Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/203

Rh repeatedly obliged to disown the violent assailants of the validity of the sacraments administered by priests living in fornication, for the double reason that sound catholic doctrine has always separated the sacredness of the office from the personal dignity of the bearer, and that she knew herself to be not strong enough to uproot the evil. Jean de Varennes had been a learned divine and a celebrated preacher. Chaplain to the youthful Cardinal of Luxemburg at Avignon, he seemed destined for the highest ecclesiastical career, when he suddenly threw up all his benefices, with the exception of a canonry of Notre Dame of Reims, gave up the great style of his life and went to Saint Lié, his birthplace, where he began to lead a saintly life and to preach. “And he was much visited by people who came to see him from all countries on account of the simple, very noble and most honest life he led.” Soon he is called “ the holy man of Saint Lié”; he is regarded as a future pope, a miraculous being, a messenger of God. All France talks of him.

Now, in the person of Jean de Varennes the passion of sexual purity assumes a revolutionary aspect. He reduces all the evils of the Church to the one evil of lust. His extremist programme for the re-establishment of chastity is not aimed only at the clergy. As to fornicating priests, he denies the efficacy of the sacraments they administer: an ancient and redoubtable thesis which the Church had encountered more than once. According to him, it was not permissible for a priest to live in the same house with his sister or with an elderly woman. Moreover, he attacks immorality in general. He ascribes twenty-three different sins to the matrimonial state. He demands that adultery shall be punished according to the Ancient Law; Christ Himself would have ordered the stoning of the adulterous woman, if He had been sure of her fault. He asserts that no woman in France is chaste, and that no bastard can live a good life and be saved. In his vehement indignation he preaches resistance to the ecclesiastical authorities, to the archbishop of Reims in particular. “A wolf, a wolf!” he cried to the people, who understood but too wall who the wolf was, and repeated joyously: “Hahay, aus leus, mes bones gens, aus leus.” The archbishop had Jean de Varennes locked up in a horrible prison.