We shall perhaps best understand the inner life of the schools in

the Middle Ages by likening it to that of the universities of our own

time, where there is unquestionably much unbelief among teachers and

taught, but where the economic and other pressures of the institution

suffice to preserve an outward acquiescence. In the Middle Ages it

was immeasurably less possible than in our day for the unbeliever to

strike out a free course of life and doctrine for himself. If, then,

to-day the scholarly class is in large measure tied to institutions

and conformities, much more so was it then. The cloister was almost

the sole haven of refuge for studious spirits, and to attain the haven

they had to accept the discipline and the profession of faith. We

may conclude, accordingly, that such works as Abailard's Sic et Non,

setting forth opposed views of so many doctrines and problems,

stood for and made for a great deal of quiet skepticism; [1445]

that the remarkable request of the monks of Bec for a ratiocinative

teaching which should meet even extravagant objections, covered a

good deal of resigned unfaith; and that in the Franciscan schools at

Oxford the disputants were not all at heart believers. Indeed, the

very existence of the doctrine of a "twofold truth"--one truth for

religion and another for philosophy--was from the outset a witness

for unbelief. But the unwritten word died, the litera scripta being

solely those of faith, and liberation had to come, ages later, from

without. Even when a bold saying won general currency--as that latterly

ascribed, no doubt falsely, to King Alfonso the Wise of Castile, that

"if he had been of God's council when he made the world he could have

advised him better"--it did but crystallize skepticism in a jest,

and supply the enemy with a text against impiety.

All the while, the Church was forging new and more murderous weapons

against reason. It is one of her infamies to have revived the use

in Christendom of the ancient practice of judicial torture, and this

expressly for the suppression of heresy. The later European practice

dates from the Bull of Innocent IV, Ad extirpanda, dated 1252. At

first a veto was put on its administration by clerical hands; but in

1256 Alexander IV authorized the inquisitors and their associates to

absolve one another for such acts. By the beginning of the fourteenth

century torture was in use not only in the tribunals of the Inquisition

but in the ordinary ecclesiastical courts, whence it gradually entered

into the courts of lay justice. [1446] It is impossible to estimate

the injury thus wrought at once to culture and to civilization, at

the hands of the power which claimed specially to promote both. [1447]

§ 7. FREETHOUGHT IN ITALY

Apart from the schools, there was a notable amount of hardy

freethinking among the imperialist nobles of northern Italy, in

the time of the emperors Henry IV and V, the attitude of enmity to

the Holy See having the effect of encouraging a rude rationalism. In

1115, while Henry V was vigorously carrying on the war of investitures

begun by his father, and formerly condemned by himself, the Countess

Matilda of Tuscany bequeathed her extensive fiefs to the papacy;

and in the following year Henry took forcible possession of them. At

this period the strife between the papal and the imperial factions in

the Tuscan cities was at its fiercest; and the Florentine chronicler

Giovanni Villani alleges that among many other heretics in 1115 and

1117 were some "of the sect of the Epicureans," who "with armed

hand defended the said heresy" against the orthodox. [1448] But

it is doubtful whether the heresy involved was anything more than

imperialist anti-papalism. Another chronicler speaks of the heretics

as Paterini; and even this is dubious. The title of Epicurean in the

time of Villani and Dante stood for an unbeliever in a future state;

[1449] but there was an avowed tendency to call all Ghibellines

Paterini; and other heretical aspersions were likely to be applied in

the same way. [1450] As the Averroïst philosophy had not yet risen,

and rationalistic opinions were not yet current among the western

Saracens, any bold heresy among the anti-papalists of Florence must

be assigned either to a spontaneous growth of unbelief or to the

obscure influence of the great poem of Lucretius, never wholly lost

from Italian hands. But the Lucretian view of things among men of

the world naturally remained a matter of private discussion, not of

propaganda; and it was on the less rationalistic but more organized

anti-clericalism that there came the doom of martyrdom. So with the

simple deism of which we find traces in the polemic of Guibert de

Nogent (d. 1124), who avowedly wrote his tract De Incarnatione adversus

Judæos rather as an apology against unbelievers among the Christians;

[1451] and again among the pilgrim community founded later in France

in commemoration of Thomas à Becket. [1452] Such doubters said little,

leaving it to more zealous reformers to challenge creed with creed.

Freethought in south-western Europe, however, had a measure of

countenance in very high places. In the thirteenth century the Emperor

Frederick II had the repute of being an infidel in the double sense of

being semi-Moslem [1453] and semi-atheist. By Pope Gregory IX he was

openly charged, in a furious afterthought, [1454] with saying that

the world had been deceived by three impostors (baratores)--Moses,

Jesus, and Mohammed; also with putting Jesus much below the other two,

and with delighting to call himself the forerunner of Antichrist.

The Pope's letter, dated July 1, 1239, is given by Matthew Paris

(extracts in Gieseler, vol. iii, § 55), and in Labbe's Concilia,

t. xiii, col. 1157. Cp. the other references given by Renan,

Averroès, 3e édit. pp. 296-97. As Voltaire remarks (Essai sur

les Moeurs, ch. lii), the Pope's statement is the basis for the

old belief that Frederick had written a treatise dealing with

Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as The Three Impostors. The story

is certainly a myth; and probably no such book existed in his

century. Cp. Maclaine's note to Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. i, end;

Renan, Averroès, pp. 280-81, 295. The authorship of such a book

has nevertheless been ascribed by Catholic writers successively

to Averroës, Simon of Tournay, Frederick, his Minister, Pierre

des Vignes, Arnaldo de Villanueva, Boccaccio, Poggio, Pietro

Aretino, Machiavelli, Symphorien, Champier, Pomponazzi, Cardan,

Erasmus, Rabelais, Ochinus, Servetus, Postel, Campanella, Muret,

Geoffroi Vallée, Giordano Bruno, Dolet, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Vanini

(cp. Sentimens sur le traité des trois imposteurs in the French

ed. of 1793; and Lea, Hist. of the Inquis. iii, 560); and the

seventeenth-century apologist Mersenne professed to have seen it

in Arabic (Lea, iii, 297). These references may be dismissed as

worthless. In 1654 the French physician and mathematician Morin

wrote an Epistola de tribus impostoribus under the name of Panurge,

but this attacked the three contemporary writers Gassendi, Neure,

and Bernier; and in 1680 Kortholt of Kiel published under the title

De tribus impostoribus magnis an attack on Herbert, Hobbes, and

Spinoza. The Three Impostors current later, dealing with Moses,

Jesus, and Mohammed, may have been written about the same time,

but, as we shall see later, is identical with L'Esprit de Spinoza,

first published in 1719. A Latin treatise purporting to be written

de tribus famosissimis deceptoribus, and addressed to an Otho

illustrissimus (conceivably Otho Duke of Bavaria, 13th c.), came

to light in MS. in 1706, and was described in 1716, but was not

printed. The treatise current later in French cannot have been

the same. On the whole subject see the note of R. C. Christie

(reprinted from Notes and Queries) in his Selected Essays and

Papers, 1902, pp. 309, 315; and the full discussion in Reuter's

Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung, ii, 251-96. The book De

tribus impostoribus, bearing the date 1598, of which several copies

exist, seems to have been really published, with its false date,

at Vienna in 1753.

Frederick was in reality superstitious enough; he worshipped relics;

and he was nearly as merciless as the popes to rebellious heretics and

Manicheans; [1455] his cruelty proceeding, seemingly, on the belief

that insubordination to the emperor was sure to follow intellectual

as distinguished from political revolt against the Church. He was

absolutely tolerant to Jews and Moslems, [1456] and had trusted Moslem

counsellors, thereby specially evoking the wrath of the Church. Greatly

concerned to acquire the lore of the Arabs, [1457] he gave his favour

and protection to Michael Scotus, the first translator of portions

of Averroës into Latin, [1458] and presumptively himself a heretic

of the Averroïst stamp; whence the legend of his wizardry, adopted

by Dante. [1459] Thus the doubting and persecuting emperor assisted

at the birth of the philosophic movement which for centuries was

most closely associated with unbelief in Christendom. For the rest,

he is recorded to have ridiculed the doctrine of the Virgin Birth,

the viaticum, and other dogmas, "as being repugnant to reason and to

nature"; [1460] and his general hostility to the Pope would tend to

make him a bad Churchman. Indeed the testimonies, both Christian and

Moslem, as to his freethinking are too clear to be set aside. [1461]

Certainly no monarch of that or any age was more eagerly interested

in every form of culture, or did more, on tyrannous lines, to promote

it; [1462] and to him rather than to Simon de Montfort Europe owes

the admission of representatives of cities to Parliaments. [1463]

Of his son Manfred it is recorded that he was a thorough Epicurean,

believing neither in God nor in the saints. [1464] But positive

unbelief in a future state, mockery of the Christian religion, and

even denial of deity--usually in private, and never in writing--are

frequently complained of by the clerical writers of the time in France

and Italy; [1465] while in Spain Alfonso the Wise, about 1260, speaks

of a common unbelief in immortality, alike as to heaven and hell;

and the Council of Tarragona in 1291 decrees punishments against such

unbelievers. [1466] In Italy, not unnaturally, they were most commonly

found among the Ghibelline or imperial party, the opponents of the

papacy, despite imperial orthodoxy. "Incredulity, affected or real,

was for the oppressed Ghibellines a way among others of distinguishing

themselves from the Guelph oppressors." [1467]

The commonest form of rationalistic heresy seems to have been unbelief

in immortality. Thus Dante in the Inferno estimates that among

the heretics there are more than a thousand followers of Epicurus,

"who make the soul die with the body," [1468] specifying among them

the Emperor Frederick II, a cardinal, [1469] the Ghibelline noble

Farinata degli Uberti, and the Guelph Cavalcante Cavalcanti. [1470]

He was thinking, as usual, of the men of his own age; but, as we

have seen, this particular heresy had existed in previous centuries,

having indeed probably never disappeared from Italy. Other passages in

Dante's works [1471] show, in any case, that it was much discussed in

his time; [1472] and it is noteworthy that, so far as open avowal went,

Italian freethought had got no further two hundred years later. In the

period before the papacy had thoroughly established the Inquisition,

and diplomacy supervened on the tempestuous strifes of the great

factions, there was a certain hardihood of speech on all subjects,

which tended to disappear alongside of even a more searching unbelief.

"Le 16e siècle n'a eu aucune mauvaise pensée que le 13e n'ait

eue avant lui" (Renan, Averroès, p. 231). Renan, however,

seems astray in stating that "Le Poème de la Descente de Saint

Paul aux enfers parle avec terreur d'une société secrète qui

avait juré la destruction de Christianisme" (id. p. 284). The

poem simply describes the various tortures of sinners in hell,

and mentions in their turn those who "en terre, à sainte Iglise

firent guerre," and in death "Verbe Deu refusouent"; also those

"Ki ne croient que Deu fust nez (né), ne que Sainte Marie l'eust

portez, ne que por le peuple vousist (voulait) mourir, ne que

peine deignast soffrir." See the text as given by Ozanam, Dante,

ed. 6ième, Ptie. iv--the version cited by Renan.

So, with regard to the belief in magic, there was no general advance

in the later Renaissance on the skepticism of Pietro of Abano, a

famous Paduan physician and Averroïst, who died, at the age of 80,

in 1305. He appears to have denied alike magic and miracles, though

he held fast by astrology, and ascribed the rise and progress of all

religions to the influence of the stars. Himself accused of magic, he

escaped violent death by dying naturally before his trial was ended;

and the Inquisition burned either his body or his image. [1473] After

him, superstition seems to have gone step for step with skepticism.

Dante's own poetic genius, indeed, did much to arrest intellectual

evolution in Italy. Before his time, as we have seen, the trouvères

of northern France and the Goliards of the south had handled hell

in a spirit of burlesque; and his own teacher, Brunetto Latini, had

framed a poetic allegory, Il Tesoretto, in which Nature figures as

the universal power, behind which the God-idea disappeared. [1474] But

Dante's tremendous vision ultimately effaced all others of the kind;

and his intellectual predominance in virtue of mere imaginative art is

at once the great characteristic and the great anomaly of the early

Renaissance. Happily the inseparable malignity of his pietism was in

large part superseded by a sunnier spirit; [1475] but his personality

and his poetry helped to hold the balance of authority on the side

of faith. [1476] Within a few years of his death there was burned at

Florence (1327) one of the most daring heretics of the later Middle

Ages, Cecco Stabili d'Ascoli, a professor of philosophy and astrology

at Bologna, who is recorded to have had some intimacy with Dante, and

to have been one of his detractors. [1477] Cecco has been described as

"representing natural science, against the Christian science of Dante";

[1478] and though his science was primitive, the summing-up is not

unwarranted. Combining strong anti-Christian feeling with the universal

belief in astrology, he had declared that Jesus lived as a sluggard

(come un poltrone) with his disciples, and died on the cross, under

the compulsion of his star. [1479] In view of the blasphemer's fate,

such audacity was not often repeated.

As against Dante, the great literary influence for tolerance and

liberalism if not rationalism of thought was Boccaccio (1313-1375),

whose Decameron [1480] anticipates every lighter aspect of the

Renaissance--its levity, its licence, its humour, its anti-clericalism,

its incipient tolerance, its irreverence, its partial freethinking,

as well as its exuberance in the joy of living. On the side of

anti-clericalism, the key-note is struck so strongly and so defiantly

in some of the opening tales that the toleration of the book by the

papal authorities can be accounted for only by their appreciation of

the humour of the stories therein told against them, as that [1481] of

the Jew who, after seeing the utter corruption of the clergy at Rome,

turned Christian on the score that only by divine support could such

a system survive. No Protestant ever passed a more scathing aspersion

on the whole body of the curia than is thus set in the forefront of

the Decameron. Still more deeply significant of innovating thought,

however, is the famous story of The Three Rings, [1482] embodied later

by Lessing in his Nathan the Wise as an apologue of tolerance. Such a

story, introduced with whatever parade of orthodox faith, could not but

make for rational skepticism, summarizing as it does the whole effect

of the inevitable comparison of the rival creeds made by the men of

Italy and those of the east in their intercourse. The story itself,

centring on Saladin, is of eastern origin, [1483] and so tells of even

more freethinking than meets the eye in the history of Islam. [1484]

It is noteworthy that the Rabbi Simeon Duran (1360-1444), who follows

on this period, appears to be the first Jewish teacher to plead for

mutual toleration among the conflicting schools of his race. [1485]

Current in Italy before Boccaccio, the tale had been improved from

one Italian hand to another; [1486] and the main credit for its full

development is Boccaccio's. [1487] Though the Church never officially

attempted to suppress the book--leaving it to Savonarola to destroy as

far as possible the first edition--the more serious clergy naturally

resented its hostility, first denouncing it, then seeking to expurgate

all the anti-clerical passages; [1488] and the personal pressure

brought to bear upon Boccaccio had the effect of dispiriting and

puritanizing him; so that the Decameron finally wrought its effect

in its author's despite. [1489] So far as we can divine the deeper

influence of such a work on medieval thought, it may reasonably be

supposed to have tended, like that of Averroïsm, towards Unitarianism

or deism, inasmuch as a simple belief in deity is all that is normally

implied in its language on religious matters. On that view it bore

its full intellectual fruit only in the two succeeding centuries,

when deism and Unitarianism alike grew up in Italy, apparently from

non-scholastic roots.

It is an interesting problem how far the vast calamity of the Black

Death (1348-49) told either for skepticism or for superstition in this

age. In Boccaccio's immortal book we see a few refined Florentines who

flee the pest giving themselves up to literary amusement; but there

is also mention of many who had taken to wild debauchery, and there

are many evidences as to wild outbreaks of desperate licence all over

Europe. [1490] On the other hand, many were driven by fear to religious

practices; [1491] and in the immense destruction of life the Church

acquired much new wealth. At the same time the multitudes of priests

who died [1492] had as a rule to be replaced by ill-trained persons,

where the problem was not solved by creating pluralities, the result

being a general falling-off in the culture and the authority of the

clergy. [1493] But there seems to have been little or no growth of

such questioning as came later from the previously optimistic Voltaire

after the earthquake of Lisbon; and the total effect of the immense

reduction of population all over Europe seems to have been a lowering

of the whole of the activities of life. Certainly the students of

Paris in 1376 were surprisingly freethinking on scriptural points;

[1494] but there is nothing to show that the great pestilence had set

up any new movement of ethical thought. In some ways it grievously

deepened bigotry, as in regard to the Jews, who were in many regions

madly impeached as having caused the plague by poisoning the wells,

and were then massacred in large numbers.

Side by side with Boccaccio, his friend Petrarch (1304-1374), who

with him completes the great literary trio of the late Middle Ages,

belongs to freethought in that he too, with less aggressiveness but

also without recoil, stood for independent culture and a rational habit

of mind as against the dogmatics and tyrannies of the Church. [1495]

He was in the main a practical humanist, not in accord with the

verbalizing scholastic philosophy of his time, and disposed to

find his intellectual guide in the skeptical yet conservative

Cicero. The scholastics had become as fanatical for Aristotle or

Averroës as the churchmen were for their dogmas; [1496] and Petrarch

made for mental freedom by resisting all dogmatisms alike. [1497]

The general liberality of his attitude has earned him the titles of

"the first modern man" [1498] and "the founder of modern criticism"

[1499]--both somewhat high-pitched. [1500] He represented in reality

the sobering and clarifying influence of the revived classic culture

on the fanaticisms developed in the Middle Ages; and when he argued

for the rule of reason in all things [1501] it was not that he

was a deeply searching rationalist, but that he was spontaneously

averse to all the extremes of thought around him, and was concerned

to discredit them. For himself, having little speculative power, he

was disposed to fall back on a simple and tolerant Christianity. Thus

he is quite unsympathetic in his references to those scholars of his

day who privately indicated their unbelief. Knowing nothing of the

teaching of Averroës, he speaks of him, on the strength of Christian

fictions, as "that mad dog who, moved by an execrable rage, barks

against his Lord Christ and the Catholic faith." [1502] Apart from

such conventional odium theologicum, his judgment, like his literary

art, was clear and restrained; opening no new vistas, but bringing

a steady and placid light to bear on its chosen sphere.

Between such humanistic influences and that of more systematic and

scholastic thought, Italy in that age was the chief source of practical

criticism of Christian dogmas; and the extent to which a unitarian

theism was now connected with the acceptance of the philosophy of

Averroës brought it about, despite the respectful attitude of Dante,

who gave him a tranquil place in hell, [1503] that he came to figure

as Antichrist for the faithful. [1504] Petrarch in his letters speaks

of much downright hostility to the Christian system on the part of

Averroïsts; [1505] and the association of Averroïsm with the great

medical school of Padua [1506] must have promoted practical skepticism

among physicians. Being formally restricted to the schools, however,

it tended there to undergo the usual scholastic petrifaction; and

the common-sense deism it encouraged outside had to subsist without

literary discipline. In this form it probably reached many lands,

without openly affecting culture or life; since Averroïsm itself

was professed generally in the Carmelite order, who claimed for it

orthodoxy. [1507]

Alongside, however, of intellectual solvents, there were at work others

of a more widely effective kind, set up by the long and sinister

historic episode of the Great Papal Schism. The Church, already

profoundly discredited in the eleventh century by the gross disorders

of the papacy, continued frequently throughout the twelfth to exhibit

the old spectacle of rival popes; and late in the fourteenth (1378)

there broke out the greatest schism of all. Ostensibly beginning in

a riotous coercion of the electing cardinals by the Roman populace,

it was maintained on the one side by the standing interest of the

clergy in Italy, which called for an Italian head of the Church,

and on the other hand by the French interest, which had already

enforced the residence of the popes at Avignon from 1305 to 1376. It

was natural that, just after the papal chair had been replaced in

Italy by Gregory IX, the Romans should threaten violence to the

cardinals if they chose any but an Italian; and no less natural that

the French court should determine to restore a state of things in

which it controlled the papacy in all save its corruption. During

the seventy years of "the Captivity," Rome had sunk to the condition

of a poor country town; and to the Italian clergy the struggle for a

restoration was a matter of economic life and death. For thirty-nine

years did the schism last, being ended only by the prolonged action

of the great Council of Constance in deposing the rivals of the moment

and appointing Martin V (1417); and this was achieved only after there

had slipped into the chair of Peter "the most worthless and infamous

man to be found." [1508] During the schism every species of scandal had

flourished. Indulgences had been sold and distributed at random; [1509]

simony and venality abounded more than ever; [1510] the courts of Rome

and Avignon were mere rivals in avarice, indecorum, and reciprocal

execration; and in addition to the moral occasion for skepticism there

was the intellectual, since no one could show conclusively that the

administration of sacraments was valid under either pope. [1511]

§ 8. SECTS AND ORDERS

Despite, therefore, the premium put by the Church on devotion

to its cause and doctrine, and despite its success in strangling

specific forms of heresy, hostility to its own pretensions germinated

everywhere, [1512] especially in the countries most alien to Italy

in language and civilization. An accomplished Catholic scholar [1513]

sums up that "from about the middle of the twelfth century the whole

secular and religious literature of Europe grew more and more hostile

to the papacy and the curia." The Church's own economic conditions,

constantly turning its priesthood, despite all precautions, into a

money-making and shamelessly avaricious class, ensured it a perpetuity

of ill-will and denunciation. The popular literature which now began

to grow throughout Christendom with the spread of political order was

everywhere turned to the account of anti-clerical satire; [1514] and

only the defect of real knowledge secured by the Church's own policy

prevented such hostility from developing into rational unbelief. As

it was, a tendency to criticize at once the socio-economic code and

practice and the details of creed and worship is seen in a series

of movements from the thirteenth century onwards; and some of the

most popular literature of that age is deeply tinged with the new

spirit. After the overthrow of the well-organized anti-clericalism

of the Cathari and other heretics in Languedoc, however, no movement

equally systematic and equally heretical flourished on any large scale;

and as even those heresies on their popular side were essentially

supernaturalist, and tended to set up one hierarchy in place of

another, it would be vain to look for anything like a consistent or

searching rationalism among the people in the period broadly termed

medieval, including the Renaissance.

It would be a bad misconception to infer from the abundant signs of

popular disrespect for the clergy that the mass of the laity even

in Italy, for instance, were unbelievers. [1515] They never were

anything of the kind. At all times they were deeply superstitious,

easily swayed by religious emotion, credulous as to relics, miracles,

visions, prophecies, responsive to pulpit eloquence, readily passing

from derision of worldly priests to worship of austere ones. [1516]

When Machiavelli said that religion was gone from Italy, he was

thinking of the upper classes, among whom theism was normal, [1517] and

the upper clergy, who were often at once superstitious and corrupt. As

for the common people, it was impossible that they should be grounded

rationalists as regarded the great problems of life. They were merely

the raw material on which knowledge might work if it could reach them,

which it never did. And the common people everywhere else stood at

or below the culture level of those of Italy.

For lack of other culture than Biblical, then, even the popular heresy

tended to run into mysticisms which were only so far more rational than

the dogmas and rites of the Church that they stood for some actual

reflection. A partial exception, indeed, may be made in the case of

the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a sect set up in Germany in the early

years of the thirteenth century, by one Ortlieb, on the basis of the

pantheistic teachings of Amaury of Bène and David of Dinant. [1518]

Their doctrines were set forth in a special treatise or sacred book,

called The Nine Rocks. The Fratres liberi spiritus seem to have been

identical with the sect of the "Holy Spirit"; [1519] but their tenets

were heretical in a high degree, including as they did a denial of

personal immortality, and consequently of the notions of heaven,

hell, and purgatory. Even the sect's doctrine of the Holy Spirit was

heretical in another way, inasmuch as it ran, if its opponents can be

believed, to the old antinomian assertion that anyone filled with the

Spirit was sinless, whatever deeds he might do. [1520] As always, such

antinomianism strengthened the hands of the clergy against the heresy,

though the Brethren seem to have been originally very ascetic; and

inasmuch as their pantheism involved the idea that Satan also had in

him the divine essence, they were duly accused of devil-worship. [1521]

On general principles they were furiously persecuted; but all through

the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and even in the fifteenth,

they are found in various parts of central and western Europe, [1522]

often in close alliance with the originally orthodox communities

known in France and Holland by the names of Turlupins and Beguins or

Beguines, and in Germany and Belgium as Beguttæ or Beghards, [1523]

akin to the Lollards.

These in turn are to be understood in connection with developments

which took place in the thirteenth century within the Church--notably

the rise of the great orders of Mendicant Friars, of which the

two chief were founded about 1216 by Francis of Assisi and the

Spanish Dominic, the latter a fierce persecutor in the Albigensian

crusade. Nothing availed more to preserve or restore for a time the

Church's prestige. The old criticism of priestly and monastic avarice

and worldliness was disarmed by the sudden appearance and rapid spread

of a priesthood and brotherhood of poverty; and the obvious devotion of

thousands of the earlier adherents went to the general credit of the

Church. Yet the descent of the new orders to the moral and economic

levels of the old was only a question of time; and no process could

more clearly illustrate the futility of all schemes of regenerating the

world on non-rational principles. Apart from the vast encouragement

given to sheer mendicancy among the poor, the orders themselves

substantially apostatized from their own rules within a generation.

The history of the Franciscans in particular is like that of the

Church in general--one of rapid lapse into furious schism, with a

general reversion to gross self-seeking on the part of the majority,

originally vowed to utter poverty. Elias, the first successor of

Francis, appointed by the Saint himself, proved an intolerable tyrant;

and in his day began the ferocious strife between the "Spirituals,"

who insisted on the founder's ideal of poverty, and the majority, who

insisted on accepting the wealth which the world either bestowed or

could be cajoled into bestowing on the order. The majority, of course,

ultimately overbore the Spirituals, the papacy supporting them. [1524]

They followed the practically universal law of monastic life. The

Humiliati, founded before the thirteenth century, had to be suppressed

by the Pope in the sixteenth, for sheer corruption of morals; and the

Franciscans and Dominicans, who speedily became bitterly hostile to

each other, were in large measure little better. Even in the middle

of the thirteenth century they were attacked by the Sorbonne doctor,

William of St. Amour, in a book on The Perils of the Latter Times;

[1525] and in England in the fourteenth century we find Wiclif

assailing the begging friars as the earlier satirists had assailed

the abbots and monks. That all this reciprocal invective was not

mere partizan calumny, but broadly true as against both sides, is

the conclusion forced upon a reader of the Philobiblon ascribed to

Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and Treasurer and Chancellor under

Edward III. In that book, written either by the bishop or by one

of his chaplains, Robert Holkot, [1526] the demerits of all orders

of the clergy from the points of view of letters and morals are set

forth with impartial emphasis; [1527] and the character of the bishop

in turn is no less effectively disposed of after his death by Adam

Murimuth, a distinguished lawyer and canon of St. Paul's. [1528]

The worst of the trouble for the Church was that the mendicants were

detested by bishops and the beneficed priests, whose credit they

undermined, and whose revenues they intercepted. That the Franciscans

and Dominicans remained socially powerful till the Reformation was

due to the energy developed by their corporate organization and the

measure of education they soon secured on their own behalf; not

to any general superiority on their part to the "secular" clergy

so-called. [1529] Indeed it was to the latter, within the Church,

that most pre-Reformation reformers looked for sympathy. At the outset,

however, the movement of the Mendicant Friars gave a great impulsion to

the lay communities of the type of the Beguines and Beghards who had

originated in the Netherlands, and who practised at once mendicancy

and charity very much on the early Franciscan lines; [1530] and the

spirit of innovation led in both cases to forms of heresy. That of the

Beguines and Beghards arose mainly through their association with the

Brethren of the Free Spirit; and they suffered persecution as did the

latter; while among the "Spiritual" Franciscans, who were despisers of

learning, there arose a species of new religion. At the beginning of

the century, Abbot Joachim, of Flora or Flores in Calabria (d. 1202),

who "may be regarded as the founder of modern mysticism," [1531]

had earned a great reputation by devout austerities, and a greater by

his vaticinations, [1532] which he declared to be divine. One of his

writings was condemned as heretical, thirteen years after his death,

by the Council of Lateran; but his apocalyptic writings, and others put

out in his name, had a great vogue among the rebellious Franciscans.

At length, in 1254, there was produced in Paris a book called The

Everlasting Gospel, consisting of three of his genuine works, with a

long and audacious Introduction by an anonymous hand, which expressed

a spirit of innovation and revolt, mystical rather than rational, that

seemed to promise the utter disruption of the Church. It declared

that, as the dispensation of the Son had followed on that of the

Father, so Christ's evangel in turn was to be superseded by that of

the "Holy Spirit." [1533] Adopted by the "Spiritual" section of the

Franciscans, it brought heresy within the organization itself, the

Introduction being by many ascribed--probably in error--to the head

of the order, John of Parma, a devotee of Joachim. On other grounds,

he was ultimately deposed; [1534] but the ferment of heresy was

great. And while the Franciscans are commonly reputed to have been led

by small-minded generals, [1535] their order, as Renan notes, [1536]

not only never lost the stamp of its popular and irregular origin,

but was always less orthodox in general than the Dominican. But its

deviations were rather ultra-religious than rational; and some of its

heresies have become orthodoxy. Thus it was the Franciscans, notably

Duns Scotus, who carried the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception

of the Virgin against the Dominicans, who held by the teaching of

Thomas Aquinas that she was conceived "in sin." [1537] Mary was thus

deified on a popular impulse, dating from paganism, at the expense

of Christism; and, considering that both Thomas and St. Bernard had

flatly rejected the Immaculate Conception, its ultimate adoption as

dogma is highly significant. [1538]

In the year 1260, when, according to the "Eternal Gospel," the new

dispensation of the Holy Spirit was to begin, there was an immense

excitement in northern Italy, marked by the outbreak of the order

of Flagellants, self-scourgers, whose hysteria spread to other

lands. Gherardo Segarelli, a youth of Parma, came forward as a new

Christ, had himself circumcised, swaddled, cradled, and suckled;

[1539] and proceeded to found a new order of "Apostolicals," after

the manner of a sect of the previous century, known by the same name,

who professed to return to primitive simplicity and to chastity, and

reproduced what they supposed to be the morals of the early Church,

including the profession of ascetic cohabitation. [1540] Some of

their missionaries got as far as Germany; but Segarelli was caught,

imprisoned, reduced to the status of a bishop's jester, and at length,

after saving his life for a time by abjuration, burned at Parma,

in the year 1300.

Despite much persecution of the order, one of its adherents,

Fra Dolcino, immediately began to exploit Segarelli's martyrdom,

and renewed the movement by an adaptation of the "Eternal Gospel,"

announcing that Segarelli had begun a new era, to last till the Day

of Judgment. Predicting the formation of native states, as well as

the forcible purification of the papacy, he ultimately set up an

armed movement, which held out in the southern Alps for two years,

till the Apostolicals were reduced to cannibalism. At length (1307)

they were overpowered and massacred, and Dolcino was captured, with

his beautiful and devoted companion, Margherita di Trank. She was

slowly burned to death before his eyes, refusing to abjure; and he

in turn was gradually tortured to death, uttering no cry. [1541]

The order subsisted for a time in secret, numbers cherishing Dolcino's

memory, and practising a priestless and riteless religion, prohibiting

oaths, and wholly repudiating every claim of the Church. [1542] Yet

another sect, called by the name of "The Spirit of Liberty"--probably

the origin of the name libertini, later applied to freethinkers in

France--was linked on the one hand to the Apostolicals and on the

other to the German Brethren of the Free Spirit, as well as to the

Franciscan Fraticelli. This sect is heard of as late as 1344, when

one of its members was burned. [1543] And there were yet others;

till it seemed as if the Latin Church were to be resolved into an

endless series of schisms. But organization, as of old, prevailed;

the cohesive and aggressive force of the central system, with the

natural strifes of the new movements, whether within or without

[1544] the Church, sufficed to bring about their absorption or their

destruction. It needed a special concurrence of economic, political,

and culture forces to disrupt the fabric of the papacy.

§ 9. THOUGHT IN SPAIN

Of all the chapters in the history of the Inquisition, the most

tragical is the record of its work in Spain, for there a whole

nation's faculty of freethought was by its ministry strangled for a

whole era. There is a prevalent notion that in Spain fanaticism had

mastered the national life from the period of the overthrow of Arianism

under the later Visigothic kings; and that there the extirpation of

heresy was the spontaneous and congenial work of the bulk of the

nation, giving vent to the spirit of intolerance ingrained in it

in the long war with the Moors. "Spain," says Michelet, "has always

felt herself more Catholic than Rome." [1545] But this is a serious

misconception. Wars associated with a religious cause are usually

followed rather by indifference than by increased faith; and the long

wars of the Moors and the Christians in Spain had some such sequel,

[1546] as had the Crusades, and the later wars of religion in France

and Germany. It is true that for a century after the (political)

conversion of the Visigothic king Recared (587) from Arianism to

Catholicism--an age of complete decadence--the policy of the Spanish

Church was extremely intolerant, as might have been expected. The

Jews, in particular, were repeatedly and murderously persecuted;

[1547] but after the fall of the Visigoths before the invading

Moors, the treatment of all forms of heresy in the Christian parts

of the Peninsula, down to the establishment of the second or New

Inquisition under Torquemada, was in general rather less severe than

elsewhere. [1548]

An exception is to be noted in the case of the edicts of 1194 and 1197,

by Alfonso II and Pedro II ("the Catholic") of Aragon, against the

Waldenses. [1549] The policy in the first case was that of wholesale

expulsion of the heretics anathematized by the Church; and, as this

laid the victims open to plunder all round, there is a presumption

that cupidity was a main part of the motive. Peter the Catholic, in

turn, who decreed the stake for the heretics that remained, made a

signally complete capitulation to the Holy See; but the nation did not

support him; and the tribute he promised to pay to the Pope was never

paid. [1550] In the thirteenth century, when the Moors had been driven

out of Castile, rationalistic heresy seems to have been as common

in Spain as in Italy. Already Arab culture had spread, Archbishop

Raymond of Toledo (1130-50) having caused many books to be translated

from Arabic into Latin; [1551] and inasmuch as racial warfare had

always involved some intercourse between Christians and Moors, [1552]

the Averroïst influence which so speedily reached Sicily from Toledo

through Michael Scot must have counted for something in Spain. About

1260 Alfonso X, "the Wise" king of Castile, describes the heresies of

his kingdom under two main divisions, of which the worse is the denial

of a future state of rewards and punishments. [1553] This heresy,

further, is proceeded against by the Council of Tarragona in 1291. And

though Alfonso was orthodox, and in his legislation a persecutor,

[1554] his own astronomic and mathematical science, so famous in the

after times, came to him from the Arabs and the Jews whom he actually

called in to assist him in preparing his astronomic tables. [1555]

Such science was itself a species of heresy in that age; and to it

the orthodox king owes his Catholic reputation as a blasphemer,

as Antichrist, [1556] and as one of the countless authors of the

fabulous treatise on the "Three Impostors." He would further rank

as a bad Churchman, inasmuch as his very laws against heresy took no

account of the Roman Inquisition (though it was nominally established

by a papal rescript in 1235), [1557] but provided independently for

the treatment of offenders. Needless to say, they had due regard to

finance, non-believers who listened to heresy being fined ten pounds

weight of gold, with the alternative of fifty lashes in public; while

the property of lay heretics without kin went to the fisc. [1558]

The law condemning to the stake those Christians who apostatized to

Islam or Judaism [1559] had also a financial motive.

Such laws, however, left to unsystematic application, were but slightly

operative; and the people fiercely resisted what attempts were made

to enforce them. [1560] At the end of the thirteenth century the

heresies of the French Beguines and the Franciscan "Spirituals" spread

in Aragon, both by way of books and of preaching, and even entered

Portugal. Against these, in the years 1314-1335, the Inquisitors

maintained a persecution. [1561] But it has been put on record by

the famous Arnaldo of Villanueva--astronomer, scholar, alchemist,

reformer, and occultist [1562] (d. 1314)--whose books were at that

period condemned by a council of friars because of his championship of

the Spirituals, that King Frederick II of Aragon had confessed to him

his doubts as to the truth of the Christian religion--doubts set up by

the misconduct of priests, abbots, and bishops; the malignities of the

heads of the friar orders; and the worldliness and political intrigues

of the Holy See. [1563] Such a king was not likely to be a zealous

inquisitor; and the famous Joachite Franciscan Juan de Pera-Tallada

(Jean de la Rochetaillade), imprisoned at Avignon for his apocalyptic

teachings about 1349, seems to have died in peace in Spain long

afterwards. [1564] It cannot even be said that the ordinary motive of

rapacity worked strongly against heresy in Spain in the Middle Ages,

since there the Templars, condemned and plundered everywhere else,

were acquitted; and their final spoliation was the work of the papacy,

the Spanish authorities resisting. [1565] We shall find, further, the

orthodox Spanish king of Naples in the fifteenth century protecting

anti-papal scholarship. And though Dominic, the primary type of the

Inquisitor, had been a Castilian, no Spaniard was Pope from the fourth

to the fourteenth century, and very few were cardinals. [1566]

As late as the latter half of the fifteenth century, within a

generation of the setting-up of the murderous New Inquisition,

Spain seems to have been on the whole as much given to freethinking

as France, and much more so than England. On the one hand, Averroïsm

tinged somewhat the intellectual life through the Moorish environment,

so that in 1464 we find revolted nobles complaining that King Enrique

IV is suspected of being unsound in the faith because he has about

him both enemies of Catholicism and nominal Christians who avow their

disbelief in a future state. [1567] On the other hand, it had been

noted that many were beginning to deny the need or efficacy of priestly

confession; and about 1478 a Professor at Salamanca, Pedro de Osma,

actually printed an argument to that effect, further challenging the

power of the Pope. So slight was then the machinery of inquisition

that he had to be publicly tried by a council, which merely ordered

him to recant in public; and he died peacefully in 1480. [1568]

It was immediately after this, in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella,

that the Inquisition was newly and effectively established in Spain;

and the determining motive was the avarice of the king and queen,

not the Catholic zeal of the people. The Inquisitor-General of

Messina came to Madrid in 1477 in order to obtain confirmation of a

forged privilege, pretended to have been granted to the Dominicans

in Sicily by Frederick II in 1233--that of receiving one-third of

the property of every heretic they condemned. To such a ruler as

Ferdinand, such a system readily appealed; and as soon as possible a

new Inquisition was established in Spain, Isabella consenting. [1569]

From the first it was a system of plunder. "Men long dead, if they

were represented by rich descendants, were cited before the tribunal,

judged, and condemned; and the lands and goods that had descended to

their heirs passed into the coffers of the Catholic kings." [1570]

The solemn assertion by Queen Isabella, that she had never applied

such money to the purposes of the crown, has been proved from State

papers to be "a most deliberate and daring falsehood." [1571] The

revenue thus iniquitously obtained was enormous; and it is inferrible

that the pecuniary motive underlay the later expulsion of the Jews

and the Moriscoes as well as the average practice of the Inquisition.

The error as to the original or anciently ingrained fanaticism of

the Spanish people, first made current by Ticknor (Hist. Spanish

Lit., 6th ed. i, 505), has been to some extent diffused by Buckle,

who at this point of his inquiry reasoned à priori instead of

inductively as his own principles prescribed. See the notes to the

present writer's edition of his Introduction (Routledge, 1904),

pp. 107, 534-50. The special atrocity of the Inquisition in Spain

was not even due directly to the papacy (cp. Burke, ii, 78): it was

the result first of the rapacity of Ferdinand, utilizing a papal

institution; and later of the political fanaticisms of Charles V

and Philip II, both of Teutonic as well as Spanish descent. Philip

alleged that the Inquisition in the Netherlands was more severe

than in Spain (ed. of Buckle cited, p. 107, note). In the words

of Bishop Stubbs: "To a German race of sovereigns Spain finally

owed the subversion of her national system and ancient freedom"

(id. p. 550, note).

Such a process, however, would not have been possible in any country,

at any stage of the world's history, without the initiative and the

support of some such sacrosanct organization as the Catholic Church,

wielding a spell over the minds even of those who, in terror and

despair, fought against it. As in the thirteenth century, so at the end

of the fifteenth, [1572] the Inquisition in Spain was spasmodically

resisted in Aragon and Castile, in Catalonia, and in Valencia;

the first Inquisitor-General in Aragon being actually slain in the

cathedral of Saragossa in 1487, despite his precaution of wearing a

steel cap and coat of mail. [1573] Vigorous protests from the Cortès

even forced some restraint upon the entire machine; but such occasional

resistance could not long countervail the steady pressure of regal and

official avarice and the systematic fanaticism of the Dominican order.

It was thus the fate of Spain to illustrate once for all the power of

a dogmatic religious system to extirpate the spirit of reason from an

entire nation for a whole era. There and there only, save for a time

in Italy, did the Inquisition become all-powerful; and it wrought for

the evisceration of the intellectual and material life of Spain with

a demented zeal to which there is no parallel in later history. In

the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, after several random massacres

and much persecution of the "New Christians" or doubtful converts from

Judaism, [1574] the unconverted Jews of Spain were in 1489 penned into

Ghettos, and were in 1492 expelled bodily from the country, with every

circumstance of cruelty, so far as Church and State could compass their

plans. By this measure at least 160,000 subjects [1575] of more than

average value were lost to the State. Portugal and other Christian

countries took the same cruel step a few years later; but Spain

carried the policy much further. From the year of its establishment,

the Inquisition was hotly at work destroying heresy of every kind;

and the renowned Torquemada, the confessor of Isabella, is credited

with having burned over ten thousand persons in his eighteen years of

office as Grand Inquisitor, besides torturing many thousands. Close

upon a hundred thousand more were terrified into submission; and

a further six thousand burned in effigy in their absence or after

death. [1576] The destruction of books was proportionally thorough;

[1577] and when Lutheran Protestantism arose it was persistently killed

out; thousands leaving the country in view of the hopelessness of

the cause. [1578] At this rate, every vestige of independent thought

must soon have disappeared from any nation in the world. If she is

to be judged by the number of her slain and exiled heretics, Spain

must once have been nearly as fecund in reformative and innovating

thought as any State in northern Europe; but the fatal conjunction

of the royal and the clerical authority sufficed for a whole era to

denude her of every variety of the freethinking species. [1579]

§ 10. THOUGHT IN ENGLAND

Lying on the outskirts of the world of culture, England in the

later Middle Ages and the period of the Italian Renaissance lived

intellectually, even where ministered to by the genius of Chaucer, for

the most part in dependence on Continental impulses; yet not without

notable outcrops of native energy. There is indeed no more remarkable

figure in the Middle Ages than Roger Bacon (? 1214-1294), the English

Franciscan friar, schooled at Paris. His career remains still in parts

obscure. Born at or near Ilchester, in Somersetshire, he studied at

Oxford under Edmund Rich, Richard Fitzacre, Robert Grosstête, and Adam

de Marisco; and later, for a number of years, at Paris, where he is

supposed to have held a chair. On his return he was lionized; but a few

years afterwards, in 1257, we find him again in Paris, banished thither

by his Order. [1580] He was not absolutely imprisoned, but ordered to

live under official surveillance in a dwelling where he was forbidden

to write, to speak to novices, or observe the stars--rules which, it

is pretty clear, he broke, one and all. [1581] After some eight years

of this durance, Cardinal Guido Falcodi (otherwise Guy Foucaud or De

Foulques), who while acting as papal legate in England at the time

of the rising of Simon de Montfort may have known or heard of Bacon,

became interested in him through his chaplain, Raymond of Laon, who

spoke (in error) of the imprisoned friar as having written much on

science. The cardinal accordingly wrote asking to see the writings in

question. Bacon sent by a friend an explanation to the effect that he

had written little, and that he could not devote himself to composition

without a written mandate and a papal dispensation. About this time

the Cardinal was elevated to the papacy as Clement IV; and in that

capacity, a year later (1266), he wrote to Bacon authorizing him to

disobey his superior, but exhorting him to do it secretly. Bacon,

by his own account, had already spent in forty years of study 2,000

libri [1582] in addition to purchases of books and instruments and

teacher's fees; and it is not known whether the Pope furnished the

supplies he declared he needed. [1583] To work, however, he went with

an astonishing industry, and in the course of less than eighteen months

[1584] he had produced his chief treatise, the Opus Majus; the Opus

Minus, designed as a summary or sample of the former; and the later

Opus Tertium, planned to serve as a preamble to the two others. [1585]

Through all three documents there runs the same inspiration, the Opus

Tertium and the Majus constituting a complete treatise, which gives

at once the most vivid idea of the state of culture at the time,

and the most intimate presentment of a student's mind, that survive

from the thirteenth century. It was nothing less than a demand, such

as was made by Francis Bacon three hundred and fifty years later,

and by Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century, for a reconstruction

of all studies and all tuition. Neither pope nor emperor could have

met it; but Clement gave Roger his freedom, and he returned to Oxford,

papally protected, at the end of 1267. Four years later Clement died,

and was succeeded by Gregory X, a Franciscan.

At this stage of his life Bacon revealed that, whatever were his

wrongs, he was inclined to go halfway to meet them. In a new writing of

similar purport with the others, the Compendium Philosophiæ, written

in 1271, [1586] he not only attacked in detail the ecclesiastical

system, [1587] but argued that the Christians were incomparably

inferior to pagans in morals, and therefore in science; [1588] that

there was more truth in Aristotle's few chapters on laws than in the

whole corpus juris; [1589] that the Christian religion, as commonly

taught, was not free of errors; and that philosophy truly taught,

and not as in the schools, was perhaps the surer way to attain both

truth and salvation. [1590]

Again he was prosecuted; and this time, after much delay, it was

decided that the entire Order should deal with the case. Not till

1277 did the trial come off, under the presidency of the chief of the

Order, Jerome of Ascoli. Bacon was bracketed with another insubordinate

brother, Jean d'Olive; and both were condemned. In Bacon's case his

doctrine was specified as continentem aliquas novitates suspectas,

propter quas fuit idem Rogerius carceri condempnatus. [1591] This

time Bacon seems to have undergone a real imprisonment, which lasted

fourteen years. During that time four more popes held office, the

last of them being the said Jerome, elevated to the papal chair as

Nicholas IV. Not till his death in 1292 was Bacon released--to die

two years later.

He was in fact, with all his dogmatic orthodoxy, too essentially

in advance of his age to be otherwise than suspect to the typical

ecclesiastics of any time. The marvel is that with his radical

skepticism as to all forms of human knowledge; his intense perception

of the fatality of alternate credulity and indifference which kept

most men in a state of positive or negative error on every theme;

his insatiable thirst for knowledge; his invincible repugnance to all

acknowledgment of authority, [1592] and his insistence on an ethical

end, he should have been able to rest as he did in the assumption of

a divine infallibility vested in what he knew to be a corruptible

text. It was doubtless defect of strictly philosophic thought, as

distinguished from practical critical faculty, that enabled him to

remain orthodox in theology while anti-authoritarian in everything

else. As it was, his recalcitrance to authority in such an age sufficed

to make his life a warfare upon earth. And it is not surprising that,

even as his Franciscan predecessor Robert Grosstête, bishop of Lincoln,

came to be reputed a sorcerer on the strength of having written many

treatises on scientific questions--as well as on witchcraft--Roger

Bacon became a wizard in popular legend, and a scandal in the eyes

of his immediate superiors, for a zest of secular curiosity no less

uncommon and unpriestlike. [1593] "It is sometimes impossible to

avoid smiling," says one philosophic historian of him, "when one

sees how artfully this personified thirst for knowledge seeks to

persuade himself, or his readers, that knowledge interests him only for

ecclesiastical ends. No one has believed it: neither posterity ... nor

his contemporaries, who distrusted him as worldly-minded." [1594]

Worldly-minded he was in a noble sense, as seeking to know the

world of Nature; and perhaps the most remarkable proof of his

originality on this side is his acceptance of the theory of the

earth's sphericity. Peter de Alliaco, whose Imago Mundi was compiled

in 1410, transcribed from Roger Bacon's Opus Majus almost literally,

but without acknowledgment, a passage containing quotations from

Aristotle, Pliny, and Seneca, all arguing for the possibility of

reaching India by sailing westward. Columbus, it is known, was familiar

with the Imago Mundi; and this passage seems greatly to have inspired

him in his task. [1595] This alone was sufficient practical heresy

to put Bacon in danger; and yet his real orthodoxy can hardly be

doubted. [1596] He always protested against the scholastic doctrine

of a "twofold truth," insisting that revelation and philosophy were

at one, but that the latter also was divine. [1597] It probably

mattered little to his superiors, however, what view he took of the

abstract question: it was his zeal for concrete knowledge that they

detested. His works remain to show the scientific reach of which his

age was capable, when helped by the lore of the Arabs; for he seems

to have drawn from Averroës some of his inspiration to research;

[1598] but in the England of that day his ideals of research were as

unattainable as his wrath against clerical obstruction was powerless;

[1599] and Averroïsm in England made little for innovation. [1600]

The English Renaissance properly sets-in in the latter half of the

sixteenth century, when the glory of that of Italy is passing away.

In the fourteenth century, indeed, a remarkable new life is seen

arising in England in the poetry and prose of Chaucer, from contact

with the literature of Italy and France; but while Chaucer reflects

the spontaneous medieval hostility to the self-seeking and fraudulent

clergy, and writes of deity with quite medieval irreverence, [1601] he

tells little of the Renaissance spirit of critical unbelief, save when

he notes the proverbial irreligion of the physicians, [1602] or smiles

significantly over the problem of the potency of clerical cursing

and absolution, [1603] or shrugs his shoulders over the question of

a future state. [1604] In such matters he is noticeably undevout;

and though it is impossible to found on such passages a confident

assertion that Chaucer had no belief in immortality, it is equally

impossible in view of them to claim that he was a warm believer.

Prof. Lounsbury, who has gone closely and critically into the

whole question of Chaucer's religious opinions, asks concerning

the lines in the Knight's Tale on the passing of Arcite:

"Can modern agnosticism point to a denial more emphatic than

that made in the fourteenth century of the belief that there

exists for us any assurance of the life that is lived beyond

the grave?" (Studies in Chaucer, 1892, ii, 514-15). Prof. Skeat,

again, affirms (Notes to the Tales, Clar. Press Compl. Chaucer,

v, 92) that "the real reason why Chaucer could not here describe

the passage of Arcite's soul to heaven is because he had already

copied Boccaccio's description, and had used it with respect

to the death of Troilus" (see Troil. v, 1807-27; stanzas 7,

8, 9 from the end). This evades the question as to the poet's

faith. In point of fact, the passage in Troilus and Criseyde is

purely pagan, and tells of no Christian belief, though that poem,

written before the Tales, seems to parade a Christian contempt

for pagan lore. (Cp. Lounsbury, as cited, p. 512.)

The ascription of unbelief seems a straining of the evidence;

but it would be difficult to gainsay the critic's summing-up:

"The general view of all his [Chaucer's] production leaves upon

the mind the impression that his personal religious history was

marked by the dwindling devoutness which makes up the experience

of so many lives--the fallings from us, the vanishings, we know

not how or when, of beliefs in which we have been bred. One

characteristic which not unusually accompanies the decline of

faith in the individual is in him very conspicuous. This is

the prominence given to the falsity and fraud of those who have

professedly devoted themselves to the advancement of the cause of

Christianity.... Much of Chaucer's late work, so far as we know

it to be late, is distinctly hostile to the Church.... It is,

moreover, hostile in a way that implies an utter disbelief in

certain of its tenets, and even a disposition to regard them

as full of menace to the future of civilization" (Lounsbury,

vol. cited, pp. 519-20).

Against this general view is to be set that which proceeds on

an unquestioning acceptance of the "Retractation" or confession

at the close of the Canterbury Tales, as to the vexed question

of the genuineness of which see the same critic, work cited, i,

412-15; iii, 40. The fact that the document is appended to the

concluding "Parson's Tale" (also challenged as to authenticity),

which is not a tale at all, and to which the confession refers

as "this little treatise or rede," suggests strongly a clerical

influence brought to bear upon the aging poet.

To infer real devotion on his part from his sympathetic account of the

good parson, or from the dubious Retractation appended to the Tales,

is as unwarrantable as is the notion, dating from the Reformation

period, that he was a Wicliffite. [1605] Even if the Retractation be

of his writing, under pressure in old age, it points to a previous

indifferentism; and from the great mass of his work there can be

drawn only the inference that he is essentially non-religious in

temper and habit of mind. But he is no disputant, no propagandist,

whether on ecclesiastical or on intellectual grounds; and after his

day there is social retrogression and literary relapse in England

for two centuries. That there was some practical rationalism in his

day, however, we gather from the Vision of Piers Ploughman, by the

contemporary poet Langland (fl. 1360-90), where there is a vivid

account of the habit among anti-clerical laymen of arguing against

the doctrine of original sin and the entailment of Adam's offence

on the whole human race. [1606] To this way of thinking Chaucer

probably gave a stimulus by his translation of the De Consolatione

Philosophiae of Boethius, where is cited the "not unskilful" dilemma:

"If God is, whence come wicked things? And if God is not, whence come

good things?" [1607] The stress of the problem is hard upon theism;

and to ponder it was to resent the doctrine of inherited guilt. The

Church had, in fact, visibly turned this dogma to its own ends,

insisting on the universal need of ghostly help even as it repelled

the doctrine of unalterable predestination. In both cases, of course,

the matter was settled by Scripture and authority; and Langland's

reply to the heretics is mere angry dogmatism.

There flourished, further, a remarkable amount of heresy of the

species seen in Provence and Northern Italy in the eleventh and twelfth

centuries, such sectaries being known in England under the generic name

of "Lollards," derived from the Flemish, in which it seems to have

signified singers of hymns. [1608] Lollards or "Beghards," starting

from the southern point of propagation, spread all over civilized

Northern Europe, meeting everywhere persecution alike from the parish

priests and the mendicant monks; and in England as elsewhere their

anti-clericalism and their heresy were correlative. In the formal

Lollard petition to Parliament in 1395, however, there is evident an

amount of innovating opinion which implies more than the mere stimulus

of financial pressure. Not only the papal authority, monasteries,

clerical celibacy, nuns' vows, transubstantiation, exorcisms, bought

blessings, pilgrimages, prayers for the dead, offerings to images,

confessions and absolutions, but war and capital punishment and

"unnecessary trades," such as those of goldsmiths and armourers,

are condemned by those early Utopists. [1609] In what proportion they

really thought out the issues they dealt with we can hardly ascertain;

but a chronicler of Wiclif's time, living at Leicester, testifies that

you could not meet two men in the street but one was a Lollard. [1610]

The movement substantially came to nothing, suffering murderous

persecution in the person of Oldcastle (Lord Cobham) and others,

and disappearing in the fifteenth century in the demoralization of

conquest and the ruin of the civil wars; but apart from Chaucer's

poetry it is more significant of foreign influences in England than

almost any other phenomenon down to the reign of Henry VIII.

It is still doubtful, indeed, whence the powerful Wiclif derived his

marked Protestantism as to some Catholic dogmas; but it would seem

that he too may have been reached by the older Paulician or other

southern heresy. [1611] As early as 1286 a form of heresy approaching

the Albigensian and the Waldensian is found in the province of

Canterbury, certain persons there maintaining that Christians

were not bound by the authority of the Pope and the Fathers, but

solely by that of the Bible and "necessary reason." [1612] It is

true that Wiclif never refers to the Waldenses or Albigenses, or

any of the continental reformers of his day, though he often cites

his English predecessor, Bishop Grosstête; [1613] but this may have

been on grounds of policy. To cite heretics could do no good; to

cite a bishop was helpful. The main reason for doubting a foreign

influence in his case is that to the last he held by purgatory and

absolute predestination. [1614] In any case, Wiclif's practical and

moral resentment of ecclesiastical abuses was the mainspring of his

doctrine; and his heresies as to transubstantiation and other articles

of faith can be seen to connect with his anti-priestly attitude. He,

however, was morally disinterested as compared with the would-be

plunderers who formed the bulk of the anti-Church party of John of

Gaunt; and his failure to effect any reformation was due to the fact

that on one hand there was not intelligence enough in the nation to

respond to his doctrinal common sense, while on the other he could

not so separate ecclesiastical from feudal tyranny and extortion as

to set up a political movement which should strike at clerical evils

without inciting some to impeach the nobility who held the balance of

political power. Charged with setting vassals against tyrant lords,

he was forced to plead that he taught the reverse, though he justified

the withholding of tithes from bad curates. [1615] The revolt led by

John Ball in 1381, which was in no way promoted by Wiclif, [1616]

showed that the country people suffered as much from lay as from

clerical oppression.

The time, in short, was one of common ferment, and not only were

there other reformers who went much farther than Wiclif in the matter

of social reconstruction, [1617] but we know from his writings

that there were heretics who carried their criticism as far as to

challenge the authority and credibility of the Scriptures. Against

these accusatores and inimici Scripturae he repeatedly speaks in

his treatise De veritate Scripturae Sacrae, [1618] which is thus one

of the very earliest works in defence of Christianity against modern

criticism. [1619] His position, however, is almost wholly medieval. One

qualification should perhaps be made, in respect of his occasional

resort to reason where it was least to be expected, as on the question

of restrictions on marriage. [1620] But on such points he wavered;

and otherwise he is merely scripturalist. The infinite superiority

of Christ to all other men, and Christ's virtual authorship of the

entire Scriptures, are his premisses--a way of begging the question so

simple-minded that it is clear the other side was not heard in reply,

though these arguments had formed part of his theological lectures,

[1621] and so pre-supposed a real opposition. Wiclif was in short a

typical Protestant in his unquestioning acceptance of the Bible as a

supernatural authority; and when his demand for the publication of

the Bible in English was met by "worldly clerks" with the cry that

it would "set Christians in debate, and subjects to rebel against

their sovereigns," he could only protest that they "openly slander

God, the author of peace, and his holy law." Later English history

proved that the worldly clerks were perfectly right, and Wiclif the

erring optimist of faith. For the rest, his essentially dogmatic

view of religion did nothing to counteract the spirit of persecution;

and the passing of the Statute for the Burning of Heretics in 1401,

with the ready consent of both Houses of Parliament, constituted the

due dogmatic answer to dogmatic criticism. Yet within a few years the

Commons were proposing to confiscate the revenues of the higher clergy:

[1622] so far was anti-clericalism from implying heterodoxy.

§ 11. THOUGHT IN FRANCE

As regards France, the record of intellectual history between the

thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries is hardly less scanty than

as regards England. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the

intellectual life of the French philosophic schools, as we saw,

was more vigorous and expansive than that of any other country;

so that, looking further to the Provençal literature and to the

French beginnings of Gothic architecture, France might even be said

to prepare the Renaissance. [1623] Outside of the schools, too, there

was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a notable dissemination

of partially philosophical thought among the middle-class laity. At

that period the anti-clerical tendency was strongest in France, where

in the thirteenth century lay scholarship stood highest. In the reign

of Philippe le Bel (end of thirteenth century) was composed the poem

Fauvel, by François de Rues, which is a direct attack on pope and

clergy; [1624] and in the famous Roman de la Rose, as developed by

Jean le Clopinel (= the Limper) of Meung-sur-Loire, there enters,

without any criticism of the Christian creed, an element of all-round

Naturalism which indirectly must have made for reason. Begun by

Guillaume de Lorris in the time of St. Louis in a key of sentiment and

lyricism, the poem is carried on by Jean de Meung under Philippe le Bel

in a spirit of criticism, cynicism, science, and satire, which tells

of many developments in forty years. The continuation can hardly have

been written, as some literary historians assume, about its author's

twenty-fifth year; but it may be dated with some certainty between

1270 and 1285. To the work of his predecessor, amounting to less than

5,000 lines, he added 18,000, pouring forth a medley of scholarship,

pedantry, philosophic reflection, speculation on the process of nature

and the structure and ills of society, on property, morals, marriage,

witchcraft, the characters of women, monks, friars, aristocrats--the

whole pageant of medieval knowledge and fancy.

The literary power of the whole is great, and may be recommended to the

general reader as comparing often with that shown in the satirical and

social-didactic poems of Burns, though without much of the breath of

poetry. Particularly noteworthy, in the historic retrospect, is the

assimilization of the ancient Stoic philosophy of "living according

to Nature," set forth in the name of a "Reason" who is notably free

from theological prepossessions. It is from this standpoint that

Jean de Meung assails the mendicant friars and the monks in general:

he would have men recognize the natural laws of life; and he carries

the principle to the length of insisting on the artificial nature of

aristocracy and monarchy, which are justifiable only as far as they

subserve the common good. Thus he rises above the medieval literary

prejudice against the common people, whose merit he recognizes as

Montaigne did later. On the side of science, he expressly denies

[1625] that comets carry any such message as was commonly ascribed

to them alike by popular superstition and by theology--a stretch of

freethinking perhaps traceable to Seneca, but nonetheless centuries in

advance of the Christendom of the time. [1626] On the side of religion,

again, he is one of the first to vindicate the lay conception of

Christian excellence as against the ecclesiastical. His Naturalism,

so far, worked consistently in making him at once anti-ascetic and

anti-supernaturalist.

It is not to be inferred, however, that Jean de Meung had learned

to doubt the validity of the Christian creed. His long poem, one of

the most popular books in Europe for two hundred years, could never

have had its vogue if its readers could have suspected it to be even

indirectly anti-Christian. He can hardly have held, as some historians

believe, [1627] the status of a preaching friar; but he claims that he

neither blames nor defames religion, [1628] respecting it in all forms,

provided it be "humble and loyal." He was in fact a man of some wealth,

much culture, and orderly in life, thus standing out from the earlier

"Goliard" type. When, then, he pronounces Nature "the minister of

this earthly state," "vicar and constable of the eternal emperor,"

he has no thought of dethroning Deity, or even of setting aside the

Christian faith. In his rhymed Testament he expresses himself quite

piously, and lectures monks and women in an edifying fashion.

To say therefore that Jean de Meung's part of the Roman de la Rose

is a "popular satire on the beliefs of Romanism" (Owen, Skeptics

of Ital. Renais. p. 44) is to misstate the case. His doctrine is

rather an intellectual expression of the literary reaction against

asceticism (cp. Bartoli, Storia della letteratura italiana, i, 319,

quoting Lenient) which had been spontaneously begun by the Goliards

and Troubadours. At the same time the poem does stand for the new

secular spirit alike in "its ingrained religion and its nascent

freethought" (Saintsbury, p. 87); and with the Reynard epic it

may be taken as representing the beginning of "a whole revolution,

the resurgence and affirmation of the laity, the new force which is

to transform the world, against the Church" (Bartoli, Storia, i,

308; cp. Demogeot, Hist. de la litt. fr. 5e éd. pp. 130-31, 157;

Lanson, pp. 132-36). The frequent flings at the clergy (cp. the

partly Chaucerian English version, Skeat's ed. of Chaucer's Works,

i, 234; Bell's ed. iv, 230) were sufficient to draw upon this

as upon other medieval poems of much secular vogue the anger of

"the Church" (Sismondi, Lit. of South. Europe, i, 216); but they

were none the less relished by believing readers. "The Church"

was in fact not an entity of one mind; and some of its sections

enjoyed satire directed against the others.

When, then, we speak of the anti-clerical character of much

medieval poetry, we must guard against exaggerated implications. It

is somewhat of a straining of the facts, for instance, to say of

the humorous tale of Reynard the Fox, so widely popular in the

thirteenth century, that it is essentially anti-clerical to the

extent that "Reynard is laic: Isengrim [the wolf] is clerical"

(Bartoli, Storia della letteratura italiana, i, 307; cp. Owen,

Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, p. 44). The Reynard epic,

in origin a simple humorous animal-story, had various later

forms. Some of these, as the Latin poem, and especially the version

attributed to Peter of St. Cloud, were markedly anti-clerical, the

latter exhibiting a spirit of all-round profanity hardly compatible

with belief (cp. Gervinus, Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, 5te

Ausg. i, 227-28; Gebhart, Les Origines de la Renais. en Italie,

1874, p. 39); but the version current in the Netherlands, which

was later rendered into English prose by Caxton, is of a very

different character (Gervinus, p. 229 sq.). In Caxton's version it

is impossible to regard Reynard as laic and Isengrim as clerical;

though in the Latin and other versions the wolf figures as monk or

abbot. (See also the various shorter satires published by Grimm

in his Reinhart Fuchs, 1834.) Often the authorship is itself

clerical, one party or order satirizing another; sometimes the

spirit is religious, sometimes markedly irreverent. (Gervinus,

pp. 214-21). "La plupart de ces satires sont l'oeuvre des moines

et des abbés" (Lenient, La Satire en France au moyen âge, 1859,

préf. p. 4); and to say that these men were often irreligious is

not to say that they were rationalists. It is to be remembered

that nascent Protestantism in England under Henry VIII resorted

to the weapons of obscene parody (Blunt, Ref. of Ch. of England,

ed. 1892, i, 273, note).

"In fine," we may say with a judicious French historian, "one

cannot get out of his time, and the time was not come to be

non-Christian. Jean de Meung did not perceive that his thought put

him outside the Church, and upset her foundations. He is believing

and pious, like Rutebeuf.... The Gospel is his rule: he holds it; he

defends it; he disputes with those who seem to him to depart from it;

he makes himself the champion of the old faith against the novelties

of the Eternal Gospel.... His situation is that of the first reformers

of the sixteenth century, who believed themselves to serve Jesus Christ

in using their reason, and who very sincerely, very piously, hoped for

the reform of the Church through the progress of philosophy." [1629]

"Nevertheless," adds the same historian, "one cannot exaggerate the

real weight of the work. By his philosophy, which consists essentially

in the identity, the sovereignty, of Nature and Reason, he is the

first link in the chain which connects Rabelais, Montaigne, Molière;

to which Voltaire also links himself, and even in certain regards

Boileau." [1630]

Men could not then see whither the principle of "Nature" and Reason

was to lead, yet even in the age of Jean de Meung the philosophic

heads went far, and he can hardly have missed knowing as much, if,

as is supposed, he studied at Paris, as he certainly lived and died

there. In the latter part of the thirteenth century, as before noted,

rationalism at the Paris university was frequently carried in private

to a rejection of all the dogmas peculiar to Christianity. At that

great school Roger Bacon seems to have acquired his encyclopædic

learning and his critical habit; and there it was that in the

first half of the fourteenth century William of Occam nourished his

remarkable philosophic faculty. From about the middle of the fourteenth

century, however, there is a relative arrest of French progress for

some two centuries. [1631] Three main conditions served to check

intellectual advance: the civil wars which involved the loss of the

communal liberties which had been established in France between the

eleventh and thirteenth centuries; [1632] the exhaustion of the nation

by the English invasion under Edward III; the repressive power of the

Church; and the general devotion of the national energies to war. After

the partial recovery from the ruinous English invasion under Edward

III, civil strifes and feudal tyranny wrought new impoverishment,

making possible the still more destructive invasion under Henry V;

so that in the first half of the fifteenth century France was hardly

more civilized than England. [1633] It is from the French invasion

of Italy under Charles VIII that the enduring renascence in France

broadly dates. Earlier impulses had likewise come from Italy: Lanfranc,

Anselm, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and others of lesser note,

[1634] had gone from Italy to teach in France or England; but it

needed the full contact of Italian civilization to raise monarchic

France to the stage of general and independent intellectual life.

During the period in question, there had been established

the following universities: Paris, 1200; Toulouse, 1220;

Montpellier, 1289; Avignon, 1303; Orléans, 1312; Cahors, 1332;

Angers, 1337; Orange, 1367; Dôle, 1422; Poitiers, 1431; Caen,

1436; Valence, 1454; Nantes, 1460; Bourges, 1463; Bordeaux, 1472

(Desmaze, L'Université de Paris, 1876, p. 2. Other dates for

some of these are given on p. 31). But the militarist conditions

prevented any sufficient development of such opportunities. In

the fourteenth century, says Littré (Études sur les barbares,

p. 419), "the university of Paris ... was more powerful than

at any other epoch.... Never did she exercise such a power over

men's minds." But he also decides that in that epoch the first

florescence of French literature withered away (p. 387). The

long location of the anti-papacy at Avignon (1305-1376)

doubtless counted for something in French culture (V. Le

Clerc, Hist. Litt. de la France au XIVe siècle, i, 37; Gebhart,

pp. 221-26); but the devastation wrought by the English invasion

was sufficient to countervail that and more. See the account of

it by Petrarch (letter of the year 1360) cited by Littré, Études,

pp. 416-17; and by Hallam, Middle Ages, i, 59, note. Cp. Michelet,

Hist. de France, vi, ch. iii; Dunton, England in the Fifteenth

Century, 1888, pp. 79-84. As to the consequences of the English

invasion of the fifteenth century see Martin, Hist. de France,

4e édit. vi, 132-33; Sismondi, Hist. des Français, 1831, xii,

582; Hallam, Middle Ages, i, 83-87.

In northern France of the fourteenth century, as in Provence and Italy

and England, there was a manifold stir of innovation and heresy: there

as elsewhere the insubordinate Franciscans, with their Eternal Gospel,

the Paterini, the Beghards, fought their way against the Dominican

Inquisition. But the Inquisitors burned books as well as men; and much

anti-ecclesiastical poetry, some dating even from the Carlovingian

era, shared the fate of many copies of the Talmud, translations of

the Bible, and, à fortiori, every species of heretical writing. In

effect, the Inquisition for the time "extinguished freethought"

[1635] in France. As in England, the ferment of heresy was mixed

with one of democracy; and in the French popular poetry of the time

there are direct parallels to the contemporary English couplet,

"When Adam delved and Eve span, Where was then the gentleman?" [1636]

Such a spirit could no more prosper in feudal France than in feudal

England; and when France emerged from her mortal struggle with the

English, to be effectively solidified by Louis XI, there was left in

her life little of the spirit of free inquiry. It has been noted that

whereas the chronicler Joinville, in the thirteenth century, is full

of religious feeling, Froissart, in the fourteenth, priest as he is,

exhibits hardly any; and again Comines, in the fifteenth, reverts to

the orthodoxy of the twelfth and thirteenth. [1637] The middle period

was one of indifference, following on the killing out of heresy:

[1638] the fifteenth century is a resumption of the Middle Ages, and

Comines has the medieval cast of mind, [1639] although of a superior

order. There seems to be no community of thought between him and his

younger Italian contemporaries, Machiavelli and Guicciardini; though,

"even while Comines was writing, there were unequivocal symptoms of

a great and decisive change." [1640]

The special development in France of the spirit of "chivalry" had

joined the normal uncivilizing influence of militarism with that

of clericalism; the various knightly orders, as well as knighthood

pure and simple, being all under ecclesiastical sanctions, and

more or less strictly vowed to "defend the church," [1641] while

supremely incompetent to form an intelligent opinion. It is the more

remarkable that in the case of one of the crusading orders heresy

of the most blasphemous kind was finally charged against the entire

organization, and that it was on that ground annihilated (1311). It

remains incredible, however, that the order of the Templars can have

systematically practised the extravagances or held the tenets laid to

their charge. They had of course abused their power and departed from

their principles like every other religious order enabled to amass

wealth; and the hostility theirs aroused is perfectly intelligible

from what is known of the arrogance of its members and the general

ruffianism of the Crusaders. Their wealth alone goes far to explain

the success of their enemies against them; for, though the numbers of

the order were much smaller than tradition gives out, its possessions

were considerable. These were the true ground of the French king's

attack. [1642] But that its members were as a rule either Cathari

or anti-Christians, either disguised Moslems or deists, or that they

practised obscenity by rule, there is no reason to believe. What seems

to have happened was a resort by some unbelieving members to more or

less gross burlesque of the mysteries of initiation--a phenomenon

paralleled in ancient Greece and in the modern Catholic world, and

implying rather hardy irreligion than any reasoned heresy whatever.

The long-continued dispute as to the guilt of the Knights Templars

is still chronically re-opened. Hallam, after long hesitation,

came finally to believe them guilty, partly on the strength of

the admissions made by Michelet in defending them (Europe in

the Middle Ages, 11th ed. i, 138-42--note of 1848). He attaches,

however, a surprising weight to the obviously weak "architectural

evidence" cited by Hammer-Purgstall. Heeren (Essai sur l'influence

des croisades, 1808, pp. 221-22) takes a more judicial view. The

excellent summing-up of Lea (Hist. of the Inquis. bk. iii,

ch. v, pp. 263-76) perhaps gives too little weight to the mass

of curious confirmatory evidence cited by writers on the other

side (e.g., F. Nicolai, Versuch über die Beschuldigungen welche

dem Tempelherrenorden gemacht worden, 1782); but his conclusion

as to the falsity of the charges against the order as a whole

seems irresistible.

The solution that offensive practices occurred irregularly (Lea,

pp. 276-77) is pointed to even by the earlier hostile writers

(Nicolai, p. 17). It seems to be certain that the initiatory rites

included the act of spitting on the crucifix--presumptively a

symbolic display of absolute obedience to the orders of those in

command (Jolly, Philippe le Bel, pp. 264-68). That there was no

Catharism in the order seems certain (Lea, p. 249). The suggestion

that the offensive and burlesque practices were due to the lower

grade of "serving brethren," who were contemned by the higher,

seems, however, without firm foundation. The courage for such

freaks, and the disposition to commit them, were rather more likely

to arise among the crusaders of the upper class, who could come

in contact with Moslem-Christian unbelief through those of Sicily.

For the further theory that the "Freemasons" (at that period really

cosmopolitan guilds of masons) were already given to freethinking,

there is again no evidence. That they at times deliberately

introduced obscene symbols into church architecture is no proof

that they were collectively unbelievers in the Church's doctrines;

though it is likely enough that some of them were. Obscenity

is the expression not of an intellectual but of a physical and

unreasoning bias, and can perfectly well concur with religious

feeling. The fact that the medieval masons did not confine

obscene symbols to the churches they built for the Templars

(Hallam, as cited, pp. 140-41) should serve to discredit alike

the theory that the Templars were systematically anti-Christian,

and the theory that the Freemasons were so. That for centuries

the builders of the Christian churches throughout Europe formed

an anti-Christian organization is a grotesque hypothesis. At

most they indulged in freaks of artistic satire on the lines of

contemporary satirical literature, expressing an anti-clerical

bias, with perhaps occasional elements of blasphemy. (See Menzel,

Gesch. der Deutschen, Cap. 252, note.) It could well be that

there survived among the Freemasons various Gnostic ideas;

since the architectural art itself came in a direct line from

antiquity. Such heresy, too, might conceivably be winked at by the

Church, which depended so much on the heretics' services. But their

obscenities were the mere expression of the animal imagination and

normal salacity of all ages. Only in modern times, and that only in

Catholic countries, has the derivative organization of Freemasonry

been identified with freethought propaganda. In England in the

seventeenth century the Freemasonic clubs--no longer connected

with any trade--were thoroughly royalist and orthodox (Nicolai,

pp. 196-98), as they have always remained.

Some remarkable intellectual phenomena, however, do connect with

the French university life of the first half of the fourteenth

century. William of Occam (d. 1347), the English Franciscan, who

taught at Paris, is on the whole the most rationalistic of medieval

philosophers. Though a pupil of the Realist Duns Scotus, he became

the renewer of Nominalism, which is the specifically rationalistic

as opposed to the religious mode of metaphysic; and his anti-clerical

bias was such that he had to fly from France to Bavaria for protection

from the priesthood. His Disputatio super potestate ecclesiastica,

and his Defensorium directed against Pope John XXII (or XXI), were

so uncompromising that in 1323 the Pope gave directions for his

prosecution. What came of the step is not known; but in 1328 we find

him actually imprisoned with two Italian comrades in the papal palace

at Avignon. Thence they made their escape to Bavaria. [1643] To the

same refuge fled Marsiglio of Padua, author (with John of Jandun) of

the Defensor Pacis (1324), "the greatest and most original political

treatise of the Middle Ages," [1644] in which it is taught that,

though monarchy may be expedient, the sovereignty of the State rests

with the people, and the hereditary principle is flatly rejected; while

it is insisted that the Church properly consists of all Christians,

and that the clergy's authority is restricted to spiritual affairs

and moral suasion. [1645] Of all medieval writers on politics before

Machiavelli he is the most modern.

Only less original is Occam, who at Paris came much under Marsiglio's

influence. His philosophic doctrines apparently derive from Pierre

Aureol (Petrus Aureolus, d. 1321), who with remarkable clearness and

emphasis rejected both Realism and the doctrine that what the mind

perceives are not realities, but formæ speculares. Pierre it was who

first enounced the Law of Parsimony in philosophy and science--that

causes are not to be multiplied beyond mental necessity--which is

specially associated with the name of Occam. [1646] Both anticipated

modern criticism [1647] alike of the Platonic and the Aristotelian

philosophy; and Occam in particular drew so decided a line between

the province of reason and that of faith that there can be little

doubt on which side his allegiance lay. [1648] His dialectic is for

its time as remarkable as is that of Hume, four centuries later. The

most eminent orthodox thinker of the preceding century had been the

Franciscan John Duns Scotus (1265 or 1274-1308), who, after teaching

great crowds of students at Oxford, was transferred in 1304 to Paris,

and in 1308 to Cologne, where he died. A Realist in his philosophy,

Duns Scotus opposed the Aristotelian scholasticism, and in particular

criticized Thomas Aquinas as having unduly subordinated faith and

practice to speculation and theory. The number of matters of faith

which Thomas had held to be demonstrable by reason, accordingly, was by

Duns Scotus much reduced; and, applying his anti-rationalism to current

belief, he fought zealously for the dogma that Mary, like Jesus, was

immaculately conceived. [1649] But Occam, turning his predecessor's

tactic to a contrary purpose, denied that any matter of faith was

demonstrable by reason at all. He granted that on rational grounds

the existence of a God was probable, but denied that it was strictly

demonstrable, and rejected the ontological argument of Anselm. As to

matters of faith, he significantly observed that the will to believe

the indemonstrable is meritorious. [1650]

It is difficult now to recover a living sense of the issues at stake

in the battle between Nominalism and Realism, and of the social

atmosphere in which the battle was carried on. Broadly speaking, the

Nominalists were the more enlightened school, the Realists standing

for tradition and authority; and it has been alleged that "the books

of the Nominalists, though the art of printing tended strongly to

preserve them, were suppressed and destroyed to such a degree that

it is now exceedingly difficult to collect them, and not easy to

obtain copies even of the most remarkable." [1651] On the other hand,

while we have seen Occam a fugitive before clerical enmity, we shall

see Nominalists agreeing to persecute a Realist to the death in the

person of Huss in the following century. So little was there to choose

between the camps in the matter of sound civics; and so easily could

the hierarchy wear the colours of any philosophical system.

Contemporary with Occam was Durand de St. Pourçain, who became a bishop

(d. 1332), and, after ranking as of the school of Thomas Aquinas,

rejected and opposed its doctrine. With all this heresy in the air,

the principle of "double truth," originally put in currency by

Averroïsm, came to be held in France as in Italy, in a sense which

implied the consciousness that theological truth is not truth at

all. [1652] Occam's pupil, Buridan, rector of the University of

Paris (fl. 1340), substantially avoided theology, and dealt with

moral and intellectual problems on their own merits. [1653] It is

recorded by Albert of Saxony, who studied at Paris in the first half

of the century, that one of his teachers held by the theory of the

motion of the earth. [1654] Even a defender of Church doctrines,

Pierre d'Ailly, accepted Occam's view of theism, [1655] and it

appears to be broadly true that Occam had at Paris an unbroken line

of successors down to the Reformation. [1656] In a world in which the

doctrine of a two-fold truth provided a safety-valve for heresy, such

a philosophical doctrine as his could not greatly affect lay thought;

but at Paris University in the year 1376 there was a startling display

of freethinking by the philosophical students, not a little suggestive

of a parody of the Averroïst propositions denounced by the Bishop

of Paris exactly a century before. Under cover of the doctrine of

two-fold truth they propounded a list of 219 theses, in which they (1)

denied the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, and the

immortality of the soul; (2) affirmed the eternity of matter and the

uselessness of prayer, but also posited the principles of astrology;

(3) argued that the higher powers of the soul are incapable of sin,

and that voluntary sexual intercourse between the unmarried is not

sinful; and (4) suggested that there are fables and falsehoods in the

gospels as in other books. [1657] The element of youthful gasconnade

in the performance is obvious, and the Archbishop sharply scolded the

students; but there must have been much free discussion before such a

manifesto could have been produced. Nevertheless, untoward political

conditions prevented any dissemination of the freethinking spirit

in France; and not for some two centuries was there such another

growth of it. The remarkable case of Nicolaus of Autricuria, who in

1348 was forced to recant his teaching of the atomistic doctrine,

[1658] illustrates at once the persistence of the spirit of reason

in times of darkness, and the impossibility of its triumphing in the

wrong conditions.

§ 12. THOUGHT IN THE TEUTONIC COUNTRIES

The life of the rest of Europe in the later medieval period has little

special significance in the history of freethought. France and Italy,

by German admission, were the lands of the medieval Aufklärung. [1659]

The poetry of the German Minnesingers, a growth from that of the

Troubadours, presented the same anti-clerical features; [1660] and the

story of Reynard the Fox was turned to anti-ecclesiastical purpose

in Germany as in France. The relative freethinking set up by the

crusaders' contact with the Saracens seems to be the source of doubt of

the Minnesinger Freidank concerning the doom of hell-fire on heretics

and heathens, the opinion of Walter der Vogelweide that Christians,

Jews, and Moslems all serve the same God, [1661] and still more

mordant heresy. But such bold freethinking did not spread. Material

prosperity rather than culture was the main feature of German

progress in the Middle Ages; architecture being the only art greatly

developed. Heresy of the anti-ecclesiastical order indeed abounded,

and was duly persecuted; but the higher freethinking developments were

in the theosophic rather than the rationalistic direction. Albert the

Great (fl. 1260), "the universal Doctor," the chief German teacher

of the Middle Ages, was of unimpeached orthodoxy. [1662]

The principal German figure of the period is Master Eckhart (d. 1329),

who, finding religious beliefs excluded from the sphere of reason by

the freer philosophy of his day, undertook to show that they were all

matters of reason. He was, in fact, a mystically reasoning preacher,

and he taught in the interests of popular religion. Naturally,

as he philosophized on old bases, he did not really subject his

beliefs to any skeptical scrutiny, but took them for granted and

proceeded speculatively upon them. This sufficed to bring him before

the Inquisition at Cologne, where he recanted conditionally on an

appeal to the Pope. Dying soon after, he escaped the papal bull

condemning twenty-eight of his doctrines. His school later divided

into a heretical and a Church party, of which the former, called the

"false free spirits," seems to have either joined or resembled the

antinomian Brethren of the Free Spirit, then numerous in Germany. The

other section became known as the "Friends of God," a species

of mystics who were "faithful to the whole medieval imaginative

creed, Transubstantiation, worship of the Virgin and Saints,

Purgatory." [1663] Through Tauler and others, Eckhart's pietistic

doctrine gave a lead to later Protestant evangelicalism; but the

system as a whole can never have been held by any popular body. [1664]

Dr. Lasson pronounces (Ueberweg, i, 483) that the type of Eckhart's

character and teaching "was derived from the innermost essence

of the German national character." At the same time he admits

that all the offshoots of the school departed more or less widely

from Eckhart's type--that is, from the innermost essence of their

own national character. It would be as plausible to say that the

later mysticism of Fénelon derived from the innermost essence

of the French character. The Imitatio Christi has been similarly

described as expressing the German character, on the assumption

that it was written by Thomas à Kempis. Many have held that the

author was the Frenchman Gerson (Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872,

i, 139-40). It was in all probability, as was held by Suarez,

the work of several hands, one a monk of the twelfth century,

another a monk of the thirteenth, and the third a theologian of

the fifteenth; neither Gerson nor Thomas à Kempis being concerned

(Le Clerc, Hist. Litt. du XIVe Siècle, 2e édit. pp. 384-85;

cp. Neale's Hist. of the so-called Jansenist Church of Holland,

1858, pp. 97-98).

The Imitatio Christi (1471), the most popular Christian work

of devotion ever published, [1665] tells all the while of the

obscure persistence of the search for knowledge and for rational

satisfactions. Whatever be the truth as to its authorship, it belongs

to all Christendom in respect of its querulous strain of protest

against all manner of intellectual curiosity. After the first note of

world-renunciation, the call to absorption in the inner religious life,

there comes the sharp protest against the "desire to know." "Surely an

humble husbandman that serveth God is better than a proud philosopher

who, neglecting himself, laboureth to understand the course of the

heavens.... Cease from an inordinate desire of knowing." [1666]

No sooner is the reader warned to consider himself the frailest of

all men than he is encouraged to look down on all reasoners. "What

availeth it to cavil and dispute much about dark and hidden things,

when for being ignorant of them we shall not be so much as reproved

at the day of judgment? It is a great folly to neglect the things

that are profitable and necessary, and give our minds to that which

is curious and hurtful.... And what have we to do with genus and

species, the dry notions of logicians?" [1667] The homily swings

to and fro between occasional admissions that "learning is not to

be blamed," perhaps interpolated by one who feared to have religion

figure as opposed to knowledge, and recurrent flings--perhaps also

interpolated--at all who seek book-lore or physical science; but the

note of distrust of reason prevails. "Where are all those Doctors and

Masters whom thou didst well know whilst they lived and flourished

in learning? Now others have their livings, and perchance scarce ever

think of them. While they lived they seemed something, but now they are

not spoken of." [1668] It belongs to the whole conception of retreat

and aloofness that the devout man should "meddle not with curiosities,

but read such things as may rather yield compunction to his heart than

occupation to his head"; and the last chapter of the last book closes

on the note of the abnegation of reason. "Human reason is feeble and

may be deceived, but true faith cannot be deceived. All reason and

natural search ought to follow faith, not to go before it, nor to

break in upon it.... If the works of God were such that they might be

easily comprehended by human reason, they could not be justly called

marvellous or unspeakable." Thus the very inculcation of humility,

by its constant direction against all intellectual exercise, becomes

an incitement to a spiritual arrogance; and all manner of science

finds in the current ideal of piety its pre-ordained antagonist.