lived in their own homes and took part in the social life of the local church. They did not wear any special clothes or distinctive sign, and there is no indication of any of them living a community life. Around the primitive and essential nucleus of celibacy there appeared voluntary poverty, fasts, abstinence from certain foods, nocturnal vigils, more frequent prayer, especially the psalms.²⁹ Their commitment was understood to be a stable and definitive profession, undertaken with the knowledge of the community and the prior approval, at least implicit, of the bishop, though at this earliest stage it does not seem as if they were assigned a special place in the church.³⁰ As the discussion progresses, right down to and during the Council, this early experience will take on a particular importance, so it is well to note how the ascetical life was first lived out within the Christian congregations, usually in quite ordinary settings. ‘This last fact leads us to speak of ‘family asceticism’ – ascetics, male and female, living in and with their families – as the common form of pre-monastic asceticism.’³¹ And part of that ‘family asceticism’ also involved married couples themselves vowing to live as brother and sister, and making public their profession of continence.³²

It was during the third and fourth centuries that things began to change. The Christian virgins become more numerous. They embraced their state in a liturgical ceremony, now forming part of a juridically constituted body, and occupying a place of honour in the liturgical ceremonies.³³ Their ascetical life was under the guidance of the Bishops, who preached to them and wrote about the manner of life expected of them.³⁴ At this stage the Bishops began to encourage them to gather together in communities under the leadership of the Bishop himself, or of a cleric designated for the task, and this marks the emergence of the first feminine religious communities, as mentioned, for example, in the Life of Anthony, 3.³⁵ ‘Individual renunciants – ‘apotactics’ – celibates who had adopted a distinctive style of dress and lived in community houses as well as syneisakts, women who live a life of chastity under the spiritual direction of clerics, had long been a feature on the scene in both Alexandria and smaller towns even in the early fourth century.’³⁶

Among the men, an interesting example of the kind of thing that was going on was found in Syria, where an institution developed known as the ‘sons of the covenant’.³⁷ This ascetical movement began, possibly as early as the 2nd century AD, and so predates Egyptian monasticism and is considerably different in both spirit and content.³⁸ ‘It was a lay organization and seems to have been well integrated with each local Church, existing side-by-side with ‘ordinary’ Christians, and like these latter, subject to the Bishop.’³⁹ The institution took different forms, one of which was a small brotherhood of men attached to a local church who lived with the clergy. They were celibate and wore a distinctive dress and practised a strict asceticism. Their ascetical ideal involved a complete detachment from temporal goods. Their solitude was ‘interior’ and did not exclude apostolic tasks. They found their solitude in continual prayer and constant meditation of the Scriptures which was their only object of study. They looked to the clergy for support and leadership and assisted them in their liturgical, administrative and pastoral functions, and so they formed a pool from which local Bishops would recruit their clergy. A prime example of this form of celibate life is presented by the Asketerion of Diodore of Tarsus of which St John Chrysostom was a member. ⁴⁰

The significant thing about the life of the Church in these early years was the unity manifested; that everything was centred on the clergy, the Bishops and priests, who led the celibates united to them by their teaching and example.⁴¹ That would now change with the emergence of monasticism, and the interpretation of this turning-point is central to the debate between the two visions of the charismatic structure of the Church. The evolution of the monastic life was far from simple. One scholar distinguishes three new forms of special dedication, the eremitical life associated with Anthony, the semi-eremitical life associated with Ammoun and Macarius, the coenobitic life associated with Pachomius, and suggests that even ‘this tripartite scheme, along with its fictitious founding figures, oversimplifies a fluid, complex situation.’⁴² The complexity of the situation was enhanced by the fact that there were also the successors of the original continents and ascetics, who remained in the city and participated in the life of the local church, as they had done from the beginning, and this point will be important in the debate to come.

The Flight from the ‘World’

St Anthony may not actually have been the founder of the movement, but his vocation has ever been taken as typical. The tradition came to accept him as the first monk and St Athanasius’ Life of Anthony came to be considered the first ‘manual’ of the monastic life, giving the most influential interpretation of what happened.⁴³ The new form began with the eremitical life, for on the basis of St Athanasius’s account, it is clear that the eremitical life was well established in Egypt when Antony left for the desert. In the Life, the word ‘monk’ (monaco, j) always refers to one who lives alone, and never to one who lives in community,⁴⁴ and when Antony was discerning his vocation ‘no monk knew anything of the great desert.’⁴⁵ At that time, the ascetics ‘exercised alone not far from their village.’⁴⁶ Antony consulted one such old man and ‘later he invited the old man from his village to accompany him to the desert, but he refused on account of his old age and because this was not traditional, so Antony went off on his own.’⁴⁷

The notion of ‘fleeing the world’ was not new. A spiritual fuga mundi was part of the programme of life of the clergy, the Bishops, priests and deacons, as well as the widows, virgins, ascetics and continents who had been living the celibate life from the beginning. It was the physical separation which was new. The anchorites fled human society altogether in order to facilitate the deeper, spiritual, fuga mundi which is the one that really counts. As one scholar tells us: ‘Where the Antony of Athanasius’ Life differs from the married celibate of the early Syrian church, or the celibates of groups such as that which formed around the Coptic teacher Hieracas in Egypt, is in his extreme anachoresis by which he physically removes himself further and further from human society and habitation.’⁴⁸ The future, however, as we now know, lay with the coenobite monks, though it took time for the terminology to settle. When the word was first used, monachoi embraced not only hermits and religious organised in community, but also the other celibates who, while still in the world, were striving to live a life as far as possible detached from it, focussed wholly on God.⁴⁹ For ‘the original meaning of monachos is not living alone, but living without a wife, [and] the monachos was the unilateral, the undistracted one, with a one-track mind, tuned in to God alone.’⁵⁰

The Monastic Condemnation of Individual Ascetics

It was not just a matter of terminology, for theological judgments on the comparative value of community and solitary life began to develop among the monks which would be controversial at the Council. One was the disparagement of the earlier individual practice of the evangelical counsels ‘in the world’, the original virgins, continents and ascetics, who continued to live the ascetical life according to the earlier model, living in their own homes, or living together in or near the towns. The problem arose for St John Chrysostom in regard to the Syrian form of asceticism already mentioned. An expert in the matter writes:

This conception of a ‘solitary’ in the world, which may never have been explicitated by Diodore, but was by his disciple Chrysostom, is certainly the most original fruit of this ascetical grouping, and it was the object of quodlibets of the emperor Julian, and later it was one of the motives of the condemnation of Chrysostom by his peers at the Synod of the Oak. Pagans and Christians easily accommodated themselves to the existence of ascetics who separated themselves from the world, but the notion of an ‘evangelical’ life integrated into the city challenged the establishments, and was dangerous for both the civil and ecclesiastical order, and was in fact revolutionary.⁵¹

The explanation given for the attitude does not concern us here. The important thing is the fact of this condemnation of the individual practice of asceticism, and it also developed in Western monasticism. For, quickly enough the monks began to see themselves as the only genuine repositories of the serious pursuit of holiness and to treat the earlier forms of individual pursuit of perfection as second-rate, if not even deviant. These ascetics acknowledged no monastic superior, obeyed no definite rule, and disposed individually of the product of their manual labour, and they were roundly condemned by the monks for their failure to leave home and abandon their property in the monastic manner. ‘How many monks live with their parents!’ St Jerome exclaimed with horror. He also condemned those who claimed for themselves ‘the name of a solitary’ despite living a comfortable existence among crowds and armies of creatures (St Jerome, Ep. 125, 16.).’⁵² St Jerome calls them Remoboth, and they were also known as Sarabaites, and these various terms became derogatory ways of referring in a general way to degenerate monks.⁵³ He wrote: ‘The third class is that which they call remnuoth, a very inferior and despised type … They dwell together by twos and threes, not many more, and live according to their own will and independently. They contribute to a common fund part of their earnings, that they may have a general store of food. But they live for the most part in cities and fortified towns …’ (Ep. 122.) A variant of this picture was produced in the early fifth century West by John Cassian who wrote of cenobites, hermits, ‘sarabaites’ and a fourth unnamed category of ‘bad’ monks.⁵⁴

This position reached a high point in the Rule of St Benedict. In the first paragraph of the Rule, St Benedict distinguishes four kinds of monks. First are the coenobites; second are the hermits, of whom he approves. He writes that ‘having been well prepared in the army of brothers for the solitary fight of the hermit, being secure now without the consolation of another, they are able, God helping them, to fight with their own hand or arm against the vices of the flesh or of their thoughts.’ Of two other kinds, however, he heartily disapproves.

The third kind of monks, a detestable kind, are the Sarabaites. These, not having been tested, as gold in the furnace (Wis. 3:6), by any rule or by the lessons of experience, are as soft as lead. In their works they still keep faith with the world, so that their tonsure marks them as liars before God. They live in twos or threes, or even singly, without a shepherd, in their own sheepfolds and not in the Lord’s. Their law is the desire for self-gratification: whatever enters their mind or appeals to them, that they call holy; what they dislike, they regard as unlawful.

The fourth kind are the Gyrovagues, who were by no means an isolated phenomenon.⁵⁵ These are ‘always on the move, with no stability, they indulge their own wills and succumb to the allurements of gluttony, and are in every way worse than the Sarabaites.’ St Benedict chooses not to delay in his consideration of them and says, ‘let us proceed, therefore, with God’s help, to lay down a rule for the strongest kind of monks, the Coenobites.’⁵⁶

There is no doubt, as one monastic commentator has it, that the rule of Benedict is of primary importance in the history of Western monasticism.⁵⁷ More problematic, however, is his judgment that ‘[w]ith the spread of the rule of Benedict, the founding period of religious life came to an end.’⁵⁸ That will be the question at issue at the Council. The monks, and the religious generally, understand the development that took place as leading towards a term, the congregational religious life, leaving the earlier stages behind. An alternative view, however, will be strongly pressed at the Council by theologians from among the secular clergy, which holds that the earlier stage of the religious life retains its full value still.

Chapter 2

The Tension between the Secular

and the Regular Clergy

A matter of central importance for the difference of opinion at the Council was the tension with the local clergy which monasticism brought about. This tension between the clergy and the monks began almost immediately after monasticism first emerged.⁵⁹ As we have seen, the monks chose not to follow the forms of consecrated life practised in the Christian community from the beginning, and went out into the desert to seek holiness in solitude there. The significant aspect of this physical flight for the discussion here is that it involved separation from the local Church, its hierarchy and its liturgy. This separation was not total, but it was real and, in the end, it led to the emergence of monasticism and the subsequent forms of religious life, as a distinct and somewhat independent state in the Church. It has been remarked that ‘despite a few notable exceptions, monasticism as a whole emerged as separate from the Catholic Church, with an ideal, a style of life, and a pattern of institutions of its own, that claimed to be independent of – and even superior to – the institutions, life, and ideal of the Church itself.’ ⁶⁰ Understandably, the first reaction of the clergy to the flight to the desert was to suspect the extremes of abstinence and self-denial involved, for many felt it represented a protest movement that by-passed the liturgy, the Church’s essential means of salvation. St Anthony, for example, ‘neither went to church nor received the sacraments for years.’⁶¹

The clergy were suspicious of the monks, but it was the attitude of the monks which would begin to cause the trouble between the two groups. For, not alone did the monks begin to develop their religious life independently of the clergy, the Bishops and priests of the local churches, but they very quickly began to see theirs as a superior form of the Christian life, superior even to that of the clergy. St Antony himself had great respect for the hierarchy of the Church and wanted every cleric to take precedence before him, and bowed his head before Bishops and priests, and ceded to deacons in the matter of prayer.⁶² The attitude of the monks, however, gradually changed. One interpreter suggests that it was St Athanasius, in his Life of Antony, who ‘created a picture of early monasticism in which … the desert became the locus of true religion.’⁶³ And ‘Athanasius was remarkably successful in creating an enduring association between monasticism and the desert … It … became a classic trajectory of the monastic life reinforcing in the minds of readers and listeners the ancient polarization between Desert and City.’⁶⁴ The monks sought solitude believing it to be a better means for the pursuit of holiness, and that principle caused the problem. For the value placed on the physical flight from the world meant that the monks considered the life of the secular priest, who clearly cannot fly to the desert but must live among his people, incompatible with the serious pursuit of holiness. A whole chapter of the Vitae patrum, written in the fourth and fifth centuries, is devoted to monks who refused to be ordained,⁶⁵ and there are some quite startling examples indeed of the lengths to which men were prepared to go to avoid being forced to leave their solitude to do pastoral work.⁶⁶ Here, right at the very beginning of the movement, there emerges evidence of an assumption among the monks of the superiority of the monastic way over that of the secular clergy, such that men were prepared to mutilate themselves in horrendous ways rather than be forced to take on the life of a secular prieSt This assumption of superiority became standard in monastic spirituality and found expression in a basic text of Cassian, who wrote:

A monk must by all means flee from women and Bishops. For neither permit him, when once they have bent him to familiarity with themselves, to devote himself any longer to the quiet of his cell or to cling with most pure eyes, through insight into spiritual matters, to divine theoria.⁶⁷

Here, Cassian is basing his preference for the monastic life on the assumption that solitude is better than insertion in the world, as providing better conditions for the pursuit of contemplation which he takes to be the ultimate aim of the Christian life.

The tension between the clergy and the monks manifested itself in a competition for vocations to the different forms of life, and the opposing visions of the two groups first found expression in Church law. The earliest legislation favoured the secular clergy over the monks. At a council at Valencia in 374 it was noted that men were refusing ordination to the priesthood because it is secular, and a council at Saragossa in 380 condemned clergy who abandon their office to become monks.⁶⁸ Canon 6 of the council says that if any cleric deliberately leaves his office on account of its presumed luxury and vanity, as if he wished to see a better observance of the law in the monastic life than the clerical, he was to be excommunicated and could only be reinstated after a long penance.⁶⁹ In time, however, the monastic vision began to hold sway in the law, and the Fourth Council of Toledo, in 633, laid down that Bishops must permit clerics who wish to become monks, to do so, ‘because they desire to follow a better life … drawn by the desire of contemplation.’⁷⁰ And the Synod of Augsburg of 952, refers to Toledo IV in declaring that Bishops must permit clerics to transfer to the monastic life, ‘despising secular things for the divine remuneration and desiring to transfer to a more strict life’.⁷¹ This preference for the monastic life which came to be written into the law would eventually be used as an argument that the monastic life is superior to the life in the world of the secular clergy, as we will see.

For this tension was set to continue and was a very real factor in the debate about holiness at the Council. The tension was not simply a matter of irritation between separate groups, but it has theological foundations. Two quite distinct theological visions of the structure of the consecrated life in the Church were in conflict. The first to emerge and by far the longer standing is the vision which developed in monastic theology to explain the theological status of the monastic, or religious, life. It is only comparatively recently that the secular clergy began to develop the theology of their secular life, and these two visions came into irresolvable conflict at the Council.

Efforts to Raise the Spiritual Level of the Clergy

The Peace of Constantine, with the ending of the persecutions and the mass influx of new converts, led to a lowering of the moral level of the Church and of the clergy. The most common reason given for the great popularity of monasticism at this time was the desire of the ascetics to escape from a worldly Church, for they no longer felt at ease in it.⁷² It is also suggested that this decadence was to be found among the clergy too, for the monks ‘also fled from court Bishops who fought for richer sees, from men who, immediately they were made clerics, lengthened the fringes of their garments, rode on foam-flecked steeds, and dwelt in houses of many rooms, with pointed wardrobes.’⁷³

This situation led to efforts being made to raise the level of holiness among the clergy, and these efforts brought about tension between the clergy and the ascetics, a tension which would endure. The earliest struggle between the regular and secular clergy was the conflict over Priscillianist clergy in Spain and Gaul. Emperor Constantine had established the Bishops as civil magistrates and the role of the Bishop began to change significantly. With the need now for expertise in civil law, the criteria of selection obviously had to change. Priesthood began to lose something of its religious character, and secular values entered in. By the year 500 a.d. the clergy had replaced town councils so that ‘the urban life of the largest political unit in the Mediterranean was firmly based on the conscientious mediocrity of its Bishops.’⁷⁴ The need for reform of the situation was widely discerned, and Priscillian’s was just one of many movements in this sense.⁷⁵ Priscillian, Bishop of Avila (381-85) led an ascetical movement in Spain at the end of the fourth century. He made no attempt to create an organized monastic movement, for he wanted to foster reform within the Church, not apart from it, and had as aim ‘to put a dedicated ascetic in every see in Spain.’⁷⁶ The Priscillianists engaged in the ascetical life not simply in view of their own perfection, but quite deliberately in view of being elected to the priesthood and the episcopate.⁷⁷ Even if the Priscillianists were not monks, the monastic ideal, in its turn, began to be used for the reform of the clergy.

Election of Bishops, and even of priests, was in the hands of the people, and the people were strong partisans of the monks. More and more monks were called to the episcopate. Monasteries became actual seminaries for young clerics. These religious of different kinds considered themselves to be the elite of the Church and the only full observers of the divine law, and the clergy of many dioceses were distrustful of these ascetics. Since the Bishops and priests were generally married men, the very profession of the monks and the continents was like a reproach levelled against them, and presupposed a certain disdain in their regard.⁷⁸ The simple faithful could not but show a kind of respect for such holy people which they did not show for the lesser virtue of their religious leaders. The ascetics established themselves as a voluntary clergy, outside the institution, which threatened to supplant the canonical clergy in the eyes of the faithful. In some cities, the clergy and the ascetics lived in a state of open hostility, and some of the ascetics were excommunicated.⁷⁹ Here and there, in Spain and Aquitaine, the ascetics, disliked or even rejected by the ecclesiastical authorities, formed among themselves, outside the Church, groupings which appeared to be suspect. In general, they were considered as a sect, and that a new heresy had appeared, that of the Abstinents. Their adversaries readily considered these people, who had contempt for creation and for marriage, to be Manicheans.⁸⁰

For, during these centuries, Manichaeism had appeared and its heretical condemnation of marriage on the basis of a false dualist philosophy meant that the traditional Christian respect for celibacy could fall under suspicion. The ascetic practices of zealous Christians could smack of Manichaeism, for both the ascetics and the Manichaeans kept long fasts and eschewed all forms of self-indulgence, and both avoided marriage. Despite the fact that virginity and asceticism had been extolled from the very beginning, in these troubled times it was easy to see in the defense of celibacy a real possibility of Manichaean dualism.⁸¹ Even St Jerome, for instance, was accused of Manichaeism because he placed such an emphasis on celibacy.⁸² The Bishops saw their sacerdotal authority menaced by men they considered heretics, and they feared to see a church develop within a church.⁸³ Priscillian was condemned as a Manichean and executed at Trier in 386. As time went on, more and more of the great Bishops were drawn from the ranks of the monks, and the feud between the two bodies did not abate; the charges of heresy, fraud, and imposture were laid for all time.⁸⁴ One scholar has suggested that it was a matter of a mutual hositility of two ‘aristocracies’ – ‘priestly ordination’, and ‘practice of holiness,’⁸⁵ and that the clergy were rationalizing their hostility in accusing the ascetics of Manichaeism.⁸⁶ Another scholar has offered his opinion that it was a matter of two antagonistic conceptions of the Church; one ascetical and charismatic, the other clericalist, hierarchical, fossilized and anti-ascetical.⁸⁷ According to Babut, the conciliation of the two clergies, ‘the old instituted clergy and the new voluntary clergy’, had been achieved by the beginning of the fifth century.⁸⁸ We will see, however, that Babut’s opinion is over-optimistic, for the two clergies remained at odds, at least until Vatican II.

Chapter 3

Tension Within the Secular Clergy

The tension was not only between the clergy and the monks, for the influence of the monastic ideal began to create tension within the ranks of the secular clergy themselves. St Athanasius’ Life of Antony had a very great impact throughout the Church and, in the West, it led to a number of Bishops bringing the monastic spirituality to bear on the formation of their clergy. One scholar tells us ‘[t]he first Bishop in the West who … united the spheres of monastic discipline and pastoral activity (which up to then had been separate), … who sought to live in community with his cathedral clergy, was Eusebius of Vercelli, who made a beginning of the vita communis after a journey to Egypt round about the year 340.’⁸⁹ And the communites were not purely clerical, for another scholar says that ‘communities of clerics, virgins and lay monks gathered under the direction of a Bishop or a priest were established, notably those of St Eusebius of Vercelli (283-371), St Victricius of Rouen (330-409), St Ambrose of Milan (337-397), and St Paulinus of Nola (354-431).’⁹⁰ Two other important figures in this movement were St Martin of Tours (316-397)⁹¹, and St Augustine (354-430)⁹².

But of all these attempts to combine the monastic life with clerical duties, by far the most important was certainly that of St Augustine, since he was the most learned, the most voluminous, and by far the most famous.⁹³ He had a greater influence in this matter than anyone else, for he left to posterity a much more detailed consideration of the religious life and its relationship to the clerical state than any other Western writer.⁹⁴ It has been said of St Augustine that he ‘was a monk as soon as he was a Christian,’⁹⁵ and when he returned to Hippo he built a monastery and lived the monastic life there together with his friends. ⁹⁶ When he was prevailed upon and accepted to be made Bishop, he turned the episcopal residence into a monastery and insisted that his clergy must live a full common life which, in his opinion, had characterized the life of the apostolic Church.⁹⁷ Living the common life was the usual practice at the time, but Augustine went beyond this and also insisted that his priests and deacons should renounce private property, acquiring from the common fund only what was necessary for their needs. Going beyond the traditional practice in this way led to complaints from his fellow Bishops, and the opposition led Augustine to permit his clergy to live outside the episcopal residence with their own income, but he made it clear in Sermon 355 that his change of policy was due to expediency rather than conviction, arguing that ‘the cleric who gives up the monastic life is half lost.’⁹⁸

This tendency to consider that a zealous clergy should live a communal religious life has continued to be strong ever since, and efforts to raise the spiritual level of the clergy have ever had this dimension. St Chrodegang of Metz (712-66) formed his cathedral clergy into a community and wrote a rule for them based on the Rule of St Benedict. He is considered as one of the founders of the Canons Regular.⁹⁹ The ideal waxed very strong during the eleventh century reformation. The Rule of St Augustine, re-discovered at the end of the eleventh century, ‘suggested that the very essence of the vita apostolica was the life of clerks living in a community based upon the renunciation of private property.’¹⁰⁰ The Gregorian reformers, whose inspiration and key figures came from the Benedictine monastery at Cluny, believed ‘that the Apostles were monks and that the secular clergy, who had inherited their office, should model their lives upon them.’¹⁰¹ Pope Gregory VII held that ‘the proper life for clerks was one in common, based upon the renunciation of personal property after the example of the primitive Church.’¹⁰² St Peter Damian (1007-1072) promoted the idea very strongly. He argued that the common life was obligatory on all clergy serving cathedral churches, even though he had to concede that it was obviously impracticable for the rural clergy. He wrote that ‘private property is inconsistent with the position of a clerk, who is by his very nature cut off from the world. … Division of the common fund is inconsistent with the rule of the Apostles, and shatters spiritual unity. The canons, he urges, must live the full apostolic life as an example to others.’¹⁰³ The common life for the clergy was promoted as an integral part of the whole reform effort, and ‘[i]n response to this propaganda, houses of canons regular began to appear about the middle of the eleventh century - groups of clergy, that is, who had renounced private property and lived a fully communal life, observing a monastic timetable and sharing a common refectory and dormitory.’¹⁰⁴

This policy of demanding a common life for the clergy was almost enacted into Church law. The Lateran Council of 1059 laid down that the clergy serving city churches ‘shall eat and sleep together by the churches to which they have been ordained, as behoves religious clerks; and whatever income they derive from the churches they shall hold in common. And we ask and urge that they shall strive with all their might to attain to the apostolic, that is the common, life."¹⁰⁵’¹⁰⁶ The ruling was reaffirmed by the Lateran Council of 1063. It was not practised universally, especially in rural parishes, and St Peter Damian (1007-72) asked Pope Nicholas II (1058-61) to make common life the universal law for all the clergy, and he nearly did. The presence of the priest among the people weighed with the Council of Trent, which established the principle that the secular clergy living on their own was fully in accord with the law.¹⁰⁷ The Tridentine canon obliged parish priests to reside among their people on the basis of the great value they could thereby derive for their pastoral ministry.¹⁰⁸

The canonical movement did not succeed in taking over the clerical life completely but developed into a new form of canonical religious life, which quickly spread. It did not require large numbers, and the houses were under the supervision of the local Bishop and so it was popular with them.¹⁰⁹ This local supervision did not survive, however. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 decreed that those orders that lacked a regular system of general chapters, including the canons, should hold a meeting of heads of houses every three years in order to regulate their affairs and maintain discipline,¹¹⁰ and thus removing them from the authority of the local Bishop.

Chapter 4

The Debate at the University of

Paris in the Thirteenth Century

A new stage in the tension within the clergy was reached with the emergence of the mendicant friars. As Congar has pointed out: ‘The coming of the mendicant Orders posed the question of the ministry of monks, which had been an irritant for centuries, in a new and more acute manner … because these newcomers were no longer truly monks, but apostles, and the privileges granted to the new Orders by the papal letters were truly revolutionary in regard to the traditional pastoral structure.’¹¹¹ The friars, on the basis of privileges granted by the Pope, had begun to exercise a pastoral ministry till that time reserved to the secular clergy, and the friars disputed the monopoly of that ministry claimed by the seculars.¹¹² The diocesan Church and the monks had gradually reached an accommodation and went their separate ways. The monks were granted a degree of exemption from local episcopal authority and friction was kept to a minimum. The accommodation, however, was broken by the emergence of the mendicants. The emergence of the pastoral dimension of monasticism was gradual. Blessed Robert of Arbrissel (1045-1116) introduced a new combination of the monastic and pastoral life in the eleventh century, and St Norbert of Xanten (1080-1134) and the Premonstratensians took it further.¹¹³ It was, however, the universal mission of the friars under the immediate authority of the Pope which brought them into a direct confrontation with the diocesan clergy. So far the tension had gone largely unformulated, apart from the few legal enactments on one side or the other. That was about to change when the tension entered the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. It was in this context that the theological principles underlying the surface tension would begin to be worked out.

Shortly after the two new orders were founded, the Franciscans and Dominicans went to the University of Paris to study and to teach. Their entry into the faculty was strongly resisted by the secular Masters and a heated debate over the rights and status of the two clergies ensued.¹¹⁴ There were a number of participants in the debate, principally William of St Amour and Gerard of Abbeville on the secular side, and St Thomas, St Bonaventure and John Peckham, another Franciscan, on the mendicant side. In the light of the discussion at the Council, the key figure in the debate was St Thomas. For it was in the context of this debate that St Thomas formulated the principles which would come to dominate the theology of the states of life right down to the Council and set the terms of the debate there.

It is not necessary to review the debate in full. Many points entered the discussion. There were lots of issues raised from the canon law, many patristic references and occasional points of theology. Many of the arguments were of little weight and did not stand the test of time. Indeed, St Thomas had no hesitation in branding most of the arguments made by his opponents as ‘frivolous, derisible, and erroneous in many ways,’¹¹⁵ and repeated this polemical judgment frequently.¹¹⁶ A few of the arguments, however, did go to the heart of the matter and were part of the conciliar discussion seven centuries later. They are relevant still, and our concentration will be on these. It may indeed be true to say that there was a good deal of bias on both sides of this debate, and that most of the arguments raised are not very convincing today,¹¹⁷ but it is also true that some of the arguments continued to be used down the centuries since, and were still live issues in the debate at the Council, and must therefore be reviewed in order to understand what happened.

The Debate Begins

The debate began when William of St Amour published his Tractatus de periculis novissimorum temporum in 1256. He launched a full attack on the friars, focusing principally on their mendicancy and their ministry, their incursion into the university and their interference, as he saw it, into the divinely ordained diocesan structure of the Church. One commentator has summed his position up very well.

The fundamental issue for William of St Amour was ecclesiological. He did not see how the life and apostolate of the mendicant orders could be integrated into the traditional structure of the Church. His ecclesiology had at its centre a strict hierarchy founded on the distinction between the Twelve Apostles and the Seventy-two Disciples and their respective missions. These missions were inherited by the Bishops and the lower clergy respectively, and any other form of mission can only be by exception.¹¹⁸

The monks did not create a problem for William. Even those who regularly did pastoral work, such as the Cistercians and the Canons Regular, could be fitted into his scheme since their apostolic work was locally based and under the authority of the local Bishop. The mendicant orders, on the other hand, with their explicitly world-wide reach under the authority of the Pope represented for him a step too far. He argued that the diocesan and parochial structure of the Church was founded upon the Apostles and the secular clergy alone were entrusted with the cure of souls, and this was something that no one, be he pope or anyone else, had authority to change.¹¹⁹ ‘For him monarchy in the regulation of the apostolate applied at every level; there could only be one Bishop in each diocese, one archdeacon in each archdeaconate, and one parish rector in each parish. Any tampering with this structure could only lead to chaos.’¹²⁰

It was at this stage a new element entered the debate which would have a dominant influence in the secular side of the argument, the tradition regarding the role of the Bishop in the Church’s pursuit of holiness. One scholar has summarized the matter well. He writes: ‘A most ancient and constant liturgical and patristic tradition expects the bishop’s primacy to be a real primacy in the Spirit, constituting him in his Church the incarnation of that holiness to which his flock is called.’¹²¹ The Bishops are the successors of the Apostles, not simply in the sense that they stand in the unbroken line of succession, but rather the Bishop ‘has a sign-value in the Church insofar as he represents for the Christian community what the Apostles represented for the primitive Church.’¹²² This doctrine was summarized in the teaching of Pseudo-Denis, an obscure Patristic figure who would have a remarkable influence on the tradition in general and on St Thomas in particular.¹²³ Pseudo-Denis was foundational for William of St Amour for, as Delhaye points out, William’s vision was not only canonical but also mystical, based on a profound meditation on the works of Pseudo-Denis.¹²⁴ In his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Pseudo-Denis developed a scheme for the structure of the administration of the Church, and two affirmations in his overall system related to pursuit of holiness in the Church were picked out by William and were to become generally accepted. He had a particular vision of the relationship between the clergy and the monks in this matter of sanctification. He spoke of ‘the hierarchical order to which the perfecting power is entrusted,’¹²⁵ and he also made explicit the subordinate position of the monks in this matter, stating that the monastic order is ‘entrusted to the perfecting power of the hierarchs,’¹²⁶ and they ‘follow the priestly orders’¹²⁷ in the way of holiness. It is all summed up in a text from Pseudo-Denis which was quoted in one of the drafts of Lumen Gentium:

Everyone to whom … the sacred order is assigned has one and the same power in all his sacred functions, so that this high-priest of the sacred order, on the basis of his status, dignity and order, is initiated into divine things and united to God, and renders his assistants, on the basis of their dignity, participants in his divinely inspired sacred divinization.¹²⁸

William bases himself on these affirmations of Pseudo-Denis and says that ‘in the ecclesiastical hierarchy … there may be only two orders, … the order of the perfecting (perficientium)’ which is superior, consisting of three ranks, namely, ‘Bishops, parish priests, and deacons’ … and the ‘order of those to be perfected (perficiendorum),’ which is inferior, consisting also of three ranks, namely, ‘regular men,’ … and ‘the faithful laymen and catechumens.’¹²⁹

The Religious Life a Holocaust

William’s attack called forth two replies on the mendicant side. St Bonaventure wrote the Apologia Pauperum and St Thomas the Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem that same year. In these works St Bonaventure and St Thomas were defending the mendicant way of life, their ministry and their right to teach in the university.¹³⁰ In his treatise St Thomas did not respond to William’s ecclesiological points, but he developed his theology of the religious life. He said that ‘first we will show what a religious institute is and what constitutes the perfection of religion, for their whole intention seems to be against the religious life.’¹³¹ In the opening paragraph, he laid down a principle which would be fundamental for him and for the tradition that followed him, the notion that the religious life is a holocaust, a ‘total’ consecration of the person to God. He begins his treatment by defining the word ‘religion,’ which means to be bound to something and no longer free to separate. The first bond is by faith and baptism and consists in renouncing Satan. The second bond is that by which one serves God in a special way in renouncing secular life. He goes on:

As in Baptism by which a person is bound to God by the religion of faith, they die to sin, so by the vow of religion one not only dies to sin but to the world, in order to live for God alone in the work to which they vow themselves to the service of God, because just as the life of faith is destroyed by sin, so the service of Christ is impeded by secular occupations.¹³² Hence, by the vow of religion those things are renounced which most occupy the human spirit and impede the service of God. The principal is marriage (1 Cor 7:32-33), the second is possessions (Mt 13:22), and the third one’s own will. … By these three vows a person offers God a sacrifice of all their goods … and vowing everything to God is a holocaust¹³³

St Thomas upheld this fundamental principle from then on. In the Summa contra Gentiles he writes:

The most valuable thing for a human being is to adhere to God and things divine; it is impossible for a person to occupy themselves intensely about different things; so in order that the human heart can be more easily devoted to God, counsels are given in the divine law by which humans withdraw from the occupations of the present life, as far as is possible while living a life on earth.¹³⁴

He then treats of the three vows and concludes the chapter by saying that ‘perfection consists in devoting the heart to God, and so those making these vows are called religious, as devoting themselves and all they have to God, since religion means worship of God.’¹³⁵ In the De perfectione, he makes all these points at greater length and concludes that ‘it is clear that those who make these three vows, as if on account of the excellence of the holocaust, are called religious antonomastice.’¹³⁶ The same doctrine is carried over into his final treatment in the Summa theologica, and the point is repeated that religious are called such antonomastice since they ‘devote themselves totally to the divine service, as offering a holocaust to God.’¹³⁷ The final and definitive statement of his position is to be found in the Summa IIª-IIae, q. 186, a short treatise on the religious life. In the first article he asks if the religious life is to be considered as a state of perfection, and his response runs:

Religion … is the virtue by which a person offers something to the service and worship of God. And so those are called religious by antonomasia who devote themselves totally to the divine service, as offering a holocaust to God. … Human perfection consists in adhering totally to God … and so religious life is called the state of perfection.¹³⁸

The Second Phase of the Debate

A decade later a new phase of the debate was opened by Gerard of Abbeville in a series of Quodlibets between 1267-1269.¹³⁹ Following William of Saint-Amour, Gerard insists on the monarchical nature of pastoral government, the Patriarch in his Patriarchate, the Bishop in his diocese, the archdeacon in his archdeaconate, the priest in his parish and sees no place for the religious in his scheme.¹⁴⁰ The new element which entered the debate at this stage was the consideration of the state of perfection of each of the different categories, the Bishop, the priest and the religious. Again our interest is in the synthesis of St Thomas in these matters. It could be argued that the single most important fruit of all this controversy was the publication of the