Perhaps if I begin this time with the digression—get it out of the way early, so
to speak--my eventual topic may emerge more clearly. I first encountered the odd phrase benefit of clergy in the title of a
Kipling short story by Rudyard Kipling.
Kipling was one of two very great writers, contemporaries—the other
being Joseph Conrad—who are suffering what I pray is temporary academic neglect
for their crimes of political incorrectness. The full title of his story is “Without
Benefit of Clergy,” and its subject is amazingly “modern” and shockingly
“transgressive” for something published in 1890. It is about a British colonial bureaucrat,
John Holden, with a secret double life. Everyone
takes Holden for a bachelor, but actually he is shacked up with a young Muslim
girl, Ameera, whom he bought, in a
little house on the edge of town. She
gives birth to their child, and for a while they are blissful. Then the baby dies. Then the girl-mother dies. End of idyll, end of story. It’s as though it all never happened.
The phrase “without benefit of clergy,” of course alluded to the irregular
sexual union at the center of the story, unsanctified by religion and therefore
presumably deeply shocking to Victorian readers, or at least those unfamiliar
with Kipling’s 1892 poem “Road to Mandalay” in which he has an ordinary British
sailor wistfully hoping to be shipped “somewhere East of Suez, where the best
is like the worst, Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a
thirst.” Actual Victorians were not all
that Victorian.
I have seen the idea of “benefit of
clergy” used in a similar manner in many other places, though such usage
misunderstands the phrase. Benefit of clergy is actually a
technical legal term dating from the Middle Ages. It refers to the legally enshrined clerical
privilege of exemption from the civil courts or their penalties for felonies under
certain circumstances. The clerus in Christian Latin, the generic word
for the clerical estate, suggested a special degree of education. The “clerics” or “clergy” were the educated
ones, and they were afforded special legal advantages. So there was one law for the lettered men and another for the lewd men or lay men. The origins of this
legal peculiarity are obscure. But there
is a probably relevant biblical passage in the First Book of Chronicles (16:22)
that reads “Touch not mine anointed, and do no evil to my prophets” (Nolite tangere christos meos, et in
prophetis meis nolite malignari).
The Chronicles (or Paralipomenon as they were generally called in the
Latin Bible) are of course history books, and for the most part not merely
prose but distinctly prosaic. But most
of this one chapter is a pretty fancy poem, a kind of misplaced psalm, that
seems to suggest that the special function of the “anointed” is literary: to
proclaim among the nations the glory and dominion of the Lord. And, indeed, the special office of the
medieval clergy—actually called that, “the
Office,” was the faithful recitation of the psalter.
All this is speculative, but it
fits in so nicely with another aspect of the “benefit of clergy” that I cannot
resist bringing it up. That aspect is
the means by which an accused person could actually claim clerical exemption
from the penalties of the secular law.
Remember that English law was pretty sanguinary, becoming ever more so
with the advancement of modernity.
Somebody has made an actual census, and by the beginning of the nineteenth
century there were two hundred and twenty-two statutory crimes for which the
penalty was hanging. It is a number that
sticks in the mind. In the gentler, good
old medieval days of Merry England there were probably only half that number,
but every town had its gibbet, and many of them more than one. So if you were a Friar Tuck type, prone upon
occasion to poach a rabbit or two in Lord Oswald’s timber reserve, you needed
some definite means of demonstrating that you were too erudite to swing.
The legal convention that emerged
was this: a defendant could establish claim to benefit of clergy by being able
to read the opening verse or verses of the Miserere,
the fiftieth psalm: “Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness: in the
greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense. Thoroughly wash me from my guilt, and of my
guilt cleanse me” et caetera. The Miserere
is the most famous of the penitential psalms, and indeed it grew out of a
matter needing much penance. Its
medieval rubric identified it as “a psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet
came to him after his sin with Bathsheba,” discreetly leaving unmentioned the
fact that David had also arranged to have Bathsheba’s husband killed by way of
anticipatory cover up. Thus by being
able to bewail your guilt in biblical Latin, you might dodge guilt’s hempen and
vernacular guerdon. This biblical
passage was aptly called “the neck verse,” and it makes numerous witty
appearances in medieval literature. One
of them is this: Miserere is the very
first word spoken by the pilgrim-narrator of the Divine Comedy (Inferno,
1:65). I suspect that Kipling himself
was aware of the cultural background of “benefit of clergy,” and were there but
world enough and time I might even write an essay about it.
