It was not, of course, that any medieval moralist wished to condone a priest’s immoral life. The divine punishment which such a sinner would ultimately suffer was imagined with some relish.72 And there are treatises aplenty which describe the purification process through which a priest should pass before presuming to serve his flock—especially before administering holy communion, “confecting” (cf. the Latin verb conficere) the sacrament of the Eucharist. The traditional position was that priests who failed to live up to such (fittingly) high standards should be left to God, and hopefully their fallibilities would not become known to their congregations. For, if so, layfolk might presume to judge their superiors, thereby threatening the jealously guarded hieratic relationship between shepherd and flock.
Chaucer’s Pardoner, however, makes no secret of his moral deviancy. Indeed, he positively revels in exhibiting it to the audience of Canterbury pilgrims; given this ostentatious public display, the risk of scandal is great. If the standard scholastic critique were applied, it could be said that the effect of his preaching is thereby destroyed, since the pilgrims are bound to take more notice of his bad personal example than of his good narrative exemplum. It is hardly surprising, then, that after his tale is told he should receive insults rather than alms. Moreover, the Pardoner sins in the very act of preaching (in the sense explained above), due to his vainglory and greed for gain—here we are dealing with deviancy appertaining to his relationship with God rather than that with his audience. Of course, he sins in other ways as well, his lechery being evident (though defining the precise form or forms it takes has proved controversial in current scholarship). Complexity is heaped upon complexity when we realize that pardoners were generally not licensed to preach. Therefore it is possible to argue that— quite apart from his moral unworthiness for the task—Chaucer’s character has usurped an office to which he has no legal right. To make matters even worse, he exceeds his brief as a distributor of pardons, claiming far more for them than his license allows. And could it be that at least some of those pardons—like all of his relics—are fakes? Indeed, is the Pardoner himself a fake, not a properly licensed quaestor at all?
These interpretive challenges are further complicated by the fact that, in Chaucer’s day, not everyone was prepared to endorse orthodox attempts to contain the immoral preacher and/or priest. The schoolmen we have cited had carefully demarcated the qualities of the office and the qualities of the man—Lollard theology brought them together with a vengeance. Above, the possibilities of latent “Monophysitism” and “Nestorianism” were tentatively explored in various late-medieval attempts to reconcile abstract authority with human fallibility. Now we may add that certain statements by John Wyclif’s followers shaded into “Donatism,”73 a heresy generally believed to include the belief that, if ministers are unworthy of their ecclesiastical offices, the sacraments they perform are thereby devalued in some way.74 The Wycliffite treatise Of Prelates claims that “a prest may be so cursed & in heresie þat he makiþ not þe sacrament”;75 a Lollard sermon suggests that, because of their evil life; priests may lose “uertu to mynystre ony sacramentis” or to do anything medefuly;76 and the third of the Lollard Twelve Conclusions claims that the Holy Spirit and His noble gifts “may not stonde with dedly synne in no menere persone.”77 According to the record of his second trial, William Swinderby (first charged with preaching heresy in 1382, in Leicester) believed “that a priest being in mortal sin cannot, by the power of the sacramental words, confect the body of Christ, or perform any other Church sacrament whatever or minister to members of the Church”—a charge he vehemently denied.78
Similar attributions of Donatist views occasionally appear in the Norwich heresy trials of 1428–31, as when Hawisia Moone is quoted as saying that “oonly he that is moost holy and moost perfit in lyvyng in erthe is verry pope, and these singemesses [‘mass-singers’] that be cleped pretes ben no prestes, but thay be lecherous and covetouse men and fals deseyvours of the puple.”79 This brings out well another crucial aspect of Donatism (essential for this, our initial, definition of the term): “sacraments derive their validity from the holiness of him by whom they are conferred.”80 In other words, the best men consecrate the best sacraments. Such doctrine was quite contrary to the ideals of Christian unity, since it held out the (highly divisive) possibility of different individuals ministering and receiving different types of sacrament. St. Augustine, who in the fifth century labored long and hard against the original Donatist sect, was acutely aware of this,81 and sought a solution in the principle that ordination confers a supra-human authority on any duly appointed clergyman, which keeps his sacraments safe and secure, despite any human fallibilities he may have.82 But Wyclif’s supporters chipped away at this principle,83 developing the view that every member of their “true church,” being one of the elect and a recipient of divine grace, “was ipso facto more priest than layman, ordained of God.”84 Therefore a righteous layman had just as much right (or indeed more right) to administer the sacraments than had an evil, albeit formally ordained, priest. To take one example from many such statements, the Lollard John Skylly “held and afermed that every trewe man and woman being in charite is a prest, and that no prest hath more poar in mynystryng of the sacramentes than a lewed man hath.”85
To what extent was John Wyclif himself responsible for such latter-day Donatism, if so it may be called? He definitely was the main target of the London Blackfriars condemnations of May 1382, which included the proposition, “if a bishop or a priest is living in mortal sin he cannot ordain, or confect, or baptize.”86 But Wyclif never defended himself against this particular charge (in marked contrast to his prompt reaction to other items on the list), which leads Ian Levy to suspect that the schoolman did not accept the doctrine