CHAPTER I

MEDIÆVAL HERESY

& THE INQUISITION

MEDIÆVAL HERESY

& THE INQUISITION

BY

A. S. TURBERVILLE, M.C., M.A., B.Litt.

LECTURER IN MODERN HISTORY IN THE

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF NORTH WALES, BANGOR

LATE SCHOLAR OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD

[Illustration]

LONDON

CROSBY LOCKWOOD AND SON

7 STATIONERS’ HALL COURT, E.C. 4

AND 5 BROADWAY, WESTMINSTER, S.W. 1

1920

PREFACE

The aim of this book is to provide, within a short space, and primarily

for the general reader, an account of the heresies of the Middle Ages

and of the attitude of the Church towards them. The book is, therefore,

a brief essay in the history not only of dogma, but, inasmuch as it is

concerned with the repression of heresy by means of the Inquisition,

of judicature also. The ground covered is the _terrain_ of H. C. Lea’s

immense work, ‘A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages’; but

that was published more than thirty years ago, and since then much

has been written, though not indeed much in English, on the mediæval

Inquisition and cognate subjects. As the present work has been

undertaken in the light of some of these more recent investigations, it

is hoped that it may be of utility to rather closer students, as well

as to the general reader, as a review of the subject suggested by the

writings of Lea’s successors, both partizans and critics. At the same

time this book does not profess to be a history, even the briefest, of

the mediæval Inquisition. Its main concern is with doctrine, and for

that reason chapters on Averrhoïsm and on Wyclifitism and Husitism have

been included, though they have little bearing on the Inquisition.

The entire subject, on both its sides, is complex and highly

controversial. Probably no conceivable treatment of it could commend

itself to all tastes, be accepted as impartial by the adherents of

all types of religious belief. It can, however, at least be claimed

that this work was begun with no other object in view than honest

enquiry, with no desire whatever to demonstrate a preconceived thesis

or draw attention to a particular aspect of truth. The conclusion

arrived at in these pages is, that the traditional ultra-Protestant

conception of ecclesiastical intolerance forcing a policy of

persecution on an unwilling or indifferent laity in the Middle Ages

is unhistorical, while, on the other hand, some recent Catholic

apologists, in seeking to exculpate the Church, have tended to

underestimate the power and influence of the Church, and to read

into the Middle Ages a humanitarianism which did not actually then

exist. Heresy was persecuted because it was regarded as dangerous to

society, and intolerance was therefore the reflection, not only of the

ecclesiastical authority, but of public opinion. On the other hand,

clerical instruction had a large formative influence in the creation of

public opinion.

This book inevitably suffered a prolonged interruption owing to

the War. That there was not a complete cessation at once I owe to

my Father, who most ungrudgingly devoted valuable time to making

transcriptions from needed authorities in the British Museum, at a

time when other duties debarred me from access to books. My friend

and former colleague, Mr. W. Garmon Jones, Dean of the Faculty of

Arts of the University of Liverpool, gave me the benefit of his ripe

scholarship and fine judgment in reading through the greater part of

the work in manuscript, though I need hardly say that any errors in

statement or opinion are to be attributed to me alone. I have to thank

the Rev. T. Shankland of this College for generously undertaking the

thankless task of reading the proofs, and my Wife for the compilation

of the Index and for other help besides.

A. S. TURBERVILLE.

BANGOR, _April_, 1920.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE v

PART I

HERESY

CHAP.

I. ORIGINS OF MEDIÆVAL HERESY 1

II. WALDENSES AND CATHARI 14

III. ‘THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL’ 34

IV. AVERRHOÏST INFLUENCES 55

V. REFORM MOVEMENTS OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

AND THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE 77

VI. THE MAGIC ARTS 105

PART II

THE INQUISITION

I. ATTITUDE OF THE CHURCH TOWARDS HERESY PRIOR

TO THE INSTITUTION OF THE INQUISITION 123

II. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE INQUISITION 140

III. THE SPREAD OF THE INQUISITION THROUGH EUROPE 159

IV. THE COMPOSITION AND PROCEDURE OF THE TRIBUNAL 178

V. INQUISITORIAL PENALTIES 206

VI. CONCLUSION 229

NOTE ON AUTHORITIES 244

INDEX 255

MEDIÆVAL HERESY AND THE INQUISITION

PART I

HERESY

CHAPTER I

ORIGINS OF MEDIÆVAL HERESY

Ages of Faith—the term has often enough been applied to the long era

that separates the days of the Carolingian empire from those of the

Italian Renaissance. Like most of the other generalizations that it is

customary to make of the Middle Ages the statement is true only with

important qualifications. It is with the qualifications that this book

is concerned. But to appreciate the exceptions, it is first necessary

to realize the full significance of the rule—the very pregnant reality

concerning Church and State upon which the general statement is based.

That reality, the understanding of which is essential to a grasp, not

only of the ecclesiastical, but of any aspect of mediæval history, is

the magnificent conception of the _Civitas Dei_. The Kingdom of God on

earth was conceived, not as a vision of the future, but as a living and

present reality—the Visible Church, Christendom. Church and Christendom

were one, for the Church was Catholic. The distinction which we of

the modern world, as the Renaissance and Reformation have made it,

are wont to make between Church and State, spiritual and temporal,

was wholly foreign to mediæval thought. There was but one society,

not two parallel societies. Society had indeed two aspects—one which

looked to things mundane and transient, the other which looked to

things heavenly and eternal. To safeguard its earthly interests the

world had its secular rulers and administrators; to aid its spiritual

life it had as guides and mediators the sacred hierarchy. But the

secular rulers, on the one hand, and the priesthood, on the other,

were officers in the same polity. The secular authority of the Empire

was in the days of Frederick Barbarossa acknowledged to be derived

from the Pope by consecration; later, as in Dante, it was conceived as

collateral with that of the Pope. But always the two authorities were

regarded as essentially related. It is true that the reality never

corresponded with the august theory, that the _Respublica Christiana_

never was universal, that there were always those who disputed the

authority of Emperor or Pontiff or both; worse still, that Christendom

was distracted by bitter strife between Emperor and Pontiff. But always

such warfare was regarded as domestic, not one between two different

states, but between two officers in one state.

It is important to bear in mind that the conception of the universal

church and empire was not regarded simply as an idea which the

philosopher and the publicist wrote and disputed about, but as manifest

in facts, which every eye could see and every mind realize. There

actually existed an empire, an imperial crown and coronation; there

actually existed a Holy See and a ministering priesthood. And the

authority of the rulers of the universal state was not simply vague and

theoretical; it was discernible in crusades, in pilgrimages, in the

‘Truce of God.’ Men realized themselves no doubt in an ever increasing

degree through the Middle Ages, national characteristics becoming more

and more pronounced, as Englishmen, Frenchmen or Spaniards; but they

also thought of themselves quite naturally as members together of the

common society of Christendom.[1]

If we comprehend the _oneness_ of human society in the Middle Ages, as

actively believed in by the average thinking man and unquestioningly

accepted as a patent fact by the average uneducated man, we can realize

what is meant by the phrase ‘ages of faith’ and at the same time avoid

some of the pitfalls that lie in the path of any one seeking to study

the exceptions to the rule, namely, the heresies of these ages of faith.

What were the conditions that generated heresy? First, there were

psychological conditions. In contrast to the bustling and multiform

activity of the modern world the Middle Ages may at a first glance give

an impression of inactivity and sameness. Such an impression, if it is

encouraged by the intellectual dormancy of the ninth and tenth and,

in some degree, of the eleventh centuries, is completely at variance

with the facts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which the

mind of Western Christendom was very much awake indeed. The impression

also ignores what is one of the most marked characteristics of mediæval

history as a whole—the clash and conflict and the dissonances of

it. While the idea of the universal empire still held sway, secular

princes, pursuing purely separatist ambitions, made war one upon

another and the nations of Europe were in the throes of parturition.

Typical of the incongruities of mediæval life was the glaring contrast

between the glorious minster and the mean and filthy hovels round it

to be seen in every city; but that there was incongruity in spending

immense wealth, time and labour on building a house for God to dwell

in, while housing themselves in dwellings rude and insanitary was

not apparent to the occupants. There was another incongruity inside

the churches themselves. Together with images that were sacred and

beautiful there were hideous gargoyles, grotesque figures, whose

inspiration was not Christian but pagan. Congregated together were

saints and satyrs, and Pan is found in company with Christ. Art was

made the handmaiden of religion: that did not mean that she was wholly

consecrated. St. Bernard complained that the eyes of monks as they

walked round their cloisters were too often assailed by pictures

which could only awaken thoughts unsanctified. If the first of these

two discords is eloquent of the faith which set the worship of God

far before the common needs of men, the second is indicative of that

alien spirit, untamed and powerful, which fights against the higher

nature and the devoted life. From rebellious nature sprang all manner

of unholy lusts and ambitions, productive of wars and enmities and

other kinds of evil, which rendered the reality of human existence so

divergent from the Christian ideal. But Christianity accepted these

inevitable consequences of original sin, providing through repentance

and penance reconciliation and the possibility of amendment. In the

elemental passions, however, the Church found itself faced by a

problem which presents one of the most interesting features of the

ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages.

It is ever a hard task to expel nature, and often, where she has been

renounced and thwarted, she has her revenge by returning, clothed in

her grossest forms. The literature of the Thebaid and of mediæval

hagiology is eloquent testimony to the fact that extreme asceticism and

extreme profligacy are often found in close proximity. The fugitive

from the insurgent passions of his own being, seeking to overcome the

temptations of the flesh by severe macerations and scourgings, has only

too often found his voluntary existence of self-discipline intolerable

without the relief of an occasional wild debauch or has found that in

his savage attempt to subdue the senses he has come to take a sensual

delight in self-torture and that he is falling into the lowest depths

of bestiality. The very fervour of religious zeal in the Middle Ages

is a token of the fierceness of the passionate fires that tortured

men’s hearts. It was always doubtful what outlet these fires would

find. Would they glorify God in the martyrdom of the lower nature or

would they rage untamed, flames solely of desire, destroying the soul?

Was it a pure religious passion or a depraved sensual passion that,

when the Albigensian Crusade was being preached in Germany, drove

women who could not take the cross to run naked through the streets in

ecstasy? Which was it that was really evidenced by the practices of

the Flagellants, who at one time obtained considerable influence in

different parts of Europe? They were simply doing in public what the

monk did in seclusion and in the perfect odour of sanctity. The idea

of bringing the soul nearer to God by the wounding of the sinful flesh

had the Church’s fullest sanction. Yet the Flagellants were eventually

declared heretics. Why? Because it became plain after a time that the

motive of some of those who joined the sect was unholy—not a desire to

seek salvation, but only a perverted lust. Secondly, because alike the

genuine and the false devotee were moved in the excess of their strange

enthusiasm to build upon it a theory of the efficacy of flagellation

which made it the only means to salvation, a sacrament, indeed the

essential sacrament.

In yet another way the unregenerate part of man’s nature might breed

heresy. The lust not perhaps of the flesh so much as of the eye and the

pride of life led men to take a delight in pleasure, in the sensuous

pagan world, that was not a wholly hallowed delight. Such superabundant

joy in life was apt to produce over-confidence in the individual’s

powers unaided by religion, leading to presumption and disobedience.

The phenomenon of such rebelliousness in the later Middle Ages is

sometimes forgotten. Yet the legends of the blossoming pastoral staff

and of the Holy Grail pictured also the Venusberg and the garden of

Kundry’s flower-maidens. In remembering the figures of the anchorite

and the knight-errant one must not lose sight of the troubadour and the

courtesan. Eloquent of the movement of revolt is the famous passage in

‘Aucassin et Nicolette’ in which Aucassin, threatened with the pains

of hell if he persists in his love for the mysterious southern maid,

exclaims that in that case to hell he will go.

For none go to Paradise but I’ll tell you who. Your old priests and

your old cripples, and the halt and maimed, who are down on their

knees day and night, before altars and in old crypts; these also

that wear mangy old cloaks, or go in rags and tatters, shivering

and shoeless and showing their sores, and who die of hunger and

want and misery. Such are they who go to Paradise; and what have I

to do with them? Hell is the place for me. For to Hell go the fine

churchmen, and the fine knights, killed in the tourney or in some

grand war, the brave soldiers and the gallant gentlemen. With them

will I go. There go also the fair gracious ladies who have lovers

two or three beside their lord. There go the gold and silver, the

sables and the ermines. There go the harpers and the minstrels and

the kings of the earth. With them will I go, so I have Nicolette my

most sweet friend with me.[2]

Comparable with the fearless scepticism of this romance is the

outspoken unorthodoxy produced by the intellectual ferment of

the twelfth century. That epoch which saw the new movement of

monastic reform which gave birth to the order of Grammont, of the

Carthusians and the Cistercians, is most notable in the history of the

universities—of Paris, Oxford, Bologna. From one to another, from the

feet of one learned doctor and teacher to another, flocked wandering

scholars athirst for pure knowledge which, if it had a theological

bias and a religious garb, nevertheless inevitably tended to produce

a spirit of rationalism, to substitute freedom for discipline, the

individual consciousness for authority. The philosophy of the day—the

Scholastic Philosophy—sprang from the concentration of the thought of

theologians trained in logic on the question of the relation between

the individual unit and the universal, the εἴδος: for if the Middle

Ages knew little of Plato they were conversant with his doctrine of

ideas. The scholastic philosophers are remarkable for their great

erudition within the limitation of contemporary knowledge: but still

more for the extreme acuteness and subtlety which came from their

dialectical training. Such subtlety might at times be no better than

verbal juggling; but it always indicated alertness of mind. Such

intellectual nimbleness was generally at the service of the Church, to

elucidate doctrine, uphold and defend the Catholic faith. On the other

hand, the curious mind, even when starting with the most innocent, most

orthodox intent, was sometimes beguiled into surmises and speculations

of a dangerous nature. Logic, if untrammelled, has a way of leading

to untraditional conclusions. When this happened it was possible to

escape from an awkward dilemma by submitting that philosophy was one

thing, theology another, and that there could be two truths, in the two

different planes, subsisting together though mutually contradictory.

But this convenient compromise was obviously only a pious subterfuge

and grotesquely illogical. Unfortunately both of the two principal

schools of thought were prone to lead to error. Realism, which found

reality in the universal substance, subordinating the individual to

humanity and humanity to the Godhead, logically led to Pantheism; while

Nominalism, finding reality solely in each disjointed unit, if applied

to theology, left no choice except between Unitarianism and Tritheism.

In the year 1092 a nominalist philosopher Roscellinus was condemned

at Soissons for teaching Tritheism and denying the Trinity. Another

nominalist, Berengar of Tours, skilfully dissected the doctrine of

Transubstantiation, which had grown up in its grossest form during the

Dark Ages and was first really developed in an answer to Berengar by

Anselm of Bec. There was a greater than either Roscellinus or Berengar,

who was neither a nominalist nor a realist, but a conceptualist,

the greatest of all the wandering scholars of his time, gifted with

extraordinary vividness of personality and brilliance of intellect.

Abelard’s love story in the world of actual fact is as wonderful as

that of Aucassin in the world of romance. His teaching has the same

note of freedom and fearlessness as that which sounds so clear in the

old French story. There was nothing very alarming in his doctrines;

his conclusions were generally orthodox enough. It was the methods by

which he arrived at those conclusions that aroused the fear and the

wrath of his adversaries. For he put Christian dogma to the touchstone

of reason, accepting it because it was reasonable, not following reason

just as far as it was Christian. To St. Bernard, Abelard appeared as

a virulent plague-spot, a second Arius. But there were coming other

heresies of a more disturbing nature, for the source of whose influence

if not inspiration we must seek among facts of a different character.

Though their extent is certainly a matter of dispute, there is no doubt

about the fact of serious clerical abuses in the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries. There is no need here to trench upon contentious ground;

and it should be said that when a catalogue of offences is produced as

a picture of the mediæval church without giving the other side of the

picture, only a most erroneous impression can be created. There was

extraordinary greatness in a church that could produce a St. Bernard,

a St. Francis, an Anselm, a Grosseteste. Yet even if we leave out of

account the invectives of professed enemies altogether and only rely

upon the unimpeachable authority of the Church’s leaders themselves,

we are left with rather a dark picture. We must remember that would-be

reformers are prone to indulge in highly coloured language with

reference to the evils they seek to eradicate. Yet, simony must have

been a crying abuse, or it would not have received so much attention

from zealous pontiffs. We know too of many bishops who neglected their

spiritual duties and were nothing more than feudal barons, sometimes

fattening upon riches amassed by extortion. It cannot be denied that

there were numerous instances of absenteeism and pluralities; while for

the sexual immorality to be found among both regular and secular clergy

we have the excellent authority of great men who were scandalized by

it and sought to produce amendment, such as Honorius III, St. Bernard

and Bishop Grosseteste. Monastic reforms had been tried, the Cluniac

being followed by the Cistercian and others of a like severity. A fine

attempt had been made to assist the endeavour of the parish priest

to strive after personal holiness by the institution of the orders

of the Praemonstratensians and the Austin Friars. And much good was

unquestionably accomplished; yet order after order eventually fell

away from its pristine purity and the seed of corruption remained

uneradicated. At the very least, we can say that most men must have had

from personal experience knowledge of some glaring contrast between

clerical profession and accomplishment. That some such contrast should

at all times in greater or less degree exist is only the inevitable

result of the weaknesses of human nature. It has invariably been the

case, however, that when the ministers of a religion have failed to

proclaim their gospel in their lives as well as in their preaching,

they have sowed doubt and distrust and lost adherents.

Bishop Grosseteste told Pope Innocent IV that the corruption of the

priesthood was the source of the heresies which troubled the Church.[3]

We may feel sure that it was _one_ source at all events when we note

in the twelfth century a most marked revival of the Donatist doctrine

that the sacrament is polluted in sinful hands. By similar reasoning

the score of a great composer might be regarded as tainted for our

hearing because the members of the orchestra performing it were not all

high-minded men. That would be similar reasoning: but it would not be

the same. Skill in his art is what we expect from the musician; without

it he cannot mediate between the composer and his audience, he cannot

interpret the music, he can only jar and lacerate the feelings of his

hearers. There is the skill also of the priest. He has to interpret

spiritual things and needs therefore to be spiritually-minded. God

may not be dependent upon the worthiness of His interpreters; none

the less their unworthiness may jar upon and lacerate the feelings

of worshippers, conscious of the scandal of such unworthiness. When,

for example, priests are found abusing the confessional by actually

soliciting their female penitents to sin, a moral revulsion against

such a practice is inevitable. Such a revulsion may in some cases

generate an attack upon the whole system of confession—and that is

heresy.[4]

An intense dissatisfaction with the moral condition of the world, more

especially as revealed in the Church, is one of the dominant features

of the neo-Manichæan heresy, known as Catharism or Paulicinianism,

of Waldensianism, of Joachitism. The last actually postulated that

Christianity had failed and that mankind stood in need of a new

revelation and a new Saviour. Corruption in the Church was, then, one

of the contributory causes of mediæval heresy, and anti-sacerdotalism

was one of its features.

It must not be assumed, however, that because heretical sects protested

against scandals in the Church, they necessarily exhibited a higher

standard of morality themselves. The reverse is in some cases the

truth. Among the heresiarchs and their followers are found men who were

mere half-crazed fanatics, others whose passion was more of lust than

for righteousness. We have to bear in mind that our knowledge of the

heretics is almost entirely derived from their adversaries; unbiased

contemporary testimony there is none. Yet, even remembering this, we

can appreciate the repugnance which many heretical sects inspired in

their own day. In the second place, the Church was itself alive to the

need of reform. The best minds always were; and to all the outbreak

of heresies in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though it was

so ruthlessly and thoroughly suppressed, was a significant warning.

Unhappily the abuses actually tended to increase in the fourteenth

century, and the papacy in particular lost heavily in moral and

spiritual authority when it allowed itself to become the mere catspaw

of the French monarchy at Avignon, when it became rent asunder by the

even greater disaster of the Schism.

But the task of the Church in reforming itself was one of very great

difficulty. It was essential in purifying conduct to take the utmost

precautions against adulterating the purity of the faith, in reforming

the papacy to maintain the fundamental continuity of the Church, of its

orders, its sacraments, its traditions. Individual would-be reformers

were carried away by their perfervid zeal, led into proposing the

most unheard-of innovations. Wycliffe actually demanded the sweeping

away of the higher orders of the priesthood and the monastic orders

as a condition of the suppression of corruption. Such theories were

clearly heretical, and it was no solvent of the spiritual troubles

of the Church to weaken it still further by making concessions to

revolutionaries, by invalidating sound doctrine. Such was the point

of view of moderate reformers like Gerson, D’Ailly, Niem—men perhaps

just as earnest as Wycliffe and Hus in their desire for purity, but

anxious, as these were not, for the preservation of the Catholic faith

untouched. And it is easy to understand the position they adopted.

The general conditions of their time, political and social as well as

religious, made a strong appeal to the conservative instinct. England

and France were both suffering from the havoc of the Hundred Years War.

There was schism in the empire as well as in the papacy. The terrible

scourge of the Black Death laid all countries low. Social unrest was

widespread and alarming. Vagrant, masterless men devoured with avidity

any doctrines of a communist saviour, and to such the Wycliffite

thesis of dominion founded on grace had an obvious and dangerous

attractiveness. Just as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so

now in the case of Wycliffitism and Husitism, heresy was regarded not

as a purely religious matter, but also as a social danger. Another

phenomenon which conservatives naturally viewed with misgiving was

early translations of the Scriptures into the vernacular. Parallel to

the peril of revolution from social ideas among the servile classes

of the community was that of the ‘open’ Bible among the ignorant,

uninstructed laity. For many reasons, then, the conservatives were

prompted to be cautious. Their heroic attempt to secure reform from

within—made in the great Conciliar movement—definitely failed. It

failed in the main because it was not sufficiently drastic, and

because, while it healed the Schism, it did not secure the moral

elevation of the papacy. The Council of Basel proposed the most

elaborate measures for reform; but they were never confirmed by the

papacy. The loftiest aspirations were represented within the Church.

They had always been. The Canon law had been clear and unequivocal

enough on the subject of clerical conduct. The difficulty lay in

making these aspirations, reflected alike in the Canon law and in the

proposals of the Councils, thoroughly effective.

The history of mediæval heresy takes us as far as the Conciliar

movement. There we stand on the threshold of the modern world, the

scene changes, with new actors and a new atmosphere. The Protestant

Reformation is much more familiar than the earlier movements. Yet

the subject of these is one of great and manifold interest. For the

heresies of the Middle Ages were of various types and arose from a

variety of causes. Broadly speaking, we may say that any circumstances

which tended to break up the unity of the _Civitas Dei_, whether in

the sphere of action or of theory, might be productive of heresy.

That is obviously a very rough generalization indeed; but only

broad generalization can include such diverse sources of heresy

as the obsessions of fanatics like Eon de l’Etoile and Dolcino,

the dialectical disputations of theologians like Roscellinus and

philosophers like Siger, the anti-sacerdotalism of Waldenses and

Cathari, the profounder searchings of heart and mind that inspired the

revolts of Wycliffe and Hus. Nor must we forget the influence of the

political factor, the contention between papacy and secular princes

regarding rights and jurisdiction, which was a potent encouragement

to controversy. Such strife, where in theory there should have been

complete harmony, was in itself productive of doubt and unsettlement.

The very heinousness of heresy to the mediæval mind lay largely in its

challenge to the essential social, ecclesiastical, doctrinal unity

of Christendom. Whether the springs of its being were an emotional

afflatus, a moral revulsion, or an intellectual ferment, heresy was

in any case a challenge to the existing order. Its adherents were

always a comparatively small and unpopular minority. Society as a whole

regarded it as dangerous and was convinced of the necessity of its

repression. By far the most important, as it is the most notorious,

instrument devised for the repression of heresy in the Middle Ages was

the tribunal of the Inquisition.[5]

CHAPTER II

WALDENSES AND CATHARI

In the year 1108 there appeared in Antwerp a certain eloquent zealot

named Tanchelm. Apparently there existed in Antwerp only one priest,

and he was living in concubinage. In these circumstances the enthusiast

easily obtained a remarkable influence in the city, as he had

already done in the surrounding Flanders country. His preaching was

anti-sacerdotal, and he maintained the Donatist doctrine concerning

the Sacrament. He declared indeed that owing to the degeneracy of the

clergy the sacraments had become useless, even harmful, the authority

of the Church had vanished. He is also credited with having given

himself out to be of divine nature, the equal of Christ, with having

celebrated his nuptials with the Virgin Mary, with having been guilty

of vile promiscuous excesses, with having made such claims as that

the ground on which he trod was holy and that if sick persons drank

of water in which he had bathed they would be cured. We need not

necessarily take these stories seriously. Our knowledge of Tanchelm

and his followers is derived mainly from St. Norbert, Archbishop of

Magdeburg and founder of the Praemonstratensian order, who after the

leader’s death undertook the task of winning back his followers to

the true faith. The evidence comes, as usual in these cases, entirely

from hostile sources, and may easily be based on credulous gossip.

Certain it does, however, appear to be that the man succeeded in

obtaining a remarkable influence, surrounding himself with a bodyguard

of 300 men and making himself a power and even a terror throughout the

neighbourhood. That he cannot have regarded himself as an apostate is

clear from his having paid a visit to Rome in 1112 on the question of

the division of the bishopric of Utrecht. On the way back he was,

together with his followers, seized by the Archbishop of Cologne. Three

of the disciples were burned at Bonn; he himself escaped, to be killed

three years later by a clout on the head administered by an avenging

priest.[6]

Somewhat similar to Tanchelm, but indubitably a madman, was Eudo or

Eon de l’Etoile, who created trouble a little later on in Brittany,

declaring himself to be the son of God. The madman had convinced

himself of his divine origin from reading a special reference to

himself in the words: ‘Per _eum_ qui venturus est judicare vivos et

mortuos.’ Eon, in virtue of this high claim, plundered churches and

monasteries, giving their property to the poor, nominated angels and

apostles and ordained bishops. It is not easy to be certain as to the

extent of his influence; for it is not possible to tell whether there

was any direct connection between him and a sect who were spread abroad

in Brittany about the same time, 1145-8, but were connected with others

calling themselves Apostolic Brethren who, having their headquarters

within the diocese of Châlons, were found in most of the northern

provinces of France, their main tenets being that baptism before the

age of thirty, at which Christ Himself was baptized, was useless, that

there was no resurrection of the body, that property, meat and wine

were to be adjured.[7]

Of much more serious consequence than either of these two fanatics

was Arnold of Brescia, who, a pupil of the errant Abelard and accused

of sharing his master’s heterodoxies, was proclaiming a much more

inconvenient heresy when he invoked the ancient republican ideals of

the city of Rome, maintaining that the papal authority within the

city was an usurpation; and indeed that the whole temporal power of

the papacy and all the temporal concerns of the Church as a whole

were an usurpation—so that his crusade in Rome involved a larger

crusade against the alleged secularism, wealth and worldliness of the

clergy.[8] After his death, there remained a certain obscure sect of

Arnoldists, calling themselves ‘Poor Men,’ a devoted unworldliness

their gospel, who no doubt provided a receptive organism in which the

later culture of Waldensianism might thrive.

But it was neither in the Low Countries and northern France nor in

Italy that heresy was first recognized as a formidable menace. The

danger came from southern France, particularly from Provence, from the

country of the _langue d’oc_. In the fertile and beautiful territories

of the Counts of Toulouse, between the Rhone and the Pyrenees, a

land altogether distinct from the rest of France, where there was a

vernacular language and literature much earlier than elsewhere in

Europe, there existed a civilization unique, vivid and luxuriant.

It was distinctive in that it was not in inspiration and essential

character Catholic, for it owed much to intercourse with the Moors from

across the Pyrenees, whose trade, whose special knowledge and skill,

in particular medical skill, were welcomed there. The population was

itself of mixed origin, having in it even Saracenic elements. This

Provençal country, peculiar in Christendom, was pre-eminently the

land of chivalry, of the troubadour, of romance and poetry and the

adventures of love, of all the grace and mirth and joyousness that

were in the Middle Ages. Clearly the atmosphere was not religious,

the Church had little influence and the priesthood were disliked and

despised. It was an atmosphere in which any anti-sacerdotal heresy

might flourish.

In this country there was preaching early in the twelfth century a

certain Pierre de Bruys, denouncing infant baptism, image-worship,

the Real Presence in the Sacrament, the veneration of the Cross. He

declared indeed that the Cross—simply the piece of wood on which

the Saviour was tortured—should be regarded as an object rather of

execration than of veneration. As nothing save the individual’s own

faith could help him, vain and useless were churches and prayers

and masses for the dead. No symbol had efficacy; only personal

righteousness. Pierre de Bruys was burnt, but a small sect of

Petrobrusians survived him for several years, their heresies being

dissected by Peter the Venerable of Cluny.[9]

Much more numerous and more troublesome than the Petrobrusians were the

followers of Henry, a monk of Lausanne, of whose original doctrines

little is known save that he rejected the invocation of saints and

preached an ascetic doctrine, with which was inevitably associated a

denunciation of worldliness among the clergy. Later on he became more

venturesome, rejecting the Sacrament and avowing many of the tenets of

Pierre de Bruys. So successful was his teaching in the south of France

that St. Bernard was wellnigh in despair. Christianity seemed almost

banished out of Languedoc. With fiery zeal Bernard threw himself into

the work of reclamation, and apparently met with much success, the

refusal of Henry of Lausanne to meet him in a disputation going a long

way to discredit his influence. His sect survived his death, the nature

of which is uncertain. It is possible that the Apostolic Brethren found

in Brittany and elsewhere in France, if they were not connected with

Eon de l’Etoile, were really Henricians.[10]

The chief interest of the heresies so far mentioned is the indication

they afford of the potential popularity of any anti-sacerdotal

propaganda. Apart from the crusade of Arnold of Brescia, which had a

special significance of its own belonging less to the history of dogma

than of politics, none of the movements had within them the power of

inspiration and sincerity to make them of permanent influence and

importance. It was otherwise with the movement set on foot by Peter

Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyons, uncultured and unlearned, but

filled with an intense zeal for the Scriptures and for the rule of

genuine godliness. From diligent study of the New Testament and the

Fathers he came to the conclusion that the laws of Christ were nowhere

strictly obeyed. Resolved to live a Christ-like life himself, he gave

part of his property to his wife and distributed the proceeds of the

remainder among the poor. He then started to preach the gospel in the

streets, and soon attracted admirers and adherents, who joined him in

preaching in private houses, public places and churches. As priests

had been very neglectful of that part of their duty, the preaching

apparently had something of the charm of novelty.

The small band, adopting the garb as well as the reality of poverty,

came to be known as the Poor Men of Lyons. At first their ministrations

were approved, and even when the Archbishop of Lyons prohibited their

preaching and excommunicated them, the Pope, Alexander III, appealed

to by Waldo, gave his benediction to his vow of poverty and expressly

sanctioned the preaching of himself and his followers, provided they

had the permission of the priests. This proviso, however, in time

came to be disregarded, and the Poor Men, becoming more and more

embittered in their denunciation of clerical abuses, began to mingle

erroneous doctrines with their anti-sacerdotalism. The clergy, who

naturally resented the onslaught upon their alleged shortcomings,

resented also the usurpation of the function of preaching. It was not

difficult to maintain that such usurpation was itself indicative of

heresy. Richard, monk of Cluny, writing against the Waldenses near

the close of the century, while admitting the merit of the rich man

in voluntarily embracing poverty, on the other hand found that Waldo

read the Scriptures with little understanding, that he was proud in his

own conceit, and possessing a little learning assumed to himself and

usurped the office of the Apostles, preaching the Gospel in the streets

and squares. He caused many men and women to become his accomplices in

a like presumption, whom he sent to preach as his disciples. They being

simple and illiterate people, traversing the village and entering into

the houses, spread everywhere many errors.[11]

That they were a heretical sect and no part of the true Church is

demonstrated by Moneta, the chief authority on Waldensianism, from

the question of orders. Who gave the Poor Men of Lyons their orders,

without which there can be no Christian Church? No one but Waldo

himself! From whom did Waldo obtain them? No one. Waldo ‘glorified

himself to be a bishop; in consequence he was an antichrist, against

Christ and His Church.’[12] From preaching it was an easy transition

to hearing confessions, absolving sins, enjoining penances. The Poor

Men came eventually to undertake all these offices. By the time of the

Council of Verona of 1184, when the attitude that the Church ought

to adopt towards the new organization was first seriously discussed

as a matter of urgent moment, the points of importance were—that the

Waldenses refused obedience to the clergy, held that laymen and even

women had the right to preach, that masses for the dead were useless,

and that God was to be obeyed rather than man.[13]

The last article is clearly a butting against sacerdotal authority.

In fact, anti-sacerdotalism is still the real sum and substance of

the teaching. There was no explicit doctrinal, intellectual error of

the first magnitude. Implicitly, however, there was; for underlying

the whole Waldensian propaganda lay a heretical principle: that which

bestows authority to exercise priestly functions is not ordination at

all, but merit and the individual’s consciousness of vocation.[14]

The Church felt Waldensianism to be a serious menace because it

speedily became popular and spread rapidly. The Poor Men later came to

believe themselves the true Church, from which Catholicism had in its

corruption fallen away. And in support of this they were wont to point

to their own personal purity. To secure godliness was ever their main

concern. A simple adherent of the Waldensian creed, interrogated as to

the precepts his instructors had inculcated, explained that they had

taught him ‘that he should neither speak nor do evil, that he should do

nothing to others that he would not have done to himself, and that he

should not lie or swear.’[15]

It would be difficult to find an apter summary of the ideals of

Christian conduct! On certain points of behaviour the Waldenses laid

particular stress—perhaps most of all upon the necessity of scrupulous

truthfulness; and like many people who have a keen sense of the

compelling beauty of truth for its own sake, they strongly disapproved

of the taking of oaths.

Simple goodness and high-mindedness have rarely at any time of history

failed to make their appeal to men’s hearts; and it is clear that in

the Middle Ages especially a strict rule of life, particularly if it

had something austere and ascetic in it, held a remarkable attraction

and influence. A writer, inveighing against the Waldenses towards the

end of the fourteenth century, admits the efficacy of their purity in

promoting their teaching. ‘Because their followers saw and daily see

them endowed with exterior godliness, and a good many priests of the

Church (O shame!) entangled with vice, chiefly of lust, they believed

that they are better absolved from sins through them than through

the priests of the Church.’[16] An inquisitor bears testimony—and no

testimony could be less biased in their favour—to the moral excellence

of the sect. ‘Heretics,’ he goes so far as to say, ‘are recognized by

their customs and speech, for they are modest and well-regulated. They

take no pride in their garments, which are neither costly nor vile.

They do not engage in trade, to avoid lies and oaths and frauds, but

live by their labours as mechanics—their teachers are cobblers. They

do not accumulate wealth, but are content with necessaries. They are

chaste and temperate in meat and drink. They do not frequent taverns or

dances or other vanities. They restrain themselves from anger. They are

always at work; they teach and learn and consequently pray but little.

They are to be known by their modesty and precision of speech, avoiding

scurrility and detraction, light words and lies and oaths.’[17] That

the Waldenses should sometimes have been accused of hypocrisy and have

met with ridicule from sophisticated enemies is not surprising; but

generally there is striking evidence as to their simple piety. There

were some stories told at times of sexual immorality among them. These

we need not take very seriously. Similar stories were told against all

heretical sects; and they can be accounted for easily in this case by a

confusion found frequently between the Waldenses and the Cathari. The

preponderating evidence in favour of the moral excellence of the former

is strong. It is not perhaps too much to say that the distinctive

dangerousness of the former lay in the fact of such excellence, such

fruits of the spirit being brought forth among a sect which arrogated

to itself apostolic functions without lawful authority.

The other great contemporary heresy—Catharism—has some striking

points of resemblance with Waldensianism, but more important points

of contrast. The new Manichæism emanated from the East, being found

in the Balkans in the tenth century tolerated and flourishing under

John Zimiskes, especially in Thrace and Bulgaria, after a period

of attempted extirpation under Leo the Isaurian and Theodora. The

Manichæan belief appeared in Italy about 1030, and speedily made its

way into France, first entering Aquitaine, then spreading over the

whole country south of the Loire. Early in the twelfth century it

penetrated further north—into Champagne, Picardy, Flanders; and at the

same time in one form or another it was found in Hungary, Bohemia,

Germany. It was so far-spread indeed that its existence presented a

very serious problem for the Church.[18]

There were several varieties of Manichæan doctrine, corresponding with

the different sects of Bogomiles, as they were called in Bulgaria and

other Slavic lands, Paulicians among the Greeks, Cathari in Western

Europe; but the different varieties were united in their fundamental

dualism. The Manichæan idea started in an attempt to find a solution

for the problem of good and evil presented by the assumption that God

the Creator is all-good and all-wise.[19] Could such a Creator be

the author of all the evil abroad in the world? Yet evil could not

be fortuitous; the material universe presented too much evidence of

purpose and design. A creator of the evil there must have been; but an

evil person or principle. To this creator—call him Satan or Lucifer,

what you will—must be due sin and such disasters as famines, wars and

tempests.[20]

For such a dualism—two creators, one beneficent, the other malign—the

Catharan discovered abundant evidence in the Scriptures. In the

Temptation Satan offers Christ all the glories of the earth, which must

mean that they, constituting the material world, belong to Satan.[21]

There were numerous passages descriptive of the discrepancy between

the earthly and the heavenly. Christ said, ‘My Kingdom is not of

this world.’ One Catharan tenet was that Jehovah, the God of the Old

Testament, was the malign creator. For he was a sanguinary deity,

dealing in curses and violence, wars and massacres. What single point

in common, urged the Catharan, was there between this deity and that

of the New Testament, who desired mercy and forgiveness? The Catharan

dubbed Jehovah a deceiver, a thief, a vulgar juggler. He strongly

condemned the Mosaic law, declaring it radically evil. Had it not been

entirely abrogated by the law of Christ, according to Christ’s own

statement?[22]

There were differences among the Manichæans as to whether the evil

deity was equal to the other or not. The Bogomiles believed that God

had two sons, the younger Jesus, the elder Satan, who was entrusted

with the administration of the celestial kingdom and the creative

power. Satan revolted, was turned out of heaven, and thereupon created

a new world and, with Adam and Eve, a new race of beings. Another

Manichæan system saw in Lucifer, not a son of God, but an angel,

expelled from heaven. Two other angels—Adam and Eve—agreed to share his

exile. In order to secure their permanent allegiance to himself Satan

created Paradise to drive the idea of heaven from their minds. Not

satisfied with this device he hit upon another—the union of the sexes.

He accordingly entered into the serpent and tempted Eve, awakening the

carnal appetite, which is original sin, and has ever since been the

main source of the continuance of the Devil’s power.[23]

The Manichæans of all sections regarded Jesus as having been sent by

the good God to destroy the power of the evil one by bringing back

the seed of Adam to heaven. In their view Jesus was inferior to God,

not God Himself, but rather the highest of the angels.[24] Denying

His divinity, they also denied His humanity. For holding Satan to be

essentially the lord of the material world and the originator of the

propagation of the human race, they could not allow that Christ’s body

was of the same substance as of the ordinary man. According to them,

the transfiguration was Christ’s revelation of His celestial body to

the disciples.[25] The Passion and Crucifixion had no significance for

the Cathari. Indeed Christ’s death was a delusion. The Devil tried to

kill Jesus, under the impression that His body was vulnerable; whereas

in reality it was as invulnerable as His spirit. There was, therefore,

no death, and of course no resurrection.[26]

The dogma of the expiatory character of Christ’s life the Cathari

necessarily rejected. He came, according to them, solely to teach the

duty of penitence and to show the way to salvation, which lay only

through membership of the Catharan church.

The Virgin Mary possessed the same form of celestial body as Christ;

though apparently a woman, she was actually sexless. Some Cathari held

that the Virgin was only symbolical—of the Catharan church.[27] Some,

too, held that John the Baptist was one of the demons of the evil

god, who acted as an obstacle to the beneficent God, by preaching the

material baptism of water instead of the true baptism which is purely

spiritual.[28]

Such were some of the main doctrinal features of Catharism. Its ethical

teaching was intimately connected with its theology. Refusing to credit

that the good God could predestine any to perdition, they held that

salvation ultimately awaited all. What gain, in these circumstances,

had the Catharan over his unconverted neighbours? Only a gain in

point of time. Life on earth, the Devil’s domain, was thought of as

a dwelling in and with corruption, a penance, a probation. The aim

was to have done with such life, such probation, as soon as might be.

The unbeliever, though he eventually reached heaven, did not do so

immediately after death, but had to continue his penance in another

material form. One of the essential ideas of Catharism, then, was the

transmigration of souls.[29] But for the Catharan, death meant the

instant discarding of the filthy garment of the decadent flesh, the

entrance at once into glory.

It was in the ability to cast aside the bondage of the material world

that there consisted the Catharan’s supreme advantage over other

people. The feeling that this _was_ an advantage clearly depended on

one’s attitude towards human life. To the Catharan the essential sin

was worldliness. The Catharan made no distinction between mortal and

venial sins for this reason. All concern and pleasure in the affairs of

the world was mortal sin. Money-making was of course depraved; but so

also was devotion to parents, children, friends. Had not Christ said

as much?[30] The Catharan must give up everything he held dear in life

for the sake of the truth, which was the Catharan faith.[31] While the

Bogomiles sanctioned prevarication in order to escape persecution, the

stricter adherents of the creed combined together with a Waldensian

devotion to strict truthfulness without oaths, a conviction that to

deny the smallest article of their faith was a heinous offence.[32]

His belief in metempsychosis meant that the Catharan was a vegetarian.

He abjured cheese, milk and eggs as well as meat; but flesh was worst

of all, because all flesh is of the Devil.[33] But the human spirit was

regarded with the greatest sanctity. The effusion of blood was always

wrong, the circumstances made no difference—it was always murder. The

parricide was no wickeder than the soldier in battle or the judge

condemning the criminal to death.[34] No human being was ever justified

in preventing his fellow men from following out their own course to

salvation. It may seem at first sight curious that the Catharan, so

strongly condemning the taking of another’s life, should in certain

cases condone and even encourage suicide. The explanation is, however,

simple enough. Once granted the conception of the radically evil

nature of the world and, secondly, of entrance into the Catharan fold

as ensuring immediate entrance into glory without further probation

after death, it was legitimate for a believer, conscious of his having

accomplished the object of his earthly penance and made his salvation

secure, to hasten the time of his departure into heaven. Hence the

initiated would sometimes escape the sufferings of illness, or the

recent convert flee from the temptation of the desire for the temporal

things he had renounced, by suicide. Such Catharan suicide was known as

the Endura.

Yet more remarkable than the sanction of suicide was another

consequence of the Manichæan creed—the condemnation of matrimony.[35]

The connection of thought was logical and the conclusion perhaps

logically inevitable. If it be accepted that the carnal body is the

invention of the Devil and the propagation of the species his device

for prolonging his power, the love of the sexes original sin, then it

is clear that marriage is service of Satan. So the Cathari enjoined the

severest possible chastity.[36] As usual they found evidence of their

belief in the Bible. But for them there was no difference between one

form of sexual intercourse and another. Adultery, even incest, was not

one whit more iniquitous than marriage. On the whole they were rather

less evil. For adultery was only temporary and produced a feeling

of shame; whereas marriage was permanent, a lasting living in sin,

contemplated without shame. The bearing of children was regarded with

horror. Every birth was a new triumph for the evil one; a pregnant

woman was possessed of the Devil, and if she died pregnant, could not

at once be saved.[37]

Catharan beliefs inevitably involved the denunciation of

Catholicism.[38] It was the Catholic that was the heretic; the wearer

of the pontifical tiara could not possibly be even a disciple of Him

who wore a crown of thorns, was indeed antichrist. The clergy from the

highest to the lowest were pharisees; the sacraments—infant baptism,

the sacrificial mass—were declared to have no warrant in Scripture, to

be mere figments of the imagination.[39]

The Cathari, it has to be remembered, were a church. They had an

organization, held services with a certain very simple ritual, for

example substituting for the mass a simple blessing of bread at table,

the Catharan meal bearing a close resemblance to the early Christian

ἀγάπη. Confessions were made to elders of the church once a month.

But the most distinctive ceremony of the sect was the Consolamentum,

an imposition of hands whereby the ordinary believer was admitted

into the select ranks of the Perfected. The number of the latter was

always small, and consisted principally of the avowed ministers of the

faith. The Consolamentum, which meant re-entrance into communion with

the spiritual world, was the desire of all true Cathari, but was apt

to be postponed until late in life, often until the death-bed. The

actual ritual of the Consolamentum—or hæretication, as Catholics termed

it—was very brief. The candidate, after a series of genuflections and

blessings, asked the minister to pray God that he might be made a good

Christian.[40] Such prayer having been offered, the candidate was then

asked if he was willing to abjure prohibited foods and unchastity, and

to endure persecution if necessary. When the Consolamentum was given

to a man on his death-bed, it was frequently followed by the Endura,

which commonly took the form of suffocation or self-starvation.

The Perfected consisted of four orders—bishop, filius major, filius

minor, deacon—their duties being to preside at services and missionary

work, in which the Cathari were zealous. Outside their ranks were

the simple adherents, the Believers or, as they were sometimes

called, Christians. These bound themselves eventually to receive the

Consolamentum; but, generally speaking, they were under no obligations

save to venerate the Perfected who, in the strictest sense, composed

the true Catharan Church, and to live the pure life their faith

enjoined. But they were under no coercive authority, and were even

permitted to marry.

Wherein lay the attraction of the Catharan doctrine and system? For

evidently they were attractive, as their great and rapid spread over

Europe shows. It is at first difficult to discern anything attractive

in teaching so austere; and if the Catharan promised a reward in

heaven, so also did the Catholic. In his case purgatory had first

to be faced, but then the ordeal on earth was less exacting. There

would appear to be two explanations, the one high-minded, the other

the reverse. In its early days the gospel of Catharism probably

made to some a lofty appeal. It denounced palpable clerical abuses,

repugnant to the moral consciousness. The austerity of its ethical

principles seemed to point to a higher standard of living in days

when any outstanding examples of asceticism, whether in the Church or

outside it, evoked admiration. In its hatred for the evil spirit of

materialism, in its detestation particularly of that worst of human

passions, cruelty, there was an element of nobility which finds a

response in the instinct which we to-day call humanitarian.[41] In

so far as its appeal was of this nature, it was sincere and fine.

Unhappily, however, Catharism unquestionably developed another appeal

of a wholly different character, which resulted almost inevitably from

the complete impracticableness of its ideal. A creed that approved of

suicide and denounced marriage stands self-condemned. It was at war

with the very principles of life itself. The ascetic rule it enjoined

was one ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance.’ There was

taint of unhealthiness and corruption in a rule so hopelessly at

variance with nature; while a creed which, if it meant anything, held

as its highest hope the speediest possible destruction of all human

life, was devoid of the balance and sanity which is essential in any

doctrine that is to be of any practical service in the world. Such a

religion as Catharism could not harmonize with the most elementary

facts of life and human nature. The consequence was—and herein lies

the greatest condemnation of the sect—that it went on proclaiming

an impracticable ideal while admitting that it was impracticable,

sanctioning a compromise, itself antithetical to its essential dogma,

whereby alone the heresy was able to continue at all. The compromise is

seen in two practices—the distinction made between the Perfected and

the Believers and the postponement of the Consolamentum, or complete

initiation, until the end of life. The Believers—the great bulk of the

adherents of the creed—might do pretty well as they liked, in fact

ignore all the Catharan precepts of conduct, might marry, have riches,

make war, eat what they chose, provided only they were prepared to

receive the Consolamentum before they died. Such an arrangement is

merely the apotheosis of the system of the death-bed repentance, it

is an encouragement to insincerity and hypocrisy. This does not mean

that most, or necessarily even many, Cathari were hypocrites. Most of

them, probably, were originally simple-minded labourers and artisans,

attracted by a novel gospel, which discerned the evils of the times,

gave hopes of heaven and was marked by the ascetic and missionary

enthusiasms which were then regarded as the hall-mark of a spiritual

origin and divine inspiration.

Nevertheless, the temptation to insincerity was clearly present.

‘Believe in the Catharan creed, venerate the Perfected, receive the

Consolamentum before death,’ made a simple and an attractive faith

for one who wished to enjoy the pleasures of life to the full, yet to

whom the tortures of a material hell were painfully vivid. ‘We are

the only true Christians, the Catholic church is but an usurpation,

utterly corrupt,’ made a convenient excuse for the feudal lord, by

whom only the excuse was wanted, to harry the clergy and make inroads

on their property. Nor need we wonder that these holders of a doctrine

of ultra-asceticism, of a complete celibacy, were credited with even

the foulest of sexual orgies. The distinction between Perfected and

Believers was an antinomian arrangement. Intense asceticism among the

very select number of the former was made compatible with excesses

among the latter. Was not the very rigour of existence among the

completely initiated an invitation positively to extreme indulgence

prior to such initiation? It would be highly uncritical to place a

great deal of credence in the many stories told of immoral practices

among Cathari. Such stories were bound to be told. We find them in

connection with practically every mediæval heresy; it was such an

obvious device for the discrediting of unholy beliefs to demonstrate

that they involved unholy lives. But it would also be uncritical to

reject the stories altogether. There is an inherent probability that

a certain percentage—it may be only a small percentage—of those told

of the Cathari were true. The critic’s objection, ‘what abomination

may one not expect of those who hold incest no worse a crime than

marriage?’ is pertinent and sound.[42] What results are likely, once

given the impossibility of complete continence, from such a perverted

teaching?

Indeed, notwithstanding its better qualities, its still better

possibilities, Catharism was essentially perverted: and the

antagonism it aroused and the efforts made to suppress it are in no

way surprising. It has been termed ‘a hodge-podge of pagan dualism

and gospel teaching, given to the world as a sort of reformed

Christianity.’[43] A hodge-podge it undoubtedly was, an amalgam of

ancient Manichæism and elements of eastern origin, which were not

Christian at all but Mazdeist, together with certain features of pure

Christianity. It is no wonder that the Catholic Church viewed with

alarm the challenge made by a faith so compounded when it claimed to

be the only true Christianity. Catharism was not an antagonist to

be despised. Its missionary enterprise, its anti-social tendencies

and the evident popularity of its anti-sacerdotal features made it

undeniably dangerous. Moreover, it did not stand alone. Taken together,

the different anti-sacerdotal heresies, of which Waldensianism and

Catharism were the chief, which were abroad in Europe before the end of

the twelfth century, presented a serious problem and indeed a menace.

Was not the widespread phenomenon of organized heresy a challenge to

the whole conception of the _Civitas Dei_ alike on its spiritual and

its secular side? If only in self-defence must not the Church—society

on its spiritual side—take special measures to counteract the influence

of rebels, who had deliberately made war upon it by declaring

themselves alone to be the true repositories of the sacred truths upon

which God’s Kingdom here upon earth was founded? There were three

possible methods of answering the challenge of heresy. The first was

reform, the weeding out of those abuses which gave anti-sacerdotalism

its case and its opportunity, reform whereby all might be enabled to

recognize incontestably that Christ was plainly revealed in the life

of His Church. The second was missionary propaganda, the utilization

of the same weapon which the enemy so trenchantly wielded—that of

persuasion. The third possible method was constraint.

CHAPTER III

‘THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL’

In 1196 Pope Celestine III gave his sanction to a new order, of which

the mother-house was in Fiore. From this place its founder derived his

name, and he is generally known as Joachim of Flora. Born of a noble

family and intended for a courtier, he had joined the Cistercians in

the desire for a life of austere discipline, but finding its severities

insufficient to satisfy his zeal had retired into a hermitage, where

however would-be disciples sought him out, so that he had to put

himself at their head. Joachim, who has been described as ‘the founder

of modern mysticism,’[44] regarded himself as inspired, and in his

own life-time obtained the reputation of a prophet. As a prophet he

is recognized in Dante.[45] There is no question that Joachim was

much under Greek influences. Calabria itself, the scene of most of

his labours, was half-Greek; he paid more than one visit to Greece,

came in contact with the Greek Church and also almost certainly with

the Cathari, for Greece was a hotbed of their doctrines. There is some

common ground between Catharism and the peculiar teachings with which

the name of Abbot Joachim is associated. Except for a few unimportant

pamphlets against the Jews and other adversaries of the Christian faith

there are only three works of which he was the undoubted author—a

concordance, a psalter and a commentary on the book of the Revelation.

The authenticity of two epistles ascribed to him is probable, but many

other works put down to his authorship after his death are certainly

spurious.[46]

The contemporary reputation of Joachim would appear to have been

derived as much from his spoken utterances as from his writings: but

Adam Marsh prized the smallest fragments of his works, sending them

whenever he could obtain them from Italy to Bishop Grosseteste. On

the other hand, however interesting and indeed startling they may

have been, they were not during their author’s lifetime regarded as

in any way injurious. His reputation as a seer was wholly orthodox

and unexceptionable. In 1200 he submitted his books to the Holy See

for its approval, and the verdict was that they were undoubtedly of

divine inspiration. Thirteen years later, indeed, certain speculations

concerning the Trinity in one of his minor tracts were condemned by the

Council of the Lateran. But the author was not personally condemned,

and his order was definitely approved; while in 1220 Honorius III

issued a bull declaring Joachim to have been a good Catholic.[47]

It is doubtful if the name of Joachim of Flora would ever have been

of any more than very transitory importance had it not been for the

appearance in 1254 of a work entitled ‘The Eternal Gospel,’ of which he

was stated to be the author. No book of that title figures among the

authentic works of Joachim, nor did he give that name to any collection

of them. It seems that the book which appeared in Paris in 1254

consisted of Joachim’s three principal works—which had none of them

been hitherto deemed heretical—with explanatory notes and a lengthy and

all-important introduction (_Introductorius in Evangelium Aeternum_).

It must have been rather in the notes and introduction than in the

text that the heresy lay, in the interpretations put upon Joachim’s

apocalyptic effusions rather than in the effusions themselves. The true

author, therefore, of the heresies associated with ‘The Everlasting

Gospel’ would appear to be the commentator, not the originator. The

authorship of the introduction and the glosses was early ascribed to

one of two persons—to a certain Gherardo da Borgo San Donnino by the

contemporary chronicler Salimbene, to John of Parma by the inquisitor

Eymeric in his ‘Directorium Inquisitorum,’ written more than a century

later. In any case the author was a Franciscan.[48] And between the

conceptions contained in ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ and the Franciscan

Order, it will be seen, there was a very close and a very significant

connection.

We may take it that the compiler of the work which startled the world

in 1254—whether it was Gherardo or John of Parma—is to be regarded less

as an expounder of the teaching of Joachim of Flora than as an original

thinker, either honestly finding a preceptor and a kindred soul in

the prophet and simply elaborating his thesis, or else utilizing the

apocalyptic utterances of a man who had died in the full odour of

sanctity in order to build up a thesis essentially his own on esoteric

writings easily susceptible of a new construction. It is sufficient

that ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ has direct reference to that section of

the Franciscans which was at the time led by John of Parma, and that

in the new religion which the work predicts the Friars are to play

the leading part as inaugurators. The work is indeed astoundingly

revolutionary. In much the same way that Mazzini in his ‘From the

Council to God’ proclaimed the emergence of a new religion of Humanity

superseding Christianity did ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ proclaim a

new religion, that of the Holy Ghost. But whereas condemnation of

the Catholic Church was commonplace in the nineteenth century and

humanitarian ideas familiar; in the thirteenth century it is rather

astonishing to find an admission that Christianity has failed and that

a new dispensation is necessary for the salvation of mankind. The text

of ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ is the words in the book of the Revelation,

‘And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the

everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to

every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, saying with a loud

voice, Fear God, and give glory to him, for the hour of his judgment is

come.’[49] Joachim had foretold in his ‘Concordia’ that the world would

go through three cycles, those of the Father or the circumcision or the

law; of the Son, crucifixion, grace; of the Holy Ghost, peace and love.

The first had been the era of Judaism, of the Old Testament. It had led

on to that of the New Testament and the Christian Church. The second

period was very shortly to reach its accomplishment, and the third and

last era, that of ‘The Everlasting Gospel,’ to be inaugurated by a new

religious order. By mystic computations the date of the commencement of

the final era was found to be 1260.

Fundamental to such a mystic conception of human history is the

assumption that Christianity is not the whole and the sole truth, that

it is not complete in itself, but only a partial revelation of God to

man, destined to be superseded by a fuller, ampler revelation in the

same way in which it had superseded Judaism. Such an assumption could

only rest upon a pessimistic view of contemporary life and society,

a feeling that it urgently needed a new saviour. Joachim strongly

denounced the evils of his day, especially those evinced by the Church,

which was given up to carnal appetites and neglected its duties, to

the advantage of proselytizing heresies, for which it was thus itself

indirectly responsible. The author or authors of ‘The Everlasting

Gospel’ illustrated this very conception by elaborating a thesis really

more destructive of the Catholic faith than Catharism itself. The

ending of the second era was to be accompanied by great tribulations,

but these grievous troubles would usher in the millennium, days of

perfect justice, peace and happiness, in which God would be worshipped

everywhere and in which the Eucharist and indeed all other sacraments

would be needless, mankind being liberated from such burdens, so

complete would be the knowledge of God in the heart of the individual

man. The conversion of the world to this new dispensation, in which

each man would live the devoted life of a monk, was to be brought

about by the new mendicant order, in which would be manifested all the

highest powers of man. What order could this be but the Franciscan?

The personality and career of St. Francis of Assisi are of profound

significance in the history of mediæval Christianity. Their sanctity

and spiritual power gave other men, such as Peter Damiani, Bruno,

Stephen Harding, Norbert, Bernard, Dominic, a great reputation and

authority even in their own lifetime. But Francis stood apart from and

above all of them, even Bernard. His intense sincerity, his absolute,

unconditional renunciation of all worldly things, the charm and beauty

of his character made the man, upon whose body the στίγματα of Christ

were said to have been seen, appear to his own day as one different

from all other men—indeed so miraculously near to the spirit of his

Master as to be hailed by some even as a second Christ. Simple,

unlearned, not interested in intellectual matters, making religion

an inward matter of spiritual experience, intense conviction of sin

and of repentance together with unreserved devotion of life and soul

to God in personal service, St. Francis was no organizer, and when

the nucleus of an order gathered round him viewed the future with the

utmost disquietude, fearing in the very fact of organization a falling

away from those ideas of strictest poverty and personal holiness which

marked out the Minorites from all other religious associations. Yet if

the influence of St. Francis was to survive his death, organization,

whatever its drawbacks, was an imperative necessity. This work was

carried out by a man of rare energy and constructive powers, Elias

of Cortona, with the active support of Gregory IX. Elias did for

the Franciscans what St. Paul did for primitive Christianity. But

between the spirit of Elias and that of Francis there was a difference

equivalent to that between the zeal of a prophet and the skill of

a statesman. The Franciscan Order as it came to be, if it gained

something by its organization, lost also, as the founder had foreseen.

With organization there came indeed recruitment from the ranks of

scholarship, and the followers of the unlearned saint of Assisi

included in Alexander of Hales, Bonaventura and Roger Bacon men who

could take stand with Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas himself among

the followers of the learned Dominic de Guzman. But there came also

with organization temporal influence and worldly wealth, entirely out

of harmony with the mind and ideals of Francis, and proving indeed a

snare and a temptation to those very clerical abuses against which the

whole life of Francis had been a protest.

Accordingly, there came about a very serious and indeed irreconcilable

cleavage among the Grey Friars. There were on the one side the

followers of Elias who came to be known as the Conventuals,

arguing that a strict compliance with the principles of Francis

was impracticable, indeed fanatical, that compromise involving the

abandonment of the mendicant ideal and the acceptance of property was

not only justifiable but unavoidable for the continued existence of

their society. On the other side were the Spirituals, arguing that the

policy of compromise meant nothing less than the repudiation of the

distinctive characteristics of the order which had led to its creation

and justified its continuation, and urging to the full the strictest

conformity with all their uncompromising sincerity. The dispute between

the two parties had been some years in progress when ‘The Everlasting

Gospel’ was published, the John of Parma to whom the authorship of the

work was by some attributed being at that time General of the order

and a most perfervid Spiritual. St. Francis himself had indeed been

orthodox enough, for the most part accepting the articles of faith in

a spirit of unquestioning obedience, though the bent of his mind and

his marriage to the Lady Poverty caused him to attach more importance

to some dogmas than to others, and in particular to shorten and to

simplify all forms and ritual. But in the beautiful fancifulness of

Francis there was a strong element of mysticism, and this element was

a marked characteristic of those who sought to retain his ideal of

asceticism in the order. To such the mystical outpourings of the Abbot

Joachim made a powerful appeal. For they perceived in his predictions

a clear reference to themselves, found in Francis the forerunner and

in themselves, his true followers, the destined preachers of the new

era of the Holy Ghost in which the carnal-mindedness of a decadent

Church and the corruption and indeed the worldliness of the whole human

race were to be known no more. To some extremists Francis figured not

as a great saint and servant of Christ seeking to reclaim the world

to His truth, but as an equal with Christ—not as the restorer of an

existent religion, but as the creator of a new religion. So completely

heterodox a construction was it possible to place upon the mission of

St. Francis, in the light of Joachite prophecy.[50]

It can easily be understood that the taint of Joachitism among the

Spirituals gave a splendid opportunity to their adversaries, which the

latter were not slow to take. The Pope, Alexander IV, was appealed to;

John of Parma was forced to resign, and his successor, Bonaventura,

who belonged to neither party, was made, however unwillingly, to take

action against John himself and his most outstanding adherents. Already

evidence was accumulating of heretical dangers which might accrue from

the wedding together of Franciscan ideas of poverty with Joachitic

mysticism, and Spirituals began to be looked upon askance. Already

Languedoc, abundant source of all manner of onslaughts upon the faith,

was beginning to welcome the ideas of Joachim, and it was possible for

the Conventuals to argue that their opponents were no better than a

heretical sect, another form of Cathari. Later on there came successors

to the author of ‘The Everlasting Gospel,’ in the Franciscan Pierre

Jean Olivi in France, in Italy Arnaldo da Villanova, who pronounced the

vices of the clergy to be eloquent signs of the presence of Antichrist.

To begin with the Spirituals were in the ascendant. Bonaventura, in

controversy with William of Saint Amour, a virulent enemy of the whole

Franciscan order, maintained that poverty was an essential feature

of Christianity and that neither Christ Himself nor His disciples

owned property of any kind. Pope Nicholas III by the bull _Exiit qui

seminat_ gave the sanction of the Holy See to the view that St. Francis

had been inspired in his creation of the Rule by the Holy Ghost; that

Christ had completely renounced the ownership of property and that such

renunciation was most laudable and Christian. At the same time he drew

a distinction—no new one, because it had already been put into practice

by Innocent IV and Alexander IV—between ownership and use, and laid

down as a rule always to be followed that the ownership of Franciscan

property was vested in the Holy See, the Franciscans themselves

simply having the usufruct. This bull did not, as might have been

anticipated, settle the dispute between the two Franciscan factions.

Laxity increased among the Conventuals, and Joachite tendencies still

subsisted among their opponents. The pontificate of Boniface VIII,

which began in 1294, brought upon the scene a man most eminently

practical, essentially worldly. To the Pope, who had designs on the

temporal power and eventually announced categorically, ‘I am Caesar,

I am Emperor,’ the ascetic ideal of the Spirituals was a ridiculous

fanaticism, which was also a positive nuisance. The mendicant orders

had been especially the servants of the papacy; the Spirituals were

apt to refer to it as Antichrist. Moreover, the existence of wandering

friars, actually beggars, under no proper discipline and supervision—as

some of the Spirituals had become—outraged his sense of order and

decency. Boniface decided that these lawless bands must be hunted

down, and utilized the Inquisition for this purpose. Under Clement

V the lot of the Spirituals considerably improved, and inveighing

against the abuses of their false brethren they very nearly succeeded

in securing a permanent separation into an order of their own. Instead

of this Clement, while declaring in favour of the ascetic party and

favouring them generally during his pontificate, endeavoured to induce

the rival factions to drop their quarrels and live together in amity.

His efforts at settlement were defeated by the action of Spirituals

in Italy, who at the very time when a Council at Vienne, sitting in

1311-12, was declaring in favour of the Spirituals and prohibiting

their enemies from referring to them as heretics, proclaimed themselves

a separate community and brought down the Pope’s wrath upon them as

rebels and schismatics and indeed founders of a pestilential sect.

The controversy came to a head under Clement’s successor, the

resolute and aggressive John XXII, to whom the pauper ideal was

particularly obnoxious. He was extremely avaricious and full of

worldly ambitions which involved him in frequent wars in Italy. This

pontiff—possessing in his nature not one single feature in common with

St. Francis—determined on restoring order within the Franciscan fold

and bringing the Spirituals to obedience.[51] The first attack on the

ascetic party was made in Languedoc. One of the minor distinctive

features of the Spirituals was their wearing smaller gowns and hoods

than the Conventuals. The Spirituals in the province of Aquitaine,

in Béziers, Narbonne and Carcassonne, were forbidden to wear this

distinctive garb. Twenty-five, to whom the wearing of their habit was

symbolical of the whole principle for which they stood, refused to

submit and were delivered to the Inquisition at Marseilles. Already

the Pope had declared that all the wandering Spirituals in Languedoc

who styled themselves _Fratres de paupere vita_ or _Fraticelli_ were

heretics, and had stated very significantly in the bull _Quorundam_

that however praiseworthy poverty might be, more praiseworthy was

obedience. Four of the twenty-five remained obdurate to the last, were

handed over to the secular arm, and burnt. This proved to be but the

beginning of a persecution carried out most rigorously by means of the

Holy Office, particularly in the south of France, but also in Spain

and Italy.

The rebel Franciscans were persecuted because they were heretical, and

it is important to note in what their heresy consisted. It was not

because of Joachite tendencies—these might or might not exist, they

were not a criterion—it was because of disobedience pure and simple.

To disobey the constitution _Quorundam_, to dispute its ruling as to

the wearing of a habit and the question of ownership of property—that

was heresy. It is true that the motive which induced the recalcitrant

to refuse obedience to the bull was a repudiation of papal authority

to lay down such a regulation regarding the Franciscan Rule, and that

such repudiation was connected with Joachite views as to the degeneracy

of the Church and the unique reforming rôle of the Franciscan order.

None the less the fact remained that in running directly counter to the

ruling of the bull _Exiit qui seminat_ and the decisions of the Council

of Vienne John XXII had actually created a new heresy, had asserted

that what had seemed most Christian and laudable to Nicholas III and

Clement V was an error in the faith. The persecution had the result

of actually encouraging Joachitism. ‘As well to be hanged for a sheep

as a lamb’ is a proverb of very general validity. If it was heresy to

disobey a papal bull—granted that that _had_ to be disobeyed—why not go

to the full length of rejecting the papacy and declaring it superseded

by the era of St. Francis and the Holy Ghost? The papal pronouncement

made the fanatical Spirituals more and more convinced that the

Roman Church was indeed ‘the whore of Babylon,’ the Pope veritable

Antichrist. And certainly we may regard the extremists latterly, under

the goad of persecution, as having developed into a sect, definitely

believing itself to be the true Church—that of St. Francis and the Holy

Ghost. But such fanatical Spirituals were exceedingly small in numbers,

their influence very restricted, and their extinction was brought about

without very much difficulty.

But it was not only the extremists that were made victims. On November

12, 1323, John XXII, to whom the Spirituals’ conception of the place

of poverty in the Christian Church was definitely anathema, so

irreconcilable was it with his papal policy, issued the bull, _Cum

inter nonnullos_, in which it was authoritatively denied that Christ

and His Apostles possessed no property. To assert that they held none

was error and heresy.[52] This question of dogma became involved with

secular politics, when Lewis of Bavaria, being claimant to the imperial

crown and at enmity with Pope John, found it convenient to adopt the

cause of the Franciscans and to denounce the Pope himself as a heretic

for not believing in the absolute poverty of Christ, as he did in a

formal indictment of John known as the Protest of Sachsenhausen. A

controversy between Empire and Papacy was thus started which is of

great interest because it evoked the ‘Defensor Pacis’ of Marsiglio

of Padua and the numerous polemical works of William of Ockham on

the imperial side. This controversy is of much greater interest and

significance than the story of the persecutions of the _Fratres de

paupere vita_, or _Fraticelli_, which continued as the result of John

XXII’s action, more especially in Italy, into the later decades of

the fourteenth century. The significance of the persecutions lies

in the virtual creation of a heresy by a papal bull. That it should

be possible for any individual wearer of the papal tiara to declare

heretical what his predecessors had held to be praiseworthy and to

stigmatize as heretics his opponents in secular politics revealed a

great danger. To hold fast to an immutable faith is easy, but what if

the immutable faith does as a matter of fact change! The bull _Cum

inter nonnullos_ made it possible that a man might be condemned as

a heretic because he held a certain view as to Christ’s poverty,

although perfectly able and willing to subscribe to every article in

the Christian creed as defined in the great councils of the early

Church. Catharism may have been a real peril to the Church; but to

maintain that men who had no other wish but to preserve the strict Rule

of St. Francis in the order constituted such a peril is impossible. And

men might well be bewildered by the fact that whereas the revolutionary

teachings of Joachitism were not at first proscribed, the wearing of a

particular type of hood became heretical not many years later.

The importance of ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ lies principally in

its influence on the Franciscan order, but it had several other

developments which are of distinct interest as remarkable illustrations

of the strange fanaticisms and superstitious credulities possible

in the thirteenth century. The Joachite idea of a new era and new

religion led to the astonishing discovery of incarnations of the

divine. One was found in a certain woman, a native of Milan, called

Guglielma, who seemed to have been in no way remarkable save for her

piety.[53] Yet the little band of followers who gathered round her

came to venerate her as a saint and a miracle worker. The biographies

of mediæval worthies are full of tales of the miraculous, and there

was nothing strange in this. But the extraordinary absurdity followed

of finding her to be the Holy Ghost in female form. The woman herself

never countenanced such fantastic ideas and expressly repudiated any

supernatural powers. But after her death a small circle of fanatic

devotees established her worship in Milan with a certain Maifreda at

their head, performing high sacerdotal functions and destined in the

eyes of her associates to succeed to the papal throne when the corrupt

Roman Church should have passed away.

The Guglielmites were a very insignificant sect, easily extinguished.

Potentially more dangerous were the followers of one Gherardo

Segarelli, a very ignorant and very demented enthusiast of Parma, who,

being rejected on his seeking admission into the Franciscan order,

determined to outdo St. Francis in the exact reproduction of the life

of Christ.[54] His method of accomplishing this purpose was to have

himself circumcised, wrapped in swaddling clothes and suckled by a

woman—after which preliminaries he stalked into the streets of his

native town, a wild, uncouth figure, calling all men to repentance. In

time the madman succeeded in attracting devotees from among herdsmen

as ignorant and almost as foolish as himself. The movement began to

be formidable when it spread beyond Parma, even beyond Italy, being

found in 1287 in Germany; and it appeared that Segarelli aimed at

proselytizing the world. The papacy was roused, the Inquisition put

into action, Segarelli himself in 1300 burnt in Parma, his disciples,

known as Apostolic Brethren, energetically persecuted.

They were not, however, entirely eradicated. Some remained—men of more

intellect than the lunatic heresiarch and his half-witted herdsmen—and

among them a certain Fra Dolcino, who saw in the appearance of

Segarelli in the all-fateful year 1260 a fulfilment of the prophecies

in ‘The Everlasting Gospel.’[55] He chose to regard himself as a

heaven-appointed messenger of the new dispensation. As fanatical as

Segarelli himself, he was more dangerous because apparently gifted with

the capacity of leadership and of inspiring even enthusiastic loyalty.

Beginning in Milan, Bergamo, Brescia, Vercelli, he had by 1304 created

a distinct religious community among the Italian Alps. It appears that

in order to maintain their supplies of provisions they were wont to

resort to robbery, and must have become a public nuisance. But they

were also dangerous heretics; it is a remarkable tribute to the mark

made by Dolcino’s personality that Dante makes Mohammed send a warning

message to Dolcino, as to a kindred false prophet, lest he fall into

the same ill-case as himself.[56] In June, 1305, Clement V resolved

upon drastic measures to wipe out this ‘son of Belial who had been

polluting Lombardy.’[57] A crusade was organized against the Dolcinists

in their mountain fastnesses, and after a desperate defence against

no fewer than four different expeditions, in which there was much

bloodshed and ferocity and in which the heretics were so reduced as to

have recourse to cannibalism, they were forced to surrender.[58] The

punishment of Dolcino—for the nature of which, it should be remembered,

the state and in no way the Inquisition was responsible—was terrible

in the extreme. He was gradually torn to pieces by red-hot pincers—an

appalling torment which he bore with an almost incredible fortitude.

Indirectly connected with the ascetic and mendicant enthusiasm

of the Spiritual Franciscans were certain heretical movements in

Germany—those of the Beghards or Beguines. The names are used somewhat

indiscriminately to denote Fraticelli, who were simply wandering

Spirituals asserting the supreme virtues of poverty, and other

sectaries, much more extravagant, whose only likeness to the Spirituals

lay in their mendicancy. The indiscriminacy of nomenclature undoubtedly

denotes a very comprehensible failure at times to distinguish between

vagrants outwardly alike and all of them at least under the suspicion

of heretical tendencies.[59] Among the extravagants to whom this title

was given were followers of two teachers of a crude mysticism and

pantheism—one Amaury de Bène,[60] whose doctrine had a very marked

antinomian tinge, for he maintained that no one filled with the Holy

Ghost and the spirit of love could commit sin; the other, Ortlieb of

Strassburg, whose pantheism caused him to include Satan in the divine

essence, so that his followers, generally known as Brethren of the

Free Spirit, were also sometimes known as Luciferans and credited with

devil-worship and the perpetration of the most disgusting obscenities

at the initiation of novices into the faith. The Brethren of the Free

Spirit were never numerous, but in spite of constant persecution they

appear to have existed right up to the days of Lutheranism. Their

doctrines were not without significance, because together with an

exalted claim to impeccability which prescribed the severest tests

of sexual purity they combined a mystic belief, which under the

term Illuminism, a name they themselves adopted, had a considerable

influence on the theological thought of Germany. The most remarkable

of these was the distinguished Dominican, Master Eckhart, who appears

to have maintained that man shared the divinity of God and that in the

eyes of God virtue and sin were alike.[61]

The existence of such venturesome pantheistic speculations as these

broad-cast in Germany reacted very unfavourably on all unrecognized,

and particularly on migratory, religious associations, which became

involved in the persecutions set on foot in consequence of the

undoubted heresies of the pantheists. Such associations tended to

increase in the thirteenth century. They were not necessarily connected

with the Spiritual Franciscans or Fraticelli; but they certainly owed

their origin to the popularity of the mendicant idea as practised by

the friars, in particular the Minorites. They are found in France,

Germany, Italy and the Low Countries; and to such voluntary fellowships

there could be no legitimate objection in themselves; they might be

the most laudable instruments for the exploitation of religious zeal.

Only they called for thorough supervision. Beguinages, therefore—large

permanent houses—were established in such towns as Cologne, Ghent, and

Paris, such establishments being under careful management, the special

protection of the popes and secular princes, and enjoying often the

highest reputation for sanctity. But with wanderers it was different.

They could not be supervised, and to distinguish between the orthodox

and the schismatic mendicant was difficult. Undisciplined vagrancy

was in itself an invitation to temptation. The Inquisition in Germany

represented to Boniface IX in 1396 that for a hundred years all manner

of heresies had lurked under the outward fair-seeming of the Beghards

and that their suppression was impeded by certain papal constitutions

urged in their protection.[62] It is true that at times, owing to the

extent to which the innocent were wont to suffer with the guilty, the

papacy had ere that come to the rescue of the former, as for example

Benedict XIV in 1336 and Gregory XI in 1374. It had in particular been

necessary to protect women, large numbers of whom joined themselves

not only to the permanent mendicant communities, but to the wandering

mendicants. In times that were hard and wild and disordered, when there

was no system of poor-relief save through the Church, the lot of widows

and of women and girls who had no male protectors was exceedingly hard,

and for such the mendicant associations had a clear attraction as a

means of asylum and refuge. The war upon the Beghards in many cases led

to many respectable women being led into a life of misery and want and

sometimes prostitution, until Benedict XIV intervened on their

behalf.[63] At the Council of Constance certain rules were drawn

up for the regulation of beguinages, but beguines did not thereby

escape persecution. In 1431 we find Eugenius IV intervening for their

protection. Ever in danger of persecution, wanderers over the face

of the land, these mendicant communities, whether remaining within

the Church’s fold or not, were a source of religious unrest, of

dissatisfaction with the hierarchy, of aspiration for new doctrines

which would attune with the intense individualism of a mystic

illuminism. By such men and women Lutheranism might well be welcomed

and its progress materially assisted.[64]

One of the strangest of the fanatical outbursts of the Middle Ages,

especially in Germany, is indirectly connected with the Brethren of the

Free Spirit, some of whom joined themselves with the Flagellants. The

latter first made their appearance in Europe in 1259 in Italy, whence

the movement spread to Bohemia and Germany. A more important outbreak

occurred in the middle of the next century, when the appalling ravages

of the Black Death had no doubt brought home to many thousands of the

survivors the awful fragility and insecurity of human life and the need

for repentance and godliness. It was the consciousness of the impotence

of man probably that gave popularity to the abasement and self-torture

of the scourge. There was a positive luxury of misery in the suggestion

of so drastic a means of grace for a polluted people, smitten by the

heavy hand of an angry God. Through Hungary, Germany, Flanders, Holland

marched these penitents, proclaiming complete regeneration for all who

should persevere in flagellation for thirty-three days and a half,

chanting weird prayers in which this creed was enshrined.[65] Theirs

was a new gospel—the all-sufficient efficacy of the voluntary effusion

of blood.[66]

It is no wonder that the authorities became alarmed. Legitimate

exception was taken to the enthusiasts’ indecency—men went virtually

naked, women insufficiently clad, all were under a temptation to sexual

excesses.[67] Worse was the doctrinal error involved—the attack upon

sacraments and priesthood contained in the preaching of the strange

means of grace by these new priests of Baal.[68] In 1349 Clement VI,

condemning the movement on the ground of the contempt of the Church

implied in the formation of such an unlicensed fellowship, ordered the

suppression of the Flagellants, who thereafter came under the purview

of the Inquisition. The heretical doctrine inherent in the Flagellant

mania was enunciated in its most extravagant form by a native of

Thuringia, named Conrad Schmidt, who in 1414 was maintaining that

all spiritual authority had passed from the Catholic Church to the

Flagellants, that not only were the sacraments useless, but they had

been proscribed by God and it was mortal sin to partake of them, so

that, for example, the ceremony of marriage polluted the union.

The fundamentally anti-sacerdotal character of the Flagellant

movement was shared by another contemporary mania in Flanders and the

Rhinelands—a dancing mania, under whose impulse fanatics would leap and

convulse themselves in the most violent contortions in fierce ecstasies

of religious frenzy.[69]

It is a most curious and remarkable story that is made by these

interconnected heresies, more especially of the thirteenth century,

and by others like them. In the midst of the Ages of Faith individual

emotional outpourings or intellectual speculations would lead to

strange results of fanaticism or dogma. There were indeed some that

were mainly sensual in origin, but others betokened an earnest desire

for a new heaven and a new earth and demanded a moral progression in

human affairs not visible in existing human society. Such an aspiration

is implicit in all the strange theories connected with ‘The Everlasting

Gospel’ and in all the ideas of the Spiritual Franciscans, their

offshoots and their companion sects. How much of such aspiration,

such opinions could the mediæval Church absorb within herself? It was

ever doubtful. It would have been impossible to predict beforehand

upon which side would eventually be found many of the remarkable men

referred to in this chapter—Francis, John of Parma, Bonaventura,

Marsiglio of Padua, William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Amaury, Master

Eckhart. The pope who condemned the Spiritual Franciscans might

easily have regarded Francis himself as a heretic. Fortunately for

herself the Church, while repudiating doctrines which were obviously

unchristian, those that were the mere frenzies of the ignorant and the

demented, succeeded in absorbing a large measure of the enthusiasm and

the thought of the age, incorporated the mendicant orders, produced the

scholastic philosophy. Nevertheless there were abroad in the mediæval

world moral and intellectual ferments, yearnings for regeneration and

guesses at truth which found within her fold no satisfaction.

_Note._—In O. Holder-Egger’s (complete) edition of Salimbene

(_Monumenta Germaniae Historica_, vol. xxxii, Hanover and Leipzig,

1905-13) the most important references to Joachitism are on pp.

231-41, 292-4, 455-8.

CHAPTER IV

AVERRHOÏST INFLUENCES

The great intellectual achievement of the Middle Ages was the recovery

of the learning of the world that had vanished before the onset of

the Hun, the Vandal and the Lombard.[70] That learning was in part

classical, in part patristic. But as the process of absorption was

the achievement of the Church, the emphasis was on theology, and the

works of the Fathers bulked very much more largely than the profane

literatures of Greece and Rome. There was much in the teaching of

Augustine that was Neoplatonic, that was akin to the speculations of

Plato himself. But the whole point of view, method and cast of mind of

the mediæval thinker were radically different from those of the pagan

philosopher. The latter set out upon the search for abstract truth

without any preconceptions; the former started from the postulate

of a divine revelation. His primary object was not to investigate,

but to justify the ways of God to man. For him all knowledge must

be a theodicæa. He was not, therefore, an original thinker; for the

foundations of his scholarship being revealed truth, his most marked

characteristic was a sincere deference to authority. He was, moreover,

ever conscious that the salvation of the soul was a matter of greater

cogency than even the exposition of God’s dealings with the world. At

the same time mediæval philosophy was of a peculiarly formal pattern;

and to the modern world it is apt to appear pedantic indeed, ‘cabined,

cribbed, confined.’ It rested upon the tripod of grammar, rhetoric,

logic. It was a matter very largely of dialectic, and it may seem

to us of mere verbal juggling. The _Trivium_ was an introduction to

metaphysics, but the metaphysics were strongly theological in bias and

nakedly logical in form. Their clue to the processes of thought being

logic, not psychology, mediæval thinkers did not clearly distinguish

between problems of the human mind and problems of reality, assuming an

exact correspondence between mental conceptions and the ultimate facts

of the universe.

Yet whatever the defects of the scholastic philosophy, it holds

a great and significant place in the history of the intellectual

development of western Europe, since it was the means whereby the

learning of the ancient world was recovered and preserved and an

intellectual continuity rendered possible. Such is one out of many of

the great contributions made by the mediæval Church to the cause of

civilization. Secular knowledge was not proscribed, but on the contrary

adopted and utilized, by the Church; enquiry and research not looked

askance upon, but encouraged. The universities of the Middle Ages were

ecclesiastical in origin; their teachers and scholars were clerks. The

great University of Paris, the very centre of the intellectual life of

Christendom in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was an object

of very special solicitude to the Holy See. The two great mendicant

orders, the Prædicants and the Minorites, taking the lead in the

schools and universities only a few years after their own inception,

speedily produced some of the most erudite and the most brilliant minds

of the Middle Ages.

In the twelfth century the leading scholastics were Augustinians; in

the middle of the thirteenth the dominant philosophy was still of

a Neoplatonic character. The great Franciscans Alexander of Hales,

Bonaventura, Peckham belonged to that school of thought. In many of

them, notably in Bonaventura, there was a marked strain of mysticism.

The mystic note in Plato, his insistence on moral and spiritual

values had made his doctrine harmonize easily with Christian dogma.

The appropriation of pagan thought and secular science had not so

far produced any discord with the truths of the Christian faith, or

any serious tendency to question them. It is indeed significant that

the pupils of Anselm of Bec should have asked him for a _rational_

justification of Christian dogma; but that had not betokened any doubt

as to the possibility of reconciling faith with reason, but only an

appreciation of the desirability of being able to demonstrate that,

however superfluous, such justification was perfectly possible. Again,

in the vast compendious treatises of such encyclopædic scholars as

Vincent of Beauvais, Hugo of St. Victor and Peter Lombard, there was

the explicit recognition that, while secular learning is a thing to be

desired for its own sake, yet its stages of _cogitatio_ and _meditatio_

are only the threshold before the portal of the shrine, wherein the

divine nature may be contemplated. Reason cannot unaided explain the

ineffable; the visible world is but the _simulacrum_ of the unseen.[71]

Once or twice indeed there had been hints of danger. Right back in the

ninth century a certain very self-confident Irishman, by name John

Scotus Eriugena, had declared the supremacy of reason over authority;

for while authority sometimes proceeded from reason, reason never

proceeded from authority. In the eleventh century there had been the

aberrations of Berengar of Tours and Roscellinus. In the next century

a new and more brilliant Eriugena arose in the person of Abelard, a

man even more self-opinionated and self-confident, one who treated

the seeming contradictions of the Fathers as opportunity merely for

mental calisthenics, whose whole method of thought appeared to enthrone

reason at the expense of authority. But the potential danger was never

realized. The trained dialectician trembled before the unlearned

spiritual dictator of Christendom; the man who exalted himself in his

own eyes dared not face Bernard, to whom God was all in all and man

as nothing: and at the last Abelard, a monk of Cluny, died humbled, in

the odour of sanctity. Up to the end of the twelfth century, then, the

free play of enquiry and discussion in the schools had not threatened

defilement of the purity of the Christian faith. Heresy had indeed been

a serious danger; but not among the learned, not in the precincts of

the university, had it been bred.

The succeeding century, however, did bring with it an anxious problem.

There came a large influx of new learning out of the pagan past—the

encyclopædic knowledge of Aristotle. Aristotle had been introduced

into the world of Latin Christianity long ere this through the medium

of Boëthius in the days of Theodoric.[72] The Dark Ages had intervened

since then. Now came a second and a much more significant advent of

Aristotle. This time he came through a non-Christian medium, through

the interpretations of the ‘great commentator,’ the Moslem Ibn-Roschd,

Averrhoës. Could the Stagirite be won for Christ; could his teachings

be enlisted for the Christian theodicæa? The Church could not but be

alive to the risks involved in any converse with Aristotelianism.

There were radical contrasts between the Platonic and Aristotelian

methods. The latter was inductive, non-committal, denoted an impartial

examination of natural phenomena, the range of which was infinitely

more comprehensive than anything which any other human mind had ever

attempted. Aristotle seemed intent rather upon coldly collecting

evidence from the operations of a soulless Nature than extolling the

wonders of God in a beatific vision. The extent of secular knowledge

opened up in the writings of Aristotle was, then, vast and their

attraction to the alert and curious mind correspondingly vivid; but the

attractiveness had to be viewed with caution.

The Church perceived that there were in the Peripatetic philosophy

elements which must be repugnant to truly devout minds. This would

have been true even had the pure unadulterated text of Aristotle been

in question; it was the more cogently true seeing that Aristotle was

presented to the Christian world through the voice of Averrhoës and the

commentary was more familiar than the original.

During the tenth and eleventh centuries when Christendom was for

the most part wrapped in a barbarous ignorance, Saracen culture,

in the caliphates of Baghdad and Cordova, had kept alive the

sciences—mathematics, astronomy, medicine—and speculative thinkers had

preserved, not indeed uncorrupted, yet always as a vital influence,

the ancient philosophy of Greece, when to the Christian world it

was lost in oblivion. Side by side with an orthodox philosophy in

consonance with the teachings of the Koran, Islam had produced a

heretic philosophy, which though written in a Semitic language and

modified by an oriental environment, was essentially Greek, essentially

Aristotelian.[73] To the Arabian thinkers the Stagirite represented the

utmost limit of the human intelligence; they could not conceive that

there could ever be improvement upon knowledge so Catholic, synthesis

so complete.

The first of the great Arabian philosophers, Alfarabi, had been

Neoplatonist in thought, Aristotelian in method.[74] His great

successor, Avicenna, was Aristotelian both in the content and the

logical scheme of his work.[75] The distinctive teachings of Avicenna

were, first, the nominalist doctrine that universality exists not in

reality, but in thought only; secondly, that matter is uncreated and

eternal; thirdly, that the first and only direct emanation from God

or the First Cause is Intelligence, νοῦς, but that this communication

of intelligence to lesser beings is not a single act in time, but

a constant process or an everlasting act. While in the eastern

caliphate these bold speculations were strongly denounced by the later

philosopher of Baghdad, Ghazali, and were repudiated in a powerful

orthodox reaction;[76] in Spain at the beginning of the twelfth century

Avempace and Abubacer were teaching that the life of the soul is a

progress from a purely instinctive existence shared with the lower

animals to a spiritual absorption in the divine essence and intellect;

while the latter philosopher added the contention that religious creeds

were but types of, or approximations to, absolute truth, which the

philosopher, but never the mere theologian, may attain. The greatest

of all the Arabian thinkers, Averrhoës, whose life extended over the

greater part of the twelfth century was, in even greater degree than

Avicenna, a worshipper of Aristotle.[77] While Avicenna occasionally

questioned his great original, Averrhoës never did. He laid no claim to

originality. To him the substance of human wisdom could never alter,

being enshrined for ever in Aristotle’s pages. If Averrhoïsm differs

from Aristotelianism, it does not differ consciously. Averrhoïsm is

simply and solely the undiluted gospel of Aristotle, as Averrhoës

conceived it.

Its principal theses—the Averrhoïst version of Aristotle—are the

eternity of matter and the unity of the intellect.[78] Matter is

uncreated. God did not create; He is Himself the primordial element

in things, the latent force or impulse in the universe, which gives

it both its being and continuance. Emanating from the First Cause is

the _active_ intellect. For Averrhoës makes an important distinction

between νοῦς ποιητικός and νοῦς ποθητικός, the latter being the human

intellect. Averrhoës explains the difference by the analogy of the

sun and the human vision. Just as by the light which it sheds the sun

produces the capacity to see, so the active intellect produces the

capacity to understand. But the human intellect has no individual

immortality, being at death absorbed in the universal mind. Man,

indeed, possesses no personal immortality. Only in man’s power of

reproducing his species can there be said to be any human immortality.

The human race is permanent. In the fullest sense, however, only the

active intellect is eternal.

The attitude of Averrhoës to Islam, and indeed to all religion, is

important. It may be summed up by saying that he was the friend of

religion, the enemy of theology, for which he could see no excuse.

There could be no compromise between faith and philosophy. The

theologian was at the outset hopelessly hampered in the search for

truth, because he had to premise all the articles of his creed. His

system, thus conditioned, became a mere hodge-podge of sophistic

quibblings, groundless distinctions, fanciful allegories, which did

but serve to obscure and distort the religion which it pretended to

expound. The sincere and exact thinker could accept no such postulates,

start with no preconceptions. Philosophy and religion must be kept

completely apart; the attempt to suffuse them—made in theology—did but

corrupt both. They were not, however, mutually subversive. Religion

was no branch of knowledge, no matter of arid formularies; it was

an inward power, an inspiration. It was indispensable, because it

was the basis of morality for the multitude who could not aspire to

philosophy. But while Averrhoës thus discountenanced any attempt to

instil religious doubts into the popular mind, his attitude towards

religion was exclusively utilitarian, and he obviously regarded it as

the inferior of philosophy. The special religion of philosophers, he

declared, was to study what exists, for the noblest worship of God was

in the contemplation of his works. Philosophy, in short, the pursuit

of wisdom, was the highest form of religion, higher than that which is

based upon prophecy.[79]

Averrhoïsm speedily penetrated into Christendom. Aragon and Castile

naturally received it early. In Languedoc, at the schools of

Montpellier, Narbonne, Perpignan, Arabian medicine and philosophy

both flourished. Scholars from central and western Europe, visiting

the medical schools of the Moors, no doubt brought back with them

the current views of the Saracen philosopher as well as the Saracen

physician. The first Latin version of Averrhoës’ commentaries is

attributed to Michael Scot, who came fresh from Toledo to the court

of Frederick II; while there is a tradition that the son of Averrhoës

lived for a time in the palace of that most eclectic potentate.[80]

From Saracen Toledo itself, from Christians and Jews in Spain and

Provence, came translations of Averrhoës. It was probably with

extraordinary rapidity that the ideas of the Arabian philosopher became

the common property of the Christian schoolmen.[81] Quite certainly

Latin Averrhoïsm was a force to be reckoned with by the middle of the

thirteenth century.[82]

The Averrhoïst was not the only Latin version of Aristotle current

in western Christendom in the twelfth century. The capture of

Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204 had brought Catholic Europe

directly into contact with Greek philosophy, and translations direct

from the Greek into Latin had been attempted, one of the earliest being

made by Bishop Grosseteste. Various translations of Aristotle were,

then, available. Were they to be regarded as open without restriction

to the curious eye of scholarship? The Church decided against such

freedom. In 1210 a council of the ecclesiastical province of Sens,

held at Paris, having publicly condemned the heresies of Amaury de

Bène, went on to protect the unwary from another source of possible

contamination by commanding that neither the works of Aristotle nor

the commentaries upon him should be read in Paris under pain of

excommunication.[83] The commentaries referred to must be either those

of Averrhoës or similar Arabian treatises. In 1215 this prohibition was

renewed by the papal legate, under whose supervision the schools of

Paris came. Gregory IX, in a regulation addressed to the masters and

students of Paris on April 13, 1231, made the prohibition provisional,

until such time as the books of Aristotle could be examined and

expurgated. At the same time he entrusted this important task to

William of Auxerre and two others. The project is very much to the

credit of the Pope, a genuine supporter of learning who, however, had

probably not realized how great an undertaking it was. At all events

it came to nothing; and the prohibition, although renewed by Urban IV,

in January 1263, would appear to have remained a dead-letter. In 1255

the ‘Physics’ and ‘Metaphysics’ of Aristotle were prescribed for the

course in the Arts’ faculty in the University. In fact the Aristotelian

impulse in the vivid and vigorous atmosphere of the youthful Parisian

schools was too strong. Neither Aristotle nor Averrhoës could be got

rid of by papal inhibition. The keenest interest had been aroused in

them. It were better, as it was simpler, to utilize such keenness

rather than to attempt to combat it. Of all the great services rendered

to the Church by the Dominican order none was greater than its capture

of profane learning for orthodox Christianity. The great Franciscans

were expounding the current theology of the day with its tinge of

Platonism; the Dominicans now came forward to adapt Aristotle for the

service of Christianity. In 1256 Alexander IV commissioned Albertus

Magnus to write his ‘De unitate intellectus contra Averroëm’: a fact

that is proof positive of the headway that had already been made not

only by Aristotelianism but by the tenets of the ‘great commentator.’

The tractate is indeed written against Averrhoës himself, not

Averrhoïsts, but the fact that the Pope entrusted Albert of Cologne

with the task of answering the former is evidence of the activity of

the latter.[84] Fifteen years later Thomas Aquinas produced another

work on the same subject: but this one definitely ‘contra Averroïstas.’

Between the years 1261 and 1269 Aquinas was, together with William

of Moerbeke, at the court of Rome engaged upon the great task, now

at length undertaken under the auspices of the Holy See, of making a

translation and commentary on Aristotle. In the latter year he appeared

at Paris on the occasion of the assembly there of a chapter-general of

the Dominican order. It has been maintained that the real reason of his

presence was to clear the Prædicants of the suspicion of Averrhoïsm.[85]

The middle and the latter half of the thirteenth century were years

of violent controversy in the University of Paris. Fundamentally the

source of this was the jealousy of the secular clergy against the

Mendicant orders, which had succeeded in establishing themselves in

the University earlier in the century, the Dominicans securing their

first chair in 1217, the Franciscans theirs in 1219. Apprehensive

lest the Friars should achieve a complete predominance, the seculars

under the leadership of Gerard of Abbeville and the acrimonious

William of Saint-Amour led a heated attack upon them, first only on

the practical question of university privileges. But it was not long

before matters of doctrine were involved, and regulars and seculars

were soon denouncing each other as heretics and antichrist.[86] It is

not easy to discover what was the doctrinal position of the seculars,

but they seem to have reproached the Dominicans at all events with

overfondness for philosophy as distinct from theology.[87] Together

with the contest between seculars and regulars in the University there

went also one between the two great Mendicant orders. The same charge

seems to have been preferred against the Prædicants by their rivals.

They cared too much for knowledge that was not wholly sacred; they

were too scientific, too intellectualist.[88] Such is the gist of the

diatribes launched against the Dominicans, especially Thomas Aquinas,

by Archbishop Peckham.[89] There is no doubt that he deliberately

tried to involve Aquinas in the suspicion of Averrhoïsm. A certain

Gilles de Lessines, sending to Albertus Magnus a list of fifteen errors

current in Paris, includes in the number thirteen definitely Averrhoïst

doctrines together with two theories of Aquinas, not Averrhoïst, to

which, however, the Augustinians took exception.[90] Clearly the

Franciscans were endeavouring to discredit not only the Averrhoïsts,

but the Aristotelians. In the year 1270 there appeared two important

treatises: the one by a certain Siger of Brabant, entitled ‘De anima

intellectiva,’ the other by Aquinas, ‘De unitate intellectus contra

Averroïstas.’ The latter is defending himself vigorously against the

charge of Averrhoïsm by himself vigorously attacking the Averrhoïsts.

In a sermon preached before the University of Paris St. Thomas

vehemently denounced the self-confidence and self-sufficiency of the

Averrhoïsts, and contrasted the contradictions and the uncertainties of

philosophy with the clearness and certitude of revealed religion.[91]

In this same year 1270 the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, solemnly

condemned the thirteen propositions mentioned in Gilles de Lessines’

letter to Albertus of Cologne. They were the doctrines being taught at

the time by the two leaders of Averrhoïsm in the University, the Siger

of Brabant just mentioned and Boëthius of Dacia.

Of Siger’s works a number are extant. Two or three are concerned with

the sort of logical conundrums popular among mediæval dialecticians

or with theories of Aquinas and are orthodox enough, but the ‘De

aeternitate mundi’ and the ‘De anima intellectiva’ contain the whole

gospel of Averrhoës.[92] Their contentions are so completely a

transcription of the ‘great commentator’ that it is unnecessary to

do more than summarize them briefly. For Siger, as for the Arabian,

Aristotle is the one and only philosopher. Like Averrhöes too, Siger

makes no attempt to reconcile Aristotle with revealed religion,

but carries his teaching to its supposed logical conclusion. Both

Albertus and Aquinas, Siger maintained, had perverted Aristotle.[93]

Not they, but Averrhoës, was the true exponent of the Stagirite.

He proclaimed, then, in all boldness the doctrine of the unity of

the intellect together with its inevitable corollary, the denial

of personal immortality; the doctrine of the eternity of matter,

which involved the negation of the Biblical story of creation, the

intervention of providence, the free will and moral responsibility of

the individual.[94]

Such were the fundamental conceptions of Siger’s teaching and of

the propositions condemned by the Bishop of Paris in 1270. The

condemnation did not silence the Averrhoïst champion and his friends.

For six or seven more years they continued to be possibly a small,

but apparently an energetic and defiant, body among the masters of

arts in the University. Between 1272 and 1275 Siger was in open revolt

against the authority of the rector, Amaury of Rheims. The Averrhoïsts

separated themselves from the rest of the faculty; but the force and

skill, perhaps the very audacity, of their leader attracted a large

number of students to his lectures.[95] The doctrinal controversy

continued. It was one not so much concerning the truth or erroneousness

of the Averrhoïst position as on the question of fact—was Averrhoës

or Aquinas the more faithful interpreter of Aristotle? Aegidius

Romanus triumphantly vindicated the Stagirite from the Averrhoïst

deductions.[96] On the other hand, there continued to be those to

whom Aristotelianism and the expositions of Albertus Magnus and

Aquinas were anathema.[97] In the end the latter triumphed over their

adversaries: Aquinas was canonized, Aristotle was vindicated, and

the Alberto-Thomist principle tended to take the place of Platonic

Augustinianism as the most authoritative philosophy of the schools.

It was far otherwise with the anti-scholastic faction of Siger.

They, the literal slaves of Aristotle, accepting the Averrhoïst

interpretations of him without emendation, refusing to accept the idea

of any compromising adaptation to suit the requirements of revealed

truth, were accused of maintaining that the Christian faith, in common

with all other religious creeds with their fables and errors, was an

obstacle to scientific enquiry leading to the acquirement of exact

truth.[98] Here was Averrhoïsm naked and unashamed indeed; but it is

difficult to believe that this accusation can be true. However that

may be, the Paris Averrhoïsts—and Siger very outspokenly—asserted the

collateral existence of two distinct truths, the religious and the

philosophical.

It is remarkable that principles of this type should have been

tolerated so long. In 1277 there came a change. In January of that

year Pope John XXI addressed a letter to Etienne Tempier in which

he bids him search out notable errors in doctrine, since it is

deplorable to find the pure streams of Catholic faith, which it is the

special function of the University to send forth, being grievously

polluted.[99] Thus commanded, Tempier set to work once more, and

this time produced a list of no fewer than 219 errors.[100] Again an

attempt was made to confound the Thomists with the Averrhoïsts, and the

long list included many very petty points. But the principal errors

enumerated are Averrhoïst and the list is obviously aimed chiefly

against Siger and Boëthius. The Bishop not only produced the catalogue,

but he fulminated a decree pronouncing excommunication against all

those who harboured the opinions therein condemned. Henceforward such

persons were ‘suspect’ of heresy; and it is not surprising that either

in November 1277 or 1278—probably the former—Siger and Boëthius were

cited to appear before the inquisitor of France, Simon du Val, in

the diocese of Noyon.[101] The two Averrhoïsts seem to have appealed

against the inquisitor direct to the court of Rome, probably on

the grounds of the special privileges of the University of Paris,

the peculiar solicitude of the papacy for the University, their

own intrinsic importance as teachers of great reputation and their

persistent declaration that they were true Catholics. The circumstances

of their latter days are obscure; but the strong probability is that

they made their way to Rome to purge themselves from the suspicion

of heresy, were tried before the Inquisition of Tuscany, abjured

their errors, were duly reconciled and then penanced with perpetual

imprisonment.[102] Siger died at Orvieto, certainly before 1300, since

in that year Dante imagines a meeting with him in his journey through

Paradise. How comes it that Dante places this heretic in Paradise? Two

possible conjectures have been put forward. The first that Dante did

so in ignorance of Siger’s true character, not being sufficiently well

versed in the current philosophy of the time; the other, that he wanted

to place in Paradise some one who should represent the philosopher _par

excellence_ as distinct from the theologian. It was not easy to find

such a one; and of the possible candidates, Siger of Brabant was the

most distinguished.[103]

Parisian Averrhoïsm, despite the condemnation of its chief exponents,

did not die with Siger, Boëthius and the thirteenth century. In the

next century a certain John of Landun or of Ghent was preaching

Averrhoïst doctrine in the University and attacking the reputation

of St. Thomas; and he had numerous followers.[104] But by this time

the chief centre of Averrhoïsm was tending to be Padua rather than

Paris. Here the Averrhoïst school was founded by Peter of Abano,

equally famous as physician, magician, astrologer and Averrhoïst, who

only escaped the clutches of the Inquisition by dying an opportune

natural death in 1316.[105] The school there also admitted its direct

indebtedness to the Parisian, John of Landun. From his days right down

to the seventeenth century speculations of an Averrhoïst character

continued to be discussed in northern Italy, especially in Padua. In

the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries there were two rival

Aristotelian parties in Padua and Bologna, Averrhoïsts and Alexandrists

(so-called after the Greek commentator, Alexander of Aphrodistias), who

disputed academic-wise concerning the personal or impersonal nature of

immortality. Of the Averrhoïsts the most distinguished were Achellini,

Augustino Nifo and Zimara; of the Alexandrists, Pomponazzi. Although

an Alexandrist, this bold and lively thinker owed much to Averrhoës;

while it is an indication of the very academic nature of Italian

Averrhoïsm that Nifo, it is true after somewhat modifying his views,

was commissioned by Leo X to prove as against Pomponazzi that Aristotle

believed in the immortality of the soul.[106]

The most perfervid opponent of Latin Averrhoïsm in the Middle Ages was

Raymond Lully, who made it his dominant object in life to combat Islam

in all its shapes and forms. His schemes embraced the recovery of the

Holy Sepulchre and the conversion of all Jews and Saracens; but he

desired to attack not only the Koran, but Moslem heterodoxy also, and

to rescue the truths of Christianity from the contaminations of the

‘great commentator.’ To these ends he laboured untiringly and with an

intense zeal. We find him approaching the Council of Vienne in 1311,

with projects for the amalgamation of the great military orders, a

new crusade against the infidel, the foundation of colleges for the

study of Arabic so that Moslem errors may be the more easily confuted.

Lully also desired the suppression of the works of Averrhoës in all

schools, and the prohibition of all Christians from reading them.[107]

It is remarkable that the works of this great antagonist of Averrhoïsm

should have themselves come under suspicion of heresy. It is probable

that his followers, rather than Lully himself, were responsible for

the damaging of his reputation, since some of them held opinions

of a Joachite character. But it is clear that in his animosity to

Averrhoïsm Lully went to the opposite extreme. Condemning the tenet of

the incompatibility of philosophy and revealed truth, he was moved to

maintain that there was no difference between them, that there was no

dividing line between the rational and the supernatural.[108] Therein

was perhaps as great error as in the contrary opinion. However that may

be, Nicholas Eymeric determined to have Lully’s memory condemned, and

in the ‘Directorium’ is particularly venomous against him. In 1376 he

exhibited a papal bull condemning no fewer than 500 Lullist opinions

as heretical. The results were curious. These were in the days of the

Schism; and the Aragonese acknowledged neither pope. Declaring the bull

a forgery, perpetrated by the inquisitor himself, the Lullists secured

his banishment, and Eymeric died in exile.[109]

A better known enemy of Averrhoïsm than Raymond Lully was Petrarch,

who like Lully hated everything that savoured of Islam. He hated its

medicine and its astronomy, but above all its philosophy. He makes the

Averrhoïsts—of whom it is clear he must have known a number—targets

of an indignant irony. They are men who make it a point of honour to

deny Christ and the supernatural. Petrarch, his inspiration drawn from

the classics of paganism, a man who had witnessed and loathed the

abominations of Avignon, who regarded Rome as ‘the temple of heresy,’

had no brief to defend the orthodox creed. But to him Christianity was

endeared because of its humility, Averrhoïsm abhorrent because it was

dogmatic, self-confident, pedantic.[110]

This to the mediæval mind is the outstanding characteristic of

Averrhoïsm. It is insolent in the assurance of its denials. In

the fourteenth century Averrhoës himself stands as the unique

personification of the spirit of unbelief; and as such is bracketed

with Antichrist and Mohammed.[111] In this light he figures in the

paintings of Orcagna and others. To Gerson he is the most abominable

of all enemies of Christianity, to Petrarch a rabid dog ever raging

against the Catholic faith.[112] The famous phrase ‘the three

impostors,’ which had first been attributed by Gregory IX to Frederick

II, and the essential conception of which in book form was destined

to be attributed to many others from Boccaccio to Erasmus, Rabelais

to Milton, was fathered upon Averrhoës.[113] He had declared—so it

was believed—that Moses, Christ and Mohammed were three impostors who

had deluded the world; also that of the three religions, Judaism,

Christianity, Mohammedanism, the first was a religion for babes,

the second a sheer impossibility, the third fit only for hogs. The

Eucharist was the impossible feature of Christianity, and Christians

were especially hateful because they ate the flesh of the God whom they

professed to adore.[114]

Perhaps the most interesting fact connected with the story of the

Islamic philosophy in Europe is the fact that it helped to familiarize

Christendom with some of the features of another religion. It was not,

of course, the sole agency to do that; the Crusades played their part.

It is significant that many of the mediæval stories and mystery plays

have as their central idea apostasy, which as a rule takes the form of

conversion to Mohammedanism. Even the religious wars in Palestine

did not breed exclusively antagonism to the faith of the infidel,

and friendly intercourse with Saracen Spain and academic interest in

Islamic philosophy produced a knowledge that was less critical than

sympathetic. Such familiarity with the main conceptions of other creeds

rendered feasible the comparative study of religion. That was to be an

achievement for a future age. Yet it needed no exact science of the

subject to encourage the spirit of toleration. When other religions

were discussed, were it only for the sake of attacking and refuting

them, still the curious eye could not fail to be aware of their

common elements. Not even in Marsiglio is the principle of religious

toleration more notably set forth than in one of the tales of the

‘Decameron,’ the pithy parable of ‘The Three Rings,’ which inspired

Lessing’s ‘Nathan the Wise.’[115] Melchizedek in Boccaccio’s tale

emphasizes in his analogue the common elements in the three religions

of Jew, Moslem and Christian, each claiming to be the sole truth, and

no doubt one of them being in fact the truth, yet so alike that none

can tell which that one is. Boccaccio’s attitude is one of sceptical

indifference, and it is no far cry from that to the attitude of Pulci

in the ‘Morgante Maggiore,’ in which the mood is one of complete levity

and all the forces of ridicule are brought against the quips and

quiddities of the theologian and the superiority of Orlando’s God over

Morgante’s original deity is made to look exceedingly equivocal.

We must not allow ourselves to discover an Averrhoïst origin for all

the outspoken language used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,

in which Christianity is regarded critically, objectively.[116] It

is no doubt true that Averrhoïsm was principally an academic force

belonging to the universities, and that even there its adherents were

never numerous. On the other hand, there must inevitably have been

some infiltration of Averrhoïst ideas through the general community.

There must have been some dispersal through the agency of the scholars

who thronged the seats of learning, who were more often than not

wanderers from one school to another, from Spain to France, from

France to England, from England to Italy, and who must have scattered

abroad the influences under which they themselves were brought. There

were from the point of view of the Church two obviously dangerous

features in Averrhoïsm. First there was its anti-scholastic nature,

its determination to follow philosophy wheresoever it might lead,

regardless of whether it could be reconciled with Christian dogma

or not, a determination which was accompanied by a bold insistence

upon their incompatibility in point of fact. In the resolution to

follow truth, untrammelled by religious dogma, there might at the

surface appear to be something of that critical spirit which produced

another anti-scholastic revolt, that of Roger Bacon. But whereas in

his case the inductive method gave promise of progress in knowledge,

the possibility scarcely existed with philosophers who were just as

completely persuaded as was the most orthodox mediæval saint that

the truth had once and for ever been vouchsafed to mankind, with the

sole difference that whereas the saint found the truth in the Bible,

the Averrhoïst found it in the treatises of Aristotle. But the fact

that he did so find it—in pagan and not in sacred writ—was, one would

have thought, radical enough and dangerous enough; while the actual

doctrines he professed were as divorced from Christian belief, as

wildly heretical as any that the most fiercely persecuted mediæval

sect ever expressed. Nevertheless as a rule the Averrhoïst was not

persecuted.

At first glance this appears very surprising. Yet the explanation is

in reality simple enough. In the first place, the Church was no enemy

of speculative thinking as such. The doctors, the masters and the

students who debated so earnestly, so vehemently, abstract questions

in philosophy as well as in theology were themselves clerics; the

universities were ecclesiastical foundations; their studies were

essentially sacred, not profane. It was no part of the policy of the

mediæval Church to stifle enquiry and discussion by those properly

qualified concerning the ultimate truths of existence. Such work

might well be to the glory of God and the permanent enrichment of

the Church. And if the Averrhoïsts did not, like Albertus Magnus

and Aquinas and the great Franciscan Augustinians, convert their

learning into Christian apologetics; on the other hand, they were

not like the wandering sectaries, whom the Church did persecute,

irresponsible unlearned laity, who spoke of mysteries they were not fit

to understand, but they were themselves clergy under proper academic

discipline and supervision. Moreover, they did not attack the Church;

on the contrary, they professed themselves the most devout true

Catholics. Their interest in philosophy was purely abstract; they had

no ulterior motives, no remotest idea of propaganda with a view to

shaking the authority of the Church or the filial allegiance to her of

a single one of her children. On the contrary, they repeatedly and most

emphatically asserted that their philosophical tenets were exclusively

academic and not intended to have any bearing upon life and conduct.

Thus the Averrhoïst postulate of a double truth, one philosophic, the

other religious, stood its adherents in good stead. We cannot to-day

see into the minds of these Latin Averrhoïsts, cannot tell whether they

persuaded themselves that they really were Christians, were sincere in

their conception of two irreconcilable truths or adopted it merely as

a convenient subterfuge and were flippantly cynical or sardonically

insolent in their hypocrisy. The subterfuge served the Averrhoïsts;

whether its acquiescence in the subterfuge served the Church is another

matter. While the obviously honest Waldensian and Beghard were harried

to the stake, the obviously dishonest Averrhoïst was usually left at

large. Was not the tendency of such discrepancy of treatment to place

a premium upon mere lip-service and religious insincerity? From the

fourteenth-century Averrhoïst, with his idea of the double truth, it

is but one step to the fifteenth-century humanist, openly indifferent

to religion altogether, not troubling to consider whether such a thing

as religious truth exists at all, seeking and discerning truth in the

pagan world only.

CHAPTER V

REFORM MOVEMENTS OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY AND THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE

The earlier heresies of the Middle Ages were of importance for their

own day and generation only, leaving no permanent imprint on history.

The Church was on the whole very successful in combating them, actually

securing the destruction of the Albigenses and throughout western

Europe generally keeping the danger well in check by the activities

of the Holy Office. The story of the Spiritual Franciscans, on the

other hand, has a deeper significance, for it is intimately connected

with momentous events which betokened the overthrow of the mediæval

order, the rooting up of certain fundamental ideas associated with

the matured conception of the _Civitas Dei_. The one feature common

to Waldensianism, Catharism and the other early mediæval heresies,

which gives them any lasting importance, was their anti-sacerdotalism.

Clerical, and in particular papal, pretensions tended to increase

after the fall of the Hohenstaufen, which left the papacy triumphant

as the result of its long struggle with the empire. The high-water

mark of those assertions was reached in 1300, when Boniface VIII

declared himself to be not only Pope but also Caesar.[117] By two

most important bulls Boniface sought to put his claims into practice,

_Clericis laicos_, which defined the rights of the clergy to immunity

from secular taxation, _Unam sanctam_, which declared unequivocally the

absolute supremacy of the pope over the lay power, over every human

creature in all respects. The same uncompromising spirit was shown a

little later on by John XXII, the oppressor of the Spirituals, an old

man of immense vigour and a range of view which embraced even the

minute concerns of the secular states of Europe.[118]

Unhappily for itself, the setting forth of the papacy’s highest

pretensions was coincident with the maturing of certain forces which

tended to render those pretensions null and void. The most important

of these was the force of nationality, the growth of nation-states,

in particular under the strong royal houses of the Capets and the

Angevins respectively in France and England. In such nation-states the

papacy was to find a more formidable obstacle to the realization of

its temporal ambitions than the Empire had ever presented, especially

as they had no such tradition of alliance with the papacy as was the

heritage and indeed the technical origin and justification of the Holy

Roman Empire.[119] The distinction between the relation of the Pope

to the Emperor and the relation of the Pope to the King of France is

brought out forcibly in a work entitled ‘An Enquiry touching the Power

of the Pope,’ by Peter du Bois, who in the year 1300 published a very

remarkable treatise which advocated a modest proposal for uniting the

whole of Europe under French sovereignty. The Emperor was dependent

upon the Pope, because he had to be confirmed in his office and crowned

by the Pope. No such necessity existed in the case of the French

King.[120]

Certainly the conduct of Philip IV showed plenty of independence in his

relations with the Roman pontiff. When Boniface in 1301 asserted that

Philip held his crown of him and summoned him to appear at a council

about to be assembled at Rome, the papal bull was solemnly burnt in the

French capital. The States-General was then convened to give national

expression to a protest against the action of Boniface; and bishops

and lesser clergy united with the people as a body, and most important

with the lawyers, to address letters of remonstrance to Rome. The civil

law directly challenged the canon law.

In England the national feeling against papal exactions and

interference was extremely bitter and vociferous under Henry III.

Edward I gave a blunt answer to the claims of _Clericis laicos_ in

ruling that if the clergy were to be free of the law in respect of

its duties they should be free of it also as regards its privileges

and its protection, should be outlaws in fact. The stand taken by the

French and English kings on the subject of clerical taxation was so

firm that Boniface was forced to nullify the bull _Clericis laicos_ by

the bull _Etsi de statu_. Not only the royal will, but popular feeling

is evidenced under Edward III by the statutes of _Provisors_ and

_Praemunire_.

While in Germany the imperial dignity had much sunk in credit since

the days of the Hohenstaufen, on the other hand the importance of a

national sentiment there was revealed in the general support given to

Lewis of Bavaria. It is true that he failed in his expedition to Italy,

whither the German king journeyed in order to establish his imperial

dignity, despite his excommunication by John XXII, by coronation

at Rome, but in Italy his forces were recruited by adherents more

valuable than armies in the General of the Franciscan Order, Michael

of Cesena, and a yet greater Franciscan, William of Ockham. The issue

that had been joined was in reality one between papal and national

sovereignty; but in the lengthy war of words that ensued upon Lewis’s

failure in Italy the controversy appeared to be concerned with the

theological question of the poverty of Christ, so that the feud between

Spiritual and Conventual became a European question. It now possessed a

significance extraneous from, and much wider than, the original cause

of quarrel: for in the doctrine of apostolic poverty could be focussed

all the widespread anti-sacerdotal feeling which revolted at the

secular preoccupations and ambitions of the clergy.

A heavy blow was struck at the overweening claims of the papacy by

Philip IV’s attack upon Boniface VIII, and, as it has been said, ‘the

drama of Anagni is to be set against the drama of Canossa.’[121] But

worse humiliations were to follow, when the papacy was brought under

French tutelage by the ‘Babylonish Captivity’ of Avignon. Worse still,

to the humiliation was added infamy. The corruption at the new papal

court speedily became notorious. It surpassed all previous bounds, and

the cost of its luxury and prodigality was defrayed by unparalleled

extortion and simony.[122] More powerful than ever, therefore, became

the denunciation of the ugly materialism and spiritual decadence of

the papacy. The scandal of Avignon was followed by one more deplorable

still—the Schism. Christendom was presented with the unedifying

sight of successive rival pontiffs, each anathematizing the other

and reviling him in terms of vulgar scurrility.[123] No mystic halo

could remain undimmed, no sense of reverence unimpaired by a spectacle

so profane. The resistance of princely prerogative, the emotion

of national resentment against caste privilege and exemption were

reinforced by a general consciousness of the violence done to men’s

ordinary sense of fitness, a consciousness mirrored in the literature,

and particularly the polemics, of the day.

If disgust with the papacy led Dante in his ‘De Monarchia’ to find

a solution of the world’s troubles in a revival of the universal

empire, of an effective imperial authority, his vision being one of

a golden age in the past, in this respect he stood alone, and other

writers looked forward to a radical alteration and amendment in the

ecclesiastical polity. It was indeed a radical innovation, but it was

not so conceived by its authors, who regarded it as the true practice

of the Church and were in some cases ready to denounce the Pope as a

heretic for disregarding it. The pulpits of the Grey Friars resounded

to denunciations of John XXII as a heretic because he clave to earthly

possessions and repudiated the doctrine of the poverty of Christ and

His Disciples. But indeed the arguments of John’s opponents were often

so startling that it is in no way surprising that he with all honesty

perceived in _them_ the heretics. Michael of Cesena, in a tract against

the errors of the Pope, treated John as a mere heretic, and appealed

from him to a General Council representative of the Catholic Church,

since a Pope might err both in faith and in conduct, as indeed many

had erred before, while the Catholic Church was infallible, and its

representative, a General Council, was necessarily endowed with the

like infallibility.[124]

Of far greater weight than that of the Franciscan leader was the

authority of William of Ockham in recommending the device of a

General Council. Only, unlike the former, William of Ockham discerned

infallibility in neither Pope nor General Council. All human beings

are liable to err, whether individually or collectively, but the

ultimate power in the Church must be the Church itself, the whole body

of the faithful.[125] In his enormous work, his ‘Dialogus,’ there are

contradictions and qualifications which indicate that the author was

perplexed by the manifold practical difficulties of the problem of how

to reunite Christendom.[126] But as a Spiritual Franciscan he was clear

that the Pope had no right to secular property, and as a philosopher

preferred the Church Universal itself to its pontiff as the repository

of truth.

Of much less influence and reputation in his own lifetime than Ockham,

yet of infinitely greater originality, penetration and width of view,

astonishingly farseeing and modern in his standpoint, was Marsiglio of

Padua. The central argument of his ‘Defensor Pacis’ is that the cause

of all the turmoil and disturbance of the world has been the bid for

temporal power made by the clergy, and especially the papacy.[127]

Christ had definitely stated, ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’;

yet the clergy had become utterly immersed in affairs of the earth.

Marsiglio equally combatted two sacerdotal contentions—the right to

intervene in secular matters in despite of the spiritual office, on the

one hand; on the other hand, the right of exemption from the ordinary

payments and obligations of citizens in virtue of the same spiritual

office. He held that the clergy had one duty only, and that a spiritual

duty—to attend to the welfare of the souls of their flock. They had no

legitimate claim whatever, in his opinion, to special treatment from

the lay authority.[128] Their spiritual character was relative only to

their performance of spiritual functions; in so far as they performed

any others they were on exactly the same footing as laymen. Their

tenure of land should be on precisely the same conditions as that of

the laity; the civil obligations of the layman were incumbent upon them

also. Similarly, they had no right to special jurisdiction, involving

the infliction of the same sort of penalties—fines and imprisonments

for example—as appertained to the secular courts. Such jurisdiction

was abhorrent to the spirit of the Gospel.[129] To counsel and to warn

was within their province; to go beyond that was not. This, according

to Marsiglio, applied even to heresy. If a heresy were dangerous to

society, it was for the civil authority to deal with it. Merely as

wrong opinion it was not punishable at all in this world.[130] While he

thus restricted and narrowly defined the functions of the priesthood,

Marsiglio in no wise narrowed the conception of the Catholic Church,

but rather broadened it. For his outstanding argument is that the

clergy _have_ been narrowing that conception by arrogating to

themselves a position and powers which belong to the whole community.

While perniciously extending the meaning of the word ‘spiritual’ to

cover such essentially secular things as property and political power,

they have as falsely contracted it to exclude from all control of the

Church’s destinies the mass of the laity. They also, although not in

orders, are religious men, members of the Church; numerically they

are by far the greater part of the Church. Consequently, in a General

Council, which is a representative of the entire Christian communion,

and not merely a part—the fact of ordination not making the clergy any

the less a fragment—in a General Council resides the ultimate authority

of the Church.[131]

In these remarkable pronouncements of Marsiglio of Padua are

contained the doctrines of democracy and of toleration: so also in

the careful allocation of the clergy to purely spiritual functions

is contained the suggestion of that precise differentiation between

Church and State which perhaps more than anything else marks off

modern from mediæval society. The whole conception of the ‘Defensor

Pacis’ was revolutionary. No heresy of the Middle Ages had been more

dangerously subversive of the whole system of the Catholic Church as

it then existed. The perverse absurdities of Catharism and other such

half-crazed cults were abhorrent to all sane and healthily-minded men.

But the doctrines taught by Marsiglio have commended themselves to many

of the most sincere, the most devout and religious of men from his own

day to this.[132]

Were these opinions heretical or not? They were declared to be so by

John XXII; but amid the warring religious factions of the period it

was no easy matter to say what was orthodox and what was not. The

controversy regarding mendicancy raged. The Minorites declared Pope

John a heretic because he would not agree that mendicancy was enjoined

by Scripture. The view of the Pope was shared and soberly argued by

Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh. It was not only the worldly cleric

necessarily that failed to find warrant for the contentions of the

Spirituals in the Bible.[133] A second new tenet of the time—the dogma

of the Beatific Vision—John XXII, after first inclining to believe,

latterly decided to reject; and in 1331 a certain English Dominican,

for daring to assert that the souls of the righteous were immediately

wafted into the presence of God and beheld Him without having to wait

for the Day of Resurrection, was by the Pope’s orders brought before

the Inquisition, and was thrown into gaol. John’s political opponents

in Germany and France, together with the Spiritual Franciscans,

immediately asserted the truth of the doctrine he had denounced, the

French King writing to point out that the Pope’s ruling must seriously

invalidate the belief in the invocation of saints and also all pardons

and indulgences. John was forced to give way, and on his death-bed

affirmed his adhesion to the doctrine of the Beatific Vision. As he

did not make a formal recantation, however, of his previous error,

Michael of Cesena held him to have died a contumacious heretic.[134]

A third new doctrine, a little later on, after considerable and

powerful opposition, gained a great triumph mainly through the

instrumentality of the University of Paris, which forced Pope Clement

VII to acknowledge its truth. This was the doctrine of the Immaculate

Conception. It had been resolutely condemned by St. Bernard, Peter

Lombard, and later by Thomas Aquinas. But the appeal to the popular

imagination of Mariolatry was too strong, strong enough even to defeat

the decision of the great Doctor. It became inconceivable to the

popular imagination, which ever tended to prefer the sweetness and

gentleness of the Virgin to the awfulness of the Trinity, to believe

that she could have had any connection whatever with sin. In 1387, when

a certain Dominican professor at Paris preached a sermon maintaining

that the Virgin was conceived in sin, there was a violent uproar,

leading to Clement VII’s consenting to declare all those who held

this view to be heretics.[135] The confusion as to the definition of

orthodoxy and heresy, inevitably produced by the introduction of such

new tenets as those just enumerated, was heightened by the decadent

unreality of philosophy, when it permitted of the idea of a double

truth, one theological, the other philosophical, and rendered it

possible for a scholar to assert that even such cardinal doctrines as

those of the Trinity, immortality, the resurrection, the efficacy of

prayer might be true in theology, yet quite untrue in philosophy.[136]

Such a disingenuous compromise put a premium at once upon scepticism

and insincerity.

There was one great schoolman living against whom, despite the

prolixity and barrenness of much of his logic, no charge of unreality

or insincerity can be brought—John Wycliffe. Beneath the dialectical

subtleties and sophistries common to all the works of the scholastic

philosophers there was in his case a profound sense of the obligation

to seek, and a zealous desire to discover, the absolute truth. As with

all great thinkers who have left a permanent mark on the history of

religious and political opinion, there was in Wycliffe a great moral

earnestness, an honest hatred of shams and impurities and all that is

ignoble. The scandals of Avignon and the Schism helped to form the

creed of Wycliffe, as they did that of the most religiously-minded men

of the fourteenth century. His teaching was the moral repercussion of a

sensitive and powerful mind flung back from impact against the clerical

abuses of the Church. Indeed, as in the case of Marsiglio, so in that

of Wycliffe, his attack was primarily on the polity of the Church, only

secondly on doctrine. Many of his writings are perfervid denunciations,

in the violent language common to mediæval controversialists, of the

ill-living, laxity and ostentation of the clergy. His diatribes against

successive popes and the institution of the papacy became more and more

unmeasured in the choice of epithets. The writings of Wycliffe cannot

be taken as a true description of the Church of his time, so great is

the allowance that has to be made for the hyperbolical language of

furious partizanship.

The constructive doctrine of Wycliffe is derived from his idea of

Lordship. His theology is given a feudal structure, which cumbrously

overweights it with technicalities and analogies of interest only to

a feudal age. The whole of human society is conceived as holding from

God, the suzerain of all creation. The essential characteristic which

Wycliffe ascribed to it brings out of this feudal nomenclature no

mere analogy but a pregnant idea. Wycliffe postulated a fundamental

distinction between spiritual and earthly tenure. The feudal system

on earth was one of many gradations between the supreme overlord,

the king, and the humblest holder of land. But between God and His

subjects there were no such gradations: each man held directly of

God.[137] The consequences of this statement were radical. For one

thing it was reinforced by the contention that dominion was founded in

_grace_ only (there was no other lawful claim to rule or possession)

and that no man living in sin had any right to any gift of God,

whether that gift be spiritual or secular in nature. For all other

persons the right to such gifts was equal. Thus the only test to a

man’s right to possession was a moral test.[138] These principles and

their applications, elaborated in a work of immense length, ‘Of Civil

Lordship,’ lead logically, on their political side, to Communism:

while, on the religious side, they involve a democratic theory of the

spiritual equality of all Christians, which was subversive of the

claims of the priesthood, for whom the belief in the absence of any

‘mediation’ between God and man left no function.[139]

On the one hand, community of goods was regarded as essential to

Christians; on the other—even more notably than in Marsiglio—the laity

were accorded a novel and prominent place in the Christian fellowship.

Clerical property was an abuse and the clergy ought to live on alms,

tithes being recognized as such.[140] Wycliffe did not exaggerate the

theory of clerical poverty; he did insist that the clergy must live

simply and possess nothing superfluous to ordinary needs.[141] In

accordance with the theory of ‘grace’ or merit it was laid down that

such wealth as the clergy did enjoy should be taken away from the

undeserving. Such money could with greater profit be given to the poor.

It was for the secular power to deprive the unworthy clerk of his

possessions.[142] This teaching regarding ecclesiastical property, the

disposal of which he virtually assigned to the laity, was perhaps the

most obnoxious element in Wycliffe’s general scheme in the eyes of the

Church in his day.[143]

For the regeneration of the Church Wycliffe turned from the hierarchy

to the laity. That which makes a man a member of the Church is his

own personal sanctity, and the Church therefore consists of those

predestined to salvation, of none others.[144] The mere fact of being

a pope or a cardinal, for example, is nothing. The Church can dispense

with bad popes.[145] They are antichrist. _Per contra_, a layman might

be pope, however unlearned, even if unordained, so long as God had

chosen him.[146] It is not man’s appointment, but God’s choosing—that

is to say, spiritual excellence—that matters.

The extraordinarily radical character of these theories is obvious.

They were subversive of the whole contemporary conception of the

character of the Church. For a universal society Wycliffe substituted

a small body of the elect. In all this he was emphasizing the

spiritual nature of religion, as an inward force, the possession of

the individual soul. Confession, he declared, was superfluous for the

contrite;[147] no man could be excommunicated unless he had first been

excommunicated _by himself_, and no prelate ought ever to excommunicate

anyone unless he knew that he had already been excommunicated by

God.[148]

Like Luther after him, then, Wycliffe insisted upon the inner reality

of religion, of which the individual is conscious in the depths of

his own being. Like Luther also he insisted on the necessity of

appeal direct to the Scriptures, as to the supreme authority for the

Christian life. As he looked to the laity to reform the Church, so it

was necessary that they should be well acquainted with its text. The

translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue became, therefore, an

integral part of Wycliffe’s scheme. There were extant in Wycliffe’s

day portions of the Scriptures in the vernacular.[149] He conceived

the idea of translating all. Probably he himself translated only

the Gospels, or perhaps the whole of the New Testament; one of his

disciples did the translation of the Old Testament, and may have

completed most of it before Wycliffe’s own death.[150] The significance

of this great undertaking lies partly in its completeness; but even

more in the intention with which it was adopted. The laity must be able

to read the actual text of the Scriptures for themselves without the

glosses of traditional interpretation and theologians’ exegesis, so

that they may know the gospel in its simplicity and view the realities

of religion clearly for themselves. To the Bible in the vernacular as

such the Church had no objection, but there must be proper safeguards.

The people must be taught how to read the Scriptures with understanding

by their spiritual masters. The gospel of Christ had been entrusted to

the clergy for them to ‘administer gently’ to the laity. Wycliffe’s

method meant that the ‘gospel pearl’ was ‘cast forth and trodden down

by swine.’[151]

Wycliffe was an idealist, and confessedly his entire conception

of the Church and Society is an ideal conception. In spite of its

curiously matter-of-fact feudal foundations, Wycliffe’s structure is

not of the earth, but Utopian. His conclusions were indeed whittled

down by certain important qualifications. Thus, although all men

were ideally equal, the existing mode of society and government was

sanctioned by God; and it was therefore unlawful to seek to gain by

force the equality of possession which flagrantly did not exist—so

that Wycliffe’s communism, in so far as it was not spiritual only,

was purely anticipatory of a new order in the future; so also it was

unlawful to challenge the right to rule of the civil lord on the ground

of personal unworthiness, for his power also is sanctioned. As Wycliffe

put it in a celebrated phrase, ‘God ought to obey the Devil.’[152] Thus

while the ideal theory of dominion ‘founded in grace’ is suggestive

of antinomianism and revolution, Wycliffe’s practical teachings were

marked by devotion to the existing temporal order. On the other hand,

it is not surprising that both opponents and followers should have

tended to fasten upon the former aspects of his tenets and give to

them a revolutionary interpretation. And indeed the truly significant

part of Wycliffite doctrine is revolutionary in the emphasis that it

lays upon the individual; and as time went on both the logic of events

and the logic of the beliefs to which controversy drove him rendered

Wycliffe more and more unequivocal in the essential radicalism of his

attitude.

Anti-sacerdotalism led Wycliffe later on to attack a doctrine to which

the clergy owed much of their hold upon the popular mind, whence

largely came the peculiar veneration in which they were held—the

doctrine of Transubstantiation. The miracle of the mass obtained a

special note of awesome mystery from that doctrine; and to the ignorant

or superstitious mind it was natural to regard those who by the simple

pronunciation of the prayer of consecration could transform bread and

wine into the body and blood of the Blessed Lord as miracle-workers.

For the orthodox philosophy of Wycliffe’s day, Nominalism, there was

little difficulty in believing in such a transformation. Wycliffe

was a realist, and to him the nominalist position seemed untenable

altogether. In the days of Abelard, and again in those of Thomas

Aquinas, Realism had been the orthodox philosophy, and Aquinas in

demonstrating that the abstract and general truths of Christianity were

acceptable to the reason did the Church of his day a great service.

But another realist had come after him, who had most trenchantly

attacked St. Thomas, destroying all the reasonableness of the great

Doctor’s philosophic structure, and emphatically ousting the reason

and substituting the authority of the Church as the only sure guide in

the sacred mysteries of religion, the only sure foundation of faith.

There were action and reaction in the abstract thought of the Middle

Ages, as indeed there have ever been in history. The reaction against

the Realism of St. Thomas, apparent in Duns Scotus, grew intenser when

the principles of Ockham became the popular, and were recognized as

the orthodox, principles of Christian theology. It could easily be

shown that Realism was apt to lead to exaggerations either heretical

or absurd, very apt to end in Pantheism.[153] The fact of the matter

was that either school of the scholastic philosophy might be productive

of heresy, by laying especial emphasis on one particular aspect of

truth to the exclusion of others; that different generations, changing

subtly in mental outlook and spiritual temperament, are susceptible to

different phases of truth. It is not a matter of Yea or Nay, but simply

a varying stress of mode or fashion. But we do not look for recognition

of such a fact on the part of any mediæval controversialist. There are

no half lights and compromises with them; they have each his own vision

of truth, and bitterly assail their opponents as enemies of the light.

So Wycliffe, beginning with a standpoint which could be shared, and in

fact was shared, by many of the most orthodox Catholics of his time,

growing as he went on more profoundly conscious of, and convinced

of, the rightness of his essential principles, became less and less

compromising, more and more the opponent not only of practices but of

the doctrines with which such practices were associated. He became

urgent against the reigning nominalist creed, but most especially

against its theories of the Sacrament. For him space and time, matter

and form were objective realities. The bread and wine were not a part

of Christ and could not become so; they remained bread and wine in

substance and could never be anything else, only Christ was present

in them.[154] The doctrine of identification between the bread and

wine and the body and blood of Christ was pernicious.[155] Nothing

could be more horrible than the notion that a priest had the ability

to ‘make’ God daily.[156] The language of the service of the Eucharist

was not literal, but figurative.[157] The literal interpretation was

an invitation to mere idolatry, an encouragement to the ignorant

to worship the Host itself.[158] Christ indeed was present in the

Sacrament, and the bread and wine were not merely commemorative

symbols; on the other hand, there was no miraculous transformation of

the elements. This is very much the same theory as Luther’s doctrine

of Consubstantiation. Wycliffe united with it the tenet that a priest

living in mortal sin could not consecrate.[159]

The extent and nature of the influence of Wycliffitism in England is a

difficult and somewhat controversial question.[160] The translation of

the Bible certainly had its permanent influence; and the device of the

Poor Preachers spread the new doctrines further afield than would have

been possible in those days only with the aid of lecture, sermon and

treatise. Wycliffe’s character does not appear to have been such as to

have enabled him to become the leader of a great popular movement. He

was too much of a schoolman; his method was too academic.[161] But the

preachers—not to be thought of as crude, semi-educated men, for they

were mostly clerks of Oxford, who had studied under Wycliffe—touched

a wider public than their master himself reached. Clearly in

popularizing, they also exaggerated his doctrines, making them more

downright, more practical, more mundane, emphasizing their social

tendencies, those communistic elements which had a natural popular

appeal.

The Lollards prospered greatly at the first, being particularly

successful in the capital itself, Norwich, Bristol, Leicester,

Northampton and the larger towns generally. The protection of John

of Gaunt and other nobles helped them, while Wycliffe’s denunciation

of the friars met with the support of public opinion generally.[162]

There seemed a prospect of Wycliffitism becoming really widespread.

But separatist tendencies soon showed themselves, and already in 1392

Lollards in the diocese of Salisbury were undertaking ordinations. The

Lollards, then, soon showed a tendency to develop into a separate sect,

and their hold on the country and their national influence decayed

with extraordinary suddenness. This was partly due to the fact that

the movement had owed much to the purely ephemeral factor of John of

Gaunt’s support; partly to the fact that the favour that its social

teachings had won among the peasants was more than counterbalanced by

the conservative apprehensions of the larger population who viewed the

activities of such men as John Ball with dismay; partly to the fact

that the movement produced sharp divisions in families, between father

and son, master and servant, and this sort of thing could not last

beyond a generation.[163] Extremists took possession of Lollardy and

it began to betray a distinct iconoclastic character. But the orthodox

zeal of Henry IV and Henry V forced it very much underground, and there

were a number of recantations.[164] Lollardy survived into the days

of the Tudors, in small communities in country districts, such as the

Chilterns, and there was certainly a measure of Wycliffite leaven in

the nation; but it is going too far to discover in Lollardy a direct

and potent influence in bringing about the English Reformation.

The influence of Wycliffe was deeper and more lasting and vital

outside England than within it—for there is a clear and very important

connection between Wycliffitism and Husitism in Bohemia. On the other

hand, it would be a mistake to regard Wycliffe as the sole parent of

the movement inaugurated by Hus; for Hus had forerunners in Bohemia

itself, earnest reformers, such as Conrad Waldhäuser, John Militz

Kremsier, and Matthias of Janow.[165] The two former were never accused

of harbouring heretical opinions; they were simply protestants against

clerical abuses. Matthias of Janow, on the other hand, was definitely

interested in dogma, a professed theologian. He was notable in

appealing directly to the simple people of Christ in his denunciation

of the invocation of Saints and his insistence on the administration of

the Communion in both kinds to the laity.[166]

The beginnings of the religious movement in Bohemia centre in the

drama of the University of Prague, the struggle between the German

and native parties—a national struggle which had its significant

philosophic counterpart, for Teutonic Nominalism warred against Czech

Realism. The struggle was decided in favour of the native party by

the famous proclamation of Wenzel, which led to the German exodus

from the University. The departure of the German scholars from Prague

was a momentous event. Hus and Jerome of Prague had been expounding

the doctrines of Wycliffe; the German majority had pronounced these

heretical. Wenzel’s decision was therefore a triumph at once for

Bohemian nationalism and for the reforming Husite party, a victory

for Realism—for heresy. Hus’s satisfaction was great.[167] It was not

only the religious issue that appealed to him strongly: he was an

intense patriot as well as a religious reformer. The spread of the

Husite doctrines, however, naturally received a considerable impetus.

The association of certain religious opinions with those national

aspirations, to which the revolution at the University had given so

marked an encouragement, inevitably converted Husitism into a popular

movement. The cause of Husitism and the cause of Bohemian nationalism

became so completely dovetailed the one into the other that they were

inseparable.

Hus received a papal summons to appear at Bologna to answer for his

heretical opinions, which were making Husitism an European question,

a dangerous problem to the Church, as serious as Waldensianism and

Catharism had been.[168] Hus did not go, appealing from the Pope to

Christ. The opinions of the great Bohemian leader were not original;

and indeed his greatness is much more moral than intellectual. Starting

his career solely as a protestant against sacerdotal abuses, he was

led by the influence of the doctrines of Wycliffe, which the close

association between England and Bohemia at the time made familiar in

the latter country, into adopting many of the tenets of the Oxford

heresiarch.[169] His ‘De Ecclesia’ is little more than a translation

of Wycliffe. On the whole, he remained distinctly more orthodox than

his master. His writings abound in denunciations of the worldliness of

the clergy, in particular of the papacy; denunciations of simony (which

is heresy), of the claim of the papacy to overlordship of the Church,

based on no better foundation than the death of St. Peter in Rome.[170]

Heresy, he also declared, was not triable by the Church.[171] But

the really fundamental article of his questionable doctrines was his

conception of Predestination. Here he was following Augustine; but

he was under the influence of Wycliffe’s idea of ‘dominion founded

in grace,’ which gave the right of lordship and possession only to

the elect.[172] This principle, involving the position that only the

‘rule of the saints’ is legitimate, had clearly a dangerous tendency,

subversive of law and order in an imperfect world, both in the secular

and the ecclesiastical spheres. Yet the principal element of danger in

Husitism was the simple fact of its success. So serious was this that

when the remarkable attempt was made to heal the wounds of Christendom

by means of General Councils, the fathers aimed at dealing with the

problem of heresy together with those of the restoration of the unity,

which had been broken by the Schism, and the reform of clerical abuses.

The Conciliar movement—a serious and important attempt to reform the

Church from within—was brought about by the labours of certain moderate

reformers, of whom Gerson, Peter D’Ailly and Zabarella are the most

notable. Dietrich Niem represents a German influence; but the main

source of inspiration was the University of Paris, firmly orthodox and

nominalist and immensely influential. In 1394 the University invited

its members to send in opinions as to the best means of ending the

Schism. Thousands of answers were received; but the most outstanding

members of the University were convinced that the summoning of a

General Council was the only expedient that gave any hope of success.

The ideas of Marsiglio and Ockham—more especially the latter—had borne

fruit, and an age in which the idea of representation was ‘in the air’

decided to apply the principle to the Church for the urgent practical

purpose of removing a notorious scandal. The _apologia_ for the scheme

is to be found in the writings of Gerson and D’Ailly, and of Niem,

if Niem is indeed the author of the tractate, ‘De modis uniendi et

reformandi Ecclesiam.’[173] The _plenitudo potestatis_ of the Church

resided in its whole body, as represented in a General Council.[174]

With the assent of such a council, the Church could even dispense with

a pope.[175] It was legitimate for the civil authority to summon a

General Council. It was easy to cite the practice of Roman Emperors to

that effect.[176] Christ, urged representatives of the University of

Paris to the French king, had submitted to the authority of His mother

and Joseph. Was the Pope greater than Christ that he should not submit

to the authority of his mother, the Church?[177] The proposition, so

worded, seemed mildly reasonable, certainly most orthodox. In truth

it was a democratic innovation of the utmost significance. ‘Pisa,’

wrote Gregorovius, referring to the first of the series of councils

which provide the chief interest of the opening years of the fifteenth

century, ‘was the first real step towards the deliverance of the world

from the papal hierarchy; it was already the Reformation’; while

the decree of the second and most important of the councils, that of

Constance, in which it declared its superiority to the Pope, has been

pronounced to be ‘probably the most revolutionary official document in

the history of the world.’[178] When brought up against the glaring

abuse of the papal schism it was not only Wycliffe and Hus and their

followers that became revolutionaries; Gerson, D’Ailly, Niem and their

adherents became revolutionaries also. In the reforming programmes of

Wycliffe and Hus there was much that might have been expected to gain

the sympathies of the fathers who met at Constance: yet they condemned

both as heretics and consigned Hus and Jerome of Prague to the flames.

The explanation is easy enough. It was precisely because their scheme

was revolutionary that the cardinals and other clergy assembled at

Constance were so anxious to make it clear to Christendom that such

revolutionary practice was perfectly compatible with strict orthodoxy

regarding the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, that they

were the guardians of the unity and continuity of the essential life

and identity of the Church. A proof of this was urgently needed to

safeguard a position which had precarious elements. The opportunity

of dealing with Hus would probably have been welcomed for that reason

alone. As to the fact of Wycliffe and Hus being dangerous heretics the

fathers assembled at Constance had no doubt whatever. Zealous for the

reform of clerical abuses as many of them were, they could only see

in the invectives against the hierarchy and the doctrines concerning

Predestination and the Eucharist, in which the English and the Bohemian

teachers indulged, an attack upon the whole edifice of the Catholic

Church.[179] Reconstruction they might desire; but the specific of

Wycliffe and Hus seemed to be extensive demolition preparatory to the

creation of a new structure. Hus, therefore, came to Constance as one

‘suspect of heresy,’ virtually pre-condemned.

He answered the Council’s summons, relying upon the security of

Sigismund’s celebrated safe-conduct, expecting to take part in a public

debate, to receive a fair and courteous hearing for his defence of his

theological views. Instead he found himself treated as a criminal,

thrown into prison, to answer a formidable indictment before judges who

were also prosecutors. The Council virtually resolved itself into an

inquisitorial court and followed inquisitorial methods of procedure.

Compared indeed with an ordinary trial by the Inquisition that of Hus

was remarkably lenient. He had powerful friends and the undertaking of

Sigismund counted for something, although certainly not very much.

Sigismund has been arraigned as a monster of turpitude for allowing

Hus to be tried, condemned and executed after he had granted him a

safe-conduct. It is certain that Hus, while clearly apprehensive of

what might ensue from his bold step of entering the stronghold of his

enemies, had implicit confidence in Sigismund’s protection, and when

despite the security promised by the man who was both Emperor and

president of the Council, Hus was consigned to the stake, at first

sight unmitigated baseness on the part of Sigismund would appear to

be the only explanation.[180] If he cannot be entirely exonerated, on

the other hand, it is quite clear he never had any idea of protecting

a heretic, and that he was overruled by the Council, who, arguing from

the customary rules regarding heretics, could legitimately maintain

that no guarantee could have any validity whatever in the case of one

suspected of heresy, that Sigismund’s safe-conduct might certainly

apply to the empire and secular states, might be valid while Hus was

on his journey, but had no validity as regards the Church. The heretic

or a man suspect of heresy could enjoy neither rights nor privileges.

This was good law, both ecclesiastical and civil; and once granted

that the Council must regard Hus as suspect of heresy, it was legally

unanswerable.[181]

The trial resolved itself into a dialectical duel between Hus and

Cardinal D’Ailly, with divers interruptions and at times uproar.

Against the uproar, with which his statements were sometimes greeted,

Hus strongly protested; and the proceedings would appear to have been

more seemly subsequently.[182] He was accused of a large number of

doctrinal errors and of such absurdities as that of claiming to be

a person of the Trinity.[183] Generally speaking, the object of his

prosecutors was to show that his opinions were identical with those

of Wycliffe, which had already been condemned as heretical by the

Council. It was easy enough to show that Hus had inveighed against

the organization and practices of the Church as then existing; it was

not so easy to convict him of heretical dogma. From the first Hus’s

attitude was perfectly consistent. He wished to argue his thesis;

but that not being allowed, he declared himself perfectly willing

to abjure all tenets which he had at any time avowed if the Council

proved them from Scripture to have been erroneous, but he strongly

protested against the ascription to him of statements he had never made

and interpretations that he had never intended.[184] The Council, on

the other hand, contended that it was the duty of the suspect heretic

to put himself unreservedly in the hands of the Council, making an

entire submission to their ruling and a complete abjuration of all

the heresies with which he was charged. One doctor told him that if

the Council told him he had only one eye, though he knew he had two,

he ought to agree that it was so. Hus replied: ‘If the whole world

told me so, so long as I have the use of my reason, I could not say so

without resisting my conscience.’ It is right to add that the doctor

subsequently withdrew his remark, agreeing that he had not used a very

good illustration.[185]

Where Hus gave his enemies their best opportunity was in his teaching

with regard to the predestined. He had declared that no man living in

a state of mortal sin had any right to exercise authority. By this

ruling Sigismund himself would have been excluded. Apart from that,

as has been said already, the doctrine was undeniably of perilous

implication. The King of the Romans could appreciate the seriousness of

the political application at all events. He pertinently reminded Hus of

the truth that no man lives without sin.[186] But the decisive factor

in the trial of Hus proved eventually to be his absolute sincerity. He

refused to be false to himself, to commit perjury in order to save his

life. ‘Serene Prince,’ said he to Sigismund, ‘I do not want to cling to

any error, and I am perfectly willing to submit to the determination

of the Council. But I may not offend God and my conscience by saying

that I hold heresies that I have never held.’[187] As he put it again

in a letter written shortly before his death, ‘Assuredly it is fitting

for me rather to die than to flee a momentary penalty to fall into

the Lord’s hand and afterwards, perchance, into everlasting fire and

shame. And because I have appealed to Christ Jesus, the most potent

and just of all judges, committing my cause to Him, therefore I stand

by His judgment and sentence, knowing that He will judge every man not

on false and erroneous evidence but on the true facts and merits of

his case.’[188] Hus died a martyr for no specific theological dogma,

heretical or otherwise, but for the noblest cause for which a man can

ever die—sincerity to the truth that is in him.

After the condemnation and burning of Hus, the Council proceeded to the

trial of Jerome of Prague, who after a recantation repented of it and

elected to die like his greater comrade. The proceedings against him

were marked by great heat and acrimony, for he had made many personal

enemies. Moreover, controversialist passions, which had indeed been

apparent in the trial of Hus—for Hus was condemned as much because he

was a realist as anything—flared up with still greater violence. Among

the interested spectators of the death at the stake of Jerome of Prague

was the great Italian humanist, Poggio. Much struck by the martyr’s

eloquence and genius, he thought it was a great pity that he should

have turned his attention to heretical ideas, and half pityingly, half

uncomprehendingly, wondered that a man should be willing to die merely

for the sake of an opinion.

This chance connection between Jerome, the ardent scholastic reformer,

and Poggio, the cynical forerunner of the New Learning—between the

old order and the new, is remarkable and prophetic. The movement

towards change, which Jerome of Prague represented, whether it was a

conservative movement as interpreted by Gerson and D’Ailly, or radical

as it became in the hands of Wycliffe and Hus, definitely failed. The

mediæval system had indeed been challenged by that movement, which had

resulted from the glaring scandals of Avignon and the papal Schism; but

the system, though severely shaken, yet remained; and pontiffs such as

Martin V, Eugenius IV and Pius II were able by politic means to bolster

it up through a restoration of influence, mainly of a temporal nature,

to the Papacy. The Conciliar method of ecclesiastical reform failed

for a variety of reasons—partly because of defects in organization and

policy, still more because of a natural failure to recognize the great

significance of national differences and the need, or at least the

demand, for variety of treatment as between states, which produced the

Pragmatic Sanctions of Bourges and Mainz, of the years 1438 and 1439

respectively; yet more, precisely because the attempted reforms were

not sufficiently far-reaching and thorough in character, a tinkering,

not a renewal.

The movements of Wycliffe and Hus were also abortive of really direct

results. Lollardy certainly lived on, but, as has been already noted,

probably did not have any considerable influence among the various

forces which brought about the English Reformation. The influence

of Hus in Bohemian history is far greater and the triumphs of Ziska

and Prokop in the wars that are known after the name of the great

heresiarch won national and religious independence for the Czechs up

to the time of the battle of the White Mountain in the Thirty Years

War. It is true also that Luther expressed his own indebtedness to Hus,

declaring, ‘We have all been Husites without knowing it.’ Nevertheless,

the decisive influences which brought about the complete overthrow

of the mediæval system and the substitution of the modern belong to

the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These influences

were the humanism, which in its Italian form became critical, pagan,

drawing its influence from the Greek world to which all the ‘ages of

faith’ had been as an opaque curtain; which in its German form had

a theological bias and a moral aim, as interpreted by Reuchlin and

the school of Deventer. The other influence was the apotheosis of a

cynical nationalism, whose exponent is Machiavelli, which produced the

secularization of politics and the segregation of Church and State.

It is, therefore, fanciful and erroneous to trace back the causes of

the Reformation and the break-down of the mediæval world-state to the

mediæval heresies and movements of reform.[189] On the other hand, to

ignore them would be equally mistaken. They had a minor effect, but it

was not insignificant. It may be the violence of the storm that rends

and tears away the structure; yet its havoc has been aided by the

almost unseen, unheeded shifting of the sands.

CHAPTER VI

THE MAGIC ARTS

(i) _Sorcery_

If such phenomena as the Flagellant and dancing manias, the acceptance

of such persons as Guglielma and Segarelli as divine incarnations is

evidence of the depth of credulous superstition among the ignorant

lower orders, the great witchcraft and sorcery craze, especially in

the fifteenth century, is proof of a much wider diffusion of such a

spirit in mediæval society. Christianity early accepted the belief

in magic arts unquestioningly. The story of the Witch of Endor would

have been sufficient evidence, even had it stood alone: which it was

far from doing, for the Bible was full of references to magicians,

demoniacs, and soothsayers. Thus it was in disbelief in such things,

not in belief, that heresy lay. Incredulity challenged the authority of

Scripture. Nor was it to be argued that the existence of evil spirits

in Old Testament history was no warrant of their existence now. The

mediæval world was profoundly conscious of the powers of Satan being

abroad in the earth. It discerned the clear sign of their presence in

the frequent occurrence of disaster to the undeserving, in the fits

of the epileptic; it discerned them in the wizened features of the

shrivelled old woman who muttered inarticulately as she gathered her

herbs. Given the combination of an ignorant and wondering fear of the

bewildering riddles of nature and the cold strangeness of the stars

with a sincere conviction of the reality of that evil potentate who is

at war with God, causing disaster among men and having subtle communion

with the human heart, inspiring to wicked deeds and hideous thoughts,

it is small wonder that imagination peopled the world with sorcerers,

magicians and witches.

And the evidence was so extraordinarily sound. No reasonable man could

resist the force of it. It was not only the proverbially superstitious

Middle Ages that believed in occult arts; no one had a more wholesome

faith in these matters than Luther, and no country surpassed Protestant

Scotland in the savage cruelty of its witch-trials. Richard Baxter, in

his ‘The Certainty of the World of Spirits,’ was able to give numerous

well authenticated cases from his own lifetime; and the sceptical man

of science, Glanvill, showed that unreason, not reason, rejected the

evidence for witchcraft. All history was full of the exploits of these

instruments of darkness, and not ‘the easily deceivable vulgar only,’

but ‘wise and grave discerners’ were first-hand witnesses, who had no

interest ‘to agree together in a common lie.’[190]

The magicians and witches being almost universally believed in, it

followed as a corollary that they were punished for their nefarious

practices; but whereas in the pagan Roman world they had been punished

simply on politic grounds, the magician being punished ‘because he

injured man, not because he offended God,’[191] in the Christian

era the offence was regarded as a much more heinous sin. In days of

polytheism the state could be tolerant of certain magic practices; not

so Christianity, which regarded all pagan deities as emanations of the

Devil. The punishments, save under the apostate Julian, were usually of

a most ferocious character, reputed magicians being crucified or flung

to wild beasts.[192] But while thus zealous in punishing the magician,

there is no doubt that Christianity itself became contaminated, and in

the Dark Ages thaumaturgy became rife within the Church. On the other

hand, while in the Eastern Empire sorcery continued to be punished

with severity, the Teutonic tribes in the west, who in their pagan

days had been thoroughly imbued with magic beliefs, were more or less

tolerant. During the epoch of the Carolingian empire ecclesiastical

lenience, tempered by occasional mob violence, was the rule; and such

lenience or indifference continued in western Europe till the end of

the twelfth century.[193] Roger Bacon, unlike learned philosophers of

later and presumably more enlightened periods, gave it as his opinion

that reputed sorcery was either fraudulent or a delusion. There are

instances of severity on the part of the secular authority in Spain,

and the first mediæval legislation against sorcery was introduced in

Venice in the twelfth century; yet the Church remained apparently

indifferent. And when the Inquisition came into being, it was not given

authority in cases of witchcraft and sorcery. A change is to be traced

from Alexander IV’s bull, _Quod super nonnullis_, issued in 1257, which

laid it down that inquisitors were not to be distracted from their

all-important duties by other business and were to leave cases of

simple sorcery to the ordinary ecclesiastical tribunals; on the other

hand, in sorcery cases where heresy was clearly involved, they were to

take cognizance. This became the Canon law under Boniface VIII.[194]

Now, when did sorcery clearly involve heresy? It was not difficult

to argue that it invariably did. Sorcery was invoking demons,

trafficking with Satan, and to do this a man must surely entertain

heretical ideas about Satan and demons. Certainly, if a man dealt in

such trafficking, holding it to be not sinful, he was a manifest

heretic.[195] Again, to seek to acquire knowledge of the future from

Satan, the future depending solely on the Almighty, involved heresy.

Under the title, sorcery, there came to be included astronomy’s parent,

astrology.[196] Some men of unquestioned orthodoxy gave their sanction

and support to it, notably Cardinal D’Ailly; and it was not apparently

definitely forbidden during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in

ecclesiastical formularies. But clearly, although there was no question

of invoking demons in connection with astrology, on the other hand, the

astrologer by maintaining that a man’s destiny was controlled by the

conjunction of stars and planets at his birth was denying the freedom

of the will, questioning the omnipotence of God, consequently being

guilty of manifest blasphemy and heresy. Accordingly, the astrologer

was always liable to prosecution by the Inquisition. The best security

lay in the fact that belief in astrology was extremely widespread among

all classes of society, among clergy as well as laity, of whatever

degree of education. In the fourteenth century there was a marked

increase in sorcery. This was probably the direct consequence of

persecution on the grounds of heresy—such persecution being in a way

the highest possible testimony to its genuineness. For the Inquisition

never dealt with a reputed magician as a charlatan; it dealt with him

as one really in league with Satan. Otherwise there would have been

no heresy involved. The attitude of the Church towards sorcery—its

attribution of heresy to the magician—actually put a premium upon

sorcery. The sorcerer was the more in request because people were more

than ever convinced that his claims were well founded, and he was able

to make more out of his calling because it had become precarious. For

these reasons the extreme zeal of Pope John XXII against all workers of

magic failed in its object. In 1317 he satisfied himself, on grounds

good or bad, that several persons in his household had been plotting

to take his life. Under torture they stated that they had first had

recourse to poison, but that that ordinary humdrum method having

failed, they had next invoked the assistance of demons to accomplish

their purpose. The Pope was roused to thorough and energetic action,

and started a resolute campaign against the accursed race of magicians.

Dissatisfied with the ambiguous terms of Alexander IV’s directions to

the Inquisition in matters of sorcery, he gave it direct authority

in such cases and urged it to earnest efforts.[197] Ten years later,

however, for some reason or other, he withdrew this jurisdiction from

the Inquisition; and it is to be gathered that there ensued a period of

comparative immunity for sorcery until 1374, when Gregory XI once more

entrusted the task of prosecuting magicians to the Holy Office.

The two most remarkable men to fall into the hands of the Inquisition

as sorcerers were Peter of Abano and the Maréchal Gilles de Rais.[198]

The former, an astrologer, undoubtedly harboured speculations which

were flagrantly heretical; but he escaped the stake by dying a natural

death before his trial was concluded. The latter—the original of

the Blue-beard of the fairy-tale—had been the constant and intimate

companion of Jeanne d’Arc during her leadership of the French armies.

Of such military distinction as to be made a Marshal of France

at the age of twenty-five, he was also a man of culture, of a restless

curiosity and an intense love of things brilliant and beautiful, of

rich colours and ornaments, of all that was costly, magnificent and

ornate. But beneath all the gorgeous external trappings of this æsthete

was something much more pernicious than mere vulgar ostentation. A

depraved voluptuary, he found that the ordinary modes of satisfying his

sensuality soon palled, and they were succeeded by the most horrible

unnatural lusts and the slow torture leading to murder of his victims,

in the watching of which this monster eventually came to find his

chief delight. While he indulged himself in such enormities, de Rais’

other great interest in life was the practice of the necromantic art,

by which he hoped eventually to discover the philosopher’s stone,

which would place him in command of all the wealth of the world.

Notwithstanding the character of his favourite pursuits, the Marshal

was at the same time particularly devout, showing an even perfervid

faith, and now and again resolving to make atonement for his sins by

going on crusade, never doubting that by this means he would wipe out

all the stain of his misdeeds and eventually attain to salvation. In

spite of all this outward appearance of devotion, it is remarkable that

de Rais succeeded in maintaining his abominable way so long without

question. But secrecy and immunity could not last indefinitely. Stories

came to be bruited about of strange and loathsome happenings within

the castle of Tiffanges, of children being slain in order that with

their blood the sensualist magician might write a book of necromantic

art. Even then, owing to the Marshal’s high position, it was difficult

to strike. But eventually the Bishop of Nantes took action, citing de

Rais to appear before him on the charges of having gratified his lust

on children, whom he had subsequently butchered, of having invoked a

familiar spirit with atrocious rites, and of having committed other

crimes also suggestive of heresy. The trial that ensued was abnormal in

several respects, the most notable being its publicity, public opinion

being deliberately called into play, the fathers and mothers of the

children, who had been spirited away into the monster’s castle, being

allowed to let loose their clamourings against the villain.[199] Action

was taken in a civil court contemporaneously with the ecclesiastical

proceedings before bishop and inquisitors. In the ecclesiastical court

he was found guilty on both counts—first, unnatural lust and sacrilege;

second, heresy and the invocation of demons; but his death-sentence

was pronounced in the civil court. The extraordinary man underwent

the final penalty with a contrition, an assurance of salvation and an

enthusiasm for God which must have been strangely edifying.[200]

(ii) _Witchcraft_

The great witchcraft craze did not seize upon Europe until the

beginning of the fifteenth century. It is true that for hundreds

of years before this crimes, which became associated with the name

of witchcraft, had been known and punished, but until the twelfth

century we do not find the precise well-defined conception of the

witch as a woman who has entered into an unholy compact with Satan,

is in possession of certain miraculous powers and in particular that

of transporting herself through the air to the so-called Sabbath, or

rather Sabbat, where she and her kind meet together to renew their

allegiance to the Prince of Darkness. It is very likely that the idea

of the omnipresence of the powerful and maleficent force of Satan

took greater hold of western Europe than ever before in the twelfth

century, that marvellous period of the earlier Renaissance, when

men’s minds were quickened to a new realization of the splendour and

beauty of things of the earth, when heresy took a firm root, and doubt

and hesitation sometimes usurped the place of a faith which had been

childlike and unquestioning, a period of clashing between intellectual

aspiration and the inflexibility of dogma, such that the timid and the

ignorant were assailed by a vivid consciousness of the dangers pressing

around the Ark of the Lord upon every side, of the sinister might of

the dark powers arrayed against the Redeemer. In such circumstances

more insistent, more clearly defined became the conception of those

evil beings going about in the world, who had sold themselves to the

Devil and were assisting him in his fell purposes.[201]

At first the Church refused its sanction to the popular tales

about witches, more especially to the tale of the Sabbat and the

transportation of witches through the air, often over immense

distances. The canonists, Ivo of Chartres and Gratian, dismiss this as

a fiction: which to believe is pagan, an error in the faith—in short

heresy. But popular credence triumphed over the canonists. The reports

of the activities of witches became so numerous, so determined and

so circumstantial that it was wellnigh impossible to disbelieve. It

became simply a question of how to reconcile well-authenticated facts

with the canonists. A way out of the dilemma was discovered in the

fifteenth century, at a time when the craze had almost reached its

height. The witches meant by the canonists must have been a different

order of being from those referred to by a later generation when they

spoke of witches. It was merely a matter of nomenclature after all.

Those responsible not only for guarding the purity of the faith but

also for protecting the faithful from the assaults of the Evil One

as delivered by witches could no longer allow their freedom of action

to be curtailed, the powers of the Devil actually aggrandized by the

misinterpreted ruling that belief in witches was error. Accordingly,

when a certain eminent lawyer named Ponzinibio dared to maintain

the accuracy of the canonists and to assert that all belief in

witchcraft and sorcery was a delusion, the master of the Sacred Palace,

Bartholomew de Spina, wrote a vehement and momentous reply, in which

he turned the vials of a righteous indignation against Ponzinibio and

called upon the Inquisition to proceed against the lawyer as himself

a fautor of heretics.[202] The attitude of the Church had indeed made

a complete reversal. What previously it had been heresy to assert it

now became heresy to deny. The divine law was now discovered clearly

to prove the existence of witches, and the Scriptures were reinforced

by the civil code.[203] There no longer remained any room for doubt or

equivocation.

Before the end of the century there appeared Sprenger’s celebrated

‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ the most authoritative work in existence on

witchcraft from the standpoint of credulity.[204] Sprenger was an

inquisitor, so that in his compendium, as in other similar treatises,

we have the conclusions regarding the nature and the practices of

witches, as ascertained by the examination of supposedly authentic

cases. We learn in the first place the fundamental fact which explains

the existence of witches—the inherent inferiority of the female sex

to the male. Women are discontented, impatient creatures, who have a

natural proclivity to evil. Woman is at the best a necessary evil. St.

Chrysostom is quoted with approval on the subject of marriage. ‘Quid

est mulier nisi amicitiae inimica, ineffugabilis poena, necessarium

malum, naturalis tentatio, desirabilis calamitas, domesticum periculum,

delectabile detrimentum?...’[205] Everything considered, it was not

at all strange that women should be particularly prone to yielding

to the corrupt wiles and solicitations of the Devil. Once bought by

him, they received the sustenance for their infamous activities in the

Sabbat, the great nocturnal assembly of the powers of darkness, held

sometimes in the Brocken, sometimes in some unidentified spot east

of Jordan, or indeed it might be in any spot chosen by Satan. To the

trysting-place, however distant it might be, the witches flew through

the air. This aërial transportation to the Sabbat was in the opinion of

Sprenger and other first-rate authorities certainly no illusion, it was

a reality—only, according to Sprenger, the witch travelled in an aërial

body, a vaporous part of herself, which issued out of her mouth and

by the existence of which she was enabled to be in two places at one

and the same time.[206] At the nocturnal assemblage there took place

the offering of unqualified allegiance to the Devil, feasting, dancing

and sexual intercourse, either with Satan himself or some of his

demons.[207] Foul details occur in plenty in all the fifteenth-century

treatises on witchcraft concerning the sexual abominations practised

by ‘incubi’ and ‘succubi’ at the Sabbat. From such horrid intercourse,

we are informed by our authors, proceed giants and wizards, such as

Merlin, but never an ordinary human being.[208]

Bartholomew de Spina gives us a variety of circumstantial stories

about women who had taken part in the witches’ gathering. One or two

may be taken as samples of a large class. A respected burgomaster

studied in his youth at Parma. Returning to his lodgings one night

late, he knocked in vain at the door. He therefore let himself in by

the window and went upstairs, where he found the maid-servant lying

prone on the floor, naked and so inert as to appear dead. When she

at last came to herself, she acknowledged that she had been to the

Sabbat. This case, comments Spina, proves that in the transportation

to the Sabbat no corporal transference is involved. The body of the

girl had lain all the time on the floor, only her aërial spirit had

been absent.[209] Again, a man one day finds his wife lying in an

outhouse insensible, and on recovery she confesses to having been to

the concourse. He is horrified, and, determined to rid himself of his

atrocious spouse, gives information against her to the Inquisition,

so that she may be burnt. The woman apparently escaped this fate by

drowning herself.[210] One suspects a somewhat simpler explanation than

witchcraft of this tale of conjugal infelicity. Another similar account

is of a citizen of Ferrara, whose wife was in the habit of attending

the Sabbat. One night he, pretending to be asleep, saw his wife rise,

anoint herself and fly out of the window. As soon as she was gone he

got up, and apparently succeeded in tracking her to the wine-cellar

of a noble of the town, where he found her together with a number of

witches. Directly he was seen, they all disappeared. The unfortunate

husband, however, could not get away and was there discovered by the

servants of the house, who very naturally took him for a burglar.

Happily he succeeded in giving satisfactory explanations to the owner

of the house. At the earliest possible opportunity he gave information

against his wife, whom he handed over to the punishment she had

deserved.[211] Here again we get the hint that the charge of witchcraft

might be a useful weapon in the armoury of a husband, should he desire

for one reason or another to separate from his wife—for good. Another

tale is of a girl who saw her mother rise out of bed, anoint herself

and fly out of the window. The girl did likewise, acquiring apparently

the power of flight on the instant, and she found herself transported

into her mother’s presence. Then, being frightened, she called upon the

names of Jesus and the Virgin, and thereupon found herself back in her

bed.[212]

The witches, who entered into their unholy compact with Satan at the

Sabbat, were there invested with various tremendous and abominable

powers. Unlike sorcerers and magicians, who occasionally used their

black art to good purposes, witches could work nothing else but evil.

They were particularly fond of interfering with procreation, where both

men and women, because of the connection with original sin, were most

vulnerable. They produced sterility in the one sex, impotence in the

other.[213] Indeed it could be taken practically for certain that these

two evils were invariably due to witchcraft. Witches also produced

abortion and interfered with the flow of the mother’s milk.[214] They

sometimes offered up infants at their birth to demons; were vampires

and sustained themselves by sucking children’s blood.[215] They were

able to transform men and women into beasts, to create tempests and

thunder-storms.[216] Indeed they went about the world doing all

manner of noxious damage, ranging in seriousness from the breaking of

crucifixes to the destruction of human life. In their peregrinations

they were much assisted by their being able to transform themselves

into the likeness of animals, particularly of cats, so that it was

very difficult to keep them out of any dwelling-house they cared to

visit.[217] Indeed so powerful and versatile were witches supposed

to be, not only by vulgar report, but according to authoritative

statement, that it may seem difficult to understand how it could be

imagined that any human agency could ever get the better of them.

But something had to be done. The evil tended to grow so disastrously,

in this helped as a matter of fact—as in the case of sorcery—by the

Church’s decision that the magic arts were no mere delusion but

reality, and that while the practiser of them was a heretic, to believe

that he or she was no charlatan but genuinely in league with the Devil

was sound doctrine. In this way were men and women encouraged, whenever

ill-fortune befell them, to find a facile explanation for unmerited

calamity in such an intrinsically innocent incident, for example, as

that of a sinister-looking old woman with a hooked nose having peered

in at their cottage window. The simple fact of being found wandering

alone in fields or woods after nightfall constituted legitimate

evidence before the Inquisition. Or again, if an old woman said to

someone who had injured her, ‘You will repent of this,’ and some

misfortune subsequently occurred to the latter, the old woman might

easily on such trivial grounds be suspect.[218]

One of the most interesting and remarkable phenomena of the history

of witchcraft is that of the self-confessed witch, the woman who

deliberately and of her own accord gave herself out to be possessed

of supernatural powers in spite of the terrible peril incurred by

such an announcement. The explanation of this is partly economic—the

law of supply and demand operating in the case of the occult arts as

a marketable commodity, just as in any other—partly psychological.

Particularly when there was such unimpeachable authority for the

reality and potency of the black arts, there were always people quite

anxious to avail themselves of the means of fore-knowledge of, or

avenging an injury, or discomfiting a rival, and to pay handsomely

for the privilege. The demand existing, there were not wanting those

willing to satisfy it, to accept the risk in view of the generosity of

the remuneration. Sometimes the reputed witch succeeded in persuading

herself that she was one in very deed. Some curious coincidence,

the desired object actually occurring after the utterance of spells

and incantations, persuaded the superstitious mind, arguing ‘post

hoc ergo propter hoc,’ that the spells and incantations held in

them a miraculous power. The wretched woman would then with a vain

pride or a trembling apprehensive awe perceive in herself a being

supernatural.[219] But clearly the greater proportion of witchcraft

lore is founded upon confessions wrung by means of the rack from the

supposed culprit when brought before a civil or inquisitorial tribunal.

We do not know definitely when the Inquisition was first employed

against witchcraft; but certainly in 1374 it was determined by the

papacy that the Holy Office was competent to try such cases.[220] In

1437 Eugenius IV called upon inquisitors everywhere to exert themselves

against the evil.[221] And there is no question that throughout the

fifteenth century the tribunal carried on a crusade against witchcraft

with great assiduity. Although Sprenger was moved to confess that

the extirpation of the pest seemed an impossibility, being inclined

to lay the blame on the carelessness and inactivity of the secular

authority,[222] nevertheless the number of executions was terrible.

We are told that in a single year the Bishop of Bamberg destroyed six

hundred witches, the Bishop of Würzburg nine hundred.[223] A thousand

perished in the same space of time in the diocese of Como.[224] The

execution of witches, then, both in this century and the next, assumed

great proportions, largely owing to the thoroughness of inquisitorial

proceedings, though it must be added—despite Sprenger’s animadversions

upon its slackness—that actually the civil authority was responsible

for many. The Inquisition, therefore, must bear much of the blame

for the spread of witchcraft, or rather—for it amounted to the same

thing—for the witchcraft craze. Largely in its records were collected

the great stores of indisputable evidence of the reality of that heresy

which it had become one of the functions of the tribunal to eradicate.

By reason of its constitution and its methods of procedure the

Inquisition was always a very effective court; but it was especially

so in the case of witches, because in dealing with them the inquisitor

felt that he was engaged in a personal combat with Satan himself, and

that he had to exert all his powers in order to withstand, still more

to overcome, so formidable an adversary. Indeed it was very fortunate

that he was able to comfort himself with the knowledge that he was

impervious to the attacks of witchcraft. Nevertheless it was felt

necessary to take special precautions.[225]

Torture was used thoroughly where witches were concerned, and no doubt

the delirium thus occasioned, the victim being willing to put an end

to her torments by saying what she knew her judge wanted her to say

or imagined he would like to hear, was productive of many of the most

marvellous witch stories to be found in inquisitorial archives. But

the severity of the torture administered in these cases was due to the

extraordinary obduracy frequently shown by the victims. Such obstinacy

was taken as proof positive of Satanic assistance afforded to these

servants of hell, and the inquisitor was therefore goaded to greater

and greater cruelty, because he felt himself put upon his mettle. The

silence of the accused thus became positive evidence of guilt, as

damning as confession under the pains of rack or pulley—perhaps even

more so.[226] The gift of taciturnity, it was conjectured, might be

due to the wearing of a charm somewhere on the person, so that as a

preliminary to the application the alleged witch had to be divested of

all her clothing for thorough investigation to be made.[227] It was

held that a witch was unable to shed tears under torment, whereas—as

Sprenger urges sententiously—it is natural for women to weep. It was

desirable therefore to adjure the accused to shed tears.[228] If this

solemn exhortation was successful and the victim did cry and lament

under torture, she was not necessarily the better off; for this might

well be a device to deceive, a wile of the Devil’s to defeat the ends

of justice. The inquisitor, ever on the alert to discover such signs of

Satanic intervention, was apt to disbelieve in the genuineness of the

witch’s tears accordingly. Thus, whether it produced confession or only

obduracy, lamentation or silence, torture was in any event practically

certain to be successful. Indeed anyone defamed of witchcraft before

the Inquisition became so inextricably enmeshed in the toils that

escape from conviction was hardly possible save in the event of being

able to prove that the accuser was actuated by mortal enmity.[229]

And even the most persistent silence must, one imagines, practically

always in the end have been overborne. A sufficiently prolonged

continuance of torture must have produced the desired result—answers

to leading questions about the Sabbat, detailed descriptions culled

from the imagination of demon orgies, confessions as to the invocation

of evil spirits and malpractices carried on by their help, finally the

incrimination of others. So the witchcraft legend grew in substance,

in precision, in lurid picturesqueness. From the lips of the witches

themselves came the authentic particulars of the Sabbat, the flittings

through the air on broomsticks, the blasting of human lives by foul

spells, the inculpation of ever-increasing numbers in the guilt and the

heresy of witchcraft.

There is a most striking illustration of the astonishing efficacy of

inquisitorial methods in effectively defeating their purpose, and

actually producing the spread of the witchcraft craze, in the famous

case of the Vaudois or witches of Arras in the years 1459-1460,

when the arrest of a single alleged witch led to the inculpation of

one after another, each new victim in her torments naming others,

including many of the wealthiest and most important as well as the

humblest citizens, so that at length a positive panic was created.[230]

Not a single member of the community in Arras could feel himself

or herself secure. No one dared leave the city for fear that that

innocent act might be seized upon as a confession of guilt, and no one

cared to enter for fear of falling into the hands of the tribunal,

thus busily engaged in investigating an outburst of heresy of such

alarming proportions. To such a pass did things come that the material

prosperity of Arras was seriously prejudiced, as people became afraid

of having any dealings with the city. One dangerous source of economic

disturbance was that all creditors demanded instant payment of their

dues, fearing that their debtors might be among those arrested, seeing

that conviction involved the confiscation of the victim’s property, and

in such a case the creditor was held to have no claim on any part of it.

In producing such results as these the inquisitor was no doubt ever

most sincere and disinterested, genuinely aghast at the magnitude of

the evil he was charged to suppress, wholly blind to the fact that

its magnitude was mainly of his own creation. And in the feeling that

there could be no security so long as the witch remained alive, he

only shared the popular view. It was simply the universal conviction

that the appropriate punishment of witchcraft and the only sure remedy

against it was death by fire. Nor was the inquisitor alone in bringing

offenders to the stake. The civil courts and the ordinary episcopal

courts were no more lenient than the Holy Office. Even in Protestant

countries, where there was no Inquisition, the lot of the supposed

witch in the sixteenth century was no more tolerable than in those

countries where the Inquisition still continued to flourish. The

belief in the reality of witchcraft had taken firm root everywhere,

and Catholic and Protestant were alike in their literal interpretation

of the terrible words of Scripture, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch

to live,’ which seemed to afford all-sufficient sanction for the

inexorable judgments of all tribunals, whether clerical or lay. At the

same time the part played by the Inquisition forms one of the most

important chapters in the history of witchcraft, as it was the most

efficient and energetic tribunal engaged in the prosecution of the

heresy in its earlier days, inasmuch especially as it contributed so

much to the spread of the belief by the convinced fanaticism of its

members and those methods of obtaining evidence, which not only led

to sure conviction and constant incriminations, but actually provided

the raw material of supposed fact on which credulity was based. The

voluminous records of the holy tribunal, the learned treatises of its

members are the great repositories of the true and indisputable facts

concerning the abominable heresies of sorcery and witchcraft.

PART II

THE INQUISITION

CHAPTER I

ATTITUDE OF THE CHURCH TOWARDS HERESY PRIOR TO THE INSTITUTION OF THE

INQUISITION

The literal and fundamental meaning of the word Heresy is _choosing_.

The heretic is the man who selects certain doctrines, discards others,

giving rein to individual preference in the realm of religious belief.

Such an attitude is essentially incompatible with the conception that

the truth has once and for all been delivered to the saints, that the

faith is indivisible and unalterable, to be accepted in its entirety.

It is easily understood that eclecticism should be regarded as a danger

in the earliest days of a new religion by its adherents. The first

proselytes are anxious to define those distinctive features which mark

it off from other religions: for all religions have certain elements in

common. It was thus in the early stages of Christianity, which shared

certain characteristics with such beliefs as Mithraism, Gnosticism,

Neoplatonism. The idea of man’s need of a mediator with heaven was

abroad in the Roman world before the Messiah was proclaimed to it.

There thus existed a danger of confusion, that alien shoots of dogma

might be grafted upon the pure and original stock of Christianity.

The influence of such extraneous sources is apparent in the fourth

gospel. Even in the very earliest days when the body of Christian

belief consisted of little more than the disciples’ recollections of

the sayings and actions of their Founder, when the simplest conception

of pure and undefiled religion was being taught,[231] even then the

faithful were warned to beware of ‘false prophets,’ ‘false teachers’

who ‘privily shall bring in damnable heresies.’[232] As the fabric of

dogma began to be woven, the note became vehement. St. Paul denounces

‘false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the

apostles of Christ.’[233] In another place he declares, ‘But though

we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than

that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.’[234] So

far, however, even the idea of what constitutes heresy is vague, and

the spirit of tolerance and of brotherliness is strong. The offender

is not to be counted as an enemy, but admonished as a brother.[235]

The fact is that the flock is so small and the pagan world outside

so powerful that internal dissensions cannot be permitted. But the

new faith surviving, doctrine becomes more stereotyped, the feeling

of later generations more confident. Polycarp finds the heretic to

be antichrist, who belongs to the Devil and is the oldest son of

Satan,[236] and Tertullian in one passage recommends the employment of

compulsion against the heretic.[237]

Such language is not common among the early Fathers. They are

themselves members of a society liable to persecution, and they do not

preach coercion. Lactantius urges that the only weapon for Christians

to use is their reason; they must defend their faith not by violence,

but persuasion.[238] The Church in those days had not the opportunity

to use force, even if it had wished to: and this fact must be borne in

mind in connection with Tertullian’s enunciation of the principle of

tolerance, when he declares that the selection of his mode of worship

is a man’s natural right, the exercise of which cannot be either

harmful or profitable to his neighbour, and that it is not the part

of a religion to compel men to embrace it.[239] In the (only apparent)

contradiction between this ruling and the counsel given regarding the

treatment of heretics, Tertullian laid down a principle of momentous

consequence for the future, namely, that while force should not be

applied to the unbeliever, its use is legitimate in the case of the man

who has once accepted the faith and erred in it.

With the accession of Constantine, there dawned a new era for the

Christian Church. Till then the Roman state had been neutral, when not

actively hostile; from this time onwards, with one brief interval,

it was an active supporter. The Church became possessed of all the

enormous power of the imperial authority. The civil order is definitely

Christian, and one of the prime duties of the Emperor, lord of the

world, is the protection of the Church. Constantine speedily showed

himself anxious to take a leading part in ecclesiastical matters. He

had recourse to torture, confiscation of property, exile and possibly

the death penalty also in harrying the Donatists.[240]

Donatism was a small thing in comparison with Arianism, which shook the

Christian Church to its foundations. When the fathers of Nicaea decided

the intricate metaphysical question of ‘consubstantial,’ the Emperor

proclaimed exile for all who did not accept the Council’s decision.

Against this determination to root out their enemies, to establish one

interpretation of truth by force, the Fathers made no protest, but

accepted the intervention of the secular authority on their behalf.

There was no thought of the possible consequence of such a pact in the

future.[241] The triumph of the orthodox was short-lived. The Arians

were victorious later on and in their turn persecuted the Trinitarians.

The Christians, said Julian the Apostate, treated each other like

wild beasts. The punishments inflicted by one party upon the other

included imprisonment, flogging, torture, death. To such a pass had

doctrinal differences already brought the adherents of a religion which

proclaimed peace and goodwill among men. The tradition of persecution

had been thoroughly established. The laws of Theodosius II and

Valentinian II enumerate as many as thirty-two different heresies, all

punishable, the penalties being such as deprivation of civil rights,

exile, corporal punishment and death. But the heresies are carefully

differentiated, the severest penalties being reserved for Manichæism,

which had been punished by the Roman state in its pagan, polytheistic

and tolerant days, because of its anti-social tendencies.[242] But

now orthodox emperors persecuted Arians, Arian emperors persecuted

followers of Athanasius, simply because they had taken sides in a

theological controversy.

What view did the Church take of the activities of the lay power?

Was it actively approving or disapproving, or passively acquiescent?

We find some of the Fathers still preaching the old doctrines of

tolerance. Athanasius, himself at the time persecuted, declared that

persecution was an invention of the Devil. To Chrysostom heretics are

as persons diseased, nearly blind, assuredly to be led, not forced. He

comments on the parable of the tares, and urges the necessity of being

very careful, lest the godly be destroyed together with heretics.[243]

Jerome remembers that the Church was founded upon persecutions and

martyrdoms and on the whole seems to inculcate lenience in treatment

of heretics, though a remark to the effect that Arius, at first only

a single spark, not being immediately extinguished, set the whole

world on fire, and that corrupted flesh must be cut off, points to a

different opinion.[244]

The most significant of the later Fathers is St. Augustine. In his

case there is a notable change of front with regard to the treatment

of heretics. By temperament he was an advocate of toleration, and at

first, like Chrysostom, he appeals to the parable of the tares in

justification of tolerance. Heretics should be allowed the opportunity

to correct themselves and to repent. They are to be regarded as lost

sheep. He is afraid that persecution might lead to those who were in

reality heretics becoming hypocritical Catholics.[245] But later on

he altered his opinions. He had found that the weapons of persuasion

and eloquence were not strong enough to break down the obduracy of his

enemies the Donatists. He had been too optimistic. The methods of force

employed by the secular power were after all salutary and necessary.

‘He therefore, who refuses to obey the imperial laws, when made against

the truth of God, acquires a great reward; he who refuses to obey, when

they are made for support of the divine truth, exposes himself to most

grievous punishment.’[246] He rejoices, therefore, in a Christianized

state. The death penalty he indeed strongly reprobates as contrary to

Christian charity, but he approves both banishment and confiscation

of property.[247] These later opinions of St. Augustine were largely

accepted after him.

An important episode in the history of the Church’s attitude to heresy

is the execution of the Spanish heretic, Priscillian, by the Emperor

Maximus. Priscillian’s teachings, akin to Manichæism, were denounced

by several bishops, and it was upon their complaint that the Spaniard

was brought before the imperial tyrant. The action of the bishops,

who had thus involved themselves in the guilt of blood, wittingly or

unwittingly, was severely condemned by St. Ambrose and still more by

Martin of Tours, who refused to have any communion with them. This

happened in 385.[248] In 447 it seemed that heresy was reviving in

Spain, and Pope Leo I expressly commended the act of Maximus. He feared

lest, if such damnable error was not crushed, there should be an end

to all human and divine law; and if he did not ask for the death

sentence, he was quite willing that the Church should acquiesce in the

state’s severity and reap the advantages resulting from it.[249] Thus

to welcome the results of the shedding of blood in cases of heresy,

while refusing to accept the responsibility for it, constituted a most

dangerous attitude.

For centuries after the days of Leo I heresy almost ceased to be a

problem for the Church at all. Western Christendom entered into the

gloom of the Dark Ages, its history the arid record of barbarian

invasions and the rivalries of Childerichs and Chilperichs. The human

intelligence was dormant: consequently heresy ceased to be a force.

When there is no mental activity, no education, no discussion, there

may be faith, there can never be heresy. When the darkness lifted a

little, heresy once more became a problem. In 1022 thirteen Cathari

were burnt by order of, and in the presence of, King Robert II of

France. The punishment of heresy by fire was an entire innovation.

There was no existing law to sanction it. The stake had been used

by Roman emperors to punish parricides, slaves who attempted their

masters’ lives, and incendiaries, and it still existed as a punishment

for sorcerers and witches. The stake may have been used on this

occasion because it was an impressive and theatrical death and, a

choice being demanded between abjuration and death, it was considered

the latter should be specially terrifying.[250] Another execution of

Cathari, this time by hanging, took place in 1051 at Goslar in Saxony

in the presence of the Emperor Henry III. As in France, so in Germany,

the law knew neither the offence nor the punishment. The Emperor was

acting simply in the public defence.[251]

It is important to note the part played in the treatment of heretics

at this period by the populace. In both the cases just cited the

secular prince had in his action the full approval of the people. It

is particularly noticed by the chronicles of the first incident that

the deed was ‘regis jussu et universae plebis consensu.’[252] And

Henry strengthened his position in the absence of any written law by

securing the agreement of his subjects.[253] Nothing could be better

attested than the crowd’s hatred of the heretic in the eleventh and

twelfth centuries, as far as northern Europe was concerned.[254] In

the south it was different. There are several instances of the feeling

in the north in the late decades of the eleventh and early decades of

the twelfth century. For example, in 1076 at Cambrai a Catharan who

had been condemned by the bishop as a heretic (no sentence pronounced)

was seized upon by the bishop’s officers and the mob, who placed him

in some sort of cabin, which they burned with the prisoner inside it.

It is said that the recantation of Roscellinus was due to the threat

of death at the hands of the populace.[255] In 1114 certain heretics

having been placed provisionally in prison by the Bishop of Strassburg

were in the bishop’s absence forcibly seized upon by the crowd, who,

the chronicler states, feared clerical lenience. They were led out

of the town and there burnt alive.[256] A similar event happened in

Cologne in 1143; whilst two years later at Liège the clergy only just

succeeded in rescuing the crowd’s victims from its clutches. Lawless

violence against heretics continued to evince itself in France into

the following century, there being instances of it in Troyes, Nevers,

Besançon, Paris, even at a time when the secular power, under Philip

Augustus, was active in bringing heretics to the stake.

What was the attitude of the clergy in this period, during which it

seems evident that in northern Europe secular princes and public

opinion were united in thinking heresy deserving of death, even by

burning? There is the evidence of the mob fearing clerical lenience in

one case cited, of the clergy actually intervening against the crowd

in another. When the heretics were burnt at Cambrai in 1076 Gregory

VII protested and ordered the excommunication of the inhabitants.[257]

And there is a very notable protest against the use of force by Wazon,

Bishop of Liège (1042-8), who in answer to a query of the Bishop of

Châlons as to whether he should yield up heretics to the secular arm or

not, referred to the parable of the tares in support of lenience.[258]

His successor, Theoduin, on the other hand, is found counselling Henry

I of France to mete out punishment to the followers of Berengar of

Tours,[259] and about the same time we find the Archbishop of Milan

giving some supposed Manichæans the choice between abjuration and the

stake.[260]

The fact that most clearly emerges from the consideration of rather

conflicting evidence in this period is the absence of any law

regarding heretics. The mob, secular princes and clergy are all acting

irregularly, taking measures in self-defence in the absence of written

rulings. Generally speaking, it would appear that there is a prevailing

idea that heresy merits the extreme penalty. At the same time some

attempt was made at various ecclesiastical councils to standardize

procedure against heresy.

A Council at Rheims in 1049 spoke only of excommunication as a

punishment; one at Toulouse in 1119 did the same, but also called upon

the secular arm to render aid.[261] The middle of the twelfth century

saw a great revival of both Roman and Canon law and the publication of

the Decree of Gratian. The Decree did not put all uncertainty at an

end. It certainly laid down a clear ruling regarding the confiscation

of property. The heretic, being outside both human and divine law,

could not hold property. But regarding the death penalty there could

be no plain direction, because on this subject Gratian’s authorities

were contradictory and remained so despite his efforts to reconcile

them.[262] Further efforts at definition were made by ecclesiastical

councils during the century. One sitting at Rheims in 1157 demanded

banishment and branding for those who simply professed Catharism, for

proselytizers perpetual imprisonment; but it seems to hint at the death

penalty in the veiled phrase: ‘carcere perpetuo, nisi gravius aliquid

fieri debet visum, recludentur.’[263] Another Council at Tours in 1163,

presided over by Alexander III, reiterated the demand for

incarceration and also ordered the confiscation of goods.[264] The

second Council of the Lateran of 1179, lamenting the marked spread of

heresy, commended the use of force by the secular arm and proclaimed

a two years’ indulgence to all who should take up arms against

heretics.[265]

The first secular law in the Middle Ages dealing with heresy is

English. In 1166 two Cathari were brought before Henry II at Oxford,

whipped and branded with a red key and banished.[266] Shortly

afterwards in the same year appeared the clause in the Assize of

Clarendon, forbidding the sheltering of heretics on the pain of having

one’s house destroyed.[267] Other severe secular legislation soon

appeared in other countries. In 1194 the Emperor Henry VI ordered

the confiscation of the property, and the destruction of the houses,

of heretics and inforced fines on communities and individuals who

neglected to assist, when they had the opportunity, in the arrest

of heretics.[268] The same year Alfonso II of Aragon, aiming at

expelling all Manichæans and Waldenses from his dominions, issued an

edict declaring all heretics public enemies and banishing them.[269]

The ineffectiveness of this edict is demonstrated by the appearance

of a severer one three years later issued by Alfonso’s successor,

Pedro II, famous as the victor over the Moors at Las Navas de Tolosa,

equally notorious for his warlike prowess, his religious zeal, his

prodigality and licentiousness. Once again banishment is decreed, but

it is added that if any heretics remain in defiance of the edict after

a specified date they shall perish at the stake and their effects be

confiscated.[270]

Whatever may have been the case earlier, there seems good evidence

of the zeal of the clergy against heretics in the latter part of the

twelfth century, which saw so much more precision in the declarations

of ecclesiastical councils and secular laws on the subject. In 1167

we find the Abbot of Vézelai, when several heretics were before

him, appealing to the people to give sentence, and accepting their

demand for a death of torture. Some years later at Rheims we find the

Archbishop and clergy in agreement with the nobles that two Catharan

women should be burnt.[271] Hugh, Bishop of Auxerre (1183-1206), is

a busy prosecutor of heretics, causing many to be burnt or exiled.

More notable than such isolated instances of clerical activity is

the co-operation between Pope and Emperor which led to the important

bull entitled _Ad abolendam_.[272] In 1184, Lucius III and Frederick

Barbarossa met at Verona, and as the result of their conference this

bull was promulgated, which (among other provisions) fixed rules for

the prosecution of suspected heretics, the visitation of infected

areas and the assistance of all civil authorities. The Emperor for his

part placed heretics under the ban of the empire.[273] The decree of

Henry VI, already referred to, was plainly based on this action of his

predecessor’s.

Towards the end of the twelfth century, then, we have clear evidence

of secular and ecclesiastical authorities working hand in hand for

the suppression of heresy. To the former, heresy seemed equivalent to

rebellion; to the latter, equivalent to murder, being the murder of

the soul. When Pedro II issued his harsh edict against the Cathari of

Aragon, he claimed that he was actuated by zeal for the public welfare

and a desire to obey the canons of the Church.[274] There was no order

in the canons that heretics should be burnt to death; but otherwise,

Pedro’s appeal to Canon law was justified: and besides the canons,

there were the various edicts of ecclesiastical councils during the

century, all of them calling upon the secular authority to use its

utmost efforts towards the eradication of heresy.

It has been urged that the attitude adopted by the Church was a

most unwilling attitude, forced upon it by influences too powerful

to resist, that the main motive power of persecution came not from

the Church, but from the lay authority and from public opinion. The

theory is advanced that during the period, roughly from 1000 to 1150,

when the position of the heretic was a matter of legal uncertainty,

the clergy opposed the violence evinced against heretics, and in

eventually yielding they submitted to the strength of a custom which

constituted a sort of _jus non scriptum_.[275] But there is not much

force in this plea. To acquiesce in a _jus non scriptum_ argues

either indifference or impotence: and the Church in the eleventh and

twelfth centuries was neither indifferent nor impotent. Nor is the

opposition of the clergy to mob violence an argument to the point.

A dislike for mob law and lynching does not necessarily betoken

disapproval of capital punishment.[276] It is true—and this is very

important—that spontaneously, without any direct incitement from the

clergy, the people regarded the heretic with intense abhorrence. We

ought probably to add that in the absence of written law on the subject

there was a rather vague idea, shared by the mob and their rulers,

that not only death, but a particularly terrible kind of death, was

an appropriate punishment for the heretic—this idea being perhaps

derived from the fact that Roman law had at different times meted out

this doom for certain kinds of heretics, particularly Manichæans,

and other offenders, such as sorcerers and witches. It is true also

that the heretics upon whom the mob turned were generally Manichæan.

Yet no one who has any knowledge of the position of the mediæval

Church can honestly maintain on these grounds that the Church had

no responsibility for the rigour displayed towards the heretic. The

heretic was regarded as an offender against society, because it was a

Christian society. Heresy, being error in the faith, was investigated

and recognized by the Church. The clergy, not the mob, discovered

the heresy and the heretic; for such discovery could not be made

without theological knowledge, of which the mob were ignorant. And

such knowledge as they possessed, were it reasoned understanding or

merely half-assimilated fragments of doctrine, was derived solely from

clerical instruction. It was difficult for any sort of knowledge to

come from any other source. Heresy was regarded as dangerous to the

community, because, to begin with, the Church had found it dangerous

to itself. The intellectual and spiritual atmosphere with which

Christendom was permeated was of the Church’s making. The attempt,

therefore, to absolve the Church from responsibility for the measures

taken against heresy in these centuries—by whomsoever they were

taken—involves a wholly erroneous, indeed an absurd, under-estimate of

the authority of the Church.

In 1198 there came to the papal throne perhaps the greatest of the

whole pontifical line, Lothario Conti, Innocent III. High in resolve

to strengthen Church and Papacy, he at once gave his attention to the

problem of heresy. But though zealous, in some respects he showed a

commendable moderation. He was anxious that the innocent should not

be confounded with the guilty in the impetuosity of the perfervid

clerk or the impatience of the mob; and for the first ten years of

his pontificate he made trial of a pacific programme.[277] But in one

part of Christendom the problem of heresy had by this time become

acute. In the lands of the Count of Toulouse, Catharism was as rampant

as were clerical abuses. The pleasure-loving, prosperous inhabitants

of Provence, of Narbonne, of Albi felt the authority of the Church

to be an obnoxious incubus upon their worldliness, their careless

independence. The clergy were hated and despised. The troubadour made

pleasant ridicule of the sacraments and every doctrine of the Church,

however sacred. The death-bed repentance scheme of the Catharan system,

its denial of a purgatory and a hell, were popular. Still more so was

the pretext afforded by its anti-sacerdotal precepts for despoiling the

Church.[278] So the nobles and the rich _bourgeoisie_ and merchants

received heretics into their houses, clothed them and fed them, while

they were exempted from taxes. So great was the hold of heresy in his

lands, that Count Raymond V of Toulouse declared himself to be wholly

unable to resist it.[279] His successor, Raymond VI, had no wish to

resist it, being of the same stuff as his people and seeing no call

to disturb them at the bidding of priests. Thus when a Council at

Montpellier in 1195 anathematized all princes failing to enforce the

Church’s decrees against heretics, he paid no heed.

A couple of months after his accession Innocent III sent two

commissioners into Languedoc, one of them being subsequently

entrusted with legatine powers, to tackle a situation so serious

that the whole of that country seemed on the point of slipping away

from its allegiance to the Catholic faith and communion. They were

instructed that obdurate heretics were to be banished, their property

confiscated; and the secular authority was to see to it that their

measures were carried out under pain of interdict. The efforts of these

two commissioners were entirely fruitless. In 1204 their successors

were entrusted with increased authority, which gave them a complete

dictatorship over the ecclesiastical dignitaries of Languedoc, who were

bitterly reviled for their incapacity. Yet neither these measures nor

lavish bribes to secular rulers proved efficacious, and even the iron

resolution of the commissioners, Pierre de Castelnau and Arnaud of

Citeaux, was breaking down beneath the weight of persistent failure,

when a certain Spaniard, Diego de Arzevedo, Bishop of Osma, suggested

to the legates the scheme of an evangelistic enterprise. This was

adopted, and bare-footed missionaries were sent forth to re-convert

the erring by simple preaching and exhortation. Among the preachers

was St. Dominic himself. This laudable scheme also failed. There is

a legend that Dominic, stung by his ill-success, predicted what the

upshot of such deplorable obduracy must eventually be. There was a

saying in Spain, he quoted, that a beating may work where a blessing

won’t. The towers of the cities of the fair land would have to be

laid low, its people reduced to servitude.[280] The actual signal for

a complete reversal of policy was the murder of Pierre de Castelnau

in circumstances which recall the murder of Becket. The legate had

exasperated the Count of Toulouse; one of the latter’s knights slew the

priest. Innocent called for vengeance upon the blood-guilty Count; and

the Albigensian Crusade, which Innocent had ere this been preaching

in vain to Philip Augustus of France, was the immediate consequence.

The first crusading army, an international force, assembled at Lyons

in June 1209.[281] The ensuing wars are memorable for the men who took

part in them—Pedro of Aragon, the zealous Catholic, now intervening

on behalf of Count Raymond and perishing on the field of Muret,

Simon de Montfort, the ‘athlete of Christ’! Never was there Christian

warrior purer in his motives than Simon, more whole-hearted in his

enthusiasm, or more utterly inhuman in his fanaticism. These wars are

also memorable for their political issues and consequences. From the

outset purely political interests were intermixed with the religious.

The great nobles who led the forces of the Cross united with their

pious zeal an at least equally genuine and powerful hatred and jealousy

of the rich and bountiful southern land which harboured a culture so

different from their own, more Saracen than European. The wars were

wars of the north against the south, of one civilization against

another. The astute and calculating Philip Augustus seized with avidity

the opportunity of bringing under his direct control a province of

France, which had been practically an independent kingdom; and the

crusade is, therefore, of first-rate importance as a big contribution

to the unification of the French kingdom.

If to many who took part in them the original purpose of these

religious wars was altogether subsidiary, that purpose was none

the less most horribly accomplished. The peculiar civilization of

Languedoc was blotted out, its beauty and fragrance being utterly

extinguished by the onslaught of the crusaders. With the civilization

went the heresy that it had harboured. Catharism indeed continued to

exist in the devastated region, but all its vital power of expansion

had been destroyed when the conditions that fostered it vanished.

The Albigensian wars were the most successful attempt to extirpate

heresy known in history. They were successful because they were

utterly ruthless and included wholesale massacres. When the town of

Béziers fell, it is said that twenty thousand of its inhabitants were

slaughtered. There were good Catholics as well as Cathari among the

populace of the place; but the story goes that when Arnaud of Citeaux

was asked whether the Catholics were to be spared, in his anxiety lest

a single heretic should escape by pretending orthodoxy, he replied,

‘Kill them all, for God knows His own.’[282]

When the crusaders appeared in Languedoc, toleration vanished out of

western Christendom. There was no asylum left where the heretic could

feel assured of safety from the persecutor. The power of the Church

against the disobedient had been mightily asserted. The ruler who had

dared to disregard her order to purify his land of its contaminators

had been brought low. From every country the papacy had been able to

bring together doughty warriors to uphold the unity of the faith by

spilling the blood of the perverse wanderers from the fold. The policy

of force had been triumphantly vindicated by the amplitude of its

success.