THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE FRIARS[38]
The _Regnum_, the _Sacerdotium_, and the _Studium_—The Beginnings of
the Universities—Their Organisation and their Spirit—Their
Relations to the Church—The Introduction of Aristotle—Intellectual
and Popular Heresy—St. Francis and the Minorites—St. Dominic and
the Order of Preachers—Other Mendicant Orders—The Work of the
Mendicants—Preaching and Pastoral Care—The Religious Revival—The
Mendicants and the Universities—The Triumph of the Mendicants—The
Great Scholastics of the Thirteenth Century and the Results of
their Influence.
[Sidenote: Regnum, Sacerdotium, and Studium.]
From the unorganised schools of the twelfth century proceeded the
corporate universities of the thirteenth century. The same age that
witnessed the culmination of the idea of the ‘regnum’ under Barbarossa
and Henry VI. and the triumph of the ‘sacerdotium’ under Innocent III.,
saw the establishment of the ‘studium’ as a new bond of unity and
authority, worthy to be set up side by side with the Empire and the
Papacy themselves. The strong instinct for association that about the
same period led to the organisation of the Lombard League and the French
Communes, that united England under the Angevins and South Italy under
Frederick II., that set up merchant guilds in every urban centre and
gave fresh life to both the old and the new ecclesiastical societies,
brought about the organisation of the masters and scholars into the
universities which still remain as the most abiding product of the
genius of the Middle Ages. Just as the institution of knighthood had set
up a new cosmopolitan principle of union that bound together men of
different lands, wealth, and social station, in a common brotherhood of
arms, so did the establishment of the corporations of doctors and
scholars unite the subtlest brains of diverse countries and ranks in a
common professional and social life.
[Sidenote: The earliest universities.]
The earliest universities were, like Paris, associations of teachers,
or, like Bologna, clubs of foreign students. They had no founders, and
based their rights on no charters of king or pope, but grew up gradually
as a natural outcome of the wide spread of intellectual pursuits that
had followed upon the twelfth-century Renascence. The accident of the
abiding presence of a series of great teachers had made Paris the centre
of theological and philosophical study north of the Alps, and had given
the schools of Bologna a prestige that attracted to them students of the
civil and canon laws from every country in Europe. [Sidenote: Paris and
Bologna.] It was inevitable that sooner or later the accidental and
spasmodic character of the earlier schools should give way to systematic
organisation. The numerous teachers of arts and theology at Paris
gradually became a definite college or guild of doctors and masters,
with power to admit and to exclude new members of their profession, and
with an increasingly strong corporate spirit and tradition. Before the
death of Louis VII. a university, that is to say a corporation, of
masters, had replaced the individual schools of the age of Abelard.
Before the century was out Philip Augustus had given the infant
university its earliest privileges of exemption from the ordinary
municipal organisation. Before the middle of the thirteenth century, the
Faculties had been organised, the Four Nations and the Rectorate set up,
the authority of the Episcopal Chancellor reduced to a minimum, and the
universal acceptation of the teaching rights of the masters secured.
Kings and popes vied with each other in showering privileges on a
society that controlled with such absolute authority educated public
opinion. Moreover, the simple expedient of suspension of lectures or of
secession wrung by force the privileges not to be obtained by favour,
while a more permanent result of these academic secessions was the
creation of other universities, whose rivalry wholesomely stimulated the
energies of the teachers of the ancient centre. Bologna did for Italy
almost all that Paris did for the North, though the difference of the
circumstances of a free municipality and those of a great capital of a
national state affected both the organisation of the institution and the
character of the studies. Not the teaching masters but the well-to-do
and mature students themselves formed the corporations that were the
earliest form of the university of Bologna. The supreme importance of
legal studies was the outcome of the social, political, and intellectual
condition of Italy. [Sidenote: The multiplication of universities.] The
constant secessions that set up flourishing schools at Padua and Pisa,
and covered Italy with smaller universities, were helped by the
centrifugal tendency that had already become a marked feature of Italian
politics. Yet no mediæval university was in any sense a purely national
institution. It was the home of the Latinised, cosmopolitan, clerkly
culture that made the wandering scholar as much at home in a distant
city of a foreign land as in the schools of his native town. The
Studium, like the Regnum and the Sacerdotium, belonged to the old
cosmopolitan Roman order that knew nothing of the modern ideas of
national life and local states. Yet no local state that aspired to
civilised life could dispense with a ‘studium generale’ or university.
The great position of Angevin England made the English school at Oxford
the chief northern rival of Paris, from which perhaps it was the most
important secession. Thirteenth-century Spain celebrated its deliverance
from the Moor and its entrance into the Christian commonwealth by the
setting up of new learned corporations. It was a sign of the
dethronement of Germany from her ancient predominance that she had no
university till long after our period was over. So great were the
benefits of an organised general school that kings and popes began to
institute, deliberately, imitations of what had earlier grown up
spontaneously. Gregory IX. established the first university of papal
foundation at Toulouse, and Frederick II. the first university of royal
foundation at Naples. Alfonso VIII. of Castile not only conquered at Las
Navas de Tolosa, but strove, though to little purpose, to found the
first Spanish university at Palencia.
[Sidenote: The spirit of the universities.]
From the remotest parts of Europe eager students of every rank and
condition, from highest to lowest, from wealthiest to poorest, flocked
to the universities of repute. If many were chiefly eager for a career
and professional advancement, there were not wanting a few touched with
a higher spirit. The free life, the democratic equality of the teachers,
the unrestrained licence of the taught, if leading to constant
disorders, brought about a spirit of independence within the academic
band such as Europe had not witnessed since the fall of the Roman
Empire. This was the more important since the universities of the
thirteenth century were no mere abodes of recluse scholars, but
exercised a profound influence on every side of human activity. They
affected politics and statecraft nearly as much as they affected thought
and religion. It is with their influence on the State and the Church
that we are mainly concerned now.
[Sidenote: Relation of the universities to the Church.]
It was an all-important question what would be the relations of the
Studium to the Sacerdotium. The universities were in the long-run bound
to be either the friends or the foes of the existing order, which was so
intimately bound up with the ascendency of the Church. At first there
seemed to be little danger of rivalry. The reconciliation of orthodoxy
and free speculation, which had put the limited but safe activity of a
Peter Lombard in the place of the antagonistic ideas of a Bernard or an
Abelard, still continued during the period that saw the crystallisation
of the European schools into systematic corporations. If the Civilians
upheld a Barbarossa, the Canonists were equally strenuous in upholding
the universal bishopric of the Roman pontiff. North of the Alps every
scholar was a clerk with the privileges of clergy, and the Church alone
provided both the materials of thought and the worldly careers that were
open to scholars. If the Italian scholars were commonly laymen, the
spirit of the Italian schools was too averse to abstract speculation to
be likely to lead to formal heresy, and law was still, even in Italy,
the study through which churchmen rose to greatness. Yet it was by no
means clear, at the beginning of the century, that the intellectual
ferment which the universities had perpetuated would permit the
reconciliation of philosophy with theology, and of law with the
ecclesiastical order. [Sidenote: The introduction of Aristotle.] The
tradition of Greek thought had been revived before the twelfth century
was over, and the full knowledge of the ethical, physical and
metaphysical teachings of Aristotle did not come in a more Christian
shape when it was filtered through the imperfect translations and free
paraphrases through which Arabs and Jews had kept alive a perverted yet
stimulating version of the doctrines of the great Greek philosopher.
[Sidenote: Arab and Jewish influence.] The glories of the Arab and the
Jewish schools of Spain had already culminated in Averroes (_d._ 1198),
and Moses Maimonides (_d._ 1204), when they were made public to the
Latin world by scholars like the translators employed by Archbishop
Raymond of Toledo, and Frederick II.’s protégé, Michael Scot. The
increased intercourse between East and West, which resulted in the Latin
conquest of Constantinople, led before long to a better acquaintance
with Aristotelian texts and to Latin versions based upon the Greek
itself.
[Sidenote: Intellectual and popular heresy.]
The Moorish and Jewish doctors of Spain had endured persecution from the
orthodox Mohammedans for the boldness and freedom of their speculations.
The materialistic pantheism of Averroes was as famous as his
commentaries on Aristotle, and the introduction of the latter was soon
followed by the spread of the former. The doctrines of the Averroists
stimulated anew the popular heresies of the Cathari, who were now
fighting desperately against orthodoxy in Languedoc, and who still
filled Lombardy with enemies of the Church. The union of the popular
with the scientific heretics might well have led to a violent
revolution, especially since the changes involved in the rapid progress
of the age threatened social and economic disturbances that imperilled
the whole order of society. The ever-increasing wealth and political
power of the Church were blighting the best interests of religion. The
new orders of the twelfth century had lost their early fervour, and
proved almost as susceptible of corruption as their older brethren. The
dangers of an earlier age were renewed, and the schools that had long
been ‘secular’ in the mediæval sense bade fair to become secular in a
more modern signification of the term. A famous Paris master, Simon of
Tournai, boasted to those who had applauded his vindication of the
orthodox faith that he could demolish it with equal ease and
plausibility. In the early years of the thirteenth century Amalric of
Bena taught undisguised pantheism at Paris, and had a following of
enthusiastic and outspoken heretics, whose views were as wild and
revolutionary as those of any of the Albigenses. The false teaching of
Amalric was attributed to the influence of Aristotle and Averroes, and
in 1215 the papal legate Courçon drew up a body of statutes for the
Paris masters which prohibited the study of the physics and metaphysics
of Aristotle—a prohibition renewed later by Gregory IX.—‘until they have
been examined and purged from all heresy.’ In Italy, if there were less
speculative theology than in Paris, there was more popular heresy, and
more political opposition to the church that was also a state. The
dangerous mysticism of the abbot Joachim might well become a new source
of danger to the hierarchy. Despite all that Innocent III. had done his
successors still saw themselves face to face with imminent danger. But
the source from which salvation was to arise had already been revealed.
From the obscure labours of Francis and Dominic was soon to come not
only the reconciliation of the new philosophy with the old orthodoxy,
but a revival of spiritual religion, from which asceticism became mighty
to do good works, and in which the Church of the Middle Ages attained
its loftiest and purest ideals.
In 1182 was born at Assisi John Bernardone, more often known by the
nickname Francis, that is the Frenchman, which was given him by his
father, a wandering cloth merchant, who had travelled much in France and
loved its people. [Sidenote: St. Francis of Assisi, 1182–1226.] The
father was well-to-do, and ambitious that his gifted and attractive son
should play a great part in the world. But an overmastering religious
enthusiasm soon drew Francis from the revels and sports of the wealthy
youth of Perugia. He renounced friends, fortune, kinsfolk, and declared
that he had wedded the Lady Poverty, the fairest, richest, and purest of
brides. His glowing imagination and earnest spiritual longings saw all
things through the medium of a divine and ecstatic love. His
single-minded devotion to the poor and afflicted, his loving care for
the despised and neglected lepers, his holiness, pureness, and goodness
soon attracted round him a little band of followers. One day he took
them into a church, opened the gospels on the altar and read them the
words in which Christ bade His disciples sell all that they have and
give to the poor, and take no care of staff nor scrip, nor gold or
silver, nor bread nor clothes, but leave all and follow Him. [Sidenote:
Beginnings of the Ordo Minorum.] In these words, he told his followers,
lay all their life and rule. His one endeavour now became the literal
imitation of Christ’s life on earth. The doings of Francis and his
penitents excited lively opposition as well as unbounded admiration. But
in 1210 Francis and eleven companions travelled on foot to Rome, where
Innocent III., stranger though he was to their spirit, received them
kindly and permitted them to continue to uphold their simple rule of
absolute poverty and devotion to good works. The brotherhood grew in
numbers, and soon spread beyond the limits of Assisi and central Italy.
Francis himself went on missions to the heathen, and pleaded for
Christianity before the Sultan of Egypt. Francis called himself and
followers the Poor Men of Assisi, or the Order of Lesser Brethren (Ordo
Minorum); but the rope-girt grey frock that they wore caused the people
to call them the Grey Friars, while the prestige of the founder
frequently gave them the name of Franciscans. For years the fraternity
in no wise departed from its primitive simplicity. The simple mysticism
of Francis, his frank joyousness and cheerfulness, despite his constant
perils and rigid asceticism, his strange and forcible preaching, and his
utter indifference to all worldly power and influence, won an absolute
mastery over men’s hearts. He was not a man of learning: he was a simple
deacon, who never aspired to the priesthood: he was no organiser, and
had an absolute horror of the political forces that kept the Church so
absorbed in worldly cares. [Sidenote: The Rule of 1223.] The growing
support of great churchmen, the powerful favour of the zealous Cardinal
Ugolino, the future Gregory IX., the establishment of a fixed rule for
the order by Honorius III. in 1223, were evidence of the spread of the
founder’s ideas. Yet they gave Francis as much anxiety as satisfaction.
They involved the danger lest the simple gospel of love should be
overshadowed by formalism and officialism, lest the doctrine of absolute
poverty should be interpreted so as to become a snare to the brethren as
it had been to the older orders of monks. [Sidenote: Antagonistic
tendencies within the Franciscan Order.] The gentle saint retired to his
favourite chapels and shrines near Assisi, leaving to the energetic and
strenuous Elias of Cortona the uncongenial but necessary task of
organising the new society. Francis died in 1226, full of trouble as to
the future, and solemnly warning the brethren to add no glosses or
amplifications to the absolute simplicity of the rule which he had
prescribed for them. Two years later Gregory IX. made him a saint, and
laid the foundation of the great church at Assisi, where the art of
Giotto was later to commemorate his glories. But the absorption of the
Franciscan spirit to the service of the hierarchy had robbed it of much
that was most beautiful and characteristic. Later divisions within the
order long bore witness that the literal doctrines of the Testament of
St. Francis were still cherished by his more faithful followers. But a
great world-wide order could not be controlled by a few pious
aspirations and general exhortations to poverty. The work of Gregory and
of Elias was as necessary as the life and character of the founder
himself, if the Franciscan order were to maintain the place which it had
begun to fill in the life of the thirteenth century.
[Sidenote: St. Dominic, 1170–1221.]
Even before Francis had begun to preach poverty and good works to the
scattered towns and villages of central Italy, Dominic de Guzman had
begun his parallel but yet strangely different career. The son of a
mighty Castilian house, a man of learning, zeal, and fiery orthodoxy,
Dominic had become a regular canon of the cathedral chapter of Osma,
near which town he was born in 1170. The Premonstratensian ideal of
living like a monk and working like a clerk was never more fully
realised than by this young Spanish canon. Called almost by accident to
Languedoc, he resolved to devote his life to the winning over of the
Albigensian heretics to orthodoxy. Protected by the bishop of Toulouse,
he settled down in a house in that city, where he soon gathered around
himself a band of like-minded followers. He remained there during all
the storms of the Albigensian wars, and his little society flourished so
much that he sought to obtain for himself and his sixteen companions
recognition from the Pope as a new religious order specially devoted to
the conversion of heretics. But the decision of the Lateran Council of
1215 against the establishment of new orders stood in their way, and
Innocent III., though sympathetic, was contented to recommend them to
affiliate themselves to one of the recognised regular fraternities.
[Sidenote: The Preaching Brothers of Toulouse, 1216.] Of these,
Dominic’s own ‘rule of St. Austin’ best expressed his ideals, and in
1216 Honorius III. confirmed the adoption by the ‘Preaching Brothers of
St. Romanus of Toulouse’ of a modification of the Premonstratensian
rule. The first four years of the young brotherhood were full of
success. Affiliated communities sprang up in Spain, in Italy, and in
northern France, where the famous convent of the Jacobins was set up at
Paris on the south of the Seine, hard by the Orleans gate. In Rome
Dominic found a warm welcome and an establishment within the papal
palace, along with the pastoral care of the numerous courtiers and
domestics of the pontiff. Cardinal Ugolino was as zealous for Dominic as
for the Poor Man of Assisi, and was perhaps the means through which the
Spanish canon made the personal acquaintance of St. Francis. The result
of this intercourse was that Dominic was strongly impressed with the
holiness and beauty of the Franciscan cult of poverty, and resolved that
his order also should tread in the footsteps of Christ and the Apostles
after the method set forth by the Franciscans. [Sidenote: The Order of
Preachers becomes a Mendicant Order, 1220.] In 1220 the Order of
Preachers, as it was now called, took its final form by adopting the
doctrine of absolute corporate poverty as well as the life of mendicancy
which had become usual with the Franciscans. Dominic then went to
Bologna, to seek from the doctors there new support against the
heretics. In 1221 he died, and was buried at the house of his order in
that city. In 1234 Gregory raised him to the list of saints. Long before
this his followers were spread all over Europe, rivalling in zeal and
energy the Franciscans themselves. The Preaching Friars were called
Dominicans from their founder, while their plain but effective garb of a
short black cape, over a long white frock, led to their popular name of
the Black Friars.
[Sidenote: The Mendicant Ideal.]
The ideals of Francis and Dominic were widely different, but the methods
they adopted to secure them were almost identical. The man of
inspiration and love had won over the man of authority and order to his
ideal of absolute poverty; and Franciscans and Dominicans alike agreed
so to interpret the monastic vow of poverty that corporate as well as
individual possessions were utterly renounced. The early Franciscans had
neither houses nor churches. The Dominicans, faithful to their
Augustinian traditions, did not push the principles of St. Francis so
far as this, but contented themselves with ordaining that the houses of
the order should be simple, modest, and of lowly dimensions, and that
all ornaments should be reserved for their churches. Gradually, as the
spirit of Elias prevailed over the spirit of Francis, the Minorites also
had houses and churches of their own, and with the establishment of a
systematic conventual life, the isolated brother, working with his hands
for his bread, or depending, in his pious wanderings, on passing
charity, was replaced by an ordered band of Mendicant Friars, members of
a world wide order, controlled by an almost military discipline that
found its expression in the autocracy of the General of the order, and
in the annual assembling of a General Chapter, such as the Lateran
Council had imposed on all conditions of religious. Thus the Mendicants
pushed to further results the great principles of monastic reformation
which had already been worked out in the twelfth century. The world-wide
organisation and simplicity of life came from the Cistercians, and the
vindication of the freedom of the individual as against the excesses of
the cœnobitic ideal had belonged to the Carthusians. The combination of
the ‘religious’ life and the work of the ministry characterised the
Regular Canons. But the doctrine of absolute Poverty was all their own,
and calculated to save them from the dangers before which the new orders
had succumbed. The mysticism and love of the poor which had
characterised Francis left an enduring impression on his followers. No
less strong was the spirit of reasoned orthodoxy and the zeal for
popular preaching against heresy which adhered to the Order of Preachers
long after its founder had passed away. Francis aimed at the heart,
while Dominic appealed to the intellect, but the work of both
communities was social and evangelistic, and even when they most
differed in spirit they constantly overlapped each other in their
labours. Their convents were soon established in every part of
Christendom, and exercised the profoundest influence on every section of
the community.
So striking was the attraction of the Mendicant ideal that many other
attempts were made, besides those of Francis and Dominic, to embody its
principles. Even in the lifetime of the Poor Man of Assisi, his
influence had gone beyond his own immediate band of followers.
[Sidenote: Other Mendicant Orders.] So far back as 1212 the spirit of
Francis had driven Clara Scifi, a knight’s daughter in Assisi, to settle
down by the little chapel of St. Damian with a band of followers,
pledged to a poverty as absolute and a self-renunciation as complete as
that of the Minorites themselves. [Sidenote: St. Clare and the
Claresses.] If Cardinal Ugolino for a time imposed on these ‘poor
ladies’ a rigid form of the rule of Benedictine nuns, the earnest wish
of Francis himself procured from Honorius III., in 1224, the approval of
a plan of life by which the community was to adopt the principle of
absolute poverty (save in respect to cloister and garden), depend for
support upon freewill offerings, and promise special obedience to the
Pope, brother Francis, and their successors. The ‘Claresses’ or ‘Poor
Clares’ soon became numerous and did for the religious life of women
what St. Francis did for regular communities of men. A more sweeping
innovation was the establishment by St. Francis himself of lay
brotherhoods of penitents, affiliated to the Mendicant orders, and
living ordered and religious lives, yet untrammelled by vows and, unlike
the _conversi_ of earlier reforms, continuing in the exercise of their
worldly professions. [Sidenote: The Tertiaries.] In 1230 Gregory IX.
formally founded these communities as ‘brethren of the third order of
St. Francis.’ Similar societies of ‘Tertiaries’ were also affiliated to
the Dominicans. By their means the Mendicant ideal was still further
spread, and the great framework of affiliated societies established
which so closely connected the new orders with the religious life of the
time, and broke down the ancient breach between ‘religion’ and the
‘world.’ [Sidenote: The Carmelites.] Moreover, after the triumph of the
Franciscans and Dominicans, other Mendicant Orders were set up, and some
older brotherhoods brought into the Mendicant fold. Among the latter
were the communities of hermits on Mount Carmel, which in 1219 were
constituted by the Patriarch of Jerusalem as the Hermit Friars of Mount
Carmel, and received from Innocent IV. the stamp of a Mendicant order.
The white garb of the Carmelites gave them the popular name of the White
Friars. [Sidenote: The Austin Friars.] In 1250 Alexander IV. created the
Austin Friars out of several societies of Italian hermits, to whom he
prescribed a common rule and the Mendicant ideal. Carmelites and Austin
Friars took up a strong position all over Europe, almost vying with
Minorites and Preachers, and constituting with them the Four Orders of
Friars. Other mendicant societies, such as that of the Friars of the
Sack, were also set up, but in 1274 the second Council of Lyons
abolished all but the four recognised orders and forbade the formation
of new ones. [Sidenote: The Servites.] Nevertheless, the Servite Friars,
an offshoot of the rule of St. Augustine, received a separate
establishment before the end of the century.
[Sidenote: The Work of the Mendicants.]
The Mendicants of the thirteenth century worked out to the fullest
result the ideal of St. Augustine of combining the life of a monk with
the work of a clerk, and thus stand in the strongest contrast to the
older contemplative orders, who sought seclusion from the world and
eschewed even the care of souls as a worldly occupation. If, despite
this self-imposed limitation, the earlier orders had been enabled to
play so large a part in the religious life of the times of their
foundation and early fervour, it is easy to see how much more complete
and permanent was the influence of bodies of self-devoted men pledged to
redeem their own souls by working out the salvation of others. Through
their labours the ascetic and hierarchic ideals of the Church
penetrated, as they had never penetrated before, into every rank and
every region of the Christian commonwealth. [Sidenote: Preaching.]
Popular preaching assumed a new importance now that specialists trained
to devote their lives to pulpit oratory supplemented the rude and
occasional efforts of the ill-educated parish priests, and the still
more occasional appearances of the dignified clergy as teachers of the
people. Preaching was naturally the first care of the followers of
Dominic, whose official name was the Order of Preachers, and among whose
doctors one at least maintained that preaching was more important for
the people than the Mass itself. But, even from the beginning, the
Minorites were almost as much devoted to this work as the Black Friars
themselves. [Sidenote: Contrast between Franciscan and Dominican
Preaching.] While Dominican preaching tended to be grave, learned, and
argumentative, the Grey Friars rather affected the simple,
straightforward, emotional methods of address, through which St. Francis
himself had gone straight to the hearts of his hearers. These qualities
were strongly illustrated by the career of St. Anthony of Padua (_d._
1231), a native of Lisbon and an Austin canon, who, like St. Dominic,
preached with great effect in Languedoc, and, attaching himself to St.
Francis and Poverty, became the most popular of the early Minorite
orators, and died in 1231 at Padua, in the enjoyment of a unique
reputation for his eloquence and miraculous powers. The best side of the
Mendicant gospel was impressed on Germany and the East by the wonderful
preaching of another Minorite, Berthold of Ratisbon (_d._ 1272), whose
still surviving German sermons are striking illustrations of the depth
and force of the new teaching. Nor did the Order of Preachers neglect
the more popular side of its special work. Its greatest intellect, St.
Thomas of Aquino, was not only the famous doctor of the schools but a
practical preacher to the people in the Italian vernacular. [Sidenote:
Religious Poetry.] Not less effective and more permanent than their
sermons was the religious poetry inspired by the Mendicants, and
especially by the Franciscans, both in the vulgar tongues and in Latin.
St. Francis’ own famous Song of the Sun struck a chord that was
re-echoed in the hearts of his followers. To his biographer, Thomas of
Celano, is commonly ascribed the most majestic of mediæval Latin hymns,
the _Dies Iræ_. The pathetic _Stabat Mater Dolorosa_ is, with less
certainty, attributed to Jacopone da Todi, a Grey Friar of the latter
part of the century, whose vernacular poems express not only the mystic
piety of St. Francis but the fierce glow of indignation of the
Fraticelli against the worldliness of the hierarchy.
[Sidenote: Pastoral care.]
The pastoral work of the Mendicants among the people was the chief means
by which they established that profound hold over the mind of Europe
that, despite many corruptions, they retained until the Reformation. The
parish clergy were ignorant and lax, and tended in too many cases to
limit themselves to the perfunctory discharge of the routine duties of
their office. A new state of things began when the zeal of Gregory IX.
assured for both Franciscans and Dominicans the right to preach and hear
confessions over all Christendom. Despite the natural but violent
opposition which both the seculars and the older orders offered to their
pushing rivals, the Friars soon won by their devotion, their skill, and
their sympathy a unique place among the religious teachers of Europe.
They chose as their favourite abodes the noisome suburbs where the
poorest were huddled together outside the bounds of municipal authority
or care. They lived among the sick, the suffering, and the lepers.
Poorer than the poorest, they inspired no envy, but shared the lot of
those among whom they lived and worked. They set no rigid limits to
their activity. Their care for the sick led them to the study of
medicine, while their sympathy with the oppressed made them the natural
spokesmen of the cause of popular rights. A nameless Franciscan
formulated the English baronial policy in the Song of Lewes. Yet kings
like St. Louis or Edward I. chose Friars as their confessors, and their
power was as great among the highest as the lowest. Great churches grew
up in every city of Europe for each of the four orders of Friars, and
were thronged by earnest and zealous congregations. It became a
cherished privilege to be allowed burial within their precincts. The
extraordinary popularity of the Mendicants soon brought dangers in its
train. Their churches became more splendid and adorned with the fairest
works of art. [Sidenote: The extent of Mendicant influence.] Wealth
flowed towards them, and this, though at first they held it in trust for
the poor, they soon began to regard as virtually their own, with the
result that, particularly among the Franciscans, there was a continued
feud as to whether the rule of absolute poverty was to be rigidly or
laxly interpreted. Long before the danger of wealth had begun, the more
subtle temptations of power had exercised their sway. In direct
contradiction to the teachings of St. Francis, Mendicants accepted high
places in the Church, and became bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and
popes. Flushed with the pride of their devotion, they laid their hands
on all that they could reach. They called the Benedictines proud
epicureans, the Canons little better than laymen, and the Cistercians
rude rustics. ‘None of the faithful,’ lamented the Benedictine Matthew
Paris, ‘now believe that they can be saved unless they are under the
direction of the Preachers or the Minorites.’ Innocent IV. sought to
withstand their growing influence by refusing to allow them to exercise
the cure of souls in parishes without the permission of the parish
priest, and directed that they should hand over to the same authority a
share of the gifts made to them by the faithful who had bought the right
of burial in the friars’ churches. But on Innocent’s death—hastened, as
it was believed, by the prayers of the Mendicants—Alexander IV. reversed
his legislation and left the new orders triumphant. With all their
feverish grasping after power, they used it with more sense of
responsibility than most of their rivals. A real revival of religion
followed everywhere upon their work, and was manifested not only in
formal acts, in heaping wealth upon ecclesiastics, and in an extension
of the power of the Church, but in works of piety and justice,
generosity and mercy, that were all too few in the rude Middle Ages.
[Sidenote: The Mendicants and the Inquisition.]
The Mendicant Orders were everywhere the champions of papal authority,
rigid hierarchical pretensions, and uncompromising orthodoxy. Both
Franciscans and Dominicans were intrusted with the administration of the
Papal Inquisition which Gregory IX. had established, and did not scruple
to hand over to the secular arm the relapsed or unrepentant heretic. But
they were not merely persecutors. They were unwearied in their missions
to the heretic as well as in those to the heathen and the infidel, and
it was now an easier task to deal with popular heresy, since it yielded
even more readily to the preaching of the Friars than to the terrors of
the Inquisition. The intellectual heresies of the schools, and the
vaguer unrestfulness that saw no permanent satisfaction in the
traditional teachings, were harder to deal with. Yet even against these
the Mendicants waged a long contest, which did not end until they had
wrested scholastic philosophy and the new Aristotle to serve as chief
buttresses to the authority of the Church.
[Sidenote: The Friars and the Universities.]
The special mission of the Order of Preachers made it from the first a
great centre of theological study. St. Dominic settled down in Bologna
because of its schools, and his death and burial there gave the place an
enduring sanctity to his faithful followers. In 1221, the year of the
founders death, the Dominican Convent of St. James was established at
Paris, and very soon made itself a separate and exclusive school of
rigidly orthodox theology, without any great care being taken to
co-ordinate its teaching and system with those of the public regents of
the university. Doctors of great reputation attached themselves to the
order, and before long a regular succession of friar-doctors, trained
within the convent, set up a definite type of Mendicant theological
teaching. The Franciscans were not slow in following the example of the
Preachers. Though Francis himself had no learning and few speculative
interests, his teaching had never been more effective than among the
proud doctors of Bologna, and the spirit of Elias and Ugolino, no less
than the necessities of the time and the desire to rival the Preachers,
turned even the earlier followers of the saint to theological study.
With the establishment of St. Anthony, Francis’ close friend, at Padua,
where a great university was just being formed by a secession from
Bologna, the Minorites enter eagerly on the course marked out by St.
Dominic. If Francis inspired Dominic with the worship of poverty,
Dominic supplied the followers of Francis with his zeal for theology.
Within a year of the foundation of the Jacobin convent, four years
before St. Francis’ death, the English theologian, Alexander of Hales,
who was then teaching with great applause at Paris, entered the Minorite
fold, and was celebrated as the ‘first Paris doctor of the Franciscan
religion.’ Before long he resumed his teaching, and henceforth the
Parisian convent of the Franciscans was only second to the Dominican
cloister in its intellectual activity. [Sidenote: The struggle between
Mendicants and Seculars at Paris.] Within thirty years the Mendicant
schools of theology had taken up so overwhelming a position in Paris,
and so ostentatiously kept aloof from all the ordinary regulations and
traditions of the university, that a vigorous attack was made upon them
by the secular masters. In 1252 the university required the Friars to
take an oath of obedience to its statutes, and, on their refusal,
expelled them from its fellowship. A fierce and long struggle followed,
in which the chief secular champion, William of Saint-Amour, wrote a
book called _The Perils of the Last Times_, which violently attacked the
Mendicants and their ideals. The seculars availed themselves of the
notorious splits within their enemies’ ranks, and regarding the orders
as a whole as responsible for the extremer members of one society,
signalled out for attack as heretical an ‘Introduction to the Eternal
Gospel,’ in which an Italian Franciscan gave currency to the apocalyptic
ideas of the abbot Joachim. The disfavour of Innocent IV. to the Friars
increased their difficulties, though they had strong supporters in St.
Louis and his brothers. At last Alexander IV. cleared the way for their
return, and condemned William’s book as scandalous though not heretical.
Restored to their chairs in 1255, the Mendicant doctors were contented
to abate some of their extreme pretensions. Finally, they decided to
accept the oath to the statutes and recognise their responsibilities as
members of the corporation of masters. Their doctors were now in so
commanding a position that they had no longer reason to desire such
exceptional privileges as in the days of their weakness. [Sidenote: The
Mendicants’ victory.] South of the Alps the Mendicant theologians
acquired what there was no chance of their ever getting in the northern
universities, a practical monopoly of the teaching of theology.
Everywhere the tone of the theological schools was attuned to their
teaching. Philosophy was made orthodox, and the most brilliant and
fruitful period of scholasticism followed when the ranks of the Friars
produced the greatest of the mediæval philosophers and theologians.
[Sidenote: The Great Mendicant Scholastics.]
Alexander of Hales (_d._ 1245), the first Franciscan doctor at Paris,
began in his _Summa Theologiæ_, which weighed, said an enemy, as much as
a horse, the series of the systematic Mendicant scholastics, and was
celebrated as the monarch of theologians and the irrefragable doctor.
The first of the great Dominicans was Albertus Magnus (_d._ 1280), a
German, who as doctor at Paris, chief of the Dominican school at
Cologne, Provincial of his order in Germany, and bishop of Ratisbon,
exercised a profound influence and became known as the universal doctor.
[Sidenote: Albertus Magnus.] Albert’s pupil, Thomas of Aquino
(1225–1274), represents the culminating point of scholastic theology.
[Sidenote: Thomas Aquinas.] A son of an illustrious Neapolitan house,
Thomas renounced the brilliant worldly career promised by his influence
and abilities, and entered a Dominican convent. He studied under Albert
at Paris, where he acquired a unique reputation. Called back to Italy by
Urban IV., he gave a momentary lustre to the struggling university at
Naples, which Charles of Anjou had restored. He died in 1274, on his way
to the Council of Lyons. Short as was his life, he was not only the most
authoritative but the most voluminous of the schoolmen. His _Summa
Theologiæ_ represents the most complete accommodation of Aristotelian
doctrine with Catholic orthodoxy, and has profoundly influenced all
later ecclesiastical teaching. His political and ethical writings no
less faithfully represent the Peripatetic tradition. [Sidenote:
Bonaventura.] His friend, the Italian Franciscan Bonaventura (_d._
1274), a pupil of Alexander of Hales, gave a scholarly form to the
mysticism of the Minorites. Other paths of learning were trodden by
writers such as Hugh of Saint-Cher, the chief of the mediæval expositors
of Scripture, while the physical speculations and the advocacy of
experimental methods by the English Franciscan, Roger Bacon (_d._ 1294),
were the most promising results of that contact with nature to which the
pursuit of medicine had led the Minorite order. [Sidenote: Roger Bacon.]
Even in their studies the distinct individual impression of the two
rival communities was preserved, but they so far worked in common that
they had won for the Church the absolute command of the whole field of
learning. With the death of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura in 1274 the
most fruitful period of their activity came to an end.
[Sidenote: The triumph of the Schoolmen.]
Thus the Studium, which might have rivalled the Sacerdotium, became its
most strenuous ally, and the little band of mediæval scholars, who had
enough faith and character to tear themselves away from bread-winning
studies and all-engrossing professions found their highest satisfaction
in justifying the ways of the Church. Before the end of the century the
Empire had fallen from its ancient dignity, and within a generation the
Papacy itself succumbed to the rough measures of a royal conqueror. But
though the Empire might decline and the Papacy itself wane, the command
which the Church had acquired of the world of thought and learning
remained but little broken until the dawn of the Renascence, and kept
alive the papal idea when the popes were captive in a foreign land, and
when, through a still more lamentable decline, rival pontiffs at Rome
and Avignon disputed the allegiance of Europe and prostituted their
dignity by the violence of their brawls. The Studium survived the
Regnum, and sustained with its authority the declining might of the
Sacerdotium, thus allowing mediæval ideas to remain longer in currency,
even when the political and hierarchical system which had engendered
them was no longer supreme and triumphant. It is significant that the
chief seat of this newly-won power of the mind was at Paris, the one
great national capital of the strongest of the national states that had
arisen on the ruins of Feudalism and the Empire. But the national
principles of the king and his knights and clerks in the Cité were in
strange contrast to the fundamental ideas of the cosmopolitan doctors of
the university. [Sidenote: Paris and France.] Yet both the physical
forces which kings can wield and the intellectual influence of teachers
and thinkers united to show that France had become the centre of all the
chief European movements. In her vernacular literature, more strenuous,
copious, robust and varied than that of any other nation, France was
showing how in due course a new national culture might supersede the
international universal culture of the mediæval schools. No less
permanent was her influence on social ideas, on manners, on art, on
knightly action and on civic life. It is significant that Brunetto
Latini, the master of Dante, wrote his chief work in French, because
‘the French tongue is the most delectable and the most common to all
peoples.’ Even in a land like England, at a time when the national
sentiment was becoming strongly anti-French, the French tongue, art,
manners and ideals became more profoundly influential than at the time
when the island was the province of a French duke. So thorough an
Englishman as Matthew Paris called the French monarch the king of
earthly kings.[39]