"A RELIC OF SUPERSTITION" BODILY IMPURITY AND THE CHURCH FROM GREGORY THE GREAT TO THE TWELFTH CENTURY DECRETISTS

Rob Meens

"It seems a relic of superstition when even the holy Gregory of the Roman Church prescribes that a man after having had intercourse with his wife should abstain a while from entering the temple and may only enter after washing himself." 1 In these words Erasmus of Rotterdam expressed his amazement at a letter in which Gregory the Great answers a series of questions put to him by Augustine of Canterbury.2 The Roman monk Augustine had arrived in Canterbury to christianize the Anglo-Saxons in 597; there he was confronted with certain taboos surrounding menstruation, childbirth and sexual intercourse. Augustine felt obliged to ask Pope Gregory, the spir­ itual father of his mission-the first organized movement of this sort­ for advice. The queries which he submitted to the Pope dealt with several kinds of problems. In the first place questions of church organ­ ization had to be solved: for example, how many bishops were needed for consecrating a fellow-bishop or how to deal with British and Gallic bishops? But also questions of liturgical diversity, of marriage law and finally of ritual purity had to be dealt with. In his answer to these questions, Gregory devotes a lengthy discussion to the question

Erasmus Ep. 916, ed. P.S. Allen, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 3, Oxford 1913, 487, I. 255-8: "Ex qua superstitionc relictum vidctur, quod diuus etiam Gregorius Romanae ecclesiae vsu receptum praccipit obseruandum, vt vir qui cum vxore propria rem habuisset, abstineret aliquandiu ab ingressu templi, nee ingred­ itur nisi lotus . " See also id., Enarrationes in Psalmos, cnarratio psalmi XXXVIII, ed. Opera omnia, vol. V,3, Amsterdam 1996, 196 where Erasmus mentions Gregory's views when discussing earlier teachings of the Church that have become obsolete; sec also Ad Notationes £auardi Lei in Marcum, ed. J. Leclerc, Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami opera omnia emendatiora et auctiora vol. 9, Leiden I 706, 145A. I owe these refer­ ences to Istvan Bejczy. 2 Did Erasmus read this passage in Bede's Ecclesiastical Hirtory ef the English People, where it is included in book I, 27? See B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (eds), Bede's Ecclesiastical History ef the Englifh People, rev. ed. Oxford 1992, 81 -3. 282 ROB MEENS of ritual purity, a subject that otherwise failed to arouse much inter­ est in the Bishop of Rome.:i The problems about ritual purity that Augustine had asked Gregory concerned the following topics: the first question was whether one should baptize a pregnant woman. Another problem was how much time should elapse before a woman could enter church after having given birth. Augustine also felt unsure as to whether he could bap­ tize an infant immediately after birth. Another problem was how soon a man could engage in intercourse with his wife again after she had given birth. Augustine further wanted to know whether it was allowed for a woman to enter church and to receive commu­ nion during menstruation. Finally, he adverted to the question that Erasmus regarded as a "relic from superstition", that is whether a man might enter church and receive communion before he has washed. Related to this last matter was another question: could a man receive communion after a seminal emission in a dream and was a priest in such a situation allowed to celebrate Mass. 1 What inspired Augustine to put such matters to the Pope? It has been suggested that Augustine was expressing Roman, monastic views of impurity of the female body and of sexual activity, attitudes that until then had been alien to Anglo-Saxon society." Because of opposition to these rules from the newly-converted Anglo-Saxons he then may have felt urged to ask Gregory whether some excep­ tions might be permitted. In the parallel case of close-kin-marriage, this seems indeed to have been the case.Ii We do not know, how­ ever, of any Roman rules barring people in various states of impurity from approaching the sacred. On the contrary, Gregory's reaction to

See R.A. Markus, Gregory the Great and his World Cambridge 1997, 184. That Gregory was not exceptional in this respect, is shown by G. Rouwhorst's contri­ bution to this volume. J. Woolf's contribution points to parallels, p. 268. 1 Ed. L. Hartmann, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae II,2, Berlin 1895, 332-343; for convenience's sake I will refer to the text as found in Colgrave and Mynors (eds), Bede's Ecclesiastical History 78--102. · Henry Mayr-Harting, 1he Coming qf Christianiry to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. London, 1991, 249. " See Responsio V of the Libellus Responsionum. The authenticity of this answer is, however, in serious doubt; J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede's Ecclesiastical History qf the English People. A Historical Commentary, Oxford, 1988, 40-1, regards it as a "gener­ ally accepted interpolation"; arguments for the authenticity of this passage are put forward by H. Chadwick, 'Gregory the Great and the Mission to the Anglo­ Saxons', in: Gregorio Magno e il suo tempo. XIX lncontro di studiosi dell'antichita cristiana in collabora:;,ione con l'Ecok Franfaise de Rome, 9 -12 maggw 1990, vol. I, Studia Ephemeridis "Augustinianum" 33, Rome 1991, 199-212, esp. 210.