CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES
It would be an error, in view of the biological generalization
proceeded on and the facts noted in this inquiry, to suppose that
even in the Dark Ages, so called, [1194] the spirit of critical
reason was wholly absent from the life of Christendom. It had simply
grown very rare, and was the more discountenanced where it strove
to speak. But the most systematic suppression of heresies could
not secure that no private heresy should remain. As Voltaire has
remarked, there was "nearly always a small flock separated from the
great." [1195] Apart too from such quasi-rationalism as was involved
in semi-Pelagianism, [1196] critical heresy chronically arose even
in the Byzantine provinces, which by the curtailment of the Empire
had been left the most homogeneous and therefore the most manageable
of the Christian States. It is necessary to note those survivals of
partial freethinking, when we would trace the rise of modern thought.
§ 1. HERESY IN BYZANTIUM
It was probably from some indirect influence of the new anti-idolatrous
religion of Islam that in the eighth century the soldier-emperor,
Leo the Isaurian, known as the Iconoclast, derived his aversion
to the image-worship [1197] which had long been as general in
the Christian world as ever under polytheism. So gross had the
superstition become that particular images were frequently selected
as god-parents; of others the paint was partly scratched off to be
mixed with the sacramental wine; and the bread was solemnly put in
contact with them. [1198] Leo began (726) by an edict simply causing
the images to be placed so high that they could not be kissed, but
on being met with resistance and rebellion he ordered their total
removal (730). One view is that he saw image-worship to be the
main hindrance to the spread of the faith among Jews and Moslems,
and took his measures accordingly. [1199] Save on this one point he
was an orthodox Christian and Trinitarian, and his long effort to
put down images and pictures was in itself rather fanatical [1200]
than rationalistic, though a measure of freethinking was developed
among the religious party he created. [1201] Of this spirit, as
well as of the aversion to image-worship, [1202] something must
have survived the official restoration of idolatry; but the traces
are few. The most zealous iconoclasts seem never to have risen above
the flat inconsistency of treating the cross and the written gospels
with exactly the same adoration that their opponents paid to images;
[1203] and their appeal to the scriptures--which was their first and
last argument--was accordingly met by the retort that they themselves
accepted the authority of tradition, as did the image-worshippers. The
remarkable hostility of the army to the latter is to be explained,
apparently, by the local bias of the eastern regions from which the
soldiers were mainly recruited.
In the ninth century, when Saracen rivalry had stung the Byzantines
into some partial revival of culture and science, [1204] the
all-learned Patriarch Photius (c. 820-891), who reluctantly accepted
ecclesiastical office, earned a dangerous repute for freethinking
by declaring from the pulpit that earthquakes were produced by
earthly causes and not by divine wrath. [1205] But this was an
almost solitary gleam of reason in a generation wholly given up to
furious strife over the worship of images, and Photius was one of
the image-worshippers. The battle swung from extreme to extreme. The
emperor Michael II, "the Stammerer" (820-828), held a medium position,
and accordingly acquired the repute of a freethinker. A general under
Leo V, "the Armenian," he had conspired against him, and when on the
verge of execution had been raised to the throne in place of Leo, who
was assassinated at the altar. The new emperor aimed above all things
at peace and quietness; but his methods were thoroughly Byzantine,
and included the castration of the four sons of Leo. Michael himself
is said to have doubted the future resurrection of men, to have
maintained that Judas was saved, and to have doubted the existence
of Satan because he is not named in the Pentateuch [1206]--a species
of freethinking not far removed from that of the Iconoclasts, whose
grounds were merely Biblical. A generation later came Michael IV, "the
Sot," bred a wastrel under the guardianship of his mother, Theodora
(who in 842 restored image-worship and persecuted the Paulicians),
and her brother Bardas, who ultimately put her in a convent. Michael,
repeatedly defeated by the Saracens, long held his own at home. Taking
into favour Basil, who married his (Michael's) mistress, he murdered
Bardas, and a year later (867) was about to murder Basil in turn,
when the latter anticipated him, murdered the emperor, and assumed the
purple. It was under Basil, who put down the Iconoclasts, that Photius,
after formally deposing and being deposed by the Pope of Rome (864-66)
was really deposed and banished (868), to be restored to favour and
office ten years later. In 886, on the death of Basil, he was again
deposed, dying about 891. In that kaleidoscope of plot and faction,
fanaticism and crime, there is small trace of sane thinking. Michael
IV, in his disreputable way, was something of a freethinker, and
could even with impunity burlesque the religious processions of
the clergy, [1207] the orthodox populace joining in the laugh;
but there was no such culture at Constantinople as could develop
a sober rationalism, or sustain it against the clergy if it showed
its head. Intelligence in general could not rise above the plane of
the wrangle over images. While the struggle lasted, it was marked by
all the ferocity that belonged from the outset to Christian strifes;
and in the end, as usual, the more irrational bias triumphed.
It was in a sect whose doctrine at one point coincided with iconoclasm
that there were preserved such rude seeds of oriental rationalism
as could survive the rule of the Byzantine emperors, and carry the
stimulus of heresy to the west. The rise of the Paulicians in Armenia
dates from the seventh century, and was nominally by way of setting
up a creed on the lines of Paul as against the paganized system of the
Church. Rising as they did on the borders of Persia, they were probably
affected from the first by Mazdean influences, as the dualistic
principle was always affirmed by their virtual founder, Constantine,
afterwards known as Sylvanus. [1208] Their original tenets seem to have
been anti-Manichean, anti-Gnostic (though partly Marcionite), opposed
to the worship of images and relics, to sacraments, to the adoration
of the Virgin, of saints, and of angels, and to the acceptance of the
Old Testament; and in an age in which the reading of the Sacred Books
had already come to be regarded as a privilege of monks and priests,
they insisted on reading the New Testament for themselves. [1209]
In this they were virtually founding on the old pagan conception
of religion, under which all heads of families could offer worship
and sacrifice without the intervention of a priest, as against the
Judæo-Christian sacerdotalism, which vetoed anything like a private
cultus. In the teaching of Sylvanus, further, there were distinct
Manichean and Gnostic characteristics--notably, hostility to Judaism;
the denial that Christ had a real human body, capable of suffering; and
the doctrine that baptism and the communion were properly spiritual and
not physical rites. [1210] In the ninth century, when they had become
a powerful and militant sect, often at war with the empire, they were
still marked by their refusal to make any difference between priests
and laymen. Anti-ecclesiasticism was thus a main feature of the whole
movement; and the Byzantine Government, recognizing in its doctrine
a particularly dangerous heresy, had at once bloodily attacked it,
causing Sylvanus to be stoned to death. [1211] Still it grew, even
to the length of exhibiting the usual phenomena of schism within
itself. One section obtained the protection of the first iconoclastic
emperor, who agreed with them on the subject of images; and a later
leader, Sergius or Tychicus, won similar favour from Nicephorus I;
but Leo the Armenian (suc. 813), fearing the stigma of their other
heresies, and having already trouble enough from his iconoclasm,
set up against them, as against the image-worshippers, a new and
cruel persecution. [1212] They were thus driven over to the Saracens,
whose advance-guard they became as against the Christian State; but the
iconoclast Constantine Copronymus sympathetically [1213] transplanted
many of them to Constantinople and Thrace, thus introducing their
doctrine into Europe. The Empress Theodora (841-855), who restored
image-worship, [1214] sought to exterminate those left in Armenia,
slaying, it is said, a hundred thousand. [1215] Many of the remnant
were thus forced into the arms of the Saracens; and the sect did the
empire desperate mischief during many generations. [1216]
Meantime those planted in Thrace, in concert with the main body,
carried propaganda into Bulgaria, and these again were further
reinforced by refugees from Armenia in the ninth century, and in the
tenth by a fresh colony transplanted from Armenia by the emperor
John Zimisces, who valued them as a bulwark against the barbarous
Slavs. [1217] Fresh persecution under Alexius I at the end of the
eleventh century failed to suppress them; and imperial extortion
constantly drove to their side numbers of fresh adherents, [1218]
while the Bulgarians for similar reasons tended in mass to adopt
their creed as against that of Constantinople. So greatly did the
cult flourish that at its height it had a regular hierarchy, notably
recalling that of the early Manicheans--with a pope, twelve magistri,
and seventy-two bishops, each of whom had a filius major and filius
minor as his assistants. Withal the democratic element remained strong,
the laying on of the hands of communicants on the heads of newcomers
being part of the rite of reception into full membership. Thus it
came about that from Bulgaria there passed into western Europe, [1219]
partly through the Slavonic sect called Bogomiles or Bogomilians [1220]
(= Theophiloi, "lovers of God"), who were akin to the Paulicians,
partly by more general influences, [1221] a contagion of democratic
and anti-ecclesiastical heresy; so that the very name Bulgar became
the French bougre = heretic--and worse. [1222] It specified the most
obvious source of the new anti-Romanist heresies of the Albigenses,
if not of the Vaudois (Waldenses).
§ 2. CRITICAL HERESY IN THE WEST
In the west, meanwhile, where the variety of social elements was
favourable to new life, heresy of a rationalistic kind was not wholly
lacking. About the middle of the eighth century we find one Feargal
or Vergilius, an Irish priest in Bavaria, accused by St. Boniface,
his enemy, of affirming, "in defiance of God and his own soul,"
the doctrine of the antipodes, [1223] which must have reached him
through the ancient Greek lore carried to Ireland in the primary
period of Christianization of that province. Of that influence we
have already seen a trace in Pelagius and Coelestius; and we shall
see more later in John the Scot. After being deposed by the Pope,
Vergilius was reinstated; was made Bishop of Salzburg, and held the
post till his death; and was even sainted afterwards; but the doctrine
disappeared for centuries from the Christian world.
Other heresies, however, asserted themselves. Though image-worship
finally triumphed there as in the east, it had strong opponents,
notably Claudius, bishop of Turin (fl. 830) under the emperor Louis
the Pious, son of Charlemagne, and his contemporary Agobard, bishop
of Lyons. [1224] It is a significant fact that both men were born
in Spain; and either to Saracen or to Jewish influence--the latter
being then strong in the Moorish and even in the Christian [1225]
world--may fairly be in part attributed their marked bias against
image-worship. Claudius was slightly and Agobard well educated in
Latin letters, so that an early impression [1226] would seem to have
been at work in both cases. However that may be, they stood out as
singularly rationalistic theologians in an age of general ignorance
and superstition. Claudius vehemently resisted alike image-worship,
saint-worship, and the Papal claims, and is recorded to have termed a
council of bishops which condemned him "an assembly of asses." [1227]
Agobard, in turn, is quite extraordinary in the thoroughness of his
rejection of popular superstition, being not only an iconoclast but an
enemy to prayer for change in the weather, to belief in incantations
and the power of evil spirits, to the ordeal by fire, to the wager
of battle, [1228] and to the belief in the verbal inspiration of the
Sacred Books. In an age of enormous superstition and deep ignorance,
he maintained within the Church that Reason was the noble gift of
God. [1229] He was a rationalist born out of due time. [1230]
A grain of rationalism, as apart from professional self-interest,
may also have entered into the outcry made at this period by the
clergy against the rigidly predestinarian doctrine of the monk
Gottschalk. [1231] His enemy, Rabanus or Hrabanus (called "the
Moor"), seems again to represent some Saracen influence, inasmuch
as he reproduced the scientific lore of Isidore of Seville. [1232]
But the philosophic semi-rationalism of John Scotus (d. 875), later
known as Erigena (John the Scot = of Ireland--the original "Scots"
being Irish), seems to be traceable to the Greek studies which had
been cherished in Christianized Ireland while the rest of western
Europe lost them, and represents at once the imperfect beginning
of the relatively rationalistic philosophy of Nominalism [1233] and
the first western revival of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,
howbeit by way of accommodation to the doctrine of the Church. [1234]
That John the Scot was an Irishman remains practically certain,
even if we give up the term "Erigena," which, as has been shown by
Floss, the most careful editor of his works, is not found in the
oldest MSS. The reading there is Ierugena, which later shades into
Erugena and Eriugena. (Cp. Ueberweg, i, 359; Poole, pp. 55-56,
note; Dr. Th. Christlieb, Leben und Lehre des Johannes Scotus
Erigena, 1860, p. 14 sq.; and Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena:
ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie im
Mittelalter, 1861, pp. 38-40.) From this elusive cognomen no
certain inference can be drawn, too many being open; though the
fact that John had himself coined the term Graiugena for a late
Greek writer makes it likely that he called himself Ierugena in
the sense of "born in the holy (island)" = Ireland. But the name
Scotus, occurring without the Ierugena, is common in old MSS.;
and it is almost impossible that any save a Scot of Ireland should
have possessed the scholarship of John in the ninth century. In
the west, Greek scholarship and philosophy had been special to
Ireland from the time of Pelagius; and it is from Greek sources
that John draws his inspiration and cast of thought. M. Taillandier
not unjustly calls the Ireland of that era "l'île des saints,
mais aussi l'île des libres penseurs." (Scot Érigène et la
philosophie scolastique, 1843, p. 64.) To the same effect Huber,
pp. 40-41. In writing that Johannes "was of Scottish nationality,
but was probably born and brought up in Ireland," Ueberweg (i,
358) obscures the fact that the people of Ireland were the Scoti
of that period. All the testimony goes to show "that Ireland
was called Scotia, and its ruling people Scoti, from the first
appearance of these names down to the eleventh century. But that
[the] present Scotland was called Scotia, or its people Scoti,
before the eleventh century, not so much as one single authority
can be produced" (Pinkerton, Enquiry into the History of Scotland,
1789, ii, 237). Irish Scots gave their name to Scotland, and it
was adopted by the Teutonic settlers.
While the land of John the Scot's birth is thus fairly certain, the
place of his death remains a mystery. Out of a statement by Asser
that King Alfred made one John, a priest, Abbot of Athelney, and
that the said Abbot was murdered at the altar by hired assassins,
there grew a later story that Alfred made John the Scot Abbot of
Malmesbury, and that he was slain with the styli of two of his
pupils. It is clear that the John of Asser was an "Old Saxon,"
and not the philosopher; and it is difficult to doubt that the
second story, which arises in the twelfth century, is a hearsay
distortion of the first. Cp. Christlieb, who argues (p. 42 sq.) for
two Johns, one of them Scotus, and both assassinated, with Huber,
who sets forth (p. 108 sq.) the view here followed. There is really
no adequate ground for believing that John the Scot was ever a
priest. We know not where or when he died; but the presumption
is that it was in France, and not long after the death of his
patron Charles--877. (Huber, p. 121.)
Called in by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, himself a normally
superstitious believer, [1235] to answer Gottschalk, John Scotus in
turn was accused of heresy, as he well might be on many points of his
treatise, De Praedestinatione [1236] (851). He fiercely and not very
fairly condemned Gottschalk as a heretic, charging him with denying
both divine grace and freewill, but without disposing of Gottschalk's
positive grounds; and arguing that God could not be the cause of sin,
as if Gottschalk had not said the same thing. His superior speculative
power comes out in his undertaking to show that for the Divine Being
sin is non-ens; and that therefore that Being cannot properly be said
either to foreknow or to predestinate, or to punish. But the argument
becomes inconsistent inasmuch as it further affirms Deity to have
so constituted the order of things that sin punishes itself. [1237]
It is evident that in assimilating his pantheistic conceptions he
had failed to think out their incompatibility with any theistic
dogma whatever; his reasoning, on the whole, being no more coherent
than Gottschalk's. He had in fact set out from an arbitrary theistic
position that was at once Judaic, Christian, and Platonic, and went
back on one line to the Gnostics; while on another his argument
that sin has no real existence is a variant from an old thesis--made
current, as we saw, by Euclides of Megara--with which orthodoxy had
met the Manicheans. [1238] But to the abstract doctrine he gave a new
practical point by declaring that the doctrine of hell-fire was a mere
allegory; that heaven and hell alike were states of consciousness,
not places. [1239] And if such concrete freethinking were not enough
to infuriate the orthodox, they had from him the most explicit
declarations that authority is derivable solely from reason. [1240]
In philosophy proper he must be credited, despite his inconsistency,
with deep and original thought. [1241] Like every theologian of
philosophic capacity before and since, he passes into pantheism
as soon as he grapples closely with the difficulties of theism,
and "the expressions which he uses are identical with those which
were afterwards employed by Spinoza.... It was a tradition of the
fourth or fifth century transferred to the ninth, an echo from
Alexandria." [1242] Condemned by Pope Nicholas I and by two Church
Councils, [1243] his writings none the less availed to keep that echo
audible to later centuries.
The range and vigour of his practical rationalism may be gathered from
his attitude in the controversy begun by the abbot Paschasius Radbert
(831) on the nature of the Eucharist. Paschasius taught that there was
a real transformation of the bread and wine into the divine body and
blood; and the doctrine, thus nakedly put, startled the freer scholars
of the time, who were not yet habituated to Latin orthodoxy. Another
learned monk, Ratramnus, who had written a treatise on predestination
at the request of the rationalizing emperor, Charles the Bald
(discussing the problem in Gottschalk's sense [1244] without naming
him), produced on the same monarch's invitation a treatise in which
transubstantiation was denied, and the "real presence" was declared
to be spiritual [1245]--a view already known to Paschasius as being
held by some. [1246] John Scotus, also asked by the emperor to write
on the subject, went so far as to argue that the bread and wine were
merely symbols and memorials. [1247] As usual, the irrational doctrine
became that of the Church; [1248] but the other must have wrought for
reason in secret. For the rest, he set forth the old "modal" view of
the Trinity, resolving it into the different conceptual aspects of
the universe, and thus propounding one more vital heresy. [1249]
Nothing but a succession of rationalizing emperors could have secured
continuance for such teaching as that of Ratramnus and John the
Scot. For a time, the cruelty meted out to Gottschalk kept up feeling
in favour of his views; Bishop Remigius of Lyons condemned Hincmar's
treatment of him; and others sought to maintain his positions, with
modifications, though Hincmar carried resolutions condemning them at
the second Synod of Chiersy. On the other hand, Archbishop Wenilo of
Sens, Bishop Prudentius of Troyes, and Florus, a deacon of Lyons,
all wrote against the doctrines of John the Scot; and the second
Synod of Valence (855), while opposing Hincmar and affirming duplex
predestination, denounced with fury the reasonings of John the Scot,
ascribing them to his nation as a whole. [1250] The pope taking the
same line, the fortunes of the rationalistic view of the eucharist and
of hell-fire were soon determined for the Middle Ages, though in the
year 950 we find the Archbishop of Canterbury confronted by English
ecclesiastics who asserted that there was no transubstantiation, the
elements being merely a figure of the body and blood of Christ. [1251]
The economic explanation clearly holds alike as regards the attack
on John and the condemnation of Gottschalk for a doctrine which had
actually been established for centuries, on the authority of Augustine,
as strict orthodoxy. In Augustine's time, the determining pressures
were not economic: a bankrupt world was seeking to explain its fate;
and Augustine had merely carried a majority with him against Pelagius,
partly by his personal influence, partly by force of the fatalist
mood of the time. But in the renascent world of Gottschalk's day the
economic exploitation of fear had been carried several stages forward
by the Church; and the question of predestination had a very direct
financial bearing. The northern peoples, accustomed to compound for
crimes by money payments, had so readily played into the hands of
the priesthood by their eagerness to buy surcease of purgatorial
pain that masses for the dead and "penitential certificates" were
main sources of ecclesiastical revenue. Therefore the condemnations
of such abuses passed by the Councils, on the urging of the more
thoughtful clergy, were constantly frustrated by the plain pecuniary
interest of the priests. [1252] It even appears that the eucharist
was popularly regarded not as a process of religious "communion,"
but as a magical rite objectively efficacious for bodily preservation
in this life and the next. Thus it came about that often "priests
presented the offering of the mass alone and by themselves, without
any participation of the congregation." [1253]
If then it were to be seriously understood that the future lot of
all was foreordained, all expenditure on masses for the dead, or to
secure in advance a lightening of purgatorial penance, or even to buy
off penance on earth, was so much waste; and the Teutons were still
as ready as other barbarians to make their transactions with Church,
God, and the saints a matter of explicit bargain. [1254] Gottschalk,
accordingly, had to be put down, in the general interests of the
Church. It could not truthfully be pretended that he deviated from
Augustine, for he actually held by the "semi-Pelagian" inconsistency
that God predestinates good, but merely foreknows evil. [1255]
There was in fact no clear opposition between his affirmations and
those of Rabanus Maurus, who also professed to be an Augustinian;
but the latter laid forensic stress on the "desire" of God that all
men should be saved, and on the formula that Christ died for all;
while Gottschalk, more honestly, insisted that predestination is
predestination, and applied the principle not merely, as had been
customary, to the future state of the good, but to that of the bad,
[1256] insisting on a prædestinatio duplex. His own fate was thus
economically predestinate; and he was actually tortured by the scourge
till he cast into the fire his written defence, "a document which
contained nothing but a compilation of testimonies from Scripture,
and from the older church-teachers." [1257]
Gottschalk later challenged a fourfold ordeal of "boiling water,
oil, and pitch." His primary doctrine had been the immutability
of the divine will; but he brought himself to the belief that
God would work a miracle in his favour. His conception of
"foreordination" was thus framed solely with regard to the
conception of a future state. The ordeal was not granted, the
orthodox party fearing to try conclusions, and he died without
the sacraments, rather than recant. Then began the second reaction
of feeling against his chief persecutor, Hincmar. Neander, vi, 190.
A recent writer, who handles very intelligently and temperately
the problem of persecution, urges that in that connection "one
ought not to lay great stress on the old argument of the Hallam
and Macaulay school as to the strength of vested interests, though
it has a certain historical importance, because the priest must
subsist somehow" (Religious Persecution: a Study in Psychology,
by E. S. P. Haynes, 1904, p. 4). If the "certain importance" be in
the ratio of the certainty of the last adduced fact, the legitimate
"stress" on the argument in question would seem sufficient for most
purposes. The writer adds the note: "It is not unfair, however,
to quote the case of Dr. Middleton, who, writing to Lord Radnor
in 1750 in respect of his famous work on Miracles, admits frankly
enough that he would never have given the clergy any trouble, had
he received some good appointment in the church." If the essayist
has met with no other historic fact illustrative of the play of
vested interests in ecclesiastical history, it is extremely candid
of him to mention that one. Later on, however, he commits himself
to the proposition that "the history of medieval persecution leads
one to infer that the clergy as a whole were roused to much greater
activity by menaces to their material comforts in this world than
by an altruistic anxiety for the fate of lay souls in the next"
(id. p. 60. Cp. p. 63). This amount of "stress" on vested interests
will probably satisfy most members of the Hallam and Macaulay
school; and is ample for the purposes of the present contention.
From this point onward, the slow movement of new ideas may for
a time be conveniently traced on two general lines--one that of
the philosophic discussion in the schools, reinforced by Saracen
influences, the other that of partially rationalistic and democratic
heresy among the common people, by way first of contagion from
the East. The latter was on the whole as influential for sane
thought as the former, apart from such ecclesiastical freethinking
as that of Berengar of Tours and Roscelin (Rousselin), Canon of
Compiègne. Berengar (c. 1050) was led by moral reflection [1258]
to doubt the priestly miracle of the Eucharist, and thenceforth he
entered into a stormy controversy on the subject, in the course of
which he twice recanted under bodily fear, but passionately returned
to his original positions. Fundamentally sincere, and indignantly
resentful of the gross superstition prevailing in the Church, he
struck fiercely in his writings at Popes Leo IX and Nicholas II and
Archbishop Lanfranc, [1259] all of whom had opposed him. At length,
after much strife, he threw up the contest, spending the latter part
of his long life in seclusion; Pope Gregory VII, who was personally
friendly to him, having finally shielded him from persecution. It
seems clear that, though accused, with others of his school, of
rejecting certain of the gospel miracles, [1260] he never became a
disbeliever; his very polemic testifying to the warmth of his belief
on his own lines. His teaching, however, which went far by reason of
the vividness of his style, doubtless had the effect of promoting not
only the rationalistic-Christian view of the Eucharist, [1261] but a
criticism which went further, inasmuch as his opponents forced on the
bystanders the question as to what reality there was in the Christian
creed if his view were true. [1262] All such influences, however, were
but slight in total mass compared with the overwhelming weight of the
economic interest of the priesthood; and not till the Reformation was
Berengar's doctrine accepted by a single organized sect. The orthodox
doctrine, in fact, was all-essential to the Catholic Church. Given the
daily miracle of the "real presence," the Church had a vital hold on
the Christian world, and the priest was above all lay rivalry. Seeing
as much, the Council of the Lateran (1059) met the new criticism by
establishing the technical doctrine of the real presence for the
first time as an article of faith; and as such it will doubtless
stand while there is a Catholic priesthood. Berengar's original view
must have been shared by thousands; but no Catholic carried on his
propaganda. The question had become one of life and death.
Berengar's forced prevarications, which are unsympathetically
set forth by Mosheim (11 Cent., pt. ii, ch. iii, §§ 13-18), are
made much more intelligible in the sympathetic survey of Neander
(vi, 225-60). See also the careful inquiry of Reuter, Gesch. der
religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, i, 91 sq. As to Berengar's
writings, see further Murdock's note to Mosheim, last cit.,
§ 18. The formal compromise forced on him by Pope Hildebrand,
who was personally friendly to him, consisted in adding to his
denial of the change of the bread and wine into "body and blood"
the doctrine that the body and blood were "superadded to the bread
and wine in and by their consecration." This formula, of course,
did not represent the spirit of Berengar's polemic. As to the
disputes on the subject, which ran to the most unseemly length
of physiological detail, see Voltaire, Essai sur les Moeurs,
ch. xlv. It is noteworthy that Augustine had very expressly
set forth a metaphorical interpretation of the Eucharist--De
doctrina christiana, l. iii, c. 16. But just as the Church later
set aside the verdict of Thomas Aquinas that the Virgin Mary was
"born in sin," so did it reverse Augustine's judgment on the
Eucharist. Always the more irrational view carried the day,
as being more propitious to sacerdotal claims.
So far as the Church by her keenly self-regarding organization
could attain it, all opinion was kept within the strict bounds of her
official dogma, in which life in the Middle Ages so long stagnated. For
centuries, despite the turmoil of many wars--which, indeed, helped
to arrest thought--the life of the mind presented a uniformity hardly
now conceivable. The common expectation of the ending of the world, in
the year 1000, in particular had an immense prepotency of paralysing
men's spirits; and the grooves of habit thus fixed were hard to
alter. For most men, the notion of possible innovation in thought did
not exist: the usual was the sacred: the very ideal of an improvement
or reformation, when it arose, was one of reaching back to a far-away
perfection of the past, never of remoulding things on lines laid
down by reason. Yet even into this half-stifled world there entered,
by eastern ways, and first in the guise of rude demotic departures
from priestly prescription, the indestructible spirit of change.
§ 3. POPULAR ANTI-CLERICAL HERESY
The first Western traces of the imported Paulician heresy are about the
year 1000, [1263] when a rustic of Châlons is heard of as destroying a
cross and a religious picture, and asserting that the prophets are not
wholly to be believed. [1264] From this time forward, the world having
begun to breathe again after the passing of the year 1000 without any
sign of the Day of Judgment, heresy begins to multiply, the chief
movers being "distinguished by a tendency to rationalism." [1265]
In 1010 there is a trace of it in Aquitaine. [1266] In the year
1022 (or, as the date is sometimes put, in 1017) we hear of the
unveiling of a secret society of rationalizing mystics at Orleans,
ten canons of one church being members. [1267] An Italian woman
was said to be the founder, and thirteen were burned alive on their
refusal to recant. According to the records, they denied all miracles,
including the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection; rejected baptism and
the miracle of the Eucharist; took the old "Docetic" view of Jesus,
denying his actual humanity; and affirmed the eternity of matter and
the non-creation of the world. They were also accused, like the first
Christians, of promiscuous nocturnal orgies and of eating sacrificed
infants; but unless such charges are to be held valid in the other
case, they cannot be here. [1268] The stories told of the Manichean
community who lived in the castle of Monforte, near Asti in Lombardy,
in the years 1025-1040, and who at length were likewise burned alive,
are similarly mixed with fable. [1269] On this case it is recorded
that, while the Archbishop of Milan investigated the heresy, the
burning of the victims was the work of the fanatical populace of Milan,
and was done against his will.
A less savage treatment may have made possible the alleged success
of Gerhard, bishop of Cambray and Arras, in reconciling to the
Church at Arras, in 1025 or 1030, a number of laymen--also said to
have been taught by an Italian--who as a body rejected all external
worship, setting aside priestly baptism and the sacraments, penance
and images, funeral rites, holy oil, church bells, cross-worship,
altars, and even churches, and denied the necessity of an order
of priests. [1270] Few of the Protestants of a later age were so
thorough-going; but the fact that many of the sect stood to the old
Marcionite veto on marriage and the sexual instinct gives to their
propaganda its own cast of fanaticism. This last tenet it seemingly
was that gave the Paulicians their common Greek name of cathari,
[1271] "the pure," corrupted or assimilated in Italian to gazzari,
whence presumably the German word for heretic, Ketzer. [1272] Such
a doctrine had the double misfortune that if acted on it left the
sect without the normal recruitment of members' children, while if
departed from it brought on them the stigma of wanton hypocrisy; and
as a matter of fact every movement of the kind, ancient and modern,
seems to have contained within it the two extremes of asceticism and
licence, the former generating the latter.
It could hardly, however, have been the ascetic doctrine that won for
the new heresy its vogue in medieval Europe; nor is it likely that the
majority of the heretics even professed it. If, on the other hand, we
ask how it was that in an age of dense superstition so many uneducated
people were found to reject so promptly the most sacrosanct doctrines
of the Church, it seems hardly less difficult to account for the
phenomenon on the bare ground of their common sense. Critical common
sense there must have been, to allow of it at all; but it is reasonable
to suppose that then, as clearly happened later at the Reformation,
common sense had a powerful stimulus in pecuniary interest.
With the evidence as to Christian practice in the fourth century
on the one hand, and the later evidence as to clerical life on the
other, we are certain of a common play of financial motive throughout
the Middle Ages. And whereas it is intelligible that such rapacity
as we have seen described by Libanius should evoke a heresy which
rejected alike religious ceremonial and the claims of the priest,
it is further reasonable to surmise that resentment of priestly
rapacity and luxury helped men to similar heresy in Western Europe
when the doctrine reached them. If any centuries are to be singled
out as those of maximum profligacy and extortion among the clergy,
they are the ninth and the three following. [1273] It had been part of
the policy of Charlemagne everywhere to strengthen the hands of the
clergy by way of checking the power of the nobles; [1274] and in the
disorder after his death the conflicting forces were in semi-anarchic
competition. The feudal habit of appointing younger sons and underlings
to livings wherever possible; the disorders and strifes of the papacy;
and the frequent practice of dispossessing priests to reward retainers,
thereby driving the dispossessed to plunder on their own account, must
together have created a state of things almost past exaggeration. It
was a matter of course that the clergy on their part should make the
utmost possible use of their influence over men's superstitious fears
in order to acquire bequests of lands; [1275] and such bequests in
turn exasperated the heirs thus disinherited.
Thus orthodoxy and heterodoxy alike had strong economic motives;
and in these may be placed a main part of the explanation of the
gross savagery of persecution now normal in the Church. Such a heresy
as that of Gottschalk, we saw, by denying to the priest all power
of affecting the predestined course of things here or hereafter,
logically imperilled the very existence of the whole hierarchy, and
was by many resented accordingly. The same principle entered into
the controversies over the Eucharist. Still more would the clergy
resent the new Manichean heresy, of which every element, from the
Euchite tenet of the necessity of personal prayer and mortification,
as against the innate demon, to the rejection of all the rites of
normal worship and all the pretensions of priests, was radically
hostile to the entire organization of the Church. When the heretics
in due course developed a priestly system of their own, [1276] the
hostility was only the more embittered.
The crisis was the more acute, finally, because in the latter part of
the tenth century the common expectation that the world would end with
the year 1000 had inspired enormous donations to the Church, [1277]
with a proportionally oppressive effect on the general population,
moving them to economic self-defence. It is in fact clear that
an anti-clerical element entered largely into the beginnings of
the communal movement in France in the eleventh century. In 1024
we find the citizens of Cambrai forming a league to drive out the
canons; [1278] and though that beginning of revolt was crushed out
by massacre, the same spirit expressed itself in heresy. The result
was that religious persecution ere long eclipsed political. Bishop
Wazon of Lüttich (d. 1048) in vain protested against the universal
practice of putting the heretics to death. [1279] Manicheans who
were detected in 1052 at Goslar, in Germany, were hanged, [1280]
a precedent being thus established in the day of small things.
All this went on while the course of the papacy was so scandalous
to the least exacting moral sense that only the ignorance of the
era could sustain any measure of reverence for the Church as an
institution. In the year 963 the ablest of the emperors of that
age, Otto the Great, had the consent of the people of Rome to his
deposition of Pope John XII, a disorderly youth of twenty-five,
"the most profligate if not the most guilty of all who have worn
the tiara," [1281] and to his appointing the Pope in future; but
Teutonic administration soon drove the populace to repeated revolt,
quenched by massacre, till at length John returned, speedily to
be slain by a wronged husband. Economic interest entered largely
into the subsequent attempts of the Romans to choose their own
Pope and rule their own city, and into the contrary claim of the
emperors to do both; and in the nature of things the usually absent
emperors could only spasmodically carry their point. The result was
an epoch of riotous disorder in the papacy. Between John and Leo IX
(955-1048) six popes were deposed, two murdered, and one mutilated;
[1282] and the Church was a mere battle-ground of the factions of the
Roman and Italian nobility. [1283] At last, in 1047, "a disgraceful
contest between three claimants of the papal chair shocked even the
reckless apathy of Italy"; [1284] and the emperor Henry III deposed
them all and appointed a pope of his own choosing, the clergy again
consenting. Soon, however, as before, the local claim was revived;
and in the papacy of the powerful Gregory VII, known as Hildebrand,
the head of the Church determinedly asserted its autonomy and his own
autocracy. Then came the long "war of the investitures" between the
popes and the emperors, in which the former were substantially the
gainers. The result was, in addition to the endless miseries set up
by war, a systematic development of that financial corruption which
already had been scandalous enough. The cathedral chapters and the
nobles traded in bishoprics; the popes sold their ratifications for
great sums; the money was normally borrowed by the bishops from the
papal usurers; and there was witnessed throughout Europe the spectacle
of the Church denouncing all usury as sin, while its own usurers were
scrupulously protected, the bishops paying to them their interest
from the revenues they were able to extort. [1285] Satirical comment
naturally abounded wherever men had any knowledge of the facts; and
what current literature there was reflected the feeling on all sides.
The occurrence of the first and second crusades, the work
respectively of Peter the Hermit and St. Bernard, created a period
of new fanaticism, somewhat unfavourable to heresy; but even in that
period the new sects were at work, [1286] and in the twelfth century,
when crusading had become a mere feudal conspiracy of conquest and
plunder, [1287] heresy reappeared, to be duly met by slaughter. A
perfect ferment of anti-clerical heresy had arisen in Italy, France,
and Flanders. [1288] At Orvieto, in Italy, the heretics for a time
actually had the mastery, and were put down only after a bloody
struggle. [1289] In France, for a period of twenty years from 1106,
Peter de Brueys opposed infant baptism, the use of churches, holy
crosses, prayers for the dead (the great source of clerical income),
and the doctrine of the Real Presence in the eucharist (the main
source of their power), and so set up the highly heretical sect of
Petrobrussians. [1290] Driven from his native district of Vallonise,
he long maintained himself in Gascony, till at length he was seized
and burned (1126 or 1130). The monk Henry (died in prison 1148)
took a similar line, directly denouncing the clergy in Switzerland
and France; as did Tanquelin in Flanders (killed by a priest, 1125);
though in his case there seems to have been as much of religious
hallucination as of the contrary. [1291] A peasant, Eudo of Stella
(who died in prison), is said to have half-revolutionized Brittany
with his anti-ecclesiastical preaching. [1292] The more famous monk
Arnold of Brescia (strangled and burned in 1155), a pupil of Abailard,
but orthodox in his theology and austere in his life, simplified his
plan of reform (about 1139) into a proposal that the whole wealth of
the clergy, from the pope to the monks, should be transferred to the
civil power, leaving churchmen to lead a spiritual life on voluntary
offerings. [1293] For fifteen years the stir of his movement lasted
in Lombardy, till at length his formation of a republic at Rome forced
the papacy to combine with the Emperor Frederick II, who gave Arnold up
to death. But though his movement perished, anti-clericalism did not;
and heretical sects of some kind persisted here and there, in despite
of the Church, till the age of the Reformation. In Italy, during
the age of the Renaissance, all alike were commonly called paterini
or patarini--a nickname which seems to come from pataria, a Milanese
word meaning "popular faction" or "rowdies." [1294] Thus in the whole
movement of fresh popular thought there is a manifest connection with
the democratic movement in politics, though in the schools the spirit
of discussion and dialectic had no similar relationship.
During the first half of the century its warfare with the emperors,
and the frequent appointment of anti-popes, prevented any systematic
policy on the part of the Holy See, [1295] repression being mostly
left to the local ecclesiastical authorities. It was in 1139 that
Innocent II issued the first papal decree against Cathari, expelling
them from the Church and calling on the temporal power to give full
effect to their excommunication. [1296] In 1163 Pope Alexander III,
being exiled from Rome by Frederick I and the anti-pope Victor, called
a great council at Tours, where again a policy of excommunication was
decided on, the secular authorities being commanded to imprison the
excommunicated and confiscate their property, but not to slay them. In
the same year some Cathari arrested at Cologne had been sentenced to
be burned; but the Council did not go so far. As a result the decree
had little or no effect. [1297]
So powerless was the Church at this stage that in 1167 the Cathari held
a council of their own near Toulouse; a bishop of their order, Nicetas,
coming from Constantinople to preside; and a whole system of French
sees was set on foot. [1298] So numerous had the Cathari now become
that their highest grade, the perfecti, alone was reckoned to number
4,000; [1299] and from this time it is of Cathari that we read in the
rolls of persecution. About 1170 four more of them, from Flanders, were
burned at Cologne; and others, of the higher grade called bos homes
(= boni homines, "good men"), at Toulouse. In 1179, the heresy still
gaining ground, an oecumenical council (the Third Lateran) was held at
Rome under Pope Alexander III, decreeing afresh their excommunication,
and setting up a new machinery of extirpation by proclaiming a
crusade at once against the orderly heretics of southern France and
the companies of openly irreligious freebooters who had arisen as a
result of many wars and much misgovernment. To all who joined in the
crusade was offered an indulgence of two years. In the following year
Henry of Clairvaux, Cardinal of Albano, took the matter in hand as
papal plenipotentiary; and in 1181 he raised a force of horse and foot
and fell upon the ill-defended territory of the Viscount of Beziers,
where many heretics, including the daughter of Raymond of Toulouse,
had taken refuge. The chief stronghold was captured, with two Catharist
bishops, who renounced their heresy, and were promptly given prebends
in Toulouse. Many others submitted; but as soon as the terms for which
the crusaders had enlisted were over and the army disbanded, they
returned to their heretical practices. [1300] Two years later an army
collected in central France made a campaign against the freebooters,
slaying thousands in one battle, hanging fifteen hundred after another,
and blinding eighty more. But freebooting also continued. [1301]
The first crusade against heresy having failed, it was left by the
papacy for a number of years to itself; though anti-pope Lucius III in
1184 sought to set up an Inquisition; and in 1195 a papal legate held a
council at Montpellier, seeking to create another crusade. The zeal of
the faithful was mainly absorbed in Palestine; while the nobles at home
were generally at war with each other. Heresy accordingly continued to
flourish, though there was never any suspension of local persecution
outside of Provence, where the heretics were now in a majority,
having more theological schools and scholars than the Church. [1302]
In France in particular, in the early years of the reign of Philip
Augustus (suc. 1180), many paterini were put to death by burning;
[1303] and the clergy at length persuaded the king to expel the Jews,
the work being done almost as cruelly as it was two centuries later
in Spain. In England, where there was thus far little heresy, it
was repressed by Henry II. Some thirty rustics came from Flanders
in 1166, fleeing persecution, and vainly sought to propagate their
creed. Zealous to prove his orthodoxy in the period of his quarrel
with Becket, Henry presided over a council of bishops called by him
at Oxford to discuss the case; and the heretics were condemned to
be scourged, branded in the face, and driven forth--to perish in the
winter wilds. "England was not hospitable to heresy;" and practically
her orthodoxy was "unsullied until the rise of Wiclif." [1304]
In southern Europe and northern Italy in the last quarter of
the century a foremost place began to be taken by the sect of the
Waldenses, or Vaudois (otherwise the Poor Men of Lyons), which--whether
deriving from ancient dissent surviving in the Vaux or Valleys of
Piedmont, [1305] or taking its name and character from the teaching
of the Lyons merchant, Peter Waldus, or an earlier Peter of Vaux
or Valdis [1306]--conforms substantially to the general heretical
tendencies of that age, in that it rejected the papal authority,
contended for the reading of the Bible by the laity, condemned tithes,
disparaged fasting, stipulated for poverty on the part of priests
and denied their special status, opposed prayers for the dead,
and preached peace and non-resistance. In 1199, at Metz, they were
found in possession of a French translation of the New Testament,
the Psalms, and the book of Job--a new and startling invasion of the
priestly power in the west. Above all, their men and women alike went
about preaching in the towns, in the houses, and in the churches,
and administered the eucharist without priests. [1307] Thus Cathari,
Paterini, Manicheans, and non-Manichean Albigenses and Waldenses were
on all fours for the Church, as opponents of its economic claims;
and when at length, under Celestine III and Innocent III, the Holy
See began to be consolidated after a long period of incessant change,
[1308] desperate measures began to be contemplated. Organized heresy
was seen to be indestructible save by general extirpation; and on
economic grounds it was not to be tolerated. At Orvieto the heresy
stamped out with blood in 1125 was found alive again in 1150; was
again put down in 1163 by burning, hanging, and expulsion; and yet
was again found active at the close of the century. [1309] In 1198
Innocent III is found beginning a new Inquisition among the Albigenses;
and in 1199, while threatening them with exile and confiscation, [1310]
he made a last diplomatic attempt to force the obstinately heretical
people of Orvieto to take an oath of fidelity in the year 1199. It
ended in the killing of his representative by the people. [1311]
The papacy accordingly laid plans to destroy the enemy at its centre
of propagation.
§ 4. HERESY IN SOUTHERN FRANCE
In Provence and Languedoc, the scene of the first great papal crusade
against anti-clerical heresy, there were represented all the then
existing forces of popular freethought; and the motives of the crusade
were equally typical of the cause of authority.
1. In addition to the Paulician and other movements of religious
rationalism above noted, the Languedoc region was a centre of
semi-popular literary culture, which was to no small extent
anti-clerical, and by consequence somewhat anti-religious. The
Latin-speaking jongleurs or minstrels, known as Goliards, [1312]
possessing as they did a clerical culture, were by their way of
life committed to a joyous rather than an ascetic philosophy;
and though given to blending the language of devotion with that of
the drinking-table, very much after the fashion of Hafiz, they were
capable of burlesquing the mass, the creed, hymns to the Virgin, the
Lord's Prayer, confessions, and parts of the gospels, as well as of
keenly satirizing the endless abuses of the Church. [1313] "One is
astonished to meet, in the Middle Ages, in a time always represented
as crushed under the yoke of authority, such incredible audacities on
the papacy, the episcopacy, chivalry, on the most revered dogmas of
religion, such as paradise, hell, etc." [1314] The rhymers escaped
simply because there was no police that could catch them. Denounced
by some of the stricter clergy, they were protected by others. They
were, in fact, the minstrels of the free-living churchmen. [1315]
Of this type is Guiot of Provence, a Black Friar, the author of La
Bible Guiot, written between 1187 and 1206. He is a lover of good
living, a champion of aristocrats, a foe of popular movements, [1316]
and withal a little of a buffoon. But it is to be counted to him for
righteousness that he thought the wealth devoured by the clergy might
be more usefully spent on roads, bridges, and hospitals. [1317] He has
also a good word for the old pagans who lived "according to reason";
and as to his own time, he is sharply censorious alike of princes,
pope, and prelates. The princes are rascals who "do not believe in
God," and depress their nobility; and the breed of the latter has sadly
degenerated. The pope is to be prayed for; but he is ill counselled
by his cardinals, who conform to the ancient tendency of Rome to
everything evil; many of the archbishops and bishops are no better;
and the clergy in general are eaten up by greed and simony. [1318]
This is in fact the common note. [1319]
A kindred spirit is seen in much of the verse alike of the northern
Trouvères and the southern Troubadours. A modern Catholic historian
of medieval literature complains that their compositions "abound with
the severest ridicule of such persons and of such things as, in the
temper of the age, were highly estimated and most generally revered,"
and notes that in consequence they were ranked by the devout as
"lewd and impious libertines." [1320] In particular they satirized
the practice of excommunication and the use made by the Church of
hell and purgatory as sources of revenue. [1321] Their anti-clerical
poetry having been as far as possible destroyed by the Inquisition, its
character has to be partly inferred from the remains of the northern
trouvères--e.g., Ruteboeuf and Raoul de Houdan, of whom the former
wrote a Voya de Paradis, in which Sloth is a canon and Pride a bishop,
both on their way to heaven; while Raoul has a Songe d'enfer in which
hell is treated in a spirit of the most audacious burlesque. [1322]
In a striking passage of the old tale Aucassin et Nicolette there is
naïvely revealed the spontaneous revolt against pietism which underlay
all these flings of irreverence. "Into paradise," cries Aucassin,
"go none but ... those aged priests, and those old cripples, and
the maimed, who all day long and all night cough before the altars,
and in the crypts beneath the churches; those ... who are naked and
barefoot and full of sores.... Such as these enter in paradise, and
with them have I nought to do. But in hell will I go. For to hell
go the fair clerks and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney
and the great wars, and the stout archer and the loyal man. With them
will I go. And there go the fair and courteous ladies [of many loves];
and there pass the gold and the silver, the ermine and all rich furs,
harpers and minstrels, and the happy of the world. With these will I
go...." [1323] It was such a temper, rather than reasoned unbelief,
that inspired the blasphemous parodies in Reynard the Fox and other
popular works of the Middle Ages.
The Provençal literature, further, was from the first influenced by
the culture of the Saracens, [1324] who held Sicily and Calabria in
the ninth and tenth centuries, and had held part of Languedoc itself
for a few years in the eighth. On the passing of the duchy of Provence
to Raymond Berenger, Count of Barcelona, at the end of the eleventh
century, not only were the half-Saracenized Catalans mixed with the
Provençals, but Raymond and his successors freely introduced the arts
and science of the Saracens into their dominion. [1325] In the Norman
kingdom of Sicily too the Saracen influence was great even before
the time of Frederick II; and thence it reached afresh through Italy
to Provence, [1326] carrying with it everywhere, by way of poetry, an
element of anti-clerical and even of anti-Christian rationalism. [1327]
Though this spirit was not that of the Cathari and Waldenses, yet the
fact that the latter strongly condemned the Crusades [1328] was a point
in common between them and the sympathizers with Saracen culture. And
as the tolerant Saracen schools of Spain or the Christian schools
of the same region, which copied their curriculum, [1329] were in
that age resorted to by youth from each of the countries of western
Europe for scientific teaching [1330]--all the latest medical and
most other scientific knowledge being in their hands--the influence
of such culture must have been peculiarly strong in Provence. [1331]
The medieval mystery-plays and moralities, already common in Provence,
mixed at times with the normal irreverence of illiterate faith [1332]
a vein of surprisingly pronounced skeptical criticism, [1333] which
at the least was a stimulus to critical thought among the auditors,
even if they were supposed to take it as merely dramatic. Inasmuch as
the drama was hereditarily pagan, and had been continually denounced
and ostracized by Fathers and Councils, [1334] it would be natural
that its practitioners, even when in the service of the Church,
should be unbelievers.
The philosophy and science of both the Arabs and the Spanish Jews
were specially cultivated in the Provence territory. The college of
Montpellier practised on Arab lines medicine, botany, and mathematics;
and the Jews, who had been driven from Spain by the Almohades, had
flourishing schools at Narbonne, Beziers, Nîmes, and Carcassonne,
as well as Montpellier, and spread alike the philosophy of Averroës
and the semi-rational theology of the Jewish thinker Maimonides,
[1335] whose school held broadly by Averroïsm.
For the rest, every one of the new literary influences that were
assailing the Church would tend to flourish in such a civilization as
that of Languedoc, which had been peaceful and prosperous for over two
hundred years. Unable to lay hold of the popular poets and minstrels
who propagated anti-clericalism, the papacy could hope to put down
by brute force the social system in which they flourished, crushing
the pious and more hated heretic with the scoffer. And Languedoc
was a peculiarly tempting field for such operations. Its relative
lack of military strength, as well as its pre-eminence in heresy,
led Innocent III, a peculiarly zealous assertor of the papal power,
[1336] to attack it in preference to other and remoter centres of
enmity. In the first year of his pontificate, 1198, he commenced a new
and zealous Inquisition [1337] in the doomed region; and in the year
1207, when as much persecution had been accomplished as the lax faith
of the nobility and many of the bishops would consent to--an appeal
to the King of France to interfere being disregarded--the scheme
of a crusade against the dominions of Raymond Count of Toulouse was
conceived and gradually matured. The alternate weakness and obstinacy
of Raymond, and the fresh provocation given by the murder, in 1208,
of the arrogant papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, [1338] permitted
the success of the scheme in such hands. The crusade was planned
exactly on the conditions of those against the Saracens--the heretics
at home being declared far worse than they. [1339] The crusaders
were freed from payment of interest on their debts, exempted from
the jurisdiction of all law courts, and absolved from all their
sins past or future. [1340] To earn this reward they were to give
only forty days' service [1341]--a trifle in comparison with the
hardships of the crusades to Palestine. "Never therefore had the
cross been taken up with a more unanimous consent." [1342] Bishops
and nobles in Burgundy and France, the English Simon de Montfort,
the Abbot of Citeaux, and the Bernardine monks throughout Europe,
combined in the cause; and recruits came from Austria and Saxony, from
Bremen, even from Slavonia, as well as from northern France. [1343]
The result was such a campaign of crime and massacre as European
history cannot match. [1344] Despite the abject submission of the
Count of Toulouse, who was publicly stripped and scourged, and
despite the efforts of his nephew the Count of Albi to make terms,
village after village was fired, all heretics caught were burned, and
on the capture of the city and castle of Beziers (1209), every man,
woman, and child within the walls was slaughtered, many of them in the
churches, whither they had run for refuge. The legate, Arnold abbot
of Citeaux, being asked at an early stage how the heretics were to be
distinguished from the faithful, gave the never-to-be-forgotten answer,
"Kill all; God will know his own." [1345] Seven thousand dead bodies
were counted in the great church of St. Mary Magdalene. The legate
in writing estimated the total quarry at 15,000; others put the
number at sixty thousand. [1346] When all in the place were slain,
and all the plunder removed, the town was burned to the ground,
not one house being left standing. Warned by the fate of Beziers,
the people of Carcassonne, after defending themselves for many days,
secretly evacuated their town; but the legate contrived to capture
a number of the fugitives, of whom he burned alive four hundred, and
hanged fifty. [1347] Systematic treachery, authorized and prescribed
by the Pope, [1348] completed the success of the undertaking. The
Church had succeeded, in the name of religion, in bringing half of
Europe to the attainment of the ideal height of wickedness, in that
it had learned to make evil its good; and the papacy had on the whole
come nearer to destroying the moral sense of all Christendom [1349]
than any conceivable combination of other causes could ever have done
in any age.
According to a long current fiction, it was the Pope who first
faltered when "the whole of Christendom demanded the renewal of
those scenes of massacre" (Sismondi, Crusades, p. 95); but this is
disproved by the discovery of two letters in which, shortly before
his death, he excitedly takes on himself the responsibility for
all the bloodshed (Michelet, Hist. de France, vii, introd. note
to § iv). Michelet had previously accepted the legend which
he here rejects. The bishops assembled in council at Lavaur,
in 1213, demanded the extermination of the entire population of
Toulouse. Finally, the papal policy is expressly decreed in the
third canon of the Fourth General Council of Lateran, 1215. On that
canon see The Statutes of the Fourth General Council of Lateran,
by the Rev. John Evans, 1843. On the crusade in general, cp. Lea,
History of the Inquisition, bk. i, ch. iv; Gieseler, Per. III,
Div. iii, § 89.
The first crusade was followed by others, in which Simon de Montfort
reached the maximum of massacre, varying his procedure by tearing
out eyes and cutting off noses when he was not hanging victims
by dozens or burning them by scores or putting them to the sword
by hundreds [1350] (all being done "with the utmost joy") [1351];
though the "White Company" organized by the Bishop of Toulouse [1352]
maintained a close rivalry. The Church's great difficulty was that
as soon as an army had bought its plenary indulgence for all possible
sin by forty days' service, it disbanded. Nevertheless, "the greater
part of the population of the countries where heresy had prevailed
was exterminated." [1353] Organized Christianity had contrived to
murder the civilization of Provence and Languedoc [1354] while the
fanatics of Islam in their comparatively bloodless manner were doing
as much for that of Moorish Spain. Heresy indeed was not rooted out:
throughout the whole of the thirteenth century the Inquisition met with
resistance in Languedoc [1355]; but the preponderance of numbers which
alone could sustain freethinking had been destroyed, and in course
of time it was eliminated by the sleepless engines of the Church.
It was owing to no lack of the principle of evil in the Christian
system, but simply to the much greater and more uncontrollable
diversity of the political elements of Christendom, that the whole
culture and intelligence of Europe did not undergo the same fate. The
dissensions and mutual injuries of the crusaders ultimately defeated
their ideal [1356]; after Simon de Montfort had died in the odour of
sanctity [1357] the crusade of Louis VIII of France in 1226 seems to
have been essentially one of conquest, there being practically no
heretics left; and the disasters of the expedition, crowned by the
king's death, took away the old prestige of the movement. Meanwhile,
the heresy of the Albigenses, and kindred ideas, had been effectually
driven into other parts of Europe [1358]; and about 1231 we find
Gregory IX burning a multitude of them at the gates of the church of
Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome [1359] and compassing their slaughter
in France and Germany. [1360] In Italy the murderous pertinacity of
the Dominicans gradually destroyed organized heresy despite frequent
and desperate resistance. About 1230 we hear of one eloquent zealot,
chosen podestà by the people of Verona, using his power to burn in one
day sixty heretics, male and female. [1361] The political heterogeneity
of Europe, happily, made variation inevitable; though the papacy,
by making the detection and persecution of heresy a means of gain to
a whole order of its servants, had set on foot a machinery for the
destruction of rational thought such as had never before existed.
It is still common to speak of the personnel of the Inquisition as
disinterested, and to class its crimes as "conscientious." Buckle
set up such a thesis, without due circumspection, as a support
to one of his generalizations. (See the present writer's ed. of
his Introduction to the History of Civilization in England,
pp. 105-108, notes, and the passages in McCrie and Llorente
there cited.) Dr. Lea, whose History of the Inquisition is
the greatest storehouse of learning on the subject, takes up a
similar position, arguing (i, 239): "That the men who conducted
the Inquisition, and who toiled sedulously in its arduous,
repulsive, and often dangerous labour, were thoroughly convinced
that they were furthering the kingdom of God, is shown by the
habitual practice of encouraging them with the remission of sins,
similar to that offered for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land"--a
somewhat surprising theorem. Parallel reasoning would prove that
soldiers never plunder and are always Godly; that the crusaders
were all conscientious men; and that policemen never take bribes
or commit perjury. The interpretation of history calls for a
less simple-minded psychology. That there were devoted fanatics
in the Inquisition as in the Church is not to be disputed; that
both organizations had economic bases is certain; and that the
majority of office-bearers in both, in the ages of faith, had
regard to gain, is demonstrated by all ecclesiastical history.
Dr. Lea's own History shows clearly enough (i, 471-533) that the
Inquisition, from the first generation of its existence, lived
upon its fines and confiscations. "Persecution, as a steady and
continuous policy, rested, after all, upon confiscation.... When
it was lacking, the business of defending the faith lagged
lamentably" (i, 529). "But for the gains to be made out of fines
and confiscations its [the Inquisition's] work would have been
much less thorough, and it would have sunk into comparative
insignificance as soon as the first frantic zeal of bigotry
had exhausted itself" (pp. 532-33). Why, in the face of these
avowals, "it would be unjust to say that greed and thirst for
plunder were the impelling motives of the Inquisition" (p. 532)
is not very clear. See below, ch. x, § 3, as to the causation
in Spain. Cp. Mocatta, The Jews and the Inquisition, pp. 37,
44, 52. On the Inquisition in Portugal, in turn, Professor
W. E. Collins sums up that "it was founded for reasons ostensibly
religious but actually fiscal" (in the "Cambridge Modern History,"
vol. ii, The Reformation, ch. xii, p. 415). Every charge of
economic motive that Catholicism can bring against Protestantism is
thus balanced by the equivalent charge against its own Inquisition.
§ 5. FREETHOUGHT IN THE SCHOOLS
The indestructibility of freethought, meanwhile, was being proved
even in the philosophic schools, under all their conformities to
faith. Already in the ninth century we have seen Scotus Erigena putting
the faith in jeopardy by his philosophic defence of it. Another
thinker, Roscelin (or Roussellin: fl. 1090), is interesting as
having made a critical approach to freethought in religion by way
of abstract philosophy. With him definitely begins the long academic
debate between the Nominalists and Realists so called. In an undefined
way, it had existed as early as the ninth century, [1362] the ground
being the Christian adoption of Plato's doctrine of ideas--that
individual objects are instances or images of an ideal universal,
which is a real existence, and prior to the individual thing:
"universalia ante rem." To that proposition Aristotle had opposed the
doctrine that the universal is immanent in the thing--"universalia
in re"--the latter alone being matter of knowledge; [1363] and in the
Middle Ages those who called Aristotle master carried his negation of
Plato to the extent of insisting that the "universal" or "abstract,"
or the "form" or "species," is a mere subjective creation, a name,
having no real existence. This, the Nominalist position--mistakenly
ascribed to Aristotle [1364]--was ultimately expressed in the formula,
"universalia post rem."
Such reasonings obviously tend to implicate theology; and Roscelin
was either led or helped by his Nominalist training to deny either
explicitly or implicitly the unity of the Trinity, arguing in effect
that, as only individuals are real existences, the actuality of the
persons of the Trinity involves their disunity. [1365] The thesis,
of course, evoked a storm, the English Archbishop Anselm and others
producing indignant answers. Of Roscelin's writing only one letter
is extant; and even Anselm, in criticizing his alleged doctrine,
admits having gathered it only from his opponents, whose language
suggests perversion. [1366] But if the testimony of his pupil Abailard
be truthful, [1367] he was at best a confused reasoner; and in his
theology he got no further than tritheism, then called ditheism. [1368]
Thus, though "Nominalism, by denying any objective reality to general
notions, led the way directly to the testimony of the senses and
the conclusions of experience," [1369] it did so on lines fatally
subordinate to the theology it sought to correct. Roscelin's thesis
logically led to the denial not only of trinity-in-unity but of the
Incarnation and transubstantiation; yet neither he nor his opponents
seem to have thought even of the last consequence, he having in fact
no consciously heretical intention. Commanded to recant by the Council
of Soissons in 1092, he did so, and resumed his teaching as before;
whereafter he was ordered to leave France. Coming to England, he showed
himself so little of a rebel to the papacy as to contend strongly for
priestly celibacy, arguing that all sons of priests and all born out of
wedlock should alike be excluded from clerical office. Expelled from
England in turn for these views, by a clergy still anti-celibate,
he returned to Paris, to revive the old philosophic issue, until
general hostility drove him to Aquitaine, where he spent his closing
years in peace. [1370]
Such handling of the cause of Nominalism gave an obvious advantage
to Realism. That has been justly described by one clerical scholar
as "Philosophy held in subordination to Church-Authority"; [1371]
and another has avowed that "the spirit of Realism was essentially
the spirit of dogmatism, the disposition to pronounce that truth
was already known," while "Nominalism was essentially the spirit
of progress, of inquiry, of criticism." [1372] But even a critical
philosophy may be made to capitulate to authority, as even à priori
metaphysic may be to a certain extent turned against it. Realism had
been markedly heretical in the hands of John Scotus; and in a later
age the Realist John Huss was condemned to death--perhaps on political
grounds, but not without signs of sectarian hate--by a majority of
Nominalists at the Council of Constance. Everything depended on the
force of the individual thinker and the degree of restraint put
upon him by the authoritarian environment. [1373] The world has
even seen the spectacle of a professed indifferentist justifying
the massacre of St. Bartholomew; and the Platonist Marsilio Ficino
vilified Savonarola, basely enough, after his execution, adjusting
a pantheistic Christianity to the needs of the political situation
in Medicean Florence. Valid freethinking is a matter of thoroughness
and rectitude, not of mere theoretic assents.
Tried by that test, the Nominalism of the medieval schools was no
very potent emancipator of the human spirit, no very clear herald of
freedom or new concrete truth. A doctrine which was so far adjusted
to authority as to affirm the unquestionable existence of three
deities, Father, Son, and Spirit, and merely disputed the not more
supra-rational theorem of their unity, yielded to the rival philosophy
a superiority in the kind of credit it sought for itself. Nominalism
was thus "driven to the shade of the schools," where it was "regarded
entirely in a logical point of view, and by no means in its actual
philosophic importance as a speculation concerning the grounds of
human knowledge." [1374] For Roscelin himself the question was one of
dialectics, not of faith, and he made no practical rationalists. The
popular heresies bit rather deeper into life. [1375]
It is doubtless true of the Paulicians that "there was no principle
of development in their creed: it reflected no genuine freedom
of thought" (Poole, Illustrations, p. 95); but the same thing,
as we have seen, is clearly true of scholasticism itself. It may
indeed be urged that "the contest between Ratramn and Paschase on
the doctrine of the Eucharist; of Lanfranc with Berengar on the
same subject; of Anselm with Roscelin on the nature of Universals;
the complaints of Bernard against the dialectical theology of
Abelard; are all illustrations of the collision between Reason
and Authority ... varied forms of rationalism--the pure exertions
of the mind within itself ... against the constringent force
of the Spiritual government" (Hampden, Bampton Lectures on The
Scholastic Philosophy, 3rd ed. p. 37; cp. Hardwick, Church History:
Middle Age, p. 203); but none of the scholastics ever professed
to set Authority aside. None dared. John Scotus indeed affirmed
the identity of true religion with true philosophy, without
professing to subordinate the latter; but the most eminent of the
later scholastics affirmed such a subordination. "The vassalage of
philosophy consisted in the fact that an impassable limit was fixed
for the freedom of philosophizing in the dogmas of the Church"
(Ueberweg, i, 357); and some of the chief dogmas were not allowed
to be philosophically discussed; though, "with its territory thus
limited, philosophy was indeed allowed by theology a freedom which
was rarely and only by exception infringed upon" (ib. Cp. Milman,
Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ix, 151). "The suspicion of originality
was fatal to the reputation of the scholastic divine" (Hampden,
pp. 46-47). The popular heresy, indeed, lacked the intellectual
stimulus that came to the schools from the philosophy of Averroës;
but it was the hardier movement of the two.
Already in the eleventh century, however, the simple fact of the
production of a new argument for the existence of God by Anselm,
Archbishop of Canterbury, is a proof that, apart from the published
disputes, a measure of doubt on the fundamental issue had arisen in
the schools. It is urged [1376] that, though the argumentation of
Anselm seems alien to the thought of his time, there is no proof that
the idea of proving the existence of God was in any way pressed on him
from the outside. It is, however, inconceivable that such an argument
should be framed if no one had raised a doubt. And as a matter of fact
the question was discussed in the schools, Anselm's treatise being
a reproduction of his teaching. The monks of Bec, where he taught,
urged him to write a treatise wherein nothing should be proved by mere
authority, but all by necessity of reason or evidence of truth, and
with an eye to objections of all sorts. [1377] In the preface to his
Cur Deus Homo, again, he says that his first book is an answer to the
objections of infidels who reject Christianity as irrational. [1378]
Further, the nature of part of Anselm's theistic argument and the
very able but friendly reply of Gaunilo (a Count of Montigni, who
entered a convent near Tours, 1044-1083) show that the subject was
within the range of private discussion. Anselm substantially follows
St. Augustine; [1379] and men cannot have read the ancient books
which so often spoke of atheism without confronting the atheistic
idea. It is not to be supposed that Gaunilo was an unbeliever; but
his argumentation is that of a man who had pondered the problem. [1380]
Despite the ostensibly rationalistic nature of his argument, however,
Anselm stipulated for absolute submission of the intellect to the
creed of the Church; [1381] so that the original subtitle of his
Proslogium, Fides quaerens intellectum, in no way admits rational
tests. In the next century we meet with new evidence of sporadic
unbelief, and new attempts to deal with it on the philosophic
side. John of Salisbury (1120-1180) tells of having heard many
discourse on physics "otherwise than faith may hold"; [1382] and the
same vivacious scholar put in his list of "things about which a wise
man may doubt, so ... that the doubt extend not to the multitude," some
"things which are reverently to be inquired about God himself." [1383]
Giraldus Cambrensis (1147-1223), whose abundant and credulous gossip
throws so much light on the inner life of the Church and the laity in
his age, tells that the learned Simon of Tournay "thought not soundly
on the articles of the faith," saying privately, to his intimates,
things that he dared not utter publicly, till one day, in a passion,
he cried out, "Almighty God! how long shall this superstitious sect
of Christians and this upstart invention endure?"; whereupon during
the night he lost the power of speech, and remained helpless till
his death. [1384] Other ecclesiastical chroniclers represent Simon
as deriding alike Jesus, Moses, and Mahomet--an ascription to him
of the "three impostors" formula. [1385] Again, Giraldus tells how
an unnamed priest, reproved by another for careless celebration
of the mass, angrily asked whether his rebuker really believed in
transubstantiation, in the incarnation, in the Virgin Birth, and
in resurrection; adding that it was all carried on by hypocrites,
and assuredly invented by cunning ancients to hold men in terror and
restraint. And Giraldus comments that inter nos there are many who
so think in secret. [1386] As his own picture of the Church exhibits
a gross and almost universal rapacity pervading it from the highest
clergy to the lowest, the statement is entirely credible. [1387]
Yet again, in the Romance of the Holy Grail, mention is twice made
of clerical doubters on the doctrine of the Trinity; [1388] and on
that side, in the crusading period, both the monotheistic doctrine
of Islam and the Arab philosophy of Averroës were likely to set up a
certain amount of skepticism. In the twelfth century, accordingly,
we have Nicolas of Amiens producing his tractate De articulis (or
arte) catholicæ fidei in the hope of convincing by his arguments men
"who disdain to believe the prophecies and the gospel." [1389]
To meet such skepticism too was one of the undertakings of the
renowned Abailard (1079-1142), himself persecuted as a heretic for
the arguments with which he sought to guard against unbelief. Of the
details of his early life it concerns us here to note only that he
studied under Roscelin, and swerved somewhat in philosophy from his
master's theoretic Nominalism, which he partly modified on Aristotelian
lines, though knowing little of Aristotle. [1390] After his retirement
from the world to the cloister, he was induced to resume philosophic
teaching; and his pupils, like those of Anselm, begged their master to
give them rational arguments on the main points of the faith. [1391]
He accordingly rashly prepared a treatise, De Unitate et Trinitate
divina, in which he proceeded "by analogies of human reason," avowing
that the difficulties were great. [1392] Thereupon envious rivals,
of whom he had made many by his arrogance as well as by his fame, set
up against him a heresy hunt; and for the rest of his life he figured
as a dangerous person. While, however, he took up the relatively
advanced position that reason must prepare the way for faith, since
otherwise faith has no certitude, [1393] he was in the main dependent
on the authority either of second-hand Aristotle [1394] or of the
Scriptures, though he partly set aside that of the Fathers. [1395]
When St. Bernard accused him of Arianism and of heathenism he was
expressing personal ill-will rather than criticizing. Abailard himself
complained that many heresies were current in his time [1396]; and
as a matter of fact "more intrepid views than his were promulgated
without risk by a multitude of less conspicuous masters." [1397]
For instance, Bernard Sylvester (of Chartres), in his cosmology,
treated theological considerations with open disrespect [1398];
and William of Conches, who held a similar tone on physics, [1399]
taught, until threatened with punishment, that the Holy Ghost and
the Universal Soul were convertible terms. [1400] This remarkably
rational theologian further rejected the literal interpretation of
the creation of Eve; in science he adopted the Demokritean doctrine of
atoms; and in New Testament matters he revived the old rationalistic
heresy that the three Persons of the Trinity are simply three aspects
of the divine personality--power, wisdom, and will--which doctrine he
was duly forced to retract. It is clear from his works that he lived
in an atmosphere of controversy, and had to fight all along with the
pious irrationalists who, "because they know not the forces of nature,
in order that they may have all men comrades in their ignorance,
suffer not that others should search out anything, and would have us
believe like rustics and ask no reason." "If they perceive any man
to be making search, they at once cry out that he is a heretic." The
history of a thousand years of struggle between reason and religion
is told in those sentences.
As to William's doctrines and writings see Poole, pp. 124-30,
346-59. His authorship of one treatise is only latterly cleared
up. In the work which under the title of Elementa Philosophiae
is falsely ascribed to Bede, and under the title De Philosophia
Mundi to Honorius of Autun (see Poole, pp. 340-42, 347 sq.), but
which is really the production of William of Conches, there occurs
the passage: "What is more pitiable than to say that a thing is,
because God is able to do it, and not to show any reason why it
is so; just as if God did everything that he is able to do! You
talk like one who says that God is able to make a calf out of
a log. But did he ever do it? Either, then, show a reason why a
thing is so, or a purpose wherefore it is so, or else cease to
declare it so." Migne, Patrolog. Latin. xc, 1139. It is thus an
exaggeration to say of Abailard, as does Cousin, that "il mit
de côté la vieille école d'Anselme de Laon, qui exposait sans
expliquer, et fonda ce qu'on appelle aujourd'hui le rationalisme"
(Ouvr. inédits d'Abélard, 1836, intr. p. ii).
Abailard was not more explicit on concrete issues than this
contemporary--who survived him, and studied his writings. If, indeed,
as is said, he wrote that "a doctrine is believed not because God has
said it, but because we are convinced by reason that it is so," [1401]
he went as far on one line as any theologian of his time; but his
main service to freethought seems to have lain in the great stimulus
he gave to the practice of reasoning on all topics. [1402] His enemy,
St. Bernard, on the contrary, gave an "immense impulse to the growth
of a genuinely superstitious spirit among the Latin clergy." [1403]
Dr. Rashdall pronounces Abailard "incomparably the greatest
intellect of the Middle Ages; one of the great minds which mark
a period in the world's intellectual history"; and adds that
"Abailard (a Christian thinker to the very heart's core, however
irredeemable (sic) the selfishness and overweening vanity of his
youth) was at the same time the representative of the principle of
free though reverent inquiry in matters of religion and individual
loyalty to truth." (The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages,
1895, i, 56-57.) If the praise given be intended to exalt Abailard
above John Scotus, it seems excessive.
On a survey of Abailard's theological teachings, a modern reader is
apt to see the spirit of moral reason most clearly in one set forth
in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, to the effect that
Jesus was not incarnate to redeem men from damnation, but solely to
instruct them by precept and example, and that he suffered and died
only to show his charity towards men. The thesis was implicit if not
explicit in the teaching of Pelagius; and for both men it meant the
effort to purify their creed from the barbaric taint of the principle
of sacrifice. In our own day, revived by such theologians as the
English Maurice, it seems likely to gain ground, as an accommodation
to the embarrassed moral sense of educated believers. But it is heresy
if heresy ever was, besides being a blow at the heart of Catholic
sacerdotalism; and Abailard on condemnation retracted it as he did
his other Pelagian errors. Retractation, however, is publication;
and to have been sentenced to retract such teaching in the twelfth
century is to leave on posterity an impression of moral originality
perhaps as important as the fame of a metaphysician. In any case,
it is a careful judge who thus finally estimates him: "When he is
often designated as the rationalist among the schoolmen, he deserves
the title not only on account of the doctrine of the Trinity, which
approaches Sabellianism in spite of all his polemics against it, and
not only on account of his critical attempts, but also on account of
his ethics, in which he actually completely agrees in the principal
point with many modern rationalists." [1404] And it is latterly his
singular fate to be valued at once by many sympathetic Catholics,
who hold him finally vindicated alike in life and doctrine, and by
many freethinkers.
How far the stir set up in Europe by his personal magnetism and his
personal record may have made for rational culture, it is impossible
to estimate; but some consequence there must have been. John of
Salisbury was one of Abailard's disciples and admirers; and, as
we saw, he not only noted skepticism in others but indicated an
infusion of it in his own mind--enough to earn for him from a modern
historian the praise of being a sincere skeptic, as against those
false skeptics who put forward universal doubt as a stalking horse for
their mysticism. [1405] But he was certainly not a universal skeptic
[1406]; and his denunciation of doubt as to the goodness and power
of God [1407] sounds orthodox enough. What he gained from Abailard
was a concern for earnest dialectic.
The worst side of scholasticism at all times was that it was more
often than not a mere logical expatiation in vacuo; this partly
for sheer lack of real knowledge. John of Salisbury probably did
not do injustice to the habit of verbiage it developed [1408]; and
the pupils of Abailard seem to have expressed themselves strongly to
him concerning the wordy emptiness of most of what passed current as
philosophic discourse; speaking of the teachers as blind leaders of
the blind. [1409] One version of the legend against Simon of Tournay is
to the effect that, after demonstrating by the most skilful arguments
the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity, he went on to say, when
enraptured listeners besought him to dictate his address so that
it might be preserved, that if he had been evilly minded he could
refute the doctrine by yet better arguments. [1410] Heresy apart,
this species of dialectical insincerity infected the whole life of
the schools, even the higher spirits going about their work with a
certain amount of mere logical ceremony.
§ 6. SARACEN AND JEWISH INFLUENCES
Even in the schools, however, over and above the influence of the more
original teachers, there rises at the close of the twelfth century and
the beginning of the thirteenth some measure of a new life, introduced
into philosophy through the communication of Aristotle to the western
world by the Saracens, largely by the mediation of the Jews. [1411]
The latter, in their free life under the earlier Moorish toleration,
had developed something in the nature of a school of philosophy,
in which the Judaic Platonism set up by Philo of Alexandria in the
first century was blended with the Aristotelianism of the Arabs. As
early as the eighth and ninth centuries, anti-Talmudic (the Karaïtes)
and pro-Talmudic parties professed alike to appeal to reason [1412];
and in the twelfth century the mere production of the Guide of the
Perplexed by the celebrated Moses Maimonides (1130-1205) [1413]
tells of a good deal of practical rationalism (of the kind that
reduced miracle stories to allegories), of which, however, there
is little direct literary result save of a theosophic kind. [1414]
Levi ben Gershom (1286-1344), commonly regarded as the greatest
successor of Maimonides, is like him guardedly rationalistic in his
commentaries on the Scriptures. [1415] But the doctrine which makes
Aristotle a practical support to rationalism, and which was adopted
not only by Averroës but by the Motazilites of Islam--the eternity
of matter--was rejected by Maimonides (as by nearly all other Jewish
teachers, with the partial exception of Levi ben Gershom), [1416]
on Biblical grounds; though his attempts to rationalize Biblical
doctrine and minimize miracles made him odious to the orthodox Jews,
some of whom, in France, did not scruple to call in the aid of the
Christian inquisition against his partisans. [1417] The long struggle
between the Maimonists and the orthodox is described as ending in the
"triumph of peripatetism" or Averroïsm in the synagogue [1418]; but
Averroïsm as modified by Maimonides is only a partial accommodation
of scripture to common sense. It would appear, in fact, that Jewish
thought in the Saracen world retrograded as did that of the Saracens
themselves; for we find Maimonides exclaiming over the apparent
disbelief in creatio ex nihilo in the "Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the
Great," believed by him to be ancient, but now known to be a product
of the eighth century. [1419] The pantheistic teaching of Solomon
ben Gebirol or Ibn Gebirol, better known as Avicebron, [1420] who
in point of time preceded the Arab Avempace, and who later acquired
much Christian authority, was orthodox on the side of the creation
dogma even when many Jews were on that head rationalistic. [1421]
The high-water mark, among the Jews, of the critical rationalism of
the time, is the perception by Aben or Ibn Ezra (1119-1174) that the
Pentateuch was not written by Moses--a discovery which gave Spinoza
his cue five hundred years later; but Ibn Ezra, liberioris ingenii vir,
as Spinoza pronounced him, had to express himself darkly. [1422]
Thus the Jewish influence on Christian thought in the Middle Ages was
chiefly metaphysical, carrying on Greek and Arab impulses; and to call
the Jewish people, as does Renan, "the principal representative of
rationalism during the second half of the Middle Age" is to make too
much of the academic aspects of freethinking. On the side of popular
theology it is difficult to believe that they had much Unitarian
influence; though Joinville in his Life of Saint Louis tells how,
in a debate between Churchmen and Jews at the monastery of Cluny,
a certain knight saw fit to break the head of one of the Jews with
his staff for denying the divinity of Jesus, giving as his reason
that many good Christians, listening to the Jewish arguments, were
in a fair way to go home unbelievers. It was in this case that the
sainted king laid down the principle that when a layman heard anyone
blaspheme the Christian creed his proper course was not to argue,
but to run the blasphemer through with his sword. [1423] Such admitted
inability on the part of the laity to reason on their faith, however,
was more likely to accompany a double degree of orthodoxy than to
make for doubt; and the clerical debating at the Abbey of Cluny,
despite the honourable attitude of the Abbot, who condemned the
knight's outrage, was probably a muster of foregone conclusions.
For a time, indeed, in the energetic intellectual life of northern
France the spirit of freethought went far and deep. After the great
stimulus given in Abailard's day to all discussion, we find another
Breton teacher, Amaury or Amalrich of Bène or Bena (end of twelfth
century) and his pupil David of Dinant, partly under the earlier
Arab influence, [1424] partly under that of John the Scot, [1425]
teaching a pronounced pantheism, akin to that noted as flourishing
later among the Brethren of the Free Spirit [1426] and some of the
Franciscan Fraticelli. Such a movement, involving disregard for
the sacraments and ceremonies of the Church, was soon recognized as
a dangerous heresy, and dealt with accordingly. The Church caused
Amaury to abjure his teachings; and after his death, finding his party
still growing, dug up and burned his bones. At the same time (1209)
a number of his followers were burned alive; David of Dinant had to
fly for his life; [1427] and inasmuch as the new heresy had begun
to make much of Aristotle, presumably as interpreted by Averroës,
a Council held at Paris vetoed for the university the study alike of
the pagan master and his commentators, interdicting first the Physics
and soon after the Metaphysics. [1428] This veto held until 1237,
when the school which adapted the lore of Aristotle to Christian
purposes began to carry the day.
The heretical Aristotelianism and the orthodox system which was
to overpower it were alike radiated from the south, where the Arab
influence spread early and widely. There, as we shall see, the long
duel between the Emperor Frederick II and the papacy made a special
opportunity for speculative freethought; and though this was far
from meaning at all times practical enmity to Christian doctrine,
[1429] that was not absent. It is clear that before Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274) a Naturalist and Averroïst view of the universe had
been much discussed, since he makes the remark that "God is by some
called Natura naturans" [1430]--Nature at work--an idea fundamental
alike to pantheism and to scientific naturalism. And throughout his
great work--a marvel of mental gymnastic which better than almost
any other writing redeems medieval orthodoxy from the charge of
mere ineptitude--Thomas indicates his acquaintance with unorthodox
thought. In particular he seems to owe the form of his work as well
as the subject-matter of much of his argument to Averroës. [1431]
Born within the sphere of the Saracen-Sicilian influence, and of
high rank, he must have met with what rationalism there was, and he
always presupposes it. [1432] "He is nearly as consummate a skeptic,
almost atheist, as he is a divine and theologian," says one modern
ecclesiastical dignitary; [1433] and an orthodox apologist [1434]
more severely complains that "Aquinas presented ... so many doubts
on the deepest points ... so many plausible reasons for unbelief
... that his works have probably suggested most of the skeptical
opinions which were adopted by others who were trained in the study
of them.... He has done more than most men to put the faith of his
fellow-Christians in peril." Of course he rejects Averroïsm. Yet he,
like his antagonist Duns Scotus, inevitably gravitates to pantheism
when he would rigorously philosophize. [1435]
What he did for his church was to combine so ingeniously the semblance
of Aristotelian method with constant recurrence to the sacred books
as to impose their authority on the life of the schools no less
completely than it dominated the minds of the unlearned. Meeting
method with method, and showing himself well aware of the lore he
circumvented, he built up a system quite as well fitted to be a
mere gymnastic of the mind; and he thereby effected the arrest for
some three centuries of the method of experimental science which
Aristotle had inculcated. He came just in time. Roger Bacon, trained
at Paris, was eagerly preaching the scientific gospel; and while he
was suffering imprisonment at the hands of his Franciscan superiors
for his eminently secular devotion to science, the freer scholars of
the university were developing a heresy that outwent his.
Now, however, began to be seen once for all the impossibility
of rational freedom in or under a church which depended for its
revenue on the dogmatic exploitation of popular credulity. For a
time the Aristotelian influence, as had been seen by the churchmen
who had first sought to destroy it, [1436] tended to be Averroïst
and rationalist. [1437] In 1269, however, there begins a determined
campaign, led by the bishop of Paris, against the current Averroïst
doctrines, notably the propositions "that the world is eternal";
"that there never was a first man"; "that the intellect of man
is one"; "that the mind, which is the form of man, constituting
him such, perishes with the body"; "that the acts of men are not
governed by divine providence"; "that God cannot give immortality or
incorruptibility to a corruptible or mortal thing." [1438] On such
doctrines the bishop and his coadjutors naturally passed an anathema
(1270); and at this period it was that Albertus Magnus and Thomas
Aquinas wrote their treatises against Averroïsm. [1439]
Still the freethinkers held out, and though in 1271 official commands
were given that the discussion of such matters in the university should
cease, another process of condemnation was carried out in 1277. This
time the list of propositions denounced includes the following:
"that the natural philosopher as such must deny the creation of
the world, because he proceeds upon natural causes and reasons;
while the believer (fidelis) may deny the eternity of the world,
because he argues from supernatural causes"; "that creation is not
possible, although the contrary is to be held according to faith";
"that a future resurrection is not to be believed by the philosopher,
because it cannot be investigated by reason"; "that the teachings of
the theologians are founded on fables"; "that there are fables and
falsities in the Christian religion as in others"; "that nothing more
can be known, on account of theology"; "that the Christian law prevents
from learning"; [1440] "that God is not triune and one, for trinity
is incompatible with perfect simplicity"; "that ecstatic states and
visions take place naturally, and only so." Such vital unbelief could
have only one fate; it was reduced to silence by a papal Bull, [1441]
administered by the orthodox majority; and the memory of the massacres
of the year 1209, and of the awful crusade against the Albigenses,
served to cow the thinkers of the schools into an outward conformity.
Henceforward orthodox Aristotelianism, placed on a canonical footing
in the theological system of Thomas Aquinas, ruled the universities;
and scholasticism counts for little in the liberation of European
life from either dogma or superstition. [1442] The practically
progressive forces are to be looked for outside. In the thirteenth
century in England we find the Franciscan friars in the school of
Robert Grosstête at Oxford discussing the question "Whether there
be a God?" [1443] but such a dispute was an academic exercise like
another; and in any case the authorities could be trusted to see
that it came to nothing. The work of Thomas himself serves to show
how a really great power of comprehensive and orderly thought can be
turned to the subversion of judgment by accepting the prior dominion
of a fixed body of dogma and an arbitrary rule over opinion. And yet,
so strong is the principle of ratiocination in his large performance,
and so much does it embody of the critical forces of antiquity and of
its own day, that while it served the Church as a code of orthodoxy
its influence can be seen in the skeptical philosophy of Europe
as late as Spinoza and Kant. It appears to have been as a result
of his argumentation that there became established in the later
procedure of the Church the doctrine that, while heretics who have
once received the faith and lapsed are to be coerced and punished,
other unbelievers (as Moslems and Jews) are not. This principle also,
it would appear, he derived from the Moslems, as he did their rule
that those of the true faith must avoid intimacy with the unbelievers,
though believers firm in the faith may dispute with them "when there
is greater expectation of the conversion of the infidels than of the
subversion of the fidels." And to the rule of non-inquisition into
the faith of Jews and Moslems the Church professed to adhere while the
Inquisition lasted, after having trampled it under foot in spirit by
causing the expulsion of the Jews and the Moriscoes from Spain. [1444]