Simony

The eighth chapter of Acts gives the sin its founder. Simon, a magician of Samaria who had amazed the city and accepted baptism, watches the apostles lay hands on believers who then receive the Holy Spirit, and makes the businessman's inference: he offers money, saying, Give me also this power. Peter's answer is one of the New Testament's thunderclaps: Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. The scene is brief, Simon even asks for prayer, but its logic proved permanent: the things of the Spirit are gifts, gratia, grace, and a gift sold is destroyed in the selling, converted into its opposite. Christian imagination kept Simon busy thereafter; apocryphal acts made him the arch-heretic flying over Rome until Peter's prayer brought him down, and patristic writers made simoniaca haeresis a heresy, not merely a crime, on the reasoning that the buyer of the sacred has already miscounted what it is.

The word's career tracked the church's wealth. Once bishoprics carried lands, armies and revenues, their sale became structurally tempting to every power that could arrange it, and the vocabulary of Acts 8 supplied the reformers' indictment. Dante gave the tradition its most enduring image: in the third bolgia of the eighth circle the simoniacs are planted head-down in rock, flames on their soles, in a parody of Pentecost, and Nicholas III, mistaking the visitor, asks whether Boniface VIII has arrived early, the poem holding a place in hell for a pope still alive and reigning.

By the tenth century the traffic Peter cursed had become the operating system of the Western church. Proprietary churches were bought and sold with their altars; German and French kings invested bishops with ring and staff and expected payment or service; the papacy itself was, at low moments, an object of family purchase. The reform that answered began at Cluny and radicalized in Rome, and under Gregory VII, from 1073, simony stood beside clerical marriage as one of the two named diseases the Gregorian reform existed to cure.

The reformers' argument sharpened doctrine: some, like Cardinal Humbert, held simoniacal ordinations simply void, sacraments bought being no sacraments, a position the church eventually softened, but the polemical energy came from the older equation, that selling the sacred is heresy against its nature as gift. Because the sale of offices was inseparable from lay control of appointments, the campaign against simony widened inevitably into the Investiture Controversy, the struggle over whether emperors could install bishops at all, with its excommunications, its Canossa and its compromise at Worms in 1122, which conceded canonical election while kings kept the temporalities. Simony was never abolished, only chased inward and upward; late medieval fee schedules, dispensations and the indulgence traffic kept the substance alive under better bookkeeping, and the Reformers made the charge general. The canon law of every subsequent century has restated the prohibition, testimony less to victory than to the permanence of the temptation wherever spiritual office carries worldly goods.