RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION AND STRIFE
§ 1. Growth of Idolatry and Polytheism
By the seventh century all that idolatry had meant for the early
Christists was reproduced within the Christian Church in East and
West. There was nothing, to begin with, in the inner life of the
populace in the Christian period that could keep them from the kinds
of belief natural to the multitude in pagan times. Only under the
stress of a zealous movement of reform, backed up by fanatical power,
had image-worship ever been put down for a single nation, as among the
Persians and later Jews; and only the original Jewish taboo, backed
by the Jewish sacred books, could have kept Christism anti-idolatrous
for any length of time after it had passed beyond the sphere of Jewish
proselytism. After it had become a State religion, the adoption of
images was as necessary to its popularity as the adoption of pagan
festivals and rites. Images of martyrs and holy men deceased seem
to have been first venerated; and when the bones of such were held
to have miraculous virtue, and their spirits were believed to haunt
their tombs, it was impossible that their effigies should not come to
have similar repute. Dust from Palestine or other holy places, again,
was early regarded as having magical virtue--a permitted belief which
prepared the way for others. So with the figure of the Christ. From
the first, the sign of the cross was held to be potent against evil
spirits; and Helena, the mother of Constantine, gave an irresistible
vogue to the worship of what was alleged to be the true cross, and
to have worked miraculous cures. As early as the fourth century the
Christians at Paneas in Palestine seem to have taken an old statue
of a male and a female figure as representing Jesus healing the
believing woman; and in the sixth century paintings on linen, held
to have been miraculously made by the face of the Saviour, began to
be revered. Being so different from pagan statues, the "idols" of
Jewish aversion, they readily passed the barrier of the traditional
veto on idolatry. Here again, however, the lead came from paganism,
as we know from Juvenal that many painters in his day "lived upon
Isis," then the fashionable foreign deity at Rome. Crucifixes and
images of all kinds inevitably followed. Valens and Theodosius passed
laws forbidding pictures and icons of Christ; but such laws merely
emphasized an irrepressible tendency. As for Mary, her worship seems
from the first to have been associated with that of old statues of a
nursing Goddess-Mother, and the statues followed the cult, some black
statues of Isis and Horus being worshipped to this day as representing
Mary and Jesus.
When an image was once set up in a sacred place, there soon came into
play the old belief, common to Egyptians and Romans, that the spirit
of the being represented would enter the statue. Hence all prayers to
saints were addressed wherever possible to their images, and the same
usage followed the introduction of images of Jesus and the Virgin. And
while the Theodosian code contained laws prohibiting on pain of death
the placing of wreaths on pagan statues and the burning of incense
before them, the Christian populace within a century was doing those
very things to the statues of saints. In the same way the use of holy
water, which in the time of Valentinian was still held un-Christian,
became universal in the Church a century or two later. Images could not
well be left out. The old Judaic conception of the supreme being was
indeed too strong to permit of his being imaged; though in the fourth
century the Audæans, a Syrian sect of a puritan cast, held that the
deity was of human shape, and were accordingly named Anthropomorphites;
but the orthodox insistence on the human form of Jesus was a lead
to image-making. Thus for the Moslems the eastern Christians were
idolaters as well as polytheists; and the epistles of Gregory the Great
show him to have zealously fostered the use of miraculous relics and
sacred images in the West. Professing to condemn the worship of images,
he defended their use against Bishop Selenus of Marseilles, who ejected
them from his church. One of Gregory's specialties in relics was the
chain of St. Paul, from which filings could be taken daily without
diminishing the total bulk. It was presumably while all pagan usages
were still familiar that the Italian Christians adopted the custom
of painting the statues of saints red, in the common pagan fashion,
as they did the old custom of carrying the images in procession. For
the rest, they had but to turn to the lore of the pagan temples for
examples of statues brought from heaven, statues which worked miracles,
statues which spoke, wept, perspired, and bled--all of which prodigies
became canonical in Christian idolatry.
Some scrupulous and educated Christians, such as Epiphanius and
Augustine, had naturally set their faces against such a general
reversion to practical idolatry, just as many educated pagans had done
on philosophical grounds; and the council of Elvira in the fourth
century condemned the admission of pictures into churches. But this
had no lasting effect. In the eighth century, when it could no longer
be pretended that Christian images served merely for edification,
the Greek emperor Leo the Isaurian began the famous iconoclastic
movement in the East. It is probable that he was influenced by Saracen
ideas, with which he often came in contact; though it has been held
that his motive was mainly political, the local worship of images
having weakened the central authority of the Church. But after some
generations of struggle and fluctuation, despite the ready support
given to iconoclasm by many bishops, the throne reverted to orthodoxy,
and idolatry thenceforth remained normal in the Greek as in the Latin
Church. The one variation from pagan practice lay in the substitution
of pictures and painted wooden images or icons for the nobler statues
of past paganism, with which indeed Christian art could not pretend
for a moment to compete.
In the West, though the iconoclastic emperors met from the popes not
sympathy but intense hostility, leading soon to the severance of Rome
from the empire, we find in the ninth century a remarkable opposition
to image-worship on the part of Claudius bishop of Turin, and Agobard
bishop of Lyons, both of whom show a surprising degree of rationalism
for their age. Claudius opposed papal claims as well as saint-worship
and image-worship, and when condemned by a council of bishops called
them asses. Agobard opposed all the leading superstitions of his day,
even going so far as to pronounce the theory of plenary inspiration
an absurdity. As both men were born in Spain, there is reason to
suspect that they like Leo had been influenced by the higher Saracen
thought of the time. In any case, their stand was vain; and though
the northern nations, mainly perhaps by reason of their backwardness
in the arts, were slow to follow the Italian lead, a century or two
sufficed to make the whole Latin Church devoutly image-worshipping. At
no time, of course, had any part of it been otherwise than boundlessly
credulous as to miracles of every order, and as to the supernatural
virtue of relics of every species; and both, accordingly, abounded
on all hands. The average mass of Christendom was thus on the same
religious and psychological plane as pagan polytheism.
Polytheistic, strictly speaking, Christianity had been from the
first. The formula of the Trinity was no more truly monotheistic
for the new faith than it had been for ancient Egypt; and the mere
belief in an Evil Power was a negation of monotheism. But when
saints came to be prayed-to at separate shrines, and every trade
had its saint-patron, the Christian system was both theoretically
and practically as polytheistic as that of classic Greece, where
Zeus was at least as truly the Supreme God as was the Father for
Christians. And in the elevation of Mary to Goddesshood even the formal
semblance of monotheism was lost, for her worship was in the main
absolute. The worship, indeed, was long established before she received
technical divinization from the Church, such Fathers as Epiphanius and
Augustine having too flatly condemned her early worship to permit of
a formal declaration to the contrary. But in the thirteenth century,
St. Bonaventura, who expressly maintained that the same reverence must
be paid to the Virgin's image as to herself--a doctrine established
in the same period by Thomas Aquinas in regard to Christ--arranged
a Psalter in which domina was substituted for dominus (in te domina
speravi); and this became the note of average Catholicism. In the
twelfth century began the dispute as to the Immaculate Conception
of the Virgin--the doctrine, that is, of her supernatural birth--on
which in later ages the Dominicans and Franciscans fought a bitter
and obstinate battle, the latter affirming and the former denying
the dogma. After seven centuries of temporizing, the Papacy has in
recent times endorsed it (1854); but for a thousand years it has been
implicit in the ritual of the Catholic Church.
It is not generally known among Protestants that the deification
of Joseph has long been in course of similar evolution. In the
fifteenth century, Saint Teresa seems to have regarded him as
the "plenipotentiary" of God (= Jesus), obtaining from the deity
in heaven whatever he asked, as he had done on earth according
to the Apocrypha. The cult has never been very prominent; but
the latter-day litany of St. Joseph treats him as at least the
equal of the Virgin. "The devotion to him," says Cardinal Newman,
"is comparatively of late date. When once it began, men seemed
surprised that it had not been thought of before; and now they hold
him next to the Blessed Virgin in their religious affection and
veneration." It had of course been dogmatically retarded by the
insistence on the virginity of Mary. But Gerson, one of the most
distinguished theologians of the fourteenth century, is credited by
modern Catholics with having suggested the recognition of a second or
created Trinity of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And seeing that Joseph
in the popular medieval representations of the Advent Mystery is
a constant figure, it is inferrible that for the multitude he had
practically a divine status. The process is strictly in keeping with
religious evolution in general; and the official apotheosis of Joseph
may one day take place. For a time, in the period of the Renaissance,
there was an amount of devotion paid to St. Anna, the mother of Mary,
which might conceivably have led to her deification. Pictures of that
period may still be seen in Holland, in which Anna, Mary, and Jesus
constitute a Holy Family. But the cultus of Anna had no persistent or
powerful advocate, and she seems latterly to have passed definitely
into the background.
§ 2. Doctrines of the Eucharist, Purgatory, and Confession
In the first ages of the Church, the notion of the divinity of the
"body and blood" of the communion meal was vague and undefined. The
partakers certainly regarded the consecrated bread and wine as
carrying some supernatural virtue, since they took away portions
for medicinal use; but they thought of the meal very much as devout
pagans thought of one of the some kind in their mysteries or temple
ritual. When their ritual phraseology was challenged as giving colour
to the charge of cannibalism, the Fathers seem always to have explained
that the terms were purely figurative; and such was the doctrine laid
down by Augustine. But when pagan culture had passed away, and there
was none in the barbarized West to challenge the Church as such,
the strange literalness of the original liturgy set up the stranger
belief that what was eaten in the eucharist was by "transubstantiation"
the actual flesh and blood of the God-Man. Where such a belief was
possible, it was the special interest of the priesthood to make the
affirmation. A stupendous miracle, they claimed, was worked every
time the eucharist was administered; but it was worked through the
priest. He and he only could bring it about; and thus the central
mystery and prodigy of the faith, the command of its most essential
ministry, was a clerical monopoly. The economic and spiritual centre
of gravity of the entire system was fixed in the priestly order.
Under such a dominating conception, Christianity was for the majority a
religion neither of faith nor of works: it was a religion of sacerdotal
magic. Not he that believed, still less he that loved his neighbour,
but he only that received the mystic rite at consecrated hands, was
to be saved. Moral teaching there might be, but more than ever it was
supererogatory. Already in the fourth century the sacerdotal quality
of the rite was defined by the practice of solemnly "elevating" the
wine and the hostia or sacrifice, as the bread was termed, before
every distribution; and it had become common to administer it two
or three times a week. Thus the missa or Mass, as it had come to be
termed (traditionally from the formula of dismissal, Ite, missio est,
corrupted into Missa est--another pagan detail), had passed from the
status of a periodical solemnity to that of a frequent service; and
the rite was developed by the addition of chants and responses till
it became the special act of Christian worship. The "symbols" were
thus already far on the way to be worshipped; and at the beginning
of the seventh century Gregory the Great enacted that the slightest
irregularities in their use should be atoned for by penances. Thus
"if a drop from the cup should fall on the altar, the ministering
priest must suck up the drop and do penance for three days; and the
linen cloth which the drop touched must be washed three times over
the cup, and the water in which it was washed be cast into the fire."
In various other ways the traditional practice was modified. Originally
a "supper," it was frequently partaken of after the Agapæ or love
feasts; but in the fourth century the irrepressible disorders of
those assemblages led to their being officially discountenanced,
and they gradually died out. Soon the Mass in the churches became a
regular morning rite, and the eucharist was taken fasting. After Leo
the Great, in the Roman services, it was even administered several
times in the day. Finally, in or before the eleventh century, the
priesthood, from motives either of economy or sobriety, began to
withhold the winecup from communicants, and to reserve it for the
priests--a practice which Leo the Great had denounced as heretical. The
official argument seems to have been that "the body must include
the blood," and that the miracle which turned the bread into flesh
created the divine blood therein. One of the most popular miracle
stories was to the effect that when once a Jew stabbed a Host, it
bled; and the Host in question was long on exhibition. Of older date,
apparently, is the administration of the bread in the form of a wafer,
this being admittedly an imitation either of the ancient pagan usage
of consecrating and eating small round cakes in the worship of many
deities, or of the Jewish unleavened bread of the Passover. It may,
indeed, have come through Manichæism, which at this point followed
Mazdean usage; and as the Manichæans also had the usage of bread
without wine, it may be that both practices came from them in the
medieval period. But as the priestly practice of turning round at
the altar was taken direct from ancient paganism, with the practice
of shaving the head, it is likely that the wafer was also.
The rite thus settled being a conditio sine qua non of Church
membership and spiritual life, it became the basis of the temporal
power of the Church. Without it there was no "religion"; and as the
communicant in order to retain his rights must make confession to the
priest at least once a year, the hold of the Church on the people was
universal. Any one rejecting its authority could be excommunicated; and
excommunication meant the cessation of all the offices of social life,
each man being forced by fear for himself to stand aloof from the one
condemned. The obligation to confess, in turn, was an evolution from
the primitive practice of voluntary public confession of sin before
the Church. When that went out of fashion, private confession to the
priest took its place; and when the public reading of such confessions
by the priest gave offence, Leo the Great directed that they should
be regarded as secret. What was thus made for criminals an easy means
to absolution became at length an obligation for all. In the East,
indeed, it seems to have reached that stage in the fifth century,
when a scandal caused the rule to be given up, leaving to the Western
Church its full exploitation. Sacerdotal confession, thus instituted,
was one more hint from the book of paganism, sagaciously developed. In
the ancient Greek mysteries, priests had unobtrusively traded on the
principle that the initiate must be pure, first inviting confession
and then putting a scale of prices on ceremonial absolution; but in
the pagan world the system had never gone far. It was left to Roman
Christianity to made it coextensive with the Church, and thus to
create a species of social and economic power over mankind which no
other "civilized" religion ever attained.
But yet a third hold over fear and faith was wrought by the
priesthood. Even as the priestly saying of Masses, bought at a price,
was needed to keep the Christian safe in life, so the buying of
Masses could hasten the release of his soul from purgatory after
death. Purgatory was, to begin with, yet another pagan tenet, which
in the first five centuries was regarded by the Church as heretical,
though the text about "the spirits in prison" (1 Peter iii, 19; cp. 1
Cor. v, 5) gave colour to it, and Origen had entertained it. In all
the writings of Ambrose it is not mentioned; Augustine treats it as
dubious in despite of the authority of Origen; and the Eastern Church
has never accepted the tenet. But in the writings of Gregory the Great
it is treated as an established principle, with the economic corollary
that he who would save himself or his kindred from prolonged pains in
purgatory must lay out money on atoning Masses. Thus the whole cycle
of real and supposed human experience was under the Church's sway,
and at every stage on the course the pilgrim paid toll. The episodes
of birth, marriage, and death were alike occasions for sacraments,
each a source of clerical revenue; the fruits of the earth paid their
annual tithe; and beyond death itself the Church sold privilege in the
realm of shadows, winning by that traffic, perhaps, most wealth of all.
It was a general corollary from the whole system that the Church
had the right to grant "indulgences" for sin. If the Church could
release from penalties in purgatory, it might grant pardons at will on
earth. Such a doctrine was of course only very gradually evolved. First
of all, perhaps again following a Manichæan precedent, the bishops
individually began to waive canonical penances in consideration of the
donation by offenders of sums of money for religious purposes. The
principle is expressly laid down by Gregory I. There was at the
outset no thought of selling the permission to commit an offence; the
bishop merely used the opportunity of committed offences to enrich his
church, very much as the law in so many cases inflicts fines instead of
imprisonment. The procedure, too, was local and independent, even as
that of abbots and monks who sold the privilege of seeing and kissing
holy relics, which they often carried round the country in procession
for revenue purposes. Only after such means of income had long been
in use did the papacy attempt to monopolize the former, in virtue of
its prerogative of "the keys." But step by step it absorbed the power
to release from ordinary penances and to grant "plenary" remission
from penances; and finally it undertook, what the bishops had never
ventured on, to remit the penalties of purgatory in advance. Such
enterprise was evoked only by a great occasion--the Crusades.
The earlier papal indulgences were remissions of penance, and were
often given on such tolerable grounds as pilgrimages to the Holy Land,
and loyal observance of the papal institution of a "Truce of God" on
certain days of the week; indeed, one of the original motives may even
have been that of controlling the mercenary proceedings of bishops. But
when once the popes had proffered plenary indulgence to all crusaders,
decency was at an end. It was obvious that the effect was demoralizing
to the last degree; and still the practice continued. At the beginning
of the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III offered absolution from
all sins past and future, dispensation from the payment of interest
on debts, and exemption from the jurisdiction of the ordinary law
courts, to all who would serve for a given period in the crusade
against the Albigensian and other heretics in the territory of the
Count of Toulouse. Later, similar inducements were offered to all who
would take up arms against the Moors in Spain. If the moral sense of
Christendom were not thus wholly destroyed, it is because all social
life necessitates some minimum of morality, which no system can uproot.
Thenceforth the practice went from bad to worse, despite many earnest
protests from the better and saner sort of Churchmen, till it became
possible for popes to allot the traffic in indulgences in given
districts as kings allotted trading monopolies, and the enormity of
the practices of the agents gave a sufficient ground for the decisive
explosion of the Reformation. Before that explosion an attempt
was made, on the lines of ancient Roman law, to give the practice
plausibility by the formula that the indulgence was granted "out of
the superfluous merits of Christ and the saints," a treasure of spare
sanctity which it lay with the pope to distribute. But this doctrine,
which savoured so much of the counting-house, was contemporaneous
with the worst abuse the principle ever underwent after the age of
the Crusaders.
§ 3. Rationalistic Heresies
As we have seen in connection with the growth of idolatry, there was
even in the Dark Ages an earnest minority within the Church which
resisted the downward bias of the majority and of their hierarchical
rulers. In no period, probably, was the spirit of reason wholly absent;
and from time to time it bore distinct witness. Thus we find alongside
of the effort of Claudius and Agobard against idolatry and extraneous
superstitions a less vigorous but no less remarkable testimony against
the central superstition of the priestly system. When the Frankish
monk Paschasius Radbert (831) put flatly what had become the orthodox
doctrine of Rome as to the transubstantiation of the eucharist,
some of the northern scholars who had preserved the pre-barbaric
tradition were found to gainsay him. As the discussion continued long,
the liberal-minded Frankish emperor, Charles the Bald, invited special
replies; and a learned monk, Ratramnus, wrote a treatise to the effect
that the "real presence" was spiritual, not corporeal. But John the
Scot (then = Irishman), otherwise known as Erigena, wrote on the same
invitation to the effect that the bread and wine were merely symbols or
memorials of the Last Supper--a heresy so bold that only the emperor's
protection could have saved the utterer. And his freethinking did
not end there, for in the discussion on predestination begun by the
monk Gottschalk, in which John was invited to intervene by the bigoted
abbot Hincmar, the Irish scholar was again recalcitrant to authority;
while on the question of Deity and Trinity he held a language that
anticipated Spinoza, and brought upon his memory, when he was long
dead, the anathema of the papacy. Another Irishman of the same period,
Macarius or Macaire, taught a similar pantheism in France.
John Scotus, however, was by far the greatest thinker of the Dark Ages,
and it was impossible that his ideas should become normal. Not for
two hundred years was there any overt result from his and Ratramnus's
heresy on the eucharist. Then (1045) Berengar of Tours set forth a
modified doctrine of the eucharist which rested on that of Ratramnus,
and brought on him a series of prosecutions at Rome for heresy,
from the punishment for which he was saved by Hildebrand, as papal
adviser and later as pope; but also by his own formal retractations,
to which however he did not adhere. The populace, he tells us, would
gladly have slain him; and more than once he had narrow escapes. After
all he did but affirm a "spiritual real presence"; and while some of
his party went as far as John Scotus, the stand for reason was soon
tacitly abandoned, the great majority even of the educated class
accepting the priestly dogma. Not till the Reformation was it again
firmly challenged, and even then not by all the reformers.
A similar fortune attended the attempt of the French canon Rousselin
(Roscellinus), also in the twelfth century, to rationalize the
doctrine of the Trinity. Proceeding logically as a "Nominalist,"
denying the reality of abstractions, he argued that if the Three
Persons were one thing it was only a nominal thing. His heresy,
however, admittedly ended in simple tritheism; and after he, like
Berengar, had on pressure recanted, his subsequent withdrawal of his
recantation did not revive excitement. Not till the sixteenth century
did Unitarianism begin to assert itself against Trinitarianism, and
Deism against both. There was indeed a great development of general
rationalism in philosophy in the twelfth century, especially in France,
as represented by Abailard; and even in the eleventh the argument of
Anselm to prove the existence of God shows that very radical scepticism
had indirectly made itself heard; but no philosophic movement affected
the teachings and practices of the Church as such. As for the kind of
rationalism which denied the immortality of the soul, though it seems
to have been somewhat common in Florence early in the twelfth century,
it never took such propagandist form as to bring on it the assault of
the papacy; and the occasional philosophic affirmation of the eternity
of matter met the same immunity. It is remarkable that, despite the
denunciation of all the truths of ancient science by the Church,
the doctrine of the roundness of the earth was still affirmed in the
eighth century by an Irish priest of Bavaria named Vergilius, who was
duly denounced for his heresy by St. Boniface, and deposed by the pope,
but afterwards reinstated and finally sainted. How the doctrine fared
in detail does not appear, but the knowledge persisted; and though in
the fourteenth century Nicolaus of Autricuria was compelled to recount
his teaching of the atomistic theory, in the fifteenth his namesake
of Cusa taught with impunity the rotation of the earth on its axis,
being despite that made a cardinal; while the Italian poet Pulci with
equal impunity affirmed the existence of an Antipodes. Nicolaus of Cusa
even put forth the old pagan doctrine of the infinity of the physical
universe--the beginning of modern pantheistic and atheistic philosophy.
As the "false dawn" of the Renaissance began to glimmer, a new source
of heresy can be seen in the higher teaching--heretical in its own
sphere--of Saracen philosophy, which under Aristotelian and Jewish
influences had gone far while Christendom was sinking in a deepening
darkness. The effects of Saracen contacts, acting on minds perhaps
prepared by the doctrine of John Scotus, first became obvious in
the pantheistic teaching of Amalrich of Bena and David Dinant at
the end of the twelfth century. Amalrich was forced to abjure; and
after his death his bones were dug up and burned (1209), and many of
his followers burned alive; David of Dinant having to fly for his
life. Then it was that a Council held at Paris vetoed all study of
Aristotle at the university. Yet in 1237 the veto was withdrawn; and as
Aristotle became the basis of the systematic theology of Thomas Aquinas
(d. 1274), his philosophy was thenceforth the orthodox system in the
schools. From the first it must have counted for indirect scepticism;
and in the great Summa Theologiæ of Thomas himself are to be seen
abundant traces of the new doubt of the age, much of it set up by
reflection on the spectacle of conflicting religious dogmatisms
in the Crusades, some of it by Saracen philosophy, especially that
of Averroës [Ibn Roshd]. In Sicily and Southern Italy, which under
Frederick II were the special seat of this doubt and of the tendency
to tolerance which it generated, the spirit of reason ultimately fared
ill; but thenceforth an element of skepticism pervades the higher life
of Europe. Saracen science, medical, chemical, and astronomical--the
virtual foundation of all the modern science of Europe--tended in the
same direction. In Italy, in particular, respect for the Church and
papacy almost ceased to exist among educated men; and the revival of
such specific heresies as disbelief in immortality and belief in the
eternity of matter prepared the way for simple deism.
But against all such heresy the Church could hold its ground in virtue
of its vast vested interests, as well as of the subjection of the
mass, superstitious even when irreverent. The practical danger to the
Church's power lay first in the growth of anti-clerical feeling among
people with religious instincts, and secondarily in the anti-clerical
economic interest of the nobility and upper classes in all the northern
countries. What delayed disaster was the slowness of the two hostile
elements to combine.
§ 4. Anti-clerical Heresies
The kind of heresy which first stirred the Church to murderous
repression was naturally that which struck at its monopolies. After
the ancient schism of the Donatists, which so organized itself as to
set up a rival Church, the sect which was most bloodily persecuted
in the period of established Christianity from Theodosius onwards
was the Manichæan, visibly the Church's most serious rival. So, in
the Dark Ages, the heresies which roused most priestly anger were
the movement against image-worship; the predestinarian doctrine of
Gottschalk, which, though orthodox and Augustinian, was now felt
to undermine the priest's power over souls in purgatory; and that
which impugned the priestly miracle of the eucharist, the main hold
of the priesthood over society. And the first resort to general and
systematic massacre as against heresy in the West was made after there
had arisen in the eleventh and twelfth centuries a movement of popular
schism which assailed not only a number of leading rites and dogmas,
but flatly denied the priestly prerogative.
Of this movement the first stages occurred in the eastern empire,
in the sect known as Paulicians, who are first heard of under that
name in Armenia in the seventh century. Their founder, however,
one Constantine, afterwards known as Sylvanus, worked on existing
bases. The name of the sect seems to have stood for an appeal to
the teaching of Paul as against paganized Christianity; and it had
Marcionite elements; but though it was at first anti-Gnostic and
anti-Manichæan, it acquired both Gnostic and Manichæan or at least
Mazdean characteristics, even in the teaching of Sylvanus. On the
face of the case, it suggests both Persian and Moslem influences. Its
practical heresies were opposition to the adoration of images and
relics, to the use of the Old Testament, to the worship of saints,
angels, and the Virgin, and to the prerogatives of monks and priests;
the sectaries claiming to read the New Testament for themselves,
in defiance of the virtual veto of the Greek Church on such study by
the laity. For the rest, they insisted that baptism and the eucharist
were spiritual and not bodily rites, and even reaffirmed the "Docetic"
doctrine that Jesus had not a true human body, and so was incapable
of suffering. Their flat denial of priestly claims marked them out
as a specially obnoxious body, and they were fiercely persecuted,
the founder being stoned to death.
Like all the other sects, they were in turn divided, and one section
had the protection of Leo the Iconoclast, who agreed with them as to
images. A later leader, Sergius or Tychicus, won for his sect the
favour of Nicephorus I; but the next iconoclast, Leo the Armenian,
resenting their other heresies, cruelly persecuted them; and like
previous heretical sects they were driven over to the national enemy,
which was now Islam. Constantine "Copronymus," seeking to remedy
this state of things, transplanted many of them to Constantinople
and Thrace, thus bringing their heresy into Europe; but in the ninth
century, on the final restoration of image-worship, a vast multitude
was massacred in Armenia. Most of the remnant there went over to the
Saracens, and became the fiercest enemies of the empire.
From Thrace, meanwhile, their propaganda spread into Bulgaria,
where it prospered, with the help of refugees from Armenia. In the
tenth century they were to some extent favoured as a useful bulwark
against the Slavs; but in the eleventh they were again persecuted;
and as the malcontents of the empire in general tended to join them
they became the ruling party in Bulgaria. Thus it came about that
the name Bulgar, Bulgarian, became a specific name in mid-Europe
for heretic (and worse), surviving to this day in that sense in
the French form of bougre. The Paulicians, further, had their own
extremists, who held by the old Marcionite veto on marriage, and
received the Greek name of cathari, "the pure"--a title sometimes
given to the whole mass, from whom, however, the purists were in that
case distinguished as perfecti. Either from the Cathari or from the
Chazari, a Turkish tribe whose Christianity in the ninth century was
much mixed with Mohammedanism, came the Italian nickname gazzari,
and the German word for heretic, ketzer. Yet another eastern sect,
the Slavonic Bogomilians, who remained monotheistic as against the
dualism of the Paulicians, joined in the wave of new beliefs which
began to beat from the East on central Europe.
From the very beginning of the eleventh century, outbreaks of the
new heresy, always anti-clerical and anti-ceremonial, occurred at
intervals in France, northern Italy, and Germany. In some cases, the
opposition to priests, images, and Virgin-worship extended to a denial
of all miracles and sacraments, and an assertion of the eternity
of matter--apparent signs of Saracen philosophic influence. But
the movement developed a thoroughness of enmity to everything
ecclesiastical, that told of a quite independent basis in the now
widespread hostility to the Church of Rome outside of its centre of
wealth and power. For one or two generations the crusades drew off
the superfluous energy of Europe, and the new heresies were somewhat
overshadowed; but in the first half of the twelfth century, when
the crusades had lost all religious savour, anti-clericalism sprang
up on all sides. Tanquelin in Flanders; Peter de Brueys (founder of
the Petrobrussians) in Languedoc; the monk Henry in Switzerland and
France; Eudo of Stello in Brittany, and Arnold of Brescia in Italy,
all wrought either religiously or politically against the Church;
and all died by her violence, or in prison. Arnold, the most capable
of all, was a pupil of Abailard, and his doctrine was that the entire
vested wealth of the Church should be taken over by the civil power,
leaving the clergy to live sparingly by the gifts of the faithful. His
movement, which lasted twenty years, and was very strong in Lombardy,
went so far as to set up a short-lived republic in Rome; but it needed
only a combination of the pope and the emperor, Frederick Barbarossa,
to bring the republic to the ground, and Arnold to crucifixion.
Among the other revolters there was a good deal of fanaticism;
but all were more or less emphatic in denouncing priestly
pretensions, sacraments, cross-worship, prayers for the dead, penance,
image-worship, church bells, altars, and even churches. It seemed as if
the end of the Church had begun. For, though each new prophet in turn
was slain, new heretics seemed to rise from the ashes. With various
positive tenets, they were at one in their enmity to the priesthood. In
Italy there flourished a sect called the Pasagini (apparently =
Passagieri, Crusaders) or the Circumcised, who returned to the law of
Moses and to Ebionite views of Jesus; in France, a different order
of zealots, called Caputiati from the habit of carrying an image of
the Virgin on their hats, stood for a return to primeval equality and
liberty. Between such types of heresy stood the Apostolici, mostly poor
working-folk, but with powerful sympathizers, who urged a return to the
"apostolic" ideal of poverty and simplicity, and further discouraged
marriage, calling themselves "the chaste brethren and sisters." Two
of their leaders, Sagarelli and Fra Dolcino, had shown the usual
aversion to the Church, Dolcino predicting the formation of native
States and the purification of the papacy; so they, too, were put to
death, being burnt at the stake. And still new revolters appeared.
At this stage there came to the front the sectaries known in
history as the Vaudois or Waldenses, a name standing properly for
the inhabitants of the Vaux or Valleys of Piedmont, but further
connected with the teaching of one Peter Waldus, a Lyons merchant,
whose followers received also the name of the Poor Men of Lyons. How
far the anti-Catholic tenets of the Waldenses derive from ancient
heresy is uncertain; but it is clear that late in the twelfth
century they were acted on by the immense ferment of new ideas around
them. Like the Paulicians, they insisted that the laity should read
the Bible for themselves; and their men and women members went about
preaching wherever they could get a hearing, and administering the
eucharist without priestly sanction. At the same time they condemned
tithes, opposed fasting and prayers for the dead, preached peace and
non-resistance, denied the authority of the pope, and impeached the
lives of the clergy.
All of these forces of heresy, and yet others, were specially at
work in the rich and prosperous region of Languedoc, the patrimony
of Count Raymond of Toulouse. Paulicians and Waldenses, Cathari,
Albanensians or sectaries of Albano, Albigensians or sectaries of the
town of Alby or the district of Albigensium, Bogomilians, Apostolici,
Caputiati, and nondescript Paterini (a Milanese name for a popular
faction)--all were active in the name of religion; and in addition
there were at work heretics of another stamp--the gay, wandering
Goliards or satirical poets and minstrels, who loved the priests and
the papacy as little as did the zealots; and the graver doubters who
had got new views of life from Saracen science and philosophy. As
against the whole amorphous mass of misbelief, the papacy planned
and effected a stupendous crusade of slaughter.
From the first the Manichæans, as the Church loved to call the
heretics indiscriminately, had been bloodily punished. One bishop of
the eleventh century, Wazon of Liège, is to be remembered as having
protested against the universal policy of slaughter; and another,
Gerhard of Cambrai and Arras, is said to have won over some heretics
by persuasion; but these were voices in the wilderness. Fire, sword,
halter, and cross were the normal methods of repression; and during the
eleventh and twelfth centuries thousands probably so perished. But the
campaign which came to be known as the Albigensian crusade was planned
by Pope Innocent III to outdo all the isolated punishments of the past,
and it succeeded. Grounds for quarrel with the Count of Toulouse were
easily found; and the offer of indulgences, on the lines laid down in
the crusades against the Saracens, brought eager volunteers from all
parts of Europe, for only forty days' service was now called for. The
submission of Count Raymond was not permitted to check the massacre
of his subjects. It was in the first campaign that the papal legate
Arnold, abbot of Cliteaux, when asked at the storming of Beziers how
the heretics were to be distinguished from the true believers, gave
the historic answer, "Kill all; God will know his own." By his own
account they killed in that one place fifteen thousand men, women,
and children. The chroniclers, who make the slain twice or thrice as
many, tell how seven thousand of them were found in the great church
of Mary the Magdalene--her from whom, in the legend, had been cast
out seven devils without letting of blood.
Begun in 1209, the Albigensian crusades outlasted the life of Innocent
III, who grew sick of the slaughter while the priesthood were calling
for its extension. They praised in particular the Anglo-French Simon
de Montfort, who slew many of his victims by torture, and tore out the
eyes of many more. For nearly twenty years the wars lasted, plunder
being a sufficient motive after heresy had been drowned in blood
or driven broadcast throughout Europe. It has been reckoned that a
full million of all ages and both sexes were slain. Yet as late as
1231 Pope Gregory IX was burning troops of the heretics at Rome,
and causing many more to be burned in France and Germany.
The precocious civilization of Languedoc and Provence was destroyed,
and the region became a stronghold of Catholic fanaticism; but the
political diversity of Europe baffled the papal hope of destroying
heresy. Thenceforth the anti-clerical animus never died out: in the
course of the thirteenth century it reached even England, then the
most docile section of the Catholic fold. Generations before Wiclif,
there were heretics in the province of Canterbury who denied the
authority of the pope and even of the Fathers, professing to stand
solely on the Bible and the principle of "necessary reason." Wiclif
stood on a less heterodox plane, impugning chiefly the extreme form
of transubstantiation and the practices of the begging friars; and
he was proportionately influential. In the fourteenth century, when
international crusades of repression had become politically impossible,
the critical spirit is seen freshly at work on anti-papal lines in
England, Flanders, France, Germany, and Bohemia, as well as in Italy;
and again, the more energetic began in their earnest ignorance to
frame new schemes of life in the light of their sacred books. The
lapse of time and the continuance of orthodox culture had made an end
of the old Paulician heresy as such; and of the new movements many,
like that set up by Saint Francis in the period of the Albigensian
crusades, were meant to be strictly obedient to the Church. Such were
the "Brethren of the Common Lot," a body set up in Holland by educated
Churchmen after the so-called Beghards (otherwise Beguins or Beguttæ)
had there for a time flourished and degenerated. But the Beghards and
the "Brethren of the Free Spirit," who spread widely over northern
Europe, had not only aimed at a communal life, but developed the
old tendency to pantheism, now gaining ground philosophically on the
lines of Averroism. Even among the Franciscans the "Spirituals," who
resented the falling away of the order from its ideals of poverty,
became heretical. Some adopted the new "Eternal Gospel," by Abbot
Joachim of Flora in Calabria, in which it was declared that there
now began a new dispensation of the Holy Spirit, superseding that
of Jesus. Others, called the Fraticelli, or Little Brothers, had a
"Gospel of the Holy Spirit," composed by John of Parma. In both cases
the spirit of revolt against the Church was marked.
Of the heresy of the fourteenth century the high-water mark is seen
in English Lollardism, which, without touching on the philosophical
problem, proceeded on the basis of the teaching of Wiclif to a kind
of religious rationalism which not only repudiated the rule of the
pope but rejected the institutions of religious celibacy, exorcisms,
priestly benedictions, confession and absolution, pilgrimages,
masses for the dead, and prayers and offerings to images; and
even carried the ethical spirit to the point of denouncing war
and capital punishment. In that age, such an ethic could not long
thrive. Lollardism, encouraged by the self-seeking nobility while it
menaced only the wealth of the Church, which they hoped to gain, was
trodden down by them in conjunction with the king and the Church when
it turned against the abuses of feudal government. But its destruction
was most effectually wrought through the national demoralization set
up by the new imperialism of Henry V, who, after passing a new statute
for the burning of heretics, won the enthusiastic loyalty of his people
by his successful invasion of France. In the corruption of that policy
of plunder, and in the ensuing pandemonium of the Wars of the Roses,
Lollardism disappeared like every other moral ideal. The time for a
union of critical and rapacious forces against the hierarchy was not
yet; and when it came in the sixteenth century the critical spirit
was on the whole less rational than it had been at the beginning of
the fifteenth.