Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

what even for him were spectacular heights of excoriation. ‘Yes, it is you I address, you harem of the ancient enemy, hoopoes, screech-owls, night owls, she-wolves, horse leeches.’ And so on, and so on, and so on. ‘Whores, harlots, kissing-mouths, sloughs for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits, nymphs, sirens, bloodsucking witches.’ Brutal language indeed. Yet in the sheer violence of Peter’s revulsion was the measure of his ultimate dread — which was not of women, nor even of sex, but of the coming of the hour of judgement.

And in expressing it, he spoke for multitudes. From the rag-pickers of Milan, with their riots against married priests, to great aristocrats such as Duke Godfrey and the Lady Beatrice, both of whom had piously sworn to forgo a marital bed, it was evident that chastity had become a pressing — indeed a consuming — issue for whole swaths of the Christian people. ‘Now, at the end of the ages, when men are multiplied beyond number, is the time of continence.’ Maybe - and yet the sense of urgency with which this view had come to be sanctioned by reformers such as Peter, often in the face of furious opposition from their fellow priests, was something startling, nevertheless. A papal legate, had he come across campaigners such as the Patarenes only twenty years previously, would surely have sawn off his leg rather than look sympathetically on their cause. Back in the first decades of the new millennium, any obsession with chastity on the part of the poor, even more than vegetarianism or a taste for living in forests, had been regarded by the Church with the blackest suspicion. ‘They affect a profound distaste for sex,’ Ad6mar said of the heretics in Aquitaine. True, he had gone on to insist, in a manner meant to be reassuring, that in private they indulged ‘in every kind of orgy* - but this had been only another example of his being economical with the truth. For Ademar to have acknowledged the appalling reality, that heretics were indeed capable of keeping themselves chaste, even as priests were cheerfully rutting with their wives, would have been, quite simply, insupportable. For what then would have served to distinguish the priesthood from the great mass of Christian people? What then would have served to mark the Church out as the ultimate bastion on earth of the celestial? What, indeed, people would surely have begun to ask, was the point of it at all?

It was all the more fortunate, then, that once again – as with every other gauntlet flung down by heresy — there had been dauntless warriors of God on hand to meet the challenge. Monks, unlike priests, had always been expected to live as virgins. Chastity, no less than poverty, was one of the defining marks of their separation from the fallen world. Even so, during the approach to the Millennium, it had begun to serve an even profounder purpose. Just as in the woods and trackless wilds where heretics were prone to roam, so in famous monasteries such as Cluny, virginity had become the mark of men who dared compare themselves to the hosts of heaven. Never to have sex, never even ‘to eject semen by rubbing the penis, just as snot is blown out of the nose’, was a sacrifice that fitted a monk to rank with a martyr. So, at any rate, it had boldly been declared at Cluny – where, for a decade, scribes had set themselves to producing a whole dossier of documents designed to push the argument. And when had they begun this task? Anno Domini 999. A telling date, no doubt. Certainly, there would have been no one at Cluny unaware of the role that virgins were destined to play at the end of time, before the throne of Christ, the Lamb. For it was their songs which St John, in the book of his revelation, had foretold were to sound from heaven, it is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are chaste; it is these who follow the Lamb wherever He goes; these have been redeemed from mankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are spotless.’ So St John had written.

The passage of the decades, and the failure of the Lamb to materialise, had not in any way served to diminish the potency of Cluny’s spotless state. Just the opposite, in fact. The chastity of its monks remained easily the most awesome marker of the monastery’s holiness. Of its independence from the outside world as well. Not for the warrior virgins of Cluny the tangle of earthly commitments that offspring would have brought. No place for mewling bastards within their sacred walls. A relief to the monks themselves, no doubt — and to their neighbours, certainly, a mighty comfort. To great lords, those hard-nosed and calculating men, it offered a specific reassurance: that donations to the monastery, and especially donations of land, would not end up being turned against them by ambitious monks out to father dynasties of their own. To others, men and women fretful at the prospect of Christ’s return, and who might once have been tempted to embrace chastity themselves, and the path of heresy, in an attempt to prepare for the hour of judgement, it offered a profounder consolation: that they were justified, after all, in putting their faith in men of God. Yet if the monks of Cluny were correct, and a virgin was indeed worthy to rank beside a martyr, then so too was the converse: that a priest who slept with a woman was barely a priest at all.

And what then of that supreme mystery, the awful power entrusted to him to mediate between heaven and earth, by transforming, at a holy Mass, bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ? ‘Dog shit’, according to the Patarenes, was all that the touch of