THE MONASTIC MOVEMENT AND THE TWELFTH CENTURY RENASCENCE[11]
Aspects of the Hildebrandine Movement—The new Religious Orders—Bruno
and the Carthusians—The Beginnings of the Cistercians and Robert of
Molême—The Charter of Charity—The Canons Regular—Norbert and
Prémontré—The Military Orders—Influence of St. Bernard—The
Speculative Revival—Beginnings of Scholasticism—Abelard and his
influence—Abelard and Bernard—Popular Heresies—Peter de Bruys—The
Poor Men of Lyons—The Albigenses—The Legal Revival—Irnerius and the
Civil Law—Gratian and the Canon Law.
[Sidenote: Various aspects of the Hildebrandine movement.]
With all their importance, the Crusades were only one aspect of the
great religious and intellectual movement that heralded the twelfth
century throughout the length and breadth of Western Europe, and was as
directly a result of the triumph of the Hildebrandine ideal as the new
theories themselves were an emanation from the Cluniac revival.
Beginning with the strenuous careers of Gregory VII. and Urban II., this
new spirit at once began to work powerfully on Europe, and reached its
height in the days of peace that succeeded the end of the Investiture
Contest.
[Sidenote: The monastic revival.]
A monastic revival succeeded, as it preceded, the reformation of the
Papacy. At first the movement was on the old lines, and Cluny still
maintained its reputation, and increased its number of offshoots. But
the ‘Congregation of Cluny’ was too unelastic to be capable of
indefinite expansion, and its influence was perhaps widest felt in those
houses which adopted its ideal without giving up their ancient
Benedictine independence. [Sidenote: Hirschau.] Conspicuous among such
was Hirschau, a convent situated on the north-eastern slopes of the
Black Forest, in Swabia, where Abbot William introduced the rule of
Cluny in 1077, and which immediately became a centre of monastic
reformation in southern Germany, though the congregation of Hirschau
never attained the organisation or permanence of that of Cluny.
[Sidenote: Cluny.]
The weak point of the Cluniac system was that everything depended upon
the abbot. Under the unworthy Pontius (1109–1125), whom kinship to
Paschal II. had brought to the headship of Cluny at an exceedingly early
age, discipline declined, the old simplicity disappeared, and the abbot,
whose virtues were those of a feudal noble rather than a true monk,
wasted his energies in conflicts with the Bishop of Macon, who, in spite
of papal exemptions, strove to reform the declining house as diocesan.
But under the famous abbot, Peter the Venerable, Cluny again became a
power in Europe, though its old influence was never restored. Younger
houses, organised on newer lines, divided among themselves the reverence
once felt for it, and even Peter of Cluny was overshadowed by Bernard of
Clairvaux.
The times were still so stormy, and secular life so rough, that the
impulse which drove pious minds into the cloister was as strong as ever.
The feudal anarchy that still prevailed in France, perhaps continued to
give that country the leading part, both in spreading hierarchical ideas
and in bringing about further monastic revivals. [Sidenote: Further
development of the congregational idea.] The great question for the new
race of monastic reformers was how to keep up the spirit of the older
rule while avoiding its dangers. Cluny had not quite solved the problem,
though the congregational idea, the more disciplined austerity, and the
admission of _conversi_ or lay brothers, were steps capable of wider
development. How to avoid the wealth, pride, and idleness that came from
success was a still harder problem. The importance of the new orders
that arose in the end of the eleventh and the early years of the twelfth
century depended upon the skill with which the founders answered these
fundamental questions.
[Sidenote: Order of Grammont.]
The first new order was the order of Grammont. Its founder, St. Stephen,
an Auvergnat noble, settled in 1076 with a few companions at Muret,
north of Limoges, though after his death the house was removed to the
bleak granitic plateau of the neighbouring Grammont. A large number of
daughter houses grew up in Aquitaine, Anjou, and Normandy, all of which,
after the Cluniac fashion, were subject to the prior of Grammont. St.
Stephen’s wish was to follow no fixed definite system, but to be content
with the Gospel rules of poverty, humility, and long-suffering, and his
successors embodied this aspiration in a form of life which forbade the
order to possess land, cattle, or churches, to exclude seculars from its
services, and allowed it, if no alms came, to beg for sustenance. This
was a remarkable anticipation of the chief characteristic of the
mendicant orders of the thirteenth century, but it did not prevent the
early decay of these disorderly idealists. A stern fixed rule was
necessary to a mediæval monastery.
A happier fate attended St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians. A
German from Cologne, Bruno, became scholasticus of the famous chapter
school at Reims, where he numbered Urban II. among his disciples.
[Sidenote: The Carthusian Order and St. Bruno.] Driven with disgust from
Reims by the violence of Archbishop Manasses, he hid himself in a wild
mountain valley near Grenoble in Dauphiny, the site of the still famous
Grande Chartreuse, where he gathered round him a band of hermits living
in separate cells. Bruno was called to Rome by his old pupil Urban II.;
but the love of retirement soon took him to Calabria, where he founded
another Charterhouse, and died in 1101. Charterhouses now grew up,
though not very rapidly, all over Europe, and the order took its final
shape in the statutes of 1258. The possession of land, forbidden by
Bruno, was strictly limited, as were all other sources of wealth. Ruled
by a general chapter, the order followed up still further the idea of
the congregation. But the special characteristic of the Carthusians was
the union of the hitherto separated cœnobitic and eremitic ideals. The
Carthusian belonged to an order and convent, with its common church and
other buildings; but instead of living without privacy in common
dormitory and refectory, he lived in a separate cell a life of
meditation, study, and silence, while the _conversi_ practised
agriculture. The Carthusian life was novel; but the magnificent churches
and buildings of the order show that it took a deep root. Better than
many of the purely cœnobitic orders, the Carthusians maintained their
purity with few traces of the inevitable decay that beset most monastic
types when the enthusiasm of the founders had abated. Another order,
that of Fontevrault, founded by the Breton, Robert of Arbrissel (1100),
was distinguished by combining monasteries for men and women in one
establishment after the primitive plan, and by making the abbess
superior of the whole community, since Robert reverenced in her the
representative of the Virgin. Outside France this order had no great
importance.
The most important influence among the new orders undoubtedly fell to
the Cistercians, who rose rapidly from humble beginnings to a unique
position. In 1075 a monk named Robert founded a small convent at Molême
in northern Burgundy, where he strove to carry out with absolute
literalness and fidelity the rule of St. Benedict. [Sidenote: The
Cistercian Order and Robert of Molême.] The monks found the austerities
of their abbot so painful that they rebelled, and in 1098 Robert left
Molême in despair, accompanied by the few zealots, conspicuous among
whom was the Englishman Stephen or Harding. The little band settled down
at Cîteaux, between Dijon and Châlon, a desolate spot which derived its
name from the surrounding pools of standing water. There was founded the
famous abbey, which was to give its name to a new departure in monastic
history. At first the brethren lived in excessive poverty and isolation.
But the fame of their holiness gradually brought them adherents, and
from 1113, when the young Burgundian nobleman, Bernard of Fontaines,
applied for admission with thirty of his kinsmen, the growth of Cîteaux
was rapid. The monastery overflowed, and swarm after swarm of monks
established daughter houses elsewhere. In 1115 Bernard himself, whose
strong will and saintly character had won for him in two years a leading
position, led one of these migrations to Clairvaux, of which house he
became abbot. Stephen the Englishman was now abbot of Cîteaux, and
showed a capacity for organisation which soon made the single poor
monastery that he ruled the mother of a great order. In 1119 he obtained
Calixtus II.’s approval for the famous ‘Charter of Charity,’ the
constitution which he had devised for Cîteaux and its daughter houses.
[Sidenote: Carta Caritatis, 1119.] The movement soon spread like
wildfire, and hundreds of Cistercian monasteries were founded throughout
Christendom.
The leading characteristics of the Cistercians marked the new order
clearly off from its fellows. Starting from their first principle of
absolute asceticism, they pushed the doctrine of self-renunciation as
far as human capacity allowed. They rejected soft and costly garments,
lived on the plainest and simplest food, and would not tolerate
splendour even in their churches, where, instead of gold and silver
crosses, they contented themselves with painted wood. The very vestments
of their priests were of coarse stuff without gold, or silver, or costly
embroidery. Their churches and monasteries were built as simply as was
possible. Towers and belfries were rejected as useless luxuries.
Choosing for their abode remote valleys and wildernesses far from the
haunts of men, they carefully avoided the proximity to town-life, which
was a stumbling-block in the way of the older orders. Even the cure of
souls was prohibited as likely to lead the monks into the world and its
sins, and to celebrate Masses for money was denounced as simony. Thus
the old Benedictine rule was upheld, and the monk reminded that he was
no clerk but a pious recluse, whose business was to save his own soul.
For the occupation of the brethren labour was enjoined; and a large
number of _conversi_ carried on the hard agricultural work that soon
made the wilderness blossom like a garden, and filled with sheep the
downs and deserts. It thus resulted that the Cistercians, despite their
principles, had considerable influence in promoting the civilisation of
the regions in which they settled. The interconnection of their houses
made it easy for them to spread a tendency or an idea from land to land,
as when they transmitted the first rudiments of Gothic architecture from
its north French home to Italy.[12] While wealth and idleness were thus
kept at bay, elaborate efforts were made to keep watch over backsliders.
While the example of Cluny had led all the great monasteries to strive
to get from the Pope exemption from episcopal authority, Cîteaux
ostentatiously professed canonical obedience to the Bishop of Châlon,
and every daughter house was founded with the consent of the diocesan,
to whom its abbot submitted himself as a subject. Moreover, the
constitution sketched in the ‘Carta Caritatis’ provided within the order
itself means for perpetual visitation and reproof of weaker brethren,
that was far more effective than episcopal control. Like the Cluniacs,
the Cistercians formed a congregation over which the Abbot of Cîteaux
exercised the powers of a king. But an elaborate series of checks on the
abbot’s power imparted an aristocratic or popular element to the
government of the new order. The abbots of the four first daughters of
Cîteaux [La Ferté (founded 1113), Pontigny (1114), Clairvaux (1115), and
Morimond (1115)], and the General Chapter of the abbots of the order,
while liable to be visited and corrected by their superior, had the
power of correcting, administering, and depriving the head of the order
himself. The monasteries were to be visited yearly. Each new house was
affiliated to the earlier one from which it had sprung, and the
motherhouse exercised a special watchfulness over it. So different did
the Cistercians feel themselves from other regulars that they
significantly discarded the black garment of the Benedictines in favour
of a coarse white dress, from which they got the name of the white
monks. Their elaborate organisation gave them a corporate feeling and
unity of purpose to which few other orders could aspire. They represent
the last and most complete effort to give real effect to the ideal of
St. Benedict, by enjoining an austerity even beyond that of Benedict,
and by an elaborate organisation to which his rule for a single house
was quite a stranger.
Other new orders started on a different purpose. Various hospital
orders, which laid special stress on the care of the sick and suffering,
were set up for those who sought salvation in good works for the world,
rather than in isolation from human intercourse. But the great
contribution of the twelfth century towards bridging over the great gulf
between clerk and monk was the institution of the so-called Austin
Canons, or Canons Regular. [Sidenote: The Canons Regular.] It was agreed
that the higher life was the monastic life, and that the secular priest,
possessing private property, living in his own house and immersed in
worldly affairs, stood on a lower plane than the regular, but the cure
of souls was left to the secular clergy, and it was no part of the
Hildebrandine ideal to neglect the pastoral work of the Church. Hence
came a movement for reforming the secular clergy by making them live the
life of a monk, while they carried on the duties of a clerk. It was
impossible to enforce monastic life on the isolated and ignorant parish
clergy, among whom it was hard work enough to enforce the new obligation
of celibacy. The great colleges and cathedrals, served by many priests,
offered an easier and more fruitful field for reform.
In the fifth century St. Augustine of Hippo had sought to establish a
‘monastery of clerks in the bishop’s household.’ In the days of the
Carolingian reformation, Bishop Chrodegang of Metz had, in the spirit of
the great African father, set up a rule of life, by which canons of a
cathedral should live in common along with their bishops. In
Hildebrand’s days Peter Damiani appealed to the example of St. Augustine
as the ideal pattern for the cathedral clergy. Many chapters were
reformed, and from the twelfth century onwards a sharp distinction was
drawn between ‘regular canons,’ subject to a rule of life, and ‘secular
canons’ of the old-fashioned sort. The great property and the political
influence of the cathedral chapters made it hard to keep out of them
members of the great territorial families, who looked on their prebends
as sources of income, and who soon found a regular life too austere, so
that few cathedrals became permanently served by them. But new churches
of Regular Canons, where there were no secular traditions to interfere
with the strictness of their rule, began to rise up all over
Christendom. The general name of ‘Austin Canons’ suggested that the
whole of the class strove to realise the old ideal of St. Augustine.
Various congregations of Regular Canons were now set up, conspicuous
among which was that of the Victorines, whose abbey of St. Victor in
Paris became, as we shall see, a prominent centre of conservative
theology. But it was the establishment of the Premonstratensian
congregation by Norbert of Xanten which gave the Austin Canons so great
a position in Christendom that they almost rivalled the Cistercians in
popularity. [Sidenote: Norbert and the Premonstratensians.] Norbert was
a man of high family, who, after having held canonries of the
old-fashioned sort at his native town and at Cologne, gave up the world
and wandered as a preacher of penitence throughout Gaul, carefully
avoiding intercourse with clerks or monks. In 1120 he settled in a
desert place in the forest of Coucy, not far from Laon, where the bishop
was his friend, and established there a house of Canons Regular, calling
the spot Prémontré [Pratum Monstratum], in the belief that the site had
been pointed out to him by an angel. The rule of Prémontré soon became
famous, and its canons, clad in the white garment of the Cistercians,
showed, by their energy and zeal, that clerks bound by a rule could live
lives as holy as monks and do as much pastoral work as seculars. As an
‘order of clerks’ they exercised cure of souls, preached, taught, and
heard confessions, and where possible made their churches parochial. In
1126 Norbert became Archbishop of Magdeburg. Finding the secular chapter
utterly opposed to his policy, he planted a new colony of
Premonstratensians hard by in the collegiate church of St. Mary (1129).
Through his influence the Premonstratensians took the leading share in
the civilising and Christianising of the Slavonic lands beyond the Elbe.
In a later chapter we shall see how Norbert soon became the Emperor
Lothair’s chief adviser and helper. Before his death his order had
spread throughout Western Christendom. While Cîteaux had for its
ambition the perfection of an ancient system, Prémontré made a new
departure in religious history. Later regular orders have in nearly all
cases striven to carry out the ideal of Norbert, of combining the
religious life with that pastoral care, which to the older type of
monasticism was but a subtle and attractive form of that worldliness
which they were pledged to avoid. Within Norbert’s own lifetime the rule
of the Austin Canons received a very great accession to its strength.
[Sidenote: The Military Orders.] The military orders of the Latin East
all lived when at peace the life, and took the vows of Austin Canons,
while the older military orders of Spain [Calatrava, 1158, Alcantara,
1152] stood in close connection with the Cistercians. [See chapter xx.]
[Sidenote: Influence of the new orders on the life of the twelfth
century.]
The great development of new orders had a many-sided influence on the
character of the twelfth century. The monks and the Regular Canons were
everywhere the best servants of the Papacy, while their international
organisation was a new link between the national churches. The local
jealousy of Roman influence, the aspirations of the bishops to an
independent position, were energetically withstood by the enthusiasm of
the young orders. Their asceticism and zeal for good works won for them
the passionate attachment of the laity, and stimulated the sluggish
seculars to greater activity and holiness. Their influence over public
opinion was enormous. Not Louis of France or Conrad of Germany, but
Norbert of Magdeburg and Bernard of Clairvaux, were the real leaders of
European thought towards the middle of the twelfth century.
[Sidenote: St. Bernard.]
The practical authority of Norbert was mainly limited to Germany, but
the influence of Bernard, confined to no class or country, proved
something almost unique in the whole of Christian history. While Bernard
lived the simple and self-denying life of a Cistercian in his Burgundian
monastery, his activity took in the whole of Christendom. His
correspondence was enormous, his works numerous and varied, and his
authority hardly questioned. Through his influence the white robe of the
Cistercians became familiar in the remotest valleys of Christendom, and
the simple and struggling order, which he had joined but a few years
before, attained a world-wide celebrity. Every sort of dispute and
difference was brought before his tribunal. The rulers of Church and
State flocked to the rude huts of Clairvaux as to an oracle. In his
frequent journeys throughout France, the Rhineland and Italy, he was
welcomed as Pope or Emperor was never welcomed. It was Bernard who drew
up the rule for the Knights Templars, who ended the papal schism of
1130, and procured the recognition of Innocent II. as Pope. Innocent II.
set the example of deference to his authority which subsequent Popes
obsequiously continued, till at last a simple Cistercian became Pope
Eugenius III., merely because he was the friend of Bernard. Bernard
joined with Norbert in reprobating the rationalism that sprang from the
teaching of an Abelard or Gilbert de la Porrée or Arnold of Brescia, and
strove with sublime unreasonableness to put down the new questioning
spirit. More open heresy, like that of Peter de Bruys, found in him an
equally implacable foe. He upheld every doctrine of hierarchical power,
and scrupled not to rebuke kings and emperors if they gainsaid him. He
rekindled the crusading spirit when it seemed growing cool, and
persuaded the two greatest princes of Christendom to set forth on the
ill-fated Second Crusade. Stern, unyielding, rigid, dogmatic, blind to
all things which in his view did not immediately promote the kingdom of
God, Bernard represents the very triumph of the older monastic spirit
with its completeness of self-renunciation, its terrible asceticism, its
strange and almost inhuman virtues. Even in his own day, his spirit was
not that of the whole Church, and bold voices were found to lament his
obstinacy, his narrowness, his obscurantist hatred of secular learning.
But with all his faults he is a great and noble figure, and as the
supreme representative of a dying type, his career marks a transition to
a newer, brighter and more progressive world, than the gloomy realm over
which he had reigned so long as unquestioned sovereign. Yet it shows
that the days of brute force were over, when a simple monk, whose
singleness of purpose and zeal for righteousness were never so much as
questioned, could rule with such astounding power over the minds of men.
Even more than the authority of the great Popes, the power of Bernard
supplies a striking justification of the universal monarchy of the
Church of the twelfth century.
[Sidenote: The literary and speculative revival.]
From the religious revival there sprang a revived interest in literature
and speculation. Monastic life was strictly conservative, and the old
doctrine of Gregory the Great, that secular literature was unworthy the
attention of a good Christian, was the position of St. Bernard himself.
But the monks were at least interested in theology; and not even
Bernard’s influence could prevent pious souls from seeking in nature and
literature the justification of the ways of God to man. As the necessary
preliminary of theological study, the ‘seven arts’ of the old-fashioned
‘Trivium’ and ‘Quadrivium’ had again to be cultivated. [Sidenote: Its
relation to the monastic movement.] Monastic schools once more
stimulated the intellectual interest of Europe. Many of the greater
houses became centres of education. So far back as the tenth century
monks like St. Bruno of Cologne and Gerbert of Aurillac had restored the
Carolingian educational discipline, which had fallen into ruin in the
dark days of barbarian invasion and internal anarchy. German cloisters,
like St. Gallen and Reichenau, became famous for their learning. Cluny
forged the theories that Hildebrand wielded. Lanfranc of Bec made the
Norman monastery one of the great centres of dialectical and theological
study in northern Europe. Side by side with the cloister schools were
the schools of the great cathedrals, such as that of Reims, where
Gerbert taught. In these the teachers were partly seculars, and there
was perhaps more freedom and breadth of interests than in the purely
monastic academies. When the revival of speculation brought out
differences of opinion, Berengar, the scholasticus of the cathedral
school of Tours, used the weapon of logic to attack the newly formulated
doctrine of transubstantiation. It was Lanfranc, the monk of Bec, that
employed all the resources of his skill to demolish the arguments of the
hardy heretic. But though Berengar was first condemned by Leo IX. in
1050, it was not until 1078 that Gregory VII. practically settled the
controversy by insisting upon his complete retractation. So slow were
the methods against heresy in times when its danger was hardly realised.
[Sidenote: The transition to the scholastic philosophy.]
In the next generation two distinct tendencies present themselves.
Anselm of Aosta, Lanfranc’s successor alike at Bec and Canterbury,
defended the traditional position of the Church with a wider learning
and deeper insight than his predecessor. Anselm has been called both the
last of the fathers and the first of the schoolmen. But while his motive
was the same as that of the later schoolmen, his methods were somewhat
different, and his enduring fame is not for the acuteness of his
dialectic, so much as for his broad insight into the deeper problems of
philosophy and his anticipation of positions that were not fully taken
up until the reign of scholasticism was over. [Sidenote: Anselm and
Roscelin.] The Realism of which he was the upholder was part of the
earlier tradition of the ecclesiastical schools. Much more epoch-making,
though not in itself altogether original, was the Nominalism of
Roscelin, the true parent of scholastic philosophy. While Anselm only
saw in philosophy the way of justifying the Church’s teaching,
Roscelin’s logical nominalism led him to deny the possibility of the
Trinity in Unity and teach undisguised Tritheism. But he argued as a
logician and not as a divine, and in 1092 acquiesced in the recantation
which was presented to him by a council at Soissons. From the
controversies of Anselm and Roscelin all the later intellectual activity
sprang.
Early in the twelfth century there were many schools and masters
scattered through central Europe and particularly in northern Gaul.
[Sidenote: Activity of the schools.] Of one of the least of these
schools and scholars it could be said that ‘clerks flocked from divers
countries to hear him daily; so that if thou shouldst walk about the
public places of the city and behold the crowds of disputants, thou
wouldst say that the citizens had left off their other labours and given
themselves to philosophy.’[13] There was no order or method in study.
Any one could teach who had learnt under an accredited master and had
received the Church’s licence. The students followed the masters, and
the centres of study fluctuated as reputations were made and destroyed.
But at this period there were three chief schools in northern France,
all closely connected with the cathedrals of the respective towns. The
teaching of Anselm of Laon (a scholar of St. Anselm) made that city a
great centre of theological lore. The dialectical renown of William of
Champeaux brought crowds of students to the cathedral schools of Paris.
The literary enthusiasm of the Breton Platonist, Bernard Sylvester, and
of his successor, William of Conches, made the cathedral school of
Chartres ‘the most abundant spring of letters in Gaul.’[14]
Peter Abelard (1079–1142), a Breton from Palais, near Nantes, was the
most striking manifestation of the new spirit. He was the eldest son of
a gentleman of good estate, but he early renounced his inheritance, and
devoted himself with extraordinary enthusiasm to study. He first learnt
dialectic under Roscelin at Loches, near Tours, and afterwards under
William of Champeaux at Paris. [Sidenote: Abelard and his influence.]
But his sublime self-confidence and acute sceptical intellect speedily
brought him into conflict, both with the novel Nominalism of Roscelin
and with the old-fashioned extreme Realism of William of Champeaux. He
soon despised and strove to supplant his masters. While William of
Champeaux taught with declining authority at the cathedral school, and
afterwards in the Abbey of St. Victor, his audacious disciple gathered
an opposition band of pupils round him in neighbouring towns, and
finally on the hill of Ste. Geneviève, where he became so famous, that
William retired in disgust to his bishopric of Châlons. Abelard’s
acuteness, rhetorical skill, and attractive personality, soon drew to
Paris crowds of students, who gave the city a unique position among the
schools of Europe. The Conceptualism, which he perhaps learnt from
Aristotle, seemed more scientific than Realism, and less revolutionary
than Nominalism. But it is not so much what he taught, as the spirit in
which he taught, that gave Abelard his position in history. His method
was essentially rationalistic. He based his orthodoxy on its
reasonableness. ‘A doctrine is not to be believed,’ he is reported to
have said, ‘because God has said it, but because we are convinced by
reason that it is so.’ Moved by religious zeal as well as greed for
applause, he went to Laon to study theology under Anselm, but very soon
came to despise his teacher, whom he denounced as a phrase-monger.
‘Anselm kindled a fire,’ he said, ‘not to give light but to fill the
house with smoke.’ He forsook the pretender’s school, and at once
proceeded to prove the audacious thesis that a man could learn theology
without a master. He was soon back at Paris, where his teaching
attracted greater crowds than ever, until the tragic conclusion of his
relations with Heloisa drove him to take the monastic vows at
Saint-Denis. Even in the cloister he was restless and insubordinate. He
published a treatise on the Trinity, which was denounced by the aged
Roscelin as savouring of Sabellianism, and burnt at a Council at
Soissons in 1121. He left Saint-Denis after rousing the fury of his
fellow-monks by demonstrating the unhistorical character of the
accredited legend of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, their imaginary
founder. After some years spent in his new monastery of the Paraclete in
Champagne, Abelard sought absolute retirement as abbot of St. Gildas de
Rhuys, in the wildest part of his native Brittany. [Sidenote: Abelard
and St. Bernard.] But he fled at last from the savage monks of St.
Gildas, and again appeared as a teacher in Paris. As the incarnation of
the new critical spirit, he had long been obnoxious to the stout
upholders of ecclesiastical tradition like Norbert and Bernard. Bernard
now denounced him, and induced the bishops, who registered his will, to
assemble in council at Sens to condemn his heresies (1141). Despairing
of justice from such a body, Abelard appealed to the Pope. But Innocent
II. was as much under Bernard’s influence as the French bishops, and
condemned him to lifelong confinement in a monastery. Abelard fell sick
at Cluny while on his way to Rome, and obtained from Peter the Venerable
a sympathy and kindness that stood in strong contrast to Bernard’s
inveterate hostility. He was received into the Cluniac fold, and made
some sort of recantation of his heresies. In 1142 he died at Châlon. The
spirit of his teaching did not die with him. [Sidenote: The Schools of
Paris.] The schools of Paris retained the fame with which he had first
invested them. While the Regular Canons of St. Victor made their abbey
the home of traditional theology tempered by mysticism, the secular
school of the cathedral retained the spirit of inquiry and criticism
which secured for it a permanence of influence that not even the
patronage of St. Bernard could give to the school of St. Victor. If the
stigma of heresy was attached to some of Abelard’s disciples, others
became lights of orthodoxy without any great departure from Abelard’s
doctrines. Arnold of Brescia, denounced by St. Bernard as the
armour-bearer of the Goliath of misbelief his master, incurred by his
rash entrance into politics the fate of a heretic who was also a rebel
[pages 239–243 and 250]. [Sidenote: Change in the character of
Scholasticism after Abelard.] But Peter the Lombard (died 1160), was not
only Abelard’s pupil, but a pillar of orthodoxy, bishop of Paris, and
author of that _Book of Sentences_ which was the accredited text-book of
all later scholasticism. Gilbert de la Porrée (died 1154), a disciple of
the humanistic school of Chartres, and bishop of Poitiers, was denounced
by St. Bernard as a heretic. In 1148 Pope Eugenius, a creature of
Bernard’s, presided at a council at Reims to deal with Gilbert’s errors.
But the very cardinals refused any longer to follow Bernard’s leading.
When Gilbert escaped uncondemned, the new theology had won its way to a
recognised position in the Church. With its wider diffusion, the new
learning lost the character of revolt which in Abelard’s time was
associated with it. It became more systematic, more specialised, less
original. The discovery of the whole of Aristotle’s _Organon_, in the
latter part of the century, crushed the critical spirit by the weight of
its authority. The conflict of studies drove out the liberal pursuit of
literature in favour of specialised dialectic and theology, while the
majority showed most favour to bread-winning studies like the canon and
civil laws. The dialectic of Paris prevailed over the humanism of
Chartres. But if some of the first freshness of the new birth was thus
lost, the end of the century saw the scholar class a recognised element
in the European commonwealth. So numerous were the ‘masters’ who taught
in the Paris schools that they formed themselves into guilds or
corporations, from which the germ of the University of Paris and of all
other transalpine universities grew.
Monasticism and philosophy combined to strengthen the Church, but the
spirit of revolt that had been conquered in the schools now took more
popular shapes. All through the eleventh century there were found
wandering teachers of strange doctrines. From the beginning of the
twelfth century definitively heretical sects were crystallising round
different principles of innovation. [Sidenote: Popular heresies.] For
more than twenty years an unfrocked priest, Peter de Bruys, taught with
powerful effect in Dauphiny and Provence. [Sidenote: Peter de Bruys.] He
was an enthusiast like the old Montanists, rejecting all forms,
discipline, and tradition, in favour of the living spirit, and
denouncing the sacerdotal system and many of the most treasured dogmas
of the Church. In 1137 or 1138, Peter was burnt alive at Saint-Gilles by
the mob, whose fury he had excited by making a bonfire of crosses and
pious emblems. But his followers kept together after his death, under
the guidance of Henry, an outcast monk of Cluny. Peter the Venerable
wrote against the Petrobrusians, and St. Bernard saw in the popularity
of the young sect the malign influence of the spirit of Abelard. ‘The
Catholic faith,’ he lamented, ‘is discussed in the streets and
marketplaces. We have fallen upon evil times.’ His energy secured the
conversion of many of the Petrobrusians. The remnant joined themselves
to the new sect of the Waldenses or Vaudois.
[Sidenote: Peter Valdez and the ‘Poor Men of Lyons.’]
Peter Valdez, a rich merchant of Lyons, gave up all his property, and
began about 1177 to wander about the country preaching repentance and
the imitation of the Apostles. He procured the translation of the Bible
into the vulgar tongue, and soon began to gather followers. After a few
years of toleration he was excommunicated in 1184 by Pope Lucius III.
Thus cut off from the orthodox, Peter joined the Petrobrusians and
became more frankly heretical. Before his death in 1197, his followers
were to be found in Bohemia, in Lorraine, in southern France, in Aragon,
and in northern Italy. These ‘Poor Men of Lyons,’ as they were called,
rejected all priestly ministration, and included in one sweeping
denunciation prayer for the dead, six of the seven sacraments, military
service, and property. But grave differences soon broke them up into
hostile sects. The Lombards sought to organise themselves separately
from the Church, while the French were content to remain a school within
the Church. The wise policy of later Popes allowed the more moderate to
combine their own way of thinking with acceptance of the Church’s
authority, and they remained for the most part humble-minded quietists,
whose highest aspiration was to live in peace.
Other sects assumed a more dangerous complexion than the Poor Men of
Lyons. From the eleventh century onwards, obscure bodies of heretics
appear under the names of Manicheans, Paulicians, Cathari, Bulgarians,
Patarini, and Publicani. Their strength was at first in the Rhineland,
whence they infected the north of France. Finally they found a more
sympathetic field in southern France, where heresy had long flourished
in various forms. The origin of these sects is obscure. [Sidenote: The
Manichean sect.] The ancient opinion that they were direct descendants
of the ancient Gnostics and Manichees cannot be upheld, and it is
difficult even to prove their affiliation with the Paulicians and
Bogomili of the Balkan peninsula, whose heresy had troubled the Eastern
Empire in the days of the Macedonian and Comnenian dynasties. Their
doctrines are as hard to define as their origin, and we have for the
most part to rely upon the statements of their enemies. But it is clear
that they represent neither a definite sect nor an organised body of
heretical doctrine. Like the early Gnostics, they indicate a vague
general tendency rather than any precise teaching, and differed widely
among each other. The more thoroughgoing of them were dualists like the
Manichees, believing that there existed two equal and co-eternal
deities, the one evil and the other good. The rest seem to have held the
modified dualism of the Bogomili, admitting the good principle to be the
only God, and the author of the New Testament, and regarding the evil
principle as a fallen spirit, the creator of the world, the source of
the Old Testament revelation, essentially the Demiurgus of the Gnostics.
The practical teaching of these heretics was as various as their
doctrine. They utterly despised all things of the flesh, and from this
contempt flowed moral doctrines both ascetic and antinomian. They
distinguished sharply between the elect and the reprobate. They rejected
the authority both of the Church and of the State. Instead of the
ordinary offices of the Church, they had a sort of spiritual baptism
called _Consolamentum_, which was reserved to the perfect believers.
Apart from their religious heresies, they were frankly hostile to the
whole order of society.
[Sidenote: The Albigenses.]
The south of France soon swarmed with these innovators, who took the
name of Albigenses, Albigeois, from one of their strongholds, the town
of Albi on the Tarn. Besides the avowed heresies, a general spirit of
revolt against the Church seized alike upon lords and people. Before the
end of the century, the Albigenses had obtained a firm hold over the
county of Toulouse and its dependencies, and defied the efforts of the
Church to root them out. Elsewhere the speculations of the twelfth
century had no very prolonged vitality. A few burnings of leaders, a
crusade of energetic preaching, and a dexterous effort to turn the
undisciplined zeal of the heretic into more orthodox channels, were
generally enough to prevent their further progress. The offspring of
vague discontent, twelfth century heresy took as a rule such vague and
fantastic shapes that it almost condemned itself. After all, the spirit
of Henry of Cluny or Peter Valdez was not very different from that of
Norbert or Robert of Arbrissel. But however ill-regulated, it was
another sign that the human mind had awakened from the sleep of the Dark
Ages. If the popular heretics could not reason, they could at least
feel.
[Sidenote: The revival of the study of law.]
We have still to deal with one of the great intellectual forces of the
twelfth century. The revival of the scientific study of law, which grew
up alongside the new birth of dialectic and philosophy, had almost as
powerful an influence as these studies in stimulating intellectual
interests, and had practical results of an even more direct and palpable
kind. The study of Roman Law had never been quite forgotten, especially
in Italy. The revival of the Roman Empire by the Ottos, the development
of the power of the secular state all over Europe, the growth of ordered
municipal government in southern Europe, and particularly in Italy, all
contributed to make this study more popular, more necessary, and more
universal. But side by side with the development of the civil power the
even greater growth of the ecclesiastical authority set up a law of the
Church in rivalry with the law of the State. The legal revival was thus
two-sided. There was a fresh interest in both the Civil Law, which Rome
had handed down, and in the Canon Law, which had slowly grown up in the
ecclesiastical courts The same age that witnessed the work of Irnerius
saw the publication of the _Decretum_ of Gratian.
[Sidenote: Irnerius and the revival of Civil Law.]
The early Middle Ages had an almost superstitious reverence for the
written law of Rome. Its decisions were still looked upon as eternal and
universally binding, even when practically it had been superseded by a
mass of fluctuating feudal custom. In Italy the elementary texts of the
Roman Law had always been studied, and its principles always upheld in
the courts. The eleventh century battle of Papacy and Empire became
before long a conflict of political principles and theories. Both sides
sought weapons in the legal treasures of ancient Rome. Accordingly the
eleventh century saw flourishing schools of law at Pavia, at Ravenna,
and perhaps at Rome. Early in the twelfth century the fame of Irnerius
led to the establishment of a still greater school of law at Bologna,
already the seat of flourishing schools of dialectic and literature, and
where the teaching of law had already been begun by Pepo. Irnerius was a
jurist in the service of the Countess Matilda, who, at her request,
lectured on the laws of Justinian, and particularly the Pandects, at
Bologna. The fact that he was afterwards in the service of Henry V.
shows that both the papal and imperial powers agreed in welcoming his
work. But with the appearance of Irnerius upholding the election of a
schismatic Pope in 1118, the new school of Civil Lawyers became frankly
imperialist, looking upon the law as furnishing an armoury of texts,
from which the divine rights and universal claims of the Roman Emperor
could be deduced, though also treating it as an intellectual discipline,
and almost as a literary exercise. Wealth, honour, and political
importance were showered on men, who possessed at once the key to
theoretical knowledge and to success in practical life. Even earlier
than at Paris, the law schools of Bologna became organised and
permanent. Before the end of the century, the crowds of mature foreign
students who flocked to hear the famous successors of Irnerius had set
up the student-university of Bologna, whose establishment is as much of
an epoch in the history of European thought as that of the university of
masters at Paris.
[Sidenote: The ‘Decretum’ of Gratian, and the growth of Canon Law.]
The Church had long had its own courts and its own law; but the victory
of the Hildebrandine system gave a new importance to the Courts
Christian and to the Canon Law which they upheld. It was the aim of the
Church reformers to draw a hard and fast line between Church and State,
and to bind together the scattered and often antagonistic corporations,
out of which the Church was constituted, into a single self-governing,
self-sufficing, independent body, of which the Pope was the absolute
monarch. All through the eleventh century efforts were made by leading
ecclesiastical lawyers to do for the law of the Church what was already
being done for the law of the State. Italy witnessed most of these
attempts, but the canonists of Germany and Gaul were not behindhand, and
the most famous of the early compilations, which appeared in 1115, was
the work of a north-French churchman, Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, a pupil
of Lanfranc of Bec. But these preliminary efforts were superseded by the
_Decretum_, or more accurately the _Concordantia discordantium Canonum_,
of Gratian, which probably appeared in 1142. Gratian was a monk of the
new order of Camaldoli, living in a convent at Bologna. The book which
he published was a text-book, the effort of a private student, with no
other authority than what it could command from its own merits. But its
merits were such that it swept all its predecessors out of the field,
and soon won something of the authority that belonged to a definite
codification of previous ecclesiastical jurisprudence. It appeared at
the right place and at the right moment. From that time onwards the
study of Canon Law stood side by side with that of the Civil Law at
Bologna, and the town of Irnerius and Gratian became the intellectual
centre of the great controversies of Church and State, which then
distracted Europe. Before long the Canon Law became as elaborate and
comprehensive a system as that Civil Law, which it copied, developed and
sometimes reacted against. The canonists became a band of specialists,
separated from the civilians on the one hand and the theologians on the
other. Just as the practical advantages of the study of Civil Law called
away the votaries of the unprofitable secular study of literature, so
did the practical uses of Canon Law divert active and ambitious
churchmen from the academic study of theology. Law became the attractive
science as well for ardent ecclesiastics as for men of the world. If it
involved less speculative activity than the studies it superseded, it
had the advantage of helping to bridge over the gulf between the little
world of isolated students and the broad world of everyday life. As the
revival of dialectic renewed men’s interests in abstract science, so did
the revival of law broaden men’s practical interests. If in the long-run
it gave weapons to Empire as well as to Papacy, the first result was to
complete the equipment of the hierarchy for the business of ruling the
world. While the civilian’s Empire was a theory, the canonist’s Papacy
was a fact. As living head of a living system, the Pope became a
constant fountain of new legislation for the Canon Law, while the Civil
Law remained as it had been in Justinian’s time, with little power of
adaptation to the needs of a changing state of society. [Sidenote: The
new movements strengthen the Church.] Stimulated by the religious
revival and the monastic movement, victorious over nascent heresy, yet
invigorated by the new activity of human thought, protected by the
enthusiasm which had brought about the Crusades, a state within the
state, with her own law, her own officers, and her own wonderful
organisation, the Church of the twelfth century stood at the very height
of her power, and drew fresh strength, even from the sources that might
well have brought about her ruin.