Theological and Historical Background

chapter 1 Theological and Historical Background

Scholars have long recognized the importance of the Fourth Lateran Council to the cultural and religious history of Western Europe. Indeed, it represented a capstone of Pope Innocent iii’s efforts to “extirpate vices and foster virtues, correct abuses and reform morals, suppress heresy and strengthen the faith . . . [and] encourage princes and Christian peoples to aid and maintain the Holy Land.”1 The Council’s program of reform of the life of the church covered many aspects of religious life, from the moral correction of clerics to the procedures of ecclesiastical courts.2 The Council touched the life of every Christian with its twenty-first canon, Omnis utriusque sexus, which required everyone, lay or clerical, to confess, be shriven, and take the sacrament of the Eucharist at least once a year. Just as important as Omnis utriusque sexus is Canon I, Firmiter credimus. This canon is a statement of the fundamental principles of the Christian faith and the first such statement of faith issued as part of the canons of a council since the great ecumenical councils of the late Roman Empire.3 The two canons demonstrate the pastoral desire on the part of the Pope and the attendees of the council to reform both faith and morals. The 412 bishops and about 800 abbots and priors who had attended the council carried the reform program enshrined in its canons back to their respective homelands and began to implement it shortly thereafter.4 Many of the issues requiring reform had been brought to the Pope by the episcopate after he had instructed the bishops to enquire about necessary reforms in their dioceses.5 It has acquired something of the force of a cliché that 1215 thus marks a

1 “ad extirpanda vitia et plantandas virtutes, corrigendos excessus, et reformandos mores eliminandos hereses et roborandam fidem . . . et inducendos principes et populos Christianos ad succursum et subsidium terrae sanctae.” Innocent iii, “Vineam Domini,” Patrologia Latina 216 Col. 824B, quoted in Leonard Boyle, OP, “The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology,” in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 30. 2 Canons of Fourth Lateran Council, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, trans. and ed. Norman P. Tanner (Washington, dc: Georgetown University Press, 1990), pp. 230–71, cc. 7, 8, 14–8, etc. 3 John W. Baldwin, “Paris et Rome en 1215: Les réforms du IVe concile de Latran,” Journal des Savants 1 (1997): 99–124. 4 See Baldwin, “Paris et Rome,” 99. 5 John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 1:317.

2 chapter 1 watershed—“1215 and all that” as Peter Biller puts it.6 The administrative reforms of the council had some success; the reforms that had the greatest impact were those dealing with the religious life of the laity.7 Omnis utriusque is unequivocal in its decreeing that every baptized Christian must participate in the sacramen- tal life of the Church. The years after Lateran iv saw yearly confession become enshrined as a near-universal practice.8 So, too, does Firmiter credimus empha- size the importance of lay participation in the sacraments: This participation brings everyone to eternal life through both “right faith and right actions.”9 Right actions need a foundation of right faith. The episcopal directives that followed in the wake of Lateran iv in England reflect the importance for the Christian’s life of a right faith as well as of sound morals.10 They not only empha- size lay participation in the sacraments, but also convey a renewed emphasis on making sure that every layperson know the Apostles’ Creed and Articles of Faith.11 These efforts reached their culmination in England in 1281, with arch- bishop of Canterbury John Pecham’s Council of Lambeth, whose ninth canon, Ignorantia sacerdotum, requires that every priest give his lay parishioners a quarterly vernacular exposition of, inter alia, the Articles of Faith.12 Teaching the Apostles’ Creed was nothing new, but the idea that the Creed as encom- passing the basics of the Christian faith could be broken down into a series of discrete articles that formed the foundational bases of the faith was.13

6 Peter Biller, introduction to Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and A.J. Minnis (Rochester, ny: York Medieval Press, 1998), 30. 7 Marion E. Gibbs and Jane Lang argue in Bishops and Reform: With Special Reference to the Lateran Council of 1215 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 174–9 that in the century following the Council, in England Innocent III’s reform program largely foundered. Whatever the impact of the efforts of improving the clergy, Omnis utriusque sexus was at least the efficient cause of regular confession, which for the next eight hundred years remained an integral part of Catholic faith and practice. 8 Andrew Reeves, “Teaching the Practice of Confession in Thirteenth-Century England: Priests and Laity,” in Priesthood and Holy Orders in the Middle Ages, eds. Greg Peters and C. Colt Anderson (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 9 “fidem rectam et operationem bonam.” Lateran iv, c. 1. 10 For how the reform program was implemented in England, see Gibbs and Lang, Bishops and Reform, 105–30 and C.R. Cheney, English Synodalia of the Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 31–2. 11 See Chapter 2 of this study. 12 Councils and Synods, with other Documents Relating to the English Church, ii: ad 1205–1313, eds. F.M. Powicke and C.R. Cheney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 2:900. 13 Joseph Goering, “Christ in Dominican Catechesis: The Articles of Faith,” in Christ Among the Medieval Dominicans: Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of Preachers, eds. Kent Emery, Jr. and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame: University of Notre