PERSECUTION.
The Church had not always been an organization which considered its
highest duty to be the forcible suppression of dissidence at any cost.
In the simplicity of apostolic times its members were held together by
the bond of love, and the spirit with which discipline was enforced is
expressed in St. Paul's precept to the Galatians (VI. 1, 2)--
"Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are
spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness;
considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.
"Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ."
Christ had commanded his disciples to forgive their brethren seventy
times seven, and as yet his teachings had been too recent to be buried
beneath a mass of observances and doctrines in which the letter which
kills overpowered the spirit which saves. The great primal principles of
Christianity were enough for the fervor of the faithful. Dogmatic
theology, with its endless complexities and metaphysical subtleties, as
yet was not. Even its vocabulary had still to be created and its
innumerable points of faith to be evolved out of the chance expressions
of writers on other topics, and by the literal interpretation of the
imagery of poetical diction.
It is an inexpressible relief to turn from the heated wranglings over
questions scarce appreciable by the average human intellect to St.
Paul's reproof to the Ephesians for giving heed to fables and endless
genealogies, and questions which had in them little of godly
edification, for "the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure
heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned" (I. Tim. I. 4,
5). Those who indulged in these vain janglings he denounces as men
"desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say
nor whereof they affirm" (Ib. 7), and he commands his chosen disciple,
"But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they engender
strife" (II. Tim. II. 23). The Ebionitic section of the Church agreed
with the Pauline branch in this simplicity of teaching--"Pure religion
and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless
and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the
world" (James, I. 27).
Yet already was the seed scattered which was to bear so abounding a
harvest of wrong and misery. St. Paul will listen to no deviation from
the strictness of his teachings--"But though we, or an angel from
heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have
preached, let him be accursed" (Galat. I. 8); and he boasts of
delivering unto Satan Hymenæus and Alexander "that they may learn not to
blaspheme" (I. Tim. I. 20). How this spirit increased as time wore on
may be seen in the apocalyptic threats with which the backsliders and
heretics of the seven churches are assailed (Rev. II., III.). The
process went on with accelerating rapidity. Theology could not form
itself without starting a cloud of questions unsettled by the gospel:
earnest disputants arose who, in the heat of controversy, magnified the
points at issue till they assumed an importance rendering them the vital
tests of Christianity, and men believed with the most fervid conviction
that their adversaries were not Christians because they differed on some
unimportant fragment of ritual or discipline, or on some infinitesimal
dogma which only the mind trained in the dialectics of the schools could
comprehend. When Quintilla taught that water was not necessary in
baptism, Tertullian shrieks to her that there is nothing in common
between them, not even the same God or the same Christ. The Donatist
heresy with its deplorable results arose on the question of the
eligibility of an individual bishop. When Eutyches, in his zeal against
the doctrines of Nestorius, was led to confuse in some degree the double
nature of Christ, thinking that he was only defending the dogmas of his
friend St. Cyril, he suddenly found himself convicted of a heresy as
damnable as Nestorianism; while his defence against the practised
rhetoric of Eusebius of Dorylæum shows that he was not able to grasp the
subtle distinction between _substantia_ and _subsistentia_--a fatal
failing which proved the ruin of thousands. Thus, during the first six
centuries, as men explored the infinite problems of existence here and
hereafter, new questions constantly arose and were disputed with
merciless vehemence. Those who held commanding positions in the Church
and could enforce their opinions were necessarily orthodox; those who
were weaker became heterodox, and the distinction between the faithful
and the heretic became year by year more marked.[184]
Nor was it merely the _odium theologicum_ that raised these passions;
not only pride of opinion and zeal for the purity of faith. Wealth and
power have charms even for bishop and priest, and in the Church, as it
grew through the centuries, wealth and power depended upon the obedience
of the flock. A hardy disputant who questioned the dogmatic accuracy of
his ecclesiastical superior was a mutineer of the worst kind; and if he
succeeded in attracting followers they became the nucleus of a rebellion
which threatened revolution, and every motive, good or evil, prompted
the suppression of such sedition at all hazards and by every available
means. If the sectaries became sufficiently numerous to form a community
of their own, cutting them off from the communion of the Church was of
no avail; the keenest shafts of ecclesiastical censure rebounded
harmless from their armor of conscientious belief. This naturally led to
an animosity against them greater than that visited on the worst of
criminals. No matter how trivial may have been the original cause of
schism, nor how pure and fervent might be the faith of the schismatics,
the fact that they had refused to bend to authority, and had thus sought
to divide the seamless garment of Christ, became an offence in
comparison with which all other sins dwindled into insignificance,
neutralizing all the virtues and all the devotion which men could
possess. Even Augustin could see nothing to soften his heart in the
enthusiastic ardor with which the Donatists endured, and even courted,
martyrdom. Had they carried Christ in their hearts their self-abnegation
might have merited praise, but as it was they acted only under the
promptings of Satan, like the swine who were driven into the sea by the
unclean spirit. Martyrdom, even for Christ's sake, could not save
heretic or schismatic from sharing eternal fire with Satan and his
angels.[185]
Yet the spirit of persecution was too repugnant to the spirit of Christ
for its triumph to come without a struggle, which can be traced in the
writings of the early fathers. Tertullian warmly defends the freedom of
conscience; it is irreligious to enforce religion; no one wishes to be
venerated unwillingly, so that God may be assumed to desire only the
worship which comes from the heart. Still, when the combative energy of
the man was aroused in disputation with the Gnostics, it was not
difficult for him to find in Deuteronomy and Numbers ample warrant for
the maxim that obstinacy is to be conquered, not persuaded. Cyprian says
that it is for us to endeavor to become wheat, leaving the tares to God,
and he qualifies as sacrilegious presumption the spirit which assumes
the function of God in seeking to separate and destroy the tares; yet
Cyprian had no hesitation in cutting off from the Church all who
differed from him, and consigning them to perdition, which was the only
form of persecution at that time within reach. It was, indeed, natural
that a persecuted Church should plead for toleration, and the fact that,
even in this early period, there should be these flashes of intolerance
gives ample warning of what was to come with the power of enforcing
dogma on the recalcitrant. Lactantius was the last of the fathers of the
persecuted Church, and he could feelingly argue that belief is not to be
enjoined by force, that slaughter and piety are in no sense connected,
and he boasts that none are coerced into remaining in the Church, for he
who lacks piety is useless to God.[186]
The triumph of intolerance was inevitable when Christianity became the
religion of the State, yet the slowness of its progress shows the
difficulty of overcoming the incongruity between persecution and the
gospel. Hardly had orthodoxy been defined by the Council of Nicæa when
Constantine brought the power of the State to bear to enforce
uniformity. All heretic and schismatic priests were deprived of the
privileges and immunities bestowed on the clergy and were subjected to
the burdens of the State; their meeting-places were confiscated for the
benefit of the Church, and their assemblies, whether public or private,
were prohibited. There is an instructive illustration of theological
perversity in the watchful energy with which these provisions were
enforced to the suppression of heresy while yet the pagan temples and
ceremonies remained undisturbed. Yet while the churchmen might feel it
to be a duty thus to obstruct the development and dissemination of
teachings which they regarded as destructive to religion, they still
shrank from pushing intolerance to extremity and enforcing uniformity
with blood, although the Emperor Julian declared that he had found no
wild beasts so cruel to men as most of the Christians were to each
other. Constantine, it is true, commanded the surrender of all copies of
the writings of Arius under penalty of death, but it does not appear
that any executions actually took place in consequence; and at last,
tired of the endless strife, he ordered Athanasius to admit all
Christians to the churches without distinction. No effort of the
sovereign, however, could soothe the bitterness of doctrinal strife,
which grew fiercer and fiercer. In 370 Valens is said to have put to
death eighty orthodox ecclesiastics who had complained to him of the
violence of the Arians, but this was not a judicial execution, but in
pursuance of a secret order to the Prefect Modestus, who decoyed them on
board of a vessel and caused it to be burned at sea.[187]
It was in 385 that the first instance was given of judicial capital
punishment for heresy, and the horror which it excited shows that it was
regarded everywhere as a hideous innovation. The Gnostic and Manichæan
speculations of Priscillian were looked upon with the peculiar
detestation which that group of heresies ever called forth; but when he
was tried by the tyrant Maximus, at Trèves, with the use of torture, and
was put to death with six of his disciples, while others were banished
to a barbarous island beyond Britain, there was a most righteous burst
of indignation. Of the two prosecuting bishops, Ithacius and Idacius,
one was expelled from the episcopate and the other resigned. The saintly
Martin of Tours, who had done all in his power to prevent the atrocity,
refused to join in communion with them, or with any who communed with
them. If he finally yielded, in order to save the lives of some men for
whom he had come to Maximus to beg mercy, and also to prevent the
tyrant from persecuting the Priscillianists of Spain (where, like the
subsequent Cathari, they were detected by their pallor), yet, in spite
of the consoling visit of an angel, he was overcome with grief at what
he had done, and he found that he had lost for some time the power to
expel devils and heal the sick.[188]
If the Church thus still shrank from shedding blood, it had by this time
reached the point of using all other means without scruple to enforce
conformity. Early in the fifth century we find Chrysostom teaching that
heresy must be suppressed, heretics silenced and prevented from
ensnaring others, and their conventicles broken up, but that the
death-penalty is unlawful. About the same time St. Augustin entreats the
Prefect of Africa not to put any Donatists to death because, if he does
so, no ecclesiastic can make complaint of them, for they will prefer to
suffer death themselves rather than be the cause of it to others. Yet
Augustin approved of the imperial laws which banished and fined them and
deprived them of their churches and of testamentary power, and he
consoled them by telling them that God did not wish them to perish in
antagonism to Catholic unity. To constrain any one from evil to good, he
argued, was not oppression, but charity; and when the unlucky
schismatics urged that no one ought to be coerced in his faith, he
freely admitted it as a general principle, but added that sin and
infidelity must be punished.[189]
Step by step the inevitable progress was made, and men easily found
specious arguments to justify the indulgence of their passions. The
fiery Jerome, when his wrath was excited by Vigilantius forbidding the
adoration of relics, expressed his wonder that the bishop of the hardy
heretic had not destroyed him in the flesh for the benefit of his soul,
and argued that piety and zeal for God could not be cruelty; rigor, in
fact, he argues in another place, is the most genuine mercy, since
temporal punishment may avert eternal perdition. It was only sixty-two
years after the slaughter of Priscillian and his followers had excited
so much horror, that Leo. I., when the heresy seemed to be reviving, in
447, not only justified the act, but declared that if the followers of
heresy so damnable were allowed to live there would be an end of human
and divine law. The final step had been taken, and the Church was
definitely pledged to the suppression of heresy at whatever cost. It is
impossible not to attribute to ecclesiastical influence the successive
edicts by which, from the time of Theodosius the Great, persistence in
heresy was punished with death.[190]
A powerful impulse to this development is to be found in the
responsibility which grew upon the Church from its connection with the
State. When it could influence the monarch and procure from him edicts
condemning heretics to exile, deportation, to the mines, and even to
death, it felt that God had put into its hands powers to be exercised
and not to be neglected. At the same time, with natural human
inconsistency, it could argue that it was not responsible for the
execution of the laws, and that its own hands were unstained with blood.
Even Ithacius, in the case of Priscillian, had shrunk from the function
of prosecutor and had put forward a layman in his place. Similar
devices, as we shall see, were practised by the Inquisition, and in
either case they were transparently false. In the vast body of imperial
edicts inflicting upon heretics every variety of disability and
punishment, the most ardent churchmen might find conviction that the
State recognized the preservation of the purity of the faith as its
first duty. Yet whenever the State or any of its officials lagged in the
enforcement of these laws, the churchman was at hand to goad them on.
Thus the African Church repeatedly asked the intervention of the secular
power to suppress the Donatists; Leo the Great insisted with the Empress
Pulcheria that the destruction of the Eutychians should be her highest
care; and Pelagius I., in urging Narses to suppress heresy by force,
sought to quiet the scruples of the soldier by assuring him that to
prevent or to punish evil was not persecution, but love. It became the
general doctrine of the Church, as expressed by St. Isidor of Seville,
that princes are bound not only to be orthodox themselves, but to
preserve the purity of the faith by the fullest exercise of their power
against heretics. How abundantly these assiduous teachings bore their
bitter fruit is shown in the deplorable history of the Church during
those centuries, consisting as it does of heresy after heresy
relentlessly exterminated, until the Council of Constantinople, under
the Patriarch Michael Oxista, introduced the penalty of burning alive as
the punishment of the Bogomili. Nor were the heretics always behindhand,
when they gained opportunity, in improving the lesson which had been
taught them so effectually. The persecution of the Catholics by the
Arian Vandals in Africa under Genseric was quite worthy of orthodoxy;
and when Hunneric succeeded his father, and his proposition to the
Emperor Zeno of mutual toleration was refused, his barbarous zeal was
inflamed to pitiless wrath. Under King Euric the Wisigoth, also, there
was a spasmodic persecution in Aquitaine. Yet, as a rule, the Arian
Goths and Burgundians set an example of toleration worthy of imitation,
and their conversion to Catholicism was attended with but little cruelty
on either side, except a passing ebullition in Spain at the crisis under
Leuvigild, about 585, followed by disturbances which were rather
political than religious. Later Catholic monarchs, however, enacted laws
punishing with exile and confiscation any deviations from orthodoxy,
which are notable as the only examples of the kind under the Barbarians.
The Catholic Merovingians in France seem never to have troubled their
Arian subjects, who were numerous in Burgundy and Aquitaine. The
conversion of these latter was gradual and apparently peaceful.[191]
The Latin Church through all this had taken little part in actual
persecution, for the Western mind lacked the perverse ingenuity of the
East in originating and adopting heresy. With the downfall of the
Western Empire it commenced the great task which absorbed its energies
and by which it earned the thanks of all succeeding generations--the
conversion and civilization of the Barbarians. Its new converts were not
likely to indulge in abstruse speculations; they accepted the faith
which was taught them, acquiesced for the most part in the established
discipline, and while oft unruly and turbulent, gave little trouble on
the score of orthodoxy. Under these influences the persecuting spirit
died out. Claudius of Turin, whose iconoclastic zeal destroyed all the
images in his diocese, escaped without punishment. Felix of Urgel was
forgiven his Adoptianism, and was welcomed back into the Church in spite
of his repeated tergiversations, and though not restored to his see, his
residence for fifteen or twenty years at Lyons does not seem to have
been an imprisonment, for he secretly maintained his doctrines, and an
heretical declaration was found among his papers after his death. No
force is alluded to when Archbishop Leidrad converted twenty thousand of
the Catalan followers of Felix, whose principal disciple, Elipandus,
Archbishop of Toledo, retained his primatial seat although there is no
evidence that he ever recanted his errors. In the case of the monk
Gottschalc, who disseminated his predestinarian heresy in extensive
wanderings throughout Italy, Dalmatia, Austria, and Bavaria, apparently
without opposition, Rabanus of Mainz finally summoned a council which
condemned his doctrine in the presence of Louis le Germanique. Yet it
did not venture to punish him, but sent him to his prelate, Hincmar of
Reims, who, with the authority of Charles le Chauve, declared him an
incorrigible heretic in the Council of Chiersy in 849. So little
disposition was there to inflict penalties for heresy, though his
theories struck at the root of the mediatory power of the Church, that
the scourging ordered for him was carefully stated to be merely the
discipline provided by the Council of Agde for the infraction of the
Benedictine rule prohibiting monks from travelling without commendatory
letters from their bishops; and if he was imprisoned, we are told that
this was simply to prevent him from continuing to contaminate others.
The Carlovingian legislation was exceedingly moderate as to heretics,
merely classing them with Pagans, Jews, and infamous persons, and
subjecting them to certain disabilities.[192]
The stupor of the tenth century was too profound for heresy, which
presupposes a certain amount of healthy mental activity. The Church,
ruling unquestioned over the slumbering consciences of men, laid aside
the rusted weapons of persecution and forgot their use. When, about
1018, Bishop Burchard compiled his collection of canon law he made no
reference to heretical opinions or their punishment save a couple of
regulations exhumed from the forgotten Council of Elvira in 305,
respecting the treatment of apostates to idolatry. Even the introduction
of the doctrine of transubstantiation was received submissively until,
two centuries after Gottschalc, Berenger of Tours called it in question;
but he had not in him the stuff of martyrdom, and yielded to moderate
pressure. The warmer faith of the Cathari, who commenced to disturb the
stagnation of orthodoxy in the eleventh century, called for energetic
measures, but even with those abhorred sectaries the Church was
wonderfully slow to resort to extremities. It hesitated before the
unaccustomed task; it shrank from contradicting its teachings of charity
and was driven forward by popular fanaticism. The persecution of Orleans
in 1017 was the work of King Robert the Pious; the burning at Milan soon
after was done by the people against the will of the archbishop. So
unfamiliar was the Church with its duty that when, about 1045, some
Manichæans were discovered at Chalons, Bishop Roger applied to Bishop
Wazo of Liége for advice as to what he should do with them, and whether
he should hand them over to the secular arm for punishment; to which the
good Wazo replied, urging that their lives should not be forfeited to
the secular sword, as God, their Creator and Redeemer, showed them
patience and mercy; and Canon Anselm, Wazo's biographer, strongly
condemns the executions under Henry III., at Goslar, in 1052, saying
that if our Wazo had been there he would have acted as did St. Martin in
the case of Priscillian. The same lenity was manifested by St. Anno of
Cologne about 1060, when some of his flock refused, after repeated
commands, to abandon the use of milk, eggs, and cheese during Lent, and
the archbishop at length allowed them to have their own way, saying that
those who were firm in the faith could not be much harmed by a
difference in food. Even as late as 1144 the Church of Liége
congratulated itself on having, by the mercy of God, saved the greater
part of a number of confessed and convicted Cathari from the turbulent
mob which strove to burn them. Those who were thus preserved were
distributed among the religious houses while awaiting the response of
Lucius II., to whom application was made for advice as to what should be
done with them.[193]
It is not worth while to repeat in detail the cases related in a former
chapter which show how uncertain was the position of the Church towards
heresy at this period. There was no definite policy, no fixed rule, and
heretics continued to be treated with rigor or with mercy according to
the temper of the prelate concerned. Theodwin, Wazo's successor in the
see of Liége, writes in 1050 to King Henry I. of France, urging him to
punish the followers of Berenger of Tours without even giving them a
hearing. This uncertainty is well reflected by St. Bernard in his
remarks on the occurrence at Cologne in 1145, when the zealous populace
seized the Cathari and burned them despite the resistance of the
ecclesiastical authorities. He argues that heretics should be won over
by reason rather than by coercion, and if they will not be converted
they are to be avoided; he approves the zeal of the people, but not of
their action, for faith is to be spread by persuasion and not by force;
yet he assumes the duty of the secular power to avenge the wrong done to
God by heresy, and, blind to the danger of man's assuming himself to be
the minister of the wrath of God, he quotes St. Paul, "For he beareth
not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, and revenger to
execute wrath upon him that doeth evil" (Rom. XIII. 4). Alexander III.
leaned decidedly to the side of mercy when, in 1162, he refused to pass
judgment on the Cathari sent to him by the Archbishop of Reims, saying
that it was better to pardon the guilty than to take the lives of the
innocent. Even at the close of the century Peter Cantor dared to argue
that the apostle ordered the heretic to be avoided, not slain, and he
dwelt upon the inconsistency of the severity shown to the slightest
deviation from faith, while the grossest sins and immoralities were
allowed to go unpunished.[194]
This hesitation and uncertainty extended to the punishment appropriate
to heresy. We have seen numerous cases of burning alive interspersed
with sentences of imprisonment, and it was long before a definite
formula was reached. Even when Alexander III., at the Council of Tours,
in 1163, sought to check the alarming progress of Manichæism in
Languedoc, he only commanded the secular princes to imprison the
heretics and confiscate their property; though in the same year the
Cathari detected in Cologne were sentenced to be burned by judges
appointed for the purpose. In 1157 the punishment inflicted by the
Council of Reims was branding in the face; and the same expedient was
resorted to by that of Oxford in 1166. Even as late as 1199, the first
measures of Innocent III. against the Albigenses only threaten exile and
confiscation; there is no allusion to any duty on the part of the
secular power beyond enforcing these penalties, and their enforcement is
rewarded by the same indulgences as those to be gained by pilgrimage to
Rome or to Compostella. As the struggle increased in bitterness, we have
seen how stronger measures were adopted; yet even Simon de Montfort, in
the code promulgated at Pamiers, December 1, 1212, while stimulating
persecution to the utmost, and rendering it the duty of every man, does
not formally adjudge the heretic to the stake, although in this very
year eighty heretics were burned in Strassburg. This form of punishment
had been enacted for the first time in positive law, as already stated,
by Pedro II. of Aragon, in his edict of 1197, but the example was not
speedily followed. Otho IV., in his constitution of 1210, simply places
heretics under the imperial ban, orders their property confiscated and
their houses torn down. Frederic II., in his famous statute of November
22, 1220, which made the persecution of heresy a part of the public law
of Europe, only threatened confiscation and outlawry, although this, it
must be added, placed their lives at the mercy of the first comer. In
his constitution of March, 1224, he went farther and decreed death by
fire or loss of the tongue, at the discretion of the judge; and the
contemporary practice in Germany left the penalty to be similarly
decided. It was not until 1231, in the Sicilian Constitutions, that
Frederic rendered the punishment by cremation absolute. This was in
force merely in his Neapolitan dominions, and the edict of Ravenna, in
March, 1232, while inflicting the death penalty does not prescribe the
method; but that of Cremona, in May, 1238, embodied the Sicilian law and
thus rendered the fagot and stake the recognized punishment for heresy
throughout the empire, as we find it subsequently embodied in both the
Sachsenspiegel and the Schwabenspiegel, or municipal laws of northern
and southern Germany. In Venice, after 1249, the ducal oath of office
contained a pledge to burn all heretics. In 1255 Alonso the Wise of
Castile decreed the stake for all Christians who apostatized to Islam or
to Judaism. In France the legislation adopted by both Louis IX. and
Raymond of Toulouse, for carrying out the provisions of the settlement
of 1229, is discreetly silent with regard to the penalty of heresy,
though under it the use of the stake was universal, and it is not until
Louis issued his _Établissements_, in 1270, that we find the heretic
formally condemned to be burned alive, thus rendering it part of the
recognized law of the land, although the terms in which Beaumanoir
alludes to it show that it had long been a settled custom. England,
which was free from heresy, was even later in adopting it, and it was
not until the rise of the Lollards caused fear in both Church and State
that the writ "_de hæretico comburendo_" was created by statute in
1401.[195]
The practice of burning the heretic alive was thus not the creature of
positive law, but arose generally and spontaneously, and its adoption by
the legislator was only the recognition of a popular custom. We have
seen numerous instances of this in a former chapter, and even as late as
1219, at Troyes, an insane enthusiast who maintained that he was the
Holy Ghost was seized by the people, placed in a wicker crate surrounded
by combustibles, and promptly reduced to ashes. The origin of this
punishment is not easily traced, unless it is to the pagan legislation
of Diocletian, who decreed this penalty for Manichæism. The torturing
deaths to which the martyrs were exposed in times of persecution seem to
suggest, and in some sort to justify, a similar infliction on heretics;
sorcerers were sometimes burned under the imperial jurisprudence, and
Gregory the Great mentions a case in which one was thus put to death by
the Christian zeal of the people. As heresy was regarded as the greatest
of crimes, the desire which was felt alike by laity and clergy to render
its punishment as severe and as impressive as possible found in the
stake its appropriate instrument. With the system of exegesis then in
vogue, it was not difficult to discover an emphatic command to this
effect in John, XV. 6. "If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a
branch and is withered; and men gather them and cast them into the fire
and they are burned." The literal interpretation of Scriptural metaphor
has been too frequent a source of error for us to wonder at this
application of the text. An authoritative commentary on the decree of
Lucius III. in 1184, ordering heretics to be delivered to the secular
arm for due punishment, quotes the text of John and the imperial
jurisprudence, and thence triumphantly concludes that death by fire is
the penalty due to heretics, not only by divine but also by human law
and by universal custom. Nor was the heretic mercifully strangled in
advance; the authorities of the Inquisition assure us that he must be
burned alive before the people, nay, even a whole city may be burned if
heretics dwell there.[196]
Whatever scruples the Church had, during the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, as to its duty towards heresy, it had none as to that of the
secular power, though it kept its own hands free from blood. A decent
usage from early times forbade any ecclesiastic from being concerned in
judgments involving death or mutilation, and even from being present in
the torture-chamber where criminals were placed on the rack. This
sensitiveness continued, and even was exaggerated in the time of the
bloodiest persecution. While thousands were being slaughtered in
Languedoc the Council of Lateran, in 1215, revived the ancient canons
prohibiting clerks from uttering a judgment of blood or being present at
an execution. In 1255 the Council of Bordeaux added to this a
prohibition of dictating or writing letters connected with such
judgments; and that of Buda, in 1279, in repeating this canon, appended
to it a clause forbidding clerks to practise any surgery requiring
burning or cutting. The pollution of blood was so seriously felt that a
church or cemetery in which blood chanced to be shed could not be used
until it had been reconciled, and this was carried so far that priests
were forbidden to allow judges to administer justice in churches,
because cases involving corporal punishment might be tried before them.
Had this shrinking from participation in the infliction of human
suffering been genuine, it would have been worthy of all respect; but
it was merely a device to avoid responsibility for its own acts. In
prosecutions for heresy the ecclesiastical tribunal passed no judgments
of blood. It merely found the defendant to be a heretic and "relaxed"
him, or relinquished him to the secular authorities with the
hypocritical adjuration to be merciful to him, to spare his life and not
to spill his blood. What was the real import of this plea for mercy is
easily seen from the theory of the Church as to the duty of the temporal
power, when inquisitors enforced as a legal rule that the mere belief
that persecution for conscience' sake was sinful was in itself a heresy,
to be visited with the full penalties of that unpardonable crime.[197]
The early teachings of Leo and Pelagius were revived as soon as heresy
became alarming. Early in the twelfth century Honorius of Autun
proclaimed that the rebels against God who were obdurate to the voice of
the Church must be coerced with the material sword. In the compilations
of canon law by Ivo and Gratian the allusions to the treatment of
heretics by the Church are singularly few, but there are abundant
citations to show the duty of the sovereign to extirpate heresy and to
obey the mandates of the Church to that end. Frederic Barbarossa gave
the imperial sanction to the theory that the sword had been intrusted to
him for the purpose of smiting the enemies of Christ, when he alleged
this in 1159 as a reason for persecuting Alexander III. and supporting
his antipope, Victor IV. The second Lateran Council, in 1139, orders all
potentates to coerce heretics into obedience; the third, in 1179,
sanctimoniously says that the Church does not seek blood, but it is
helped by the secular laws, for men will seek the salutary remedy to
escape bodily punishment. We have seen how inefficacious all this
proved; and in despair of voluntary assistance from the temporal princes
the Church took a further step by which it assumed for itself the
responsibility for the material as well as the spiritual punishment of
heretics. The decree of Lucius III. at the so-called Council of Verona,
in 1184, commanded that all potentates should take an oath before their
bishops to enforce the ecclesiastical and secular laws against heresy
fully and efficaciously. Any refusal or neglect was to be punished by
excommunication, deprivation of rank, and incapacity to hold other
station, while in the case of cities they were to be segregated and
debarred from all commerce with other places.[198]
The Church thus undertook to coerce the sovereign to persecution. It
would not listen to mercy, it would not hear of expediency. The monarch
held his crown by the tenure of extirpating heresy, of seeing that the
laws were sharp and were pitilessly enforced. Any hesitation was visited
with excommunication, and if this proved inefficacious, his dominions
were thrown open to the first hardy adventurer whom the Church would
supply with an army for his overthrow. Whether this new feature in the
public law of Europe could establish itself was the question at issue in
the Albigensian crusades. Raymond's lands were forfeited simply because
he would not punish heretics, and those which his son retained were
treated as a fresh gift from the crown. The triumph of the new principle
was complete, and it never was subsequently questioned.
It was applied from the highest to the lowest, and the Church made every
dignitary feel that his station was an office in a universal theocracy
wherein all interests were subordinate to the great duty of maintaining
the purity of the faith. The hegemony of Europe was vested in the Holy
Roman Empire, and its coronation was a strangely solemn religious
ceremony in which the emperor was admitted to the lower orders of the
priesthood, and was made to anathematize all heresy raising itself
against the holy Catholic Church. In handing him the ring, the pope told
him that it was a symbol that he was to destroy heresy; and in girding
him with the sword, that with it he was to strike down the enemies of
the Church. Frederic II. declared that he had received the imperial
dignity for the maintenance and propagation of the faith. In the bull of
Clement VI. recognizing Charles IV. the first named of the imperial
duties enumerated are the extension of the faith and the extirpation of
heretics; and the neglect of the Emperor Wenceslas to suppress
Wickliffitism was regarded as a satisfactory reason for his deposition.
In fact, according to the high churchmen, the only reason of the
transfer of the empire from the Greeks to the Germans was that the
Church might have an efficient agent. The principles applied to Raymond
of Toulouse were embodied in the canon law, and every prince and noble
was made to understand that his lands would be exposed to the spoiler
if, after due notice, he hesitated in trampling out heresy. Minor
officials were subjected to the same discipline. According to the
Council of Toulouse in 1229, any bailli not diligent in persecuting
heresy forfeited his property and was ineligible to public employment,
while by the Council of Narbonne in 1244, any one holding temporal
jurisdiction who delayed in exterminating heretics was held guilty of
fautorship of heresy, became an accomplice of heretics, and thus was
subjected to the penalties of heresy; this was extended to all who
should neglect a favorable opportunity of capturing a heretic, or of
helping those seeking to capture him. From the emperor to the meanest
peasant the duty of persecution was enforced with all the sanctions,
spiritual and temporal, which the Church could command. Not only must
the ruler enact rigorous laws to punish heretics, but he and his
subjects must see them strenuously executed, for any slackness of
persecution was, in the canon law, construed as fautorship of heresy,
putting a man on his purgation.[199]
These principles were tacitly or explicitly received into the public
law of Europe. Frederic II. accepted them in his cruel edicts against
heresy, whence they passed into the general compilations of civil and
feudal law, and even into bodies of local jurisprudence. Thus we see in
the statutes of Verona, in 1228, the Podestà swearing, on taking office,
to expel all heretics from the city; and in the Schwabenspiegel, or code
in force throughout southern Germany, it is laid down that a ruler who
neglects to persecute heresy is to be stripped of all possessions, and
if he does not burn those who are delivered to him as heretics by the
ecclesiastical courts he is to be punished as a heretic himself. The
Church took care that this legislation should not remain a dead letter.
Frederic's decrees in all their atrocity were required to be read and
taught in the great law-school of Bologna as a fundamental portion of
jurisprudence, and were even embodied in the canon law itself. We shall
see that they were repeatedly ordered by the popes to be inscribed
irrevocably among the laws of all the cities and states which they could
control, and the inquisitor was commanded to coerce all officials to
their rigid enforcement, by excommunicating those who were negligent in
the good work. Even excommunication, which rendered a magistrate
incompetent to perform his official functions, did not relieve him from
the duty of punishing heretics when called upon by bishop or inquisitor.
In view of this earnestness to embody in the statute-books the sharpest
laws for the extermination of heretics and to oblige the secular
officials to execute those laws, under the alternative of being
themselves condemned and punished as heretics, the adjuration for mercy
with which the inquisitors handed over their victims to be burned was
evidently, as we shall see hereafter, a mere technical formula to avoid
the "irregularity" of being concerned in judgments of blood. In process
of time the moral responsibility was freely admitted, as when in
February, 1418, the Council of Constance decreed that all who should
defend Hussitism, or regard Huss or Jerome of Prague as holy men, should
be treated as relapsed heretics and be punished with fire--"_puniantur
ad ignem_." It is altogether a modern perversion of history to assume,
as apologists do, that the request for mercy was sincere, and that the
secular magistrate and not the Inquisition was responsible for the death
of the heretic. We can imagine the smile of amused surprise with which
Gregory IX. or Gregory XI. would have listened to the dialectics with
which the Comte Joseph de Maistre proves that it is an error to suppose,
and much more to assert, that Catholic priests can in any manner be
instrumental in compassing the death of a fellow-creature.[200]
Not only were all Christians thus made to feel that it was their highest
duty to aid in the extermination of heretics, but they were taught that
they must denounce them to the authorities regardless of all
considerations, human or divine. No tie of kindred served as an excuse
for concealing heresy. The son must denounce the father, and the husband
was guilty if he did not deliver his wife to a frightful death. Every
human bond was severed by the guilt of heresy; children were taught to
desert their parents, and even the sacrament of matrimony could not
unite an orthodox wife to a misbelieving husband. No pledge was to
remain unbroken. It was an old rule that faith was not to be kept with
heretics--as Innocent III. emphatically phrased it, "according to the
canons, faith is not to be kept with him who keeps not faith with God."
No oath of secrecy, therefore, was binding in a matter of heresy, for if
one is faithful to a heretic he is unfaithful to God. Apostasy from the
faith is the greatest of all sins, says Bishop Lucas of Tuy; therefore
if any one has bound himself by oath to keep the secret of such
inexplicable wickedness, he must reveal the heresy and perform penance
for the perjury, with the comfortable assurance that, as charity
covereth a multitude of sins, he will be gently dealt with in
consideration of his zeal.[201]
Thus the hesitation as to the treatment of heretics which marked the
eleventh and twelfth centuries disappeared in the thirteenth, when the
Church was involved in mortal struggle with the sectaries. There was no
pretence of moderation, and, save in the technical adjuration for mercy,
no attempt to evade the responsibility. St. Raymond of Pennaforte, the
compiler of the decretals of Gregory IX., who was the highest authority
in his generation, lays it down as a principle of ecclesiastical law
that the heretic is to be coerced by excommunication and confiscation,
and if they fail, by the extreme exercise of the secular power. The man
who was doubtful in faith was to be held a heretic, and so also was the
schismatic who, while believing all the articles of religion, refused
the obedience due to the Roman Church. All alike were to be forced into
the Roman fold, and the fate of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram was invoked
for the destruction of the obstinate.[202]
St. Thomas Aquinas, whose overshadowing authority superseded all his
predecessors, and who brought canon and dogma into a permanent system
still in force, lays down the rules with merciless precision. Heretics,
he tells us, are not to be tolerated. The tenderness of the Church
allows them to have two warnings, after which, if pertinacious, they are
to be abandoned to the secular power, to be removed from the world by
death. This, he argues, shows the abounding charity of the Church, for
it is much more wicked to corrupt the faith on which depends the life
of the soul than to debase the coinage which provides merely for
temporal life; wherefore, if coiners and other malefactors are justly
doomed at once to death, much more may heretics be justly slain as soon
as they are convicted. Yet in its mercy the Church will always receive
the heretic back into its bosom, no matter how often he may have
relapsed, and will kindly give him penance whereby he may win eternal
life; but charity to one must not be allowed to work evil to others.
Therefore for once the heretic who repents and recants will be received
and his life be spared; but if he relapses, though he may be received to
penance for his soul's salvation, he will not be released from the
death-penalty. This is the definite expression of the policy of the
Church, which, as we shall see, became its unalterable rule of
practice.[203]
Nor was the Church content to exercise its power over the living only;
the dead must feel its chastening hand. It seemed intolerable that one
who had successfully concealed his iniquity and had died in communion
should be left to lie in consecrated ground and should be remembered in
the prayers of the faithful. Not only had he escaped the penalty due to
his sins, but his property, which was forfeit to Church and State, had
unlawfully descended to his heirs, and must be recovered from them.
Ample reason therefore existed for the trial of those who had passed to
the judgment-seat of God. It had been a debatable question in the
earlier Church whether excommunication, with all its tremendous
penalties, here and hereafter, could be directed against departed souls.
As early as the time of Cyprian the custom of excommunicating the dead
had come into fashion; and about 382 St. John Chrysostom had denounced
the frequency of such sentences as an interference attempted with the
judgment of God. Leo I., in 432, took the same position, and it was
confirmed by Gelasius I. and a council of Rome towards the end of the
century. At the fifth general council, however, held in Constantinople
in 553, the question came up as to the power of the Church to
anathematize Theodoret of Cyrus, Ibas of Edessa, and Theodore of
Mopsuestia, who had been dead for a hundred years. Many of the fathers
of the council doubted it, when Eutychius, a man well versed in
Scripture, pointed out that the pious King Josiah had not only put to
death the priests of pagandom, but had dug up the remains of those who
were deceased. The argument was irrefragable, and the anathema was
pronounced in spite of the protests of Pope Vigilius, who stubbornly
refused to be convinced. The ingenuity of Eutychius, till then an
obscure man, was rewarded with the patriarchate of Constantinople, and
Vigilius was compelled, by means not the most gentle, to subscribe to
the anathema. In 618 the Council of Seville denied the power of
condemning the dead; but in 680 the sixth general council, held at
Constantinople, exercised the largest liberty in anathematizing all whom
it regarded as heretical, both living and dead. In 897 Stephen VII.
accordingly held himself authorized to dig up the body of his
predecessor, Pope Formosus, then seven months in the tomb, drag it by
the feet and seat it in the synod which he had assembled in judgment,
and, after condemning it, to cut off two fingers of the right hand and
throw it into the Tiber, whence it chanced to be rescued and buried. The
next year, however, a new pope, John IX., annulled these proceedings and
caused a synod to declare that no one should be condemned after death,
for the accused must have the opportunity of defence. This did not
prevent Sergius III., in 905, from again exhuming the body, when it was
clothed in pontifical robes, seated on a throne, and once more solemnly
condemned, beheaded, three more fingers cut off, and thrown in the
Tiber. Yet the iniquity of these proceedings was proved when the
restless remains were dragged from the river by some fishermen, and, on
being carried to the church of St. Peter, the images of saints there
bowed before them and saluted them reverently. About the year 1100, St.
Ivo of Chartres, the foremost canonist of his day, pronounced
unhesitatingly that the power of the Church to bind and to loose was
confined to things on earth; that the dead had passed beyond human
judgment, they could not be condemned, and burial must not be refused to
those who had not been tried while living. Yet as heresy multiplied and
its obstinacy seemed to justify the passionate hatred which it excited,
the churchman might well feel himself unable to endure the thought that
the bones of heretics polluted the sacred precincts of church and
cemetery, and that unconsciously he was including them in his prayers
for the dead. It was easy to find a method of reaching them. The Council
of Verona in 1184, and subsequent popes and councils, repeatedly and
formally excommunicated all heretics. It was an old rule of the Church
that all excommunicates who did not within a year apply for absolution
were condemned. All heretics who died without confession or recantation
were thus self-condemned, and were ineligible to sepulture in
consecrated ground. Though they could not be excommunicated, being
already under _ipso facto_ excommunication, they could be anathematized.
If mistakenly they had received Christian burial, as soon as the fact
was discovered they were to be dug up and burned; the inquisition which
established their guilt was merely an examination into the facts, not a
condemnation, and the penalties followed of themselves. That it required
some effort to establish the rule is shown by an epistle of Innocent
III., in 1207, to the abbot and monks of St. Hippolytus of Faenza, who
had refused, at the order of a legate, to exhume the body of Otto of
damnable memory, a heretic buried in their cemetery, or to observe the
interdict pronounced against them in consequence, and Innocent is
obliged to threaten the most energetic measures to compel them to
obedience. With time, however, the principle became firmly established;
it was recognized as a grievous offence knowingly to bury the body of a
heretic or a fautor of heretics--an offence only to be pardoned on
condition of the offender exhuming the remains with his own hands, while
the grave was accursed forever. We shall see that the business of
investigating the record of the dead became no small or unimportant part
of the duties of the Inquisition.[204]
The influence which these teachings and practices had in guiding the
actions and policy of the age is well exemplified in the career of
Frederic II. Half Italian in blood, and wholly Italian in training, he
was a philosophical free-thinker. The accusations of Gregory IX., that
he was secretly a disciple of Mahomet, and the tradition that he was
privately in the habit of calling Moses, Christ, and Mahomet the three
impostors, contradict each other, but show what ground he gave for such
imputations. Yet this man, whom Gregory declared to take the sacrament
only to show his contempt for excommunication, was too sagacious not to
recognize that he could only reign over a Christian people by at least
pretending zeal in the work of exterminating heresy. He obtained his
coronation in St. Peter's, November 22, 1220, by issuing the edict which
is memorable in the history of persecution; and, as part of the
solemnities, Honorius paused in the ineffable mysteries of the mass to
fulminate an anathema in the name of Almighty God against all heresies
and heretics, including those rulers whose laws interfered with their
extermination. To the function thus assumed Frederic was ever true,
perhaps even more so because, in his recognition of the necessity of
ecclesiastical reform, he indulged in dreams of a caliphate in which he
would wield both the temporal and spiritual swords. However this may be,
his lifelong quarrel with the papacy only rendered him the more
merciless in his extirpation of heresy; and just when Gregory IX. was
engrossed in laying the foundation of the Inquisition we find Frederic
audaciously urging him to greater zeal in defence of the faith, and
suggesting his own example as one which the pope would do well to
follow.[205]
* * * * *
The cruel ferocity of barbarous zeal which, through so many centuries,
wrought misery on mankind in the name of Christ, has been explained in
many ways. Fanatics on the other side have denounced it as mere
bloodthirstiness or selfish lust of power. Philosophers have traced it
to the doctrine of exclusive salvation, through which it seemed the duty
of those in authority to coerce the recalcitrant for their own benefit,
and prevent them from leading other souls to perdition. Another school
has taught that it arose from the survival of the atavistic notion of
tribal solidarity, expanded into that of Christendom, making all share
the guilt of sin offensive to God which they neglected to exterminate.
Human impulses and motives, however, are too complex to be analyzed by a
single solvent, even in the case of an individual, while here we have to
deal with the whole Church, in its broadest acceptation, embracing the
laity as well as the clergy. There is no doubt that the people were as
eager as their pastors to send the heretic to the stake. There is no
doubt that men of the kindliest tempers, the profoundest intelligence,
the noblest aspirations, the purest zeal for righteousness, professing a
religion founded on love and charity, were ruthless when heresy was
concerned, and were ready to trample it out at the cost of any
suffering. Dominic and Francis, Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas, Innocent
III. and St. Louis, were types, in their several ways, of which
humanity, in any age, might well feel proud, and yet they were as
unsparing of the heretic as Ezzelin da Romano was of his enemies. With
such men it was not hope of gain or lust of blood or pride of opinion or
wanton exercise of power, but sense of duty, and they but represented
what was universal public opinion from the thirteenth to the seventeenth
century.
To comprehend it, we must picture to ourselves a stage of civilization
in many respects wholly unlike our own. Passions were fiercer,
convictions stronger, virtues and vices more exaggerated, than in our
colder and more self-contained time. The age, moreover, was a cruel one.
The military spirit was everywhere dominant; men were accustomed to rely
upon force rather than on persuasion, and habitually looked on human
suffering with indifference. The industrial spirit, which has so
softened modern manners and modes of thought, was as yet hardly
known.[206] We have only to look upon the atrocities of the criminal law
of the Middle Ages to see how pitiless men were in their dealings with
each other. The wheel, the caldron of boiling oil, burning alive,
burying alive, flaying alive, tearing apart with wild horses, were the
ordinary expedients by which the criminal jurist sought to deter crime
by frightful examples which would make a profound impression on a not
over-sensitive population. An Anglo-Saxon law punishes a female slave
convicted of theft by making eighty other female slaves each bring three
pieces of wood and burn her to death, while each contributes a fine
besides; and in mediæval England burning was the customary penalty for
attempts on the life of the feudal lord. In the Customs of Arques,
granted by the Abbey of St. Bertin in 1231, there is a provision that,
if a thief have a concubine who is his accomplice, she is to be buried
alive; though, if pregnant, a respite is given till after childbirth.
Frederic II., the most enlightened prince of his time, burned captive
rebels to death in his presence, and is even said to have encased them
in lead in order to roast them slowly. In 1261 St. Louis humanely
abolished a custom of Touraine by which the theft of a loaf of bread or
a pot of wine by a servant from his master was punished by the loss of a
limb. In Frisia arson committed at night was visited with burning alive;
and, by the old German law, the penalty of both murder and arson was
breaking on the wheel. In France women were customarily burned or buried
alive for simple felonies, and Jews were hung by the feet between two
savage dogs, while men were boiled to death for coining. In Milan
Italian ingenuity exhausted itself in devising deaths of lingering
torture for criminals of all descriptions. The _Carolina_, or criminal
code of Charles V., issued in 1530, is a hideous catalogue of blinding,
mutilation, tearing with hot pincers, burning alive, and breaking on the
wheel. In England poisoners were boiled to death even as lately as 1542,
as in the cases of Rouse and Margaret Davie; the barbarous penalty for
high treason--of hanging, drawing, and quartering--is well known, while
that for petty treason was enforced no longer ago than 1726, on
Catharine Hayes, who was burned at Tyburn for murdering her husband. By
the laws of Christian V. of Denmark, in 1683, blasphemers were beheaded
after having the tongue cut out. As recently as 1706, in Hanover, a
pastor named Zacharie Georg Flagge was burned alive for coining. Modern
tenderness for the criminal is evidently a matter of very recent date.
So careless were legislators of human suffering in general that, in
England, to cut out a man's tongue, or to pluck out his eyes with
malice prepense, was not made a felony until the fifteenth century, in a
criminal law so severe that, even in the reign of Elizabeth, the robbing
of a hawk's nest was similarly a felony; and as recently as 1833 a child
of nine was sentenced to be hanged for breaking a patched pane of glass
and stealing twopence worth of paint.[207]
The nations thus habituated to the most savage cruelty, moreover,
regarded the propagation of heresy with peculiar detestation, as not
merely a sin, but as the worst of crimes. Heresy itself, says Bishop
Lucas of Tuy, justifies, by comparison, the infidelity of the Jews; its
pollution cleanses the filthy madness of Mahomet; its vileness renders
pure even Sodom and Gomorrah. Whatever is worst in other sin becomes
holy in comparison with the turpitude of heresy. Less rhetorical, but
equally emphatic, is Thomas Aquinas, when his merciless logic
demonstrates that the sin of heresy separates man from God more than all
other sins, and therefore it is the worst of sins, and is to be punished
more severely. Of all kinds of infidelity, that of heresy is the worst.
So sensitive did the clerical mind become on the subject that Stephen
Palecz of Prague declared, in a sermon before the Council of Constance,
that if a belief was Catholic in a thousand points, and false in one,
the whole was heretical. The heretic, therefore, who labored, as all
earnest heretics necessarily did, to convert others to his way of
thinking, was inevitably regarded as a demon, striving to win souls to
share his own damnation, and none of the orthodox doubted that he was
the direct and efficient instrument of Satan in his warfare with God.
The intensity of the abhorrence thus awakened can only be realized by
those who recognize the vividness of mediæval eschatology, the living
horror which all men felt as to the possibilities of the dread
hereafter.[208]
That this view of heresy and of the duty of its suppression was not
reached at once by the mediæval Church and peoples we have seen in the
hesitation and vacillation which characterized the proceedings of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries; and this shows that the idea of
solidarity in the responsibility before God, while it undoubtedly had a
share in exaggerating the persecuting spirit, cannot by any means wholly
account for it. It stimulated the masses, who snatched the sectaries
from the hands of protecting priests, but had less influence on the
educated clergy. As heresies increased and grew more threatening, and
milder means seemed only to aggravate the evil, the minds of earnest and
enlightened men brooding over it, and contemplating the awful
possibilities of the future, when the Church of God might be overthrown
by the conventicles of Satan, grew inflamed, and fanaticism inevitably
followed. When this point was reached, when people and pastor alike felt
that the Church Militant must strike without pity if it would prevail
against the legions of hell, no firm believer in the doctrine of
exclusive salvation could doubt that the truest mercy lay in sweeping
away the emissaries of Satan with fire and sword. God had wonderfully
raised the Church to fight his battle. It had become supreme over
temporal princes, and could command their implicit obedience. It had
full power over the sword of the flesh, and with that power came
responsibility. It was responsible not only in the present, but also for
the souls of the faithful yet unborn through countless generations, and,
if weakly untrue to its trust, it could not plead inability in
extenuation. In view of the awful possibilities of neglected duty, what
were the sufferings of a few thousand hardened wretches who, deaf to the
solicitations of repentance, were hurried, but a few years before their
time, to their master the Devil?
We must also bear in mind the character which Christianity had assumed
in the gradual development of its theology, and its consequent influence
on those who guided the policy of the Church. They knew that Christ had
said "I am not come to destroy the law but to fulfil" (Matt. v. 17).
They also knew from Holy Writ that Jehovah was a God delighting in the
extermination of his enemies. They read how Saul, the chosen King of
Israel, had been divinely punished for sparing Agag of Amalek, and how
the prophet Samuel had hewn him in pieces; how the wholesale slaughter
of the unbelieving Canaanites had been ruthlessly commanded and
enforced; how Elijah had been commended for slaying four hundred and
fifty priests of Baal; and they could not conceive how mercy to those
who rejected the true faith could be aught but disobedience to God.
Moreover, Jehovah was a God who was only to be placated by the continual
sacrifice of victims. The very doctrine of the Atonement assumed that
the human race could only be rendered eligible to salvation by the most
awful sacrifice that the human mind could conceive--that of one of the
members of the Trinity. The Christian worshipped a God who had subjected
himself to the most painful and humiliating of sacrifices, and the
salvation of souls was dependent on the daily repetition of this
sacrifice in the mass, throughout Christendom. To minds moulded in such
a belief, it might well seem that the extremity of punishment inflicted
on the enemies of the Church of God was nothing in itself, and that it
was an acceptable offering to him who had commanded that neither age nor
sex should be spared in the land of Canaan.
These tendencies had been fostered and exaggerated by the growth of
asceticism. That mortal life was a thing to be despised and that heaven
was to be purchased by shunning the pleasures of existence and
extinguishing all human affections, was a lesson taught broadly
throughout the hagiology of the Church. Maceration and mortification
were the surest roads to Paradise, and sin was to be redeemed by
self-inflicted penance. This theory worked in a double sense. On the one
hand, the practices of the zealot--strict celibacy, fasting, solitude,
are direct incentives to insanity, as is shown by the epidemics of
diabolical possession and suicide which were so frequent in the
stricter monastic establishments;[209] and without assuming that such a
man as St. Peter Martyr was mad, it is impossible to read the extremity
of ascetic maceration which he habitually practised--fasts, vigils,
scourgings, and every device which perverse ingenuity could
suggest--without recognizing morbid mental conditions which could
readily render him a monomaniac on any subject which greatly engrossed
his feelings. On the other hand, the men who thus tamed their own strong
passions and mastered the rebellious flesh by these means, were not
likely to feel for the suffering of those who had abandoned themselves
to Satan, and who might be saved by temporal fire from eternal flame. Or
if, perchance, they had softer hearts and compassionated the agonies of
their victims, they might well regard the repression of their own
emotions at the spectacle as part of the penance which they were called
upon to endure. In any case, life was but an infinitesimal point in
eternity, and all human interests shrank into nothingness in comparison
with the one overmastering duty of keeping the flock from straying and
of preventing an infected sheep from communicating his poison to his
fellows. Charity itself could not hesitate over whatever methods might
be requisite to accomplish this.
That the men who conducted the Inquisition and who toiled sedulously in
its arduous, repulsive, and often dangerous labor, were thoroughly
convinced that they were furthering the kingdom of God, is shown by the
habitual practice of encouraging them with the remission of sins,
similar to that offered for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Besides the
consciousness of duty performed, it was the only recognized reward of
their joyless lives, and it was considered enough.[210] How, moreover,
cruelty to the heretic could be conjoined with boundless love and
good-will to men is well exemplified in the career of the Dominican, Frà
Giovanni Schio da Vicenza. Profoundly moved by the condition of
northern Italy, filled with dissensions which raged, not only between
city and city, and burgher and noble, but which divided families in the
factions of Guelf and Ghibelline, he devoted himself to the mission of
an Apostle of Peace. In 1233 his eloquence at Bologna induced the
opposing parties to lay aside their arms, and led enemies to swear
mutual forgiveness in a delirium of joyful reconciliation. So great was
the enthusiasm which he excited that the magistrates submitted to him
the statutes of the city and allowed him to revise them at discretion.
The same success attended him at Padua, Treviso, Feltro, and Belluno.
The lords of Camino, Romano, Conigliano, and San Bonifacio, and the
republics of Brescia, Vicenza, Verona, and Mantua made him the arbiter
of their differences and urged him to alter their political organization
as he saw fit. On the plain of Paquara, near Verona, he called a great
assembly of the Lombard peoples, and that innumerable multitude, swayed
by his fervor as by a voice from heaven, proclaimed a general
pacification. Yet this man, so worthy a disciple of the Great Teacher of
divine love, when installed in power in Verona, proceeded to burn in the
public square sixty men and women of the principal families of the town,
whom he had condemned as heretics; and twenty years later he reappears
as the leader of a Bolognese contingent in the crusade preached by
Alexander IV. against Ezzelin de Romano.[211]
In fact the zealot, however loving and charitable he might otherwise be,
was taught and believed that compassion for the sufferings of the
heretic was not only a weakness but a sin. As well might he sympathize
with Satan and his demons writhing in the endless torment of hell. If a
just and omnipotent God wreaked divine vengeance on those of his
creatures who offended him, it was not for man to question the
righteousness of his ways, but humbly to imitate his example and rejoice
when the opportunity to do so was vouchsafed to him. The stern moralists
of the age held it to be a Christian duty to find pleasure in
contemplating the anguish of the sinner. Gregory the Great, five
centuries before, had argued that the bliss of the elect in heaven would
not be perfect unless they were able to look across the abyss and enjoy
the agonies of their brethren in eternal fire. This idea was a popular
one and was not allowed to grow obsolete. Peter Lombard, the great
"Master of Sentences," whose "Sentences," produced about the middle of
the twelfth century, was the leading authority in the schools, quotes
St. Gregory with approbation, and enlarges upon the satisfaction which
the just will feel in the ineffable misery of the damned. Even the
mystic tenderness of Bonaventura does not prevent him from echoing the
same terrible exultation. When such were the sentiments in which all
thinking men were trained, and such were the views which they
disseminated among the people, it is not to be supposed that any
feelings of compassion for the sufferers would deter the most charitable
from the rigid exercise of justice. The ruthless extermination of heresy
was a work which could only be pleasing to the righteous, whether simply
as spectators or whether they were called by conscience or by station to
the higher duties of active persecution. If, notwithstanding this, any
scruple remained, the schoolmen easily removed it by proving that
persecution was a work of charity, for the benefit of the
persecuted.[212]
It is true that all popes were not like Innocent III. nor all
inquisitors like Frà Giovanni. Selfish and interested motives were at
work, as they are in all human institutions, and the actions even of the
best may doubtless have unconsciously been stimulated by pride of
opinion and by ambition as well as by a sense of duty to God and man.
The religious revolt threatened the temporal possessions of the Church
and the privileges of its members, and the desire to preserve these had
its share in the resistance which was organized against innovation.
Selfish as this desire may have been, we must not forget that, in the
thirteenth century, the power and wealth of the hierarchy, however much
abused, had yet long been recognized by the public law of Europe. The
rulers of the Church could only regard as a sacred duty the maintenance
of rights which they had inherited, against audacious assailants whose
doctrines threatened the overthrow of what they regarded as the basis of
social order. Sympathize as we must with the Waldenses and the Cathari
in their hideous martyrdom, we cannot but feel that the treatment which
they endured was inevitable, and we should pity the blindness of the
persecutor as well as the sufferings of the persecuted.
Man is seldom wholly consistent in the practical application of his
principles, and the persecutors of the thirteenth century made one
concession to humanity and common-sense which was fatal to the
completeness of the theory on which they acted. To carry it out fully,
they should have proselyted with the sword among all non-Christians whom
fate threw in their power; but from this they abstained. Infidels who
had never received the faith, such as Jews and Saracens, were not to be
compelled to Christianity. Even their children were not to be baptized
without parental consent, as this would be contrary to natural justice,
as well as dangerous to the purity of the faith. It was necessary that
the misbeliever should have been united with the Church by baptism in
order to give her jurisdiction over him.[213]