THE MENDICANT ORDERS AND THE INQUISITION.
The political decision achieved by the Albigensian Crusade, in the
hands of the French Crown, against the House of Toulouse, permitted
the establishment of the Inquisition in Languedoc, the centre of
thirteenth century heresy. Now the subject of this book is not so
much the Inquisition itself as the forces which established it.
Therefore the military and political struggle in which the House of
Toulouse went under has been narrated at some length, as well as
the events leading up to that struggle. But it is also necessary to
our subject to note the workings of these forces when regular armed
resistance had ceased.
That resistance had not been in the name of heresy against
Catholicism, but only in defence of some measure of toleration from
the State to the heretical bodies. Tolerance was not even expressly
stated as the motive of those who resisted the Crusade, but only
implied by their conduct. The point is worth noting. Not one of the
southern lords who resisted the Crusade was himself a heretic. None
of them, except Raymond Roger of Foix, was ever proved to have so
much as taken any particular interest in heresy as a fad, an object
of curiosity. Pedro of Aragon was the Pope’s vassal and “First
Standard Bearer of the Church.” Raymond VI of Toulouse had been all
his life a Catholic, and died with all the consolations of religion,
having on the morning of his sudden death gone twice to the church
of La Daurade in Toulouse to pray. After his death the honour of
burying his remains was disputed for years between the Parish of St.
Sernin and the Knights Hospitallers of Toulouse. Those who resisted
the Crusaders fought so that they might not be compelled to suppress
the heretics among whom they lived, and especially that they might
not be deprived of power and possessions by North Frenchmen who came
to seize their lands in perpetuity as a reward for bringing about
suppression of heresy.
Nowhere else in Europe was there regular armed opposition. In Italy,
which was (after Languedoc) the stronghold of mediæval Manicheanism,
the heretics of Orvieto had caused a riot and the assassination of
a zealous Catholic magistrate in 1199-1200. In Viterbo, a few years
later, the citizens elected certain heretical magistrates, and
it needed harsh words from Innocent before they would consent to
disqualify them. But compared to the Albigensian business this was
child’s play. In Languedoc the battle was fought and won.
But in order to hold a country it is necessary not only to conquer
it, but also to organize it. After the conquest force is no longer
needed on a large scale, it still plays its part, but only in
the enforcement of decisions arrived at by some form of law. And
although force plays a greater part in the conflicts of ideas than
is theoretically admitted nowadays, nevertheless it is not the
chief instrument of those conflicts. The chief instrument is, of
course, persuasion. At the end of the Albigensian war there was no
longer organized opposition in Europe to the enforcement of judicial
decisions against heresy, and these judicial decisions were made by
the Inquisition. Meanwhile, before the fighting had ceased, there
were already in existence two powerful new bodies organized for the
use of persuasion in the cause of the Church, the Dominicans and the
Franciscans, who may be grouped as the Mendicant Orders.
From the beginning, Francis and Dominic agreed in this, that they
uncloistered the monk. Instead of withdrawing their friars from the
world, they launched them into the midst of it to strive, by precept
and example, to win souls. In particular St. Dominic enlisted his
“Friar Preachers” to preach against heresy, and St. Francis to preach
the love of God after a fashion that did away with that grimness of
early mediæval religion which had nourished the over-ascetic heresies
such as the Manichean.
It is hard not to linger over St. Francis of Assisi. A true Italian
and a child of his time, it is not surprising that he sometimes
seems to us extravagant. When we hear of him rolling naked in a rose
bush to drive away the temptations of sex, or having himself dragged
through the streets and beaten, as penance for having eaten a morsel
of chicken in Lent, we are as much puzzled as repelled. We may even
lend an ear to doctors who tell us that there is a perversion of the
lusts of the flesh called Masochism, in which the subject derives
pleasure from pain. The saint himself repented at the end of having
caused his body to suffer as he had done; “I have sinned against my
brother the ass,” he said as he lay dying. And yet, all in all, he
remains the most Christ-like of Christians. His tenderness to mankind
was all-embracing, and went out beyond man to the beasts, and even to
natural objects. To him all nature was a fascinating little sister,
to be laughed at, petted and caressed. The sun was our brother: to
him he wrote a canticle. The birds were our little brothers: to them
he preached as they clustered around him. Even the wolf, whom the
saint turned from his evil courses, was “Brother Wolf.” Death was but
“our sister, the death of the body,” and the very devils were “God’s
warders.”
This spirit was the precise opposite to that grimness in the
religious feeling of a century before. To the men of the early
twelfth century, for instance to Abelard, the claims of religion were
inexorably stern. They could no more be reconciled with any sort of
human affection, than could the unyielding round arch adjust itself
to vault the irregular compartments of nave and ambulatory. In human
feeling, as in architecture, the result was ugly distortion, and it
was precisely this distorted feeling that produced Manicheanism.
Clearly, if God was good and loving and the world utterly vile, then
God had not made the world. The Devil had made it, and was by that
act co-equal, if not for the time being, superior, in power to God
Himself. Not so, said St. Francis, the earth is the Lord’s, and it
is beautiful. Only pride, both pride of possessions and pride of
intellect, stands in the way of happiness. So he joyously married his
“Lady Poverty,” and once refused to let a hesitating novice possess
so much as a breviary. Under the busy brushes of Giotto and the other
painters of the Franciscan legend, the Holy Family, without ceasing
to be a symbol of the faith, became also the emblem of innocent and
happy domestic life.
St. Francis did not begin the humanizing of religion. The change had
already begun before the middle of the twelfth century with the cult
of the Virgin. There is a legend that once, when St. Bernard was
praying to her, and had come to the words, “Show that thou art the
mother,” Our Lady appeared to him and from her breast dropped on his
lips three drops of the milk that had nourished the Saviour. That
is already far from the atmosphere of Abelard and Heloise. Already,
in St. Bernard’s time, the north-French architects were beginning
to break up the unyielding Norman and Lombard round arches into the
pointed form, and the same period was evidently trying to resolve
the distortion of religion and human love. St. Francis enormously
enlarged and deepened the new current of religious thought. The
climax was reached after his death in the story of the Miracle of
Bolsena. Here, in 1263, a priest without faith in the Real Presence
of our Lord in the Host, saw the wafer which he himself had just
consecrated covered with drops of blood. About half a century before,
in neighbouring Orvieto, a zealous Catholic magistrate had been
murdered by the Manichees. Now the Church insisted that God gave His
very self to be the food of all men, even to the poor, the serf, and
the humble.
St. Dominic was of a different temper, and attacked the problem in a
different way. Dante calls him—
“... the holy athlete, Benignant to his own and cruel to his foes,”
and praises him for wisdom, whereas he praises St. Francis for
“seraphic ardour.” Instead of being above all a poet and mystic,
like the Poverello of Assisi, St. Dominic was an organizer and
statesman. There was a strain of ecclesiastical anarchism in the
early Franciscan Order; certain “spiritual” Franciscans of the late
thirteenth and early fourteenth century rebelled against religious
authority as no Dominicans have ever done. Where the Italian saint
puts an example ahead of precept, the Spaniard put precept ahead of
example. To him the weakness of the Church was that not enough of her
clergy knew thoroughly her doctrine and were able to teach it. For
him, as for the prophet Hosea, the “... people were destroyed for
lack of knowledge.” His order was vowed to learning. Indeed, it was
a Dominican, St. Thomas Aquinas, who has left us the most complete
and harmonious of all human attempts to analyse the universe. Instead
of attacking in flank by destroying the mood out of which the ultra
ascetic, and in particular the Manichean heresies grew, St. Dominic
attacked heresy in front by direct argument. His “Preaching Friars”
observed strict poverty, not so much as a good in itself, as did St.
Francis, but rather in the spirit of the soldier who lightens his
pack the better to take the field. As they went to and fro, begging
their bread, they escaped the poor man’s envy which dogged the
footsteps of the wealthy bishops and the abbots of the older orders.
Thus they were equally free to debate with the philosophers in the
turbulent universities, or to set forth the Faith in words of one
syllable to simple folk.
The organizers, those carpenters and stonemasons of history, are
obscure by contrast with its artists and sculptors. Just so the
personality of St. Dominic (at least in the Protestant world) has
been overshadowed by that of St. Francis. Even the Church which they
both served canonized Francis within two years after he was dead, and
waited thirteen before canonizing Dominic.
But if the Poverello of Assisi had more poetry in him, the Spanish
gentleman had more statesmanship. The organization of the Franciscan
Order fluctuated violently and finally settled down into a copy
of the Dominican. According to the first Franciscan Rule, that of
1221, a Friar is not bound to obey his superiors when that superior
commands him to do something against the “life,” a proposition so
impossible in practice that it survived only two years. On the
other hand, down to 1240, the Head of the Franciscan Order was
undisputed Cæsar, nominating lesser officers and legislating either
without any Chapter (i.e., Assembly) or with a Chapter composed
exclusively of officers appointed by himself. This again worked so
badly that in 1240 the organization was changed so as to add elected
representatives of the Chapter General, and to make the nomination of
lesser officers a function of the Chapter General so constituted;
both of which features were typically Dominican, and had been part of
the first Constitution of that Order.
As with the constitution of their Order so with the Higher Learning.
Here too the Franciscans found themselves compelled by force of
circumstances to abandon their own founder’s distinctive teaching
and follow the lead of the Dominicans. Whereas St. Francis himself
feared and hated learning, even before his death some of the greatest
scholars in Christendom wore the Franciscan habit.
To the subjects of representative government and of learning I shall
return for a moment at the close of the chapter in the attempt to
estimate the permanent value of the thirteenth century achievement.
The point I now make is that, in both respects, St. Dominic builded
so much better (at least for his generation) than St. Francis that
the Franciscans themselves soon adopted Dominican methods. And
this was true not only in regard to learning and representative
government, but also with regard to the Inquisition.
Both of the mendicant orders were formed, as a modern would say, “for
service.” They were democratic in constitution: the Dominicans had
been so from their origin. Indeed it has been claimed with some show
of reason that it was the Dominicans who first brought representative
government from its original home near the Pyrenees into England.
They addressed themselves particularly to the poorer and the less
fortunate of mankind. Whereas the older orders of monks had retired
to the wilderness, or at least to the country, the mendicants
laboured chiefly in the fast growing towns characteristic of the
new and sudden mediæval rise out of the Dark Ages. It is always in
towns that the human struggle for life is sharpest and the results of
defeat most provocative of pity.
Although the ministrations of the friars were often very different in
kind from those of the “social worker” of to-day, inasmuch as they
were concerned first of all to bear witness to the Faith whereas the
average “social worker” is concerned chiefly with conferring material
benefits (I suspect that is why he, or she, does not accomplish
more), still social worker and mendicant friar have this essential
in common in that the purpose of both was to “do things” for the
poor. Alas! in the garden of “social service” a serpent lies in
wait for poor erring humans, and his name is Tyranny. Those who are
the objects of ministrations, being human, too often receive them
unwillingly and prefer their own ways. And those who would minister,
being equally human, when they see their good works (as they think
them) rejected by those whom they would benefit, too often seek
forcibly to compel acceptance.
Of course such people believe that they know better than the
rejectors (who are, in practice, the more independent and
self-respecting of the poor) what is good for the latter. But the
student of history shakes his head sadly, in the knowledge that the
innumerable oppressors of mankind have all believed that they could
govern people better than those whom they oppressed could govern
themselves.
The connection of St. Dominic himself with the Inquisition (using
the word loosely to cover all legal and judicial action against
heretics), although much disputed, is clear. The evidence consists
of two documents of St. Dominic’s own, and a tradition, written down
in its present form sixty-seven years after his death, which has
been accepted by all students of his life, including those who hold
that he had no connection with the Inquisition whatsoever. The first
document is a licence to a citizen in Toulouse to board a certain
converted heretic in his house until St. Dominic or the Cardinal
Legate should give orders to the contrary. The second enumerates the
provisions of the penance imposed upon another converted heretic.
Although this last has already been quoted in another chapter,
nevertheless it may be well to repeat it here. “Until the Lord Legate
(Arnaut Amalric) shall otherwise ordain” the unhappy man is to fast
forever “from flesh, eggs, cheese and all which comes from flesh
except at Easter, Pentecost and Christmas, when he shall eat some to
protest against his former errors.” He is to keep three Lents each
year, “fasting and abstaining from fish, unless from bodily infirmity
or the heat of the weather he shall be dispensed.” As make-weights,
he is to be beaten with rods upon his bare back, three Sundays
running, by his village priest; he is forever to wear a distinctive
dress marked with crosses to designate him as a former heretic, hear
mass every day “if possible” and vespers as well on festival days,
recite seventy paternosters a day and twenty in the middle of the
night. How this last provision was to be enforced unless some almost
equally unfortunate soul stayed awake to watch him is not stated.
Finally, once a month he is to show the parchment on which all this
is written to the village priest.
So much for the documents. The tradition is that the Saint secured
the release of a certain heretic who had been convicted and sentenced
to be burnt, acting on the strength of his own personal belief that
this particular culprit would eventually repent. Twenty years after,
the tradition goes on to say, the man did repent, and died in the
odour of sanctity, clad in Dominican habit.
For our purposes, the point of all three pieces of evidence is that
the power to loose implies an intimate connection with the power to
bind. The President of the United States and the Governors of States,
who have the pardoning power, are themselves the chief executive
officers of the nation and the States, and it is their sworn duty to
see that the laws are enforced. In St. Dominic’s case, the verdict is
conclusive. Virtually every reputable scholar of the present day is
agreed upon the point, including Roman Catholics writing under the
_nihil obstat_ and _imprimatur_ of Cardinals and Archbishops.
Among these last, Giraud sums up the verdict neatly: “Comparing with
all these documents the canon of the Council of Verona, renewed
in 1208 by the Council of Avignon, which orders that apostates
who, after being convicted of heresy by their Bishops or their
representatives, should obstinately persist in their errors, should
be delivered over to the secular arm, it would seem that it must
be concluded that, by virtue of the delegated authority of the
Cistercian monks, St. Dominic was to convict the heretics; and that,
in convicting them he delivered them up, indirectly but surely, to
execution, unless he suspended, by an act of clemency, the action of
that docile instrument of the Church, the secular arm. Doubtless he
did not himself pronounce the fatal sentence; but during their trial
he played the part of an expert in the matter of orthodoxy, or even
of a juror, transmitting to the court a verdict of guilty while
capable at the same time of signing a recommendation to mercy.”
It is, of course, true that the “bloody-minded Dominic,” that
favourite scarecrow of old-fashioned Protestant historians, never
existed. Not only the Bollandists and Lacordaire but also the whole
weight of modern scholarship agree on this point. Even Lea, almost
always accurate on points of fact even when he is most exasperating
in his utter lack of the realizing imagination so necessary to a
modern historian of the Middle Ages; even Lea, I say, admits that
the miracles ascribed to St. Dominic are almost all kindly ones,
and that the Saint was by no means notable among his contemporaries
for ferocity against heretics. Nor was he the “founder of the
Inquisition,” although he was a worker in it. It was the force of
circumstances and, in particular, the fact that both mendicant orders
were particularly dependent upon the Pope (and correspondingly
independent of the local clergy) that afterwards pushed forward
first the Dominicans and then the Franciscans into prominence as
Inquisitors.
The Albigensian struggle brought the Papal, as distinguished from the
Episcopal, Inquisition into being. Formerly the bishops had had sole
jurisdiction in matters of faith. Naturally, their policy against
heretics varied widely, so that, as we have seen in Chapter II, the
secular government and even the local mob often acted on their own
responsibility. Evidently the bishops were not in a position to deal
with heresy on a large scale. Attempts to hold them to their work,
such as the Imperial-Papal decree issued from Verona in 1184 (see
Chapter II), remained dead letters. In Languedoc, where both local
government and mob were unwilling to act, the local bishops did not
even try to do anything. Accordingly, as we have seen, Arnaut Amalric
and the other legates whose activities we have followed, were sent
by Innocent III to deal with the situation by virtue of authority
derived directly from himself as Pope without reference to the local
bishops—quite in the spirit in which President Cleveland sent federal
troops to quell the Chicago riots in 1894.
Besides the need for a strong hand in Languedoc—the chief cause of
the establishment of the Papal Inquisition—there was a second cause
which helped to keep alive the newly founded institution even after
military and political support of heresy in Languedoc had ceased.
This second cause was the need felt for order and regularity. We
have seen, in the first chapter, how order and right reason in all
things were the goals of the fresh, buoyant spirit of the time, and
how vast an event was the rediscovery of the Roman law, with its
enormous logic. The intellectual appetites of newly-awakened Europe
seized eagerly upon law as an object of study, at the same time that
the practical necessities of an expanding, intensely “progressive,”
society made the regular administration of law one of the chief
concerns of statesmen. To such a generation, it was intolerable that
so weighty a matter as that of variations from the faith should
be dealt with haphazard. In justice to those accused of heresy,
and to the Christian commonwealth as a whole—which our forefathers
considered much more—the serious business of judgment in such cases
deserved to be entrusted to the best qualified persons who could be
found. Here were the Dominicans, and after them the Franciscans,
learned in theology, independent of local prejudice, not apt to be
terrified by local influence, men who had given up everything so
that they might better serve the Church. Even though they shrank, as
they sometimes did, from the heavy responsibilities, fatigues, and
personal danger of acting as Inquisitors, the higher authorities of
State and Church combined to draft them into the service.
In one sense, then, it was a high desire for justice, for the
replacement of lynch law in heresy cases by a regular system of
procedure, which dictated the establishment of the Inquisition
(that is the Inquisition as a new instrument largely separate from
the older Church courts of canon law administered by the bishops).
At the same time, there are three facts which seem to show a baser
mind in those who co-operated in the gradual formation of the new
institution. The modern man is struck by the fact that the manner
of examination seems to offer insufficient guarantee against the
possibility of grave injustice to the accused; second, the use of
torture to compel confession. Finally, the modern man is appalled at
the extreme penalty by fire.
The main feature of the legal processes of the Inquisition is the
wide power of the Inquisitor. Instead of acting, as our judges do,
merely as referee between opposite sides, with a separate government
official for prosecutor, the Inquisitor was the prime mover of the
whole proceeding. Of his own motion he sought evidence and examined
witnesses and accused. In this there is some resemblance to modern
French procedure, and in a slighter degree, to the procedure in
American courts-martial which makes the judge-advocate at once
prosecutor and guarantor of the rights of the accused. The method
is derived from the Roman law. It was practised, in the times with
which we are concerned, by the “advanced” secular governments of the
day such as the Capetian and Plantagenet monarchies. Certain Italian
municipalities also seem to have made use of it. Besides being known
to contemporary secular justice, it was familiar to the educated men
of the time who were steeped in classical memories.
Under the Inquisition, matters went somewhat as follows: The
Inquisitors travelled about through the territories committed to
their charge preaching sermons against heresy, especially in places
where it was known to exist. In these sermons a “time of grace” was
promised, during which time all heretics who should come in and
confess their fault were to be admitted to mercy and reconciled with
the Church. Meanwhile, the faithful were asked to give information
as to local heretics. When the time of grace was up those accused
of heresy were arrested by armed servants of the Holy Office and
examined by the Inquisitor.
The evidence for the prosecution was usually furnished to the
accused, but in most cases the names of the witnesses who had given
it were concealed. This was a departure from the contemporary
procedure at canon law before the bishops. The argument in favour of
concealment was that it was the one way of protecting the witnesses
against reprisal by the friends of the accused in case of conviction.
Public security, it must be remembered, was not what it is to-day.
The best chance of having the indictment quashed was for the accused
to prove that the witnesses were his mortal enemies. The inquisitor
would, therefore, ask him whether he had any such, and if he had
anyone who (unknown to him of course) had testified, then the
evidence in question was stricken out and the whole case against him
received a damaging blow.
When the evidence was in and the prisoner had testified as to his
mortal enemies, then the crucial point of the examination was
reached. It was the business of the Inquisitor to satisfy himself
as to the guilt or innocence of the suspected heretic. There being
no organized jury system, the ideal way of establishing guilt was
to get the accused to confess. Confession was therefore sought by
all imaginable means, by prolonged theological discussion with
those capable of it, by efforts to entrap an unwary prisoner into
unintentional admissions, or by adjourning the inquiry in obstinate
cases so that the passage of time, sometimes even of years, in prison
might give the wretch full chance to think matters over.
The Inquisition differed from all secular justice in that it was
penitential, that is, it aimed to persuade those who had committed
certain sins to confess their fault and submit themselves to the
loving chastisement of Mother Church. The Inquisitor was in the
unique position of a judge who was always trying to turn himself into
a father-confessor.
When there was a strong presumption, but no conclusive proof, against
a prisoner who obstinately refused to confess, the Inquisitor was in
difficulties. His responsibility was even more than that of a modern
judge because only the germ of a jury system as yet existed. The
Inquisitor could, and usually did, summon experts (periti) or “good
men” (boni viri) to deliberate with him, and it was the custom for
him to follow their verdict, except when he thought it too harsh.
This rudimentary jury was made up of men learned in the civil or
canon law, usually mendicant friars. Its weakness was that it was
extremely difficult to get together qualified persons often enough
to give real consideration in each individual case. Indeed it was
physically impossible to do so when a large number of cases required
review, as would happen in the centres of heresy where the peril to
the Faith was greatest. Ignorance of the prisoners’ names lessened
their usefulness, for, as Vacandard ably puts it, “... tribunals
are to judge criminals and not crimes, just as physicians treat
sick people and not diseases in the abstract.” Therefore, to ease
the conscience of the judge in deciding doubtful cases, torture was
introduced to force confession when the evidence was not conclusive.
References to the use of torture are rare in the abundant records of
the Inquisition. Whether this is because its use was so repugnant
to the spirit of Christianity (and so unreliable a means for the
discovery of truth) that the recorders shrank from mentioning it on
paper, will never be known. Mediæval men in general were nothing
if not frank, and yet the verbal equivocations of the Inquisition
were many, as we shall see. Unfortunately, Roman precedents were
in its favour, although the Roman law forbade torture to be used
except against slaves. Roman freemen were liable to torture only in
the case of a crime against the Emperor. The men of the Middle Ages
seem to have thought of it as a substitute for the ordeal, which
was going out of fashion, as we have seen. Torture was introduced
late. Lea finds it mentioned in secular law, “... in the Veronese
code of 1228 and in the Sicilian Constitutions of Frederick II in
1231,” and thinks that “... the references to it show how sparingly
and hesitatingly it was employed.” In the Inquisition it was first
recognized by Innocent IV in 1252.
A certain amount of restriction, to which secular courts were not
liable, was placed upon the Inquisitors in their use of torture. No
torture could be used by them which would imperil the life or limb
of the victim, and this stipulation did amount to something, for the
secular judge was free to invent and use any refinement of cruelty he
could think of, and as often as he cared to. But it did not amount to
much. The Inquisition was free to tear the joints of its victims from
their sockets by means of the rack, or by the strappado. This last
was a rope-and-pulley arrangement which was attached to the wrists of
the victim. His wrists were bound behind his back, so as to dislocate
the shoulder joints by raising him to the ceiling, letting him drop
and then bringing him up with a jerk in mid-air. Fire and water were
also permitted; the feet might be scorched after smearing them with
fat; or the “water-cure” might be used until the stomach was horribly
distended and the prisoner almost strangled.
At first there was reluctance about allowing the Inquisitors
themselves to be present during torture. Priests, and the inquisitors
were all priests, incurred “irregularity” by looking on at such
scenes. But since this prohibition delayed business, it was virtually
removed by the leave granted by Pope Alexander IV in 1260, and
reaffirmed in 1262 by Pope Urban IV, for the Inquisitors to dispense
one another from irregularity incurred by witnessing torture.
Thenceforward it was the custom for the Inquisitor himself to be
present during the torture.
Another check on the use of torture, the prescription that no
prisoner should be twice tortured, was gotten around by equivocation.
A second torturing was merely called a “continuation” instead of a
“repetition” of the first. Furthermore, witnesses might be tortured
indefinitely, and it was one of the chief objects of the inquisitors
to get prisoners to denounce heretics still at large. Often mercy
would be promised, on condition of giving evidence against others.
In any case a heretic who denounced other heretics became at once a
witness to their guilt and might be tortured as many times as was
desired.
Another equivocation appears in the form in which confessions, made
under torture or not, were drawn up. “Usually,” writes Lea, “the
procedure appears to have been that the torture was continued until
the accused signified his readiness to confess, when he was unbound
and carried into another room, where his confession was made. If,
however, the confession was extracted during the torture, it was read
over subsequently to the prisoner, and he was asked whether it were
true. In any case the record was carefully made that the confession
was ‘free and spontaneous,’ without the pressure of ‘force or fear.’
In case a prisoner refused to confirm a confession made under
torture, the learned doctors of the Inquisition differed as to what
should be done with him. Some held that he should be set free, with a
certificate that nothing had been proved against him, others that he
should again be tortured until he again confessed!”
After conviction came sentence. Upon repentant heretics, erring
children conscious of their fault and welcoming the loving
chastisement of Mother Church, the inquisitor himself passed sentence
in the form of penance. In theory, there was no difference between
the penances imposed by any confessor and those of the Inquisitors,
and, in practice, the only penance peculiar to the Inquisition was
the wearing of crosses. Even imprisonment—the extreme legal penalty
for the rare heretics of the earlier Middle Ages—was a part of the
monastic penitential system. As late as the thirteenth century,
sentences of imprisonment were more common than any other form of
punishment.
When the sentence was for life the theory that such severity was no
more than a salutary measure of penance was certainly strained. If
such a prisoner broke jail, his guilt was supposed to be that of
rejecting the wholesome correction designed by the loving-kindness of
the Church to effect his spiritual well-being! However, there are so
many records of prisoners serving life sentences who were released
for good behaviour while in prison that it is possible to argue that
usually none but “hard cases” failed to have the balance of such
sentences suspended.
Obviously, the idea of punishment as a penance did not apply to
those who refused to repent. Therefore the Inquisition itself, being
an institution of the Church, could not punish such cases. But it
was the root of the whole matter that heresy was a crime not only
against the Church but against the State. It was the business of the
Inquisition merely to determine whether suspects were or were not
heretics. If, after conviction, one repented, the State originally
had nothing to say. The Inquisition, acting for the Church, would
then impose penance, as we have just seen, as upon any other
repentant sinner. With the obstinate heretic the Church could do
nothing. Therefore such prisoners were “relaxed,” that is turned
over to the secular authorities, with the formula that the justice
of God could do nothing more for them, inasmuch as they persisted in
rebellion against it, and that, therefore, only the justice of man
had power over them. In many of the later sentences the formula goes
on, in accordance with the canonical sanctions, to ask the State to
impose only such punishment as will not endanger life or limb, or
cause the shedding of blood. As a matter of law, the coercive power
was recognized as belonging only to the State.
The State, on the other hand, recognized the exclusive power of
the Church to determine what was heresy and who was heretical,
recognized the inquisitors as experts in such matters, accepted
their verdict without question, and promptly proceeded to pass and
execute sentence. It was a part of the formula of “relaxation” that
heretics should be punished “as they deserved (animadversio debita).”
This elastic phrase could be variously interpreted in accordance
with the different local laws. Always it meant confiscation of the
goods of the condemned. The Popes, from Alexander III, held that to
confiscation banishment should be added. Confiscation was part of
the penalty for treason which the Holy Roman Empire had copied word
for word out of the old Roman law. Therefore, says Pope Innocent
III, heretics deserve to have their goods confiscated even more than
traitors, inasmuch as they betray the majesty of God Himself who
is obviously greater than all earthly sovereigns. The great Pope
mentions the fact that, under the Roman law, traitors lost their
lives as well as their property, and that heresy involved treason
against God, the King of Kings, but did not follow out his premises
to their logical conclusion. Not until years after his death is there
even a hint that the Church as a whole desired the death of a sinner,
even when he was a heretic.
This comparative mildness was never universal in fact and gradually
disappeared even from theory. We have noted, in the second chapter,
the curious spectacle presented by the eleventh and twelfth century,
on the one hand many of the higher clergy mindful of the Christian
tradition of mercy, and on the other the laity and lower clergy
insisting upon death for the impenitent heretic, and generally death
by fire. We have now to note the slow progress by which lynch law
became written law. Even before the Albigensian Crusade there had
been at least two instances of burning alive formally set down as
the penalty for heresy. One was the law enacted in 1194 by Count
Raymond V, of Toulouse, at the very storm centre of the trouble. The
other was the law of Pedro II, in nearby Aragon in 1197, against
the Waldenses. Under Raymond V’s law, the Toulousains later claimed
that they had “burnt many.” But even if their claim be accepted
as true (whereas it seems doubtful) at any rate the practice was
not continued. Pedro of Aragon decreed burning alive only for
those Waldensians and other heretics who should fail to leave his
dominions by a certain day, so that his reference to the stake was
hardly more than a threat intended to enforce the real penalty, that
of banishment. De Montfort himself, at the parliament he held in
Pamiers in 1212 to consolidate his position in the south, decreed
no more than banishment and confiscation as penalties for heresy.
More important than any previous law is one enacted for Lombardy in
1224 by the Emperor Frederick II, by which heretics were either to
be burnt or to have their tongues cut out, in the discretion of the
judge.
It is quite in keeping with what we know of the subject in general
that the first ecclesiastical recognition of death as the normal
legal penalty for heresy should be an indirect one. A council sitting
in Toulouse in 1229, the year of Raymond VII’s final surrender, after
remarking as usual that “due punishment” is to be inflicted upon
heretics, casually goes on to say that “... heretics, _who, through
fear of death_ or any other cause except their own free will, return
to the faith, are to be imprisoned by the bishop of the city to do
penance, that they may not corrupt others” (Vancandard). After this,
examples multiply, under the influence of Frederick II and Pope
Gregory IX. It so happens, however, that not until 1252 did any Pope
formally insist upon the death penalty for heresy throughout Latin
Christendom. This was the act of Innocent IV in the same bull “Ad
Extirpanda” which authorized torture. Thenceforward the Inquisition
was virtually complete.
The institution spread rapidly throughout Europe. England was
an exception, for curiously enough in view of the inveterate
eccentricity of the English mind, there were no heretics there
until much later. There was not even a provision for burning
heretics until, in 1401, Parliament passed the statute “de heretico
comburendo.” It is less surprising to find such regions as far off as
Scandinavia without heretics, and consequently without inquisitors.
In the mountains of Bosnia, Catharistic Manicheanism became the
State religion and persisted until the coming of the Turks, when
the heretics welcomed the newcomers and went over to Islam. Bosnia
had been a backwater in Europe ever since the Roman roads from the
Adriatic to the Danube decayed in the Dark Ages—even to-day it has
many Mohammedans.
Outside of Bosnia, there was no place in Latin Christendom that
harboured heretics where the inquisitors did not make an end of them.
The Manicheans were completely uprooted, although their extraordinary
hunger for martyrdom would have made them completely victorious if
the crude folly of to-day on the subject of “making martyrs” had
truth in it. In Languedoc they lingered until the fourteenth century.
The Waldensians were reduced so low that the confiscations of their
property were not even enough to pay the expenses of the Inquisitors,
let alone any surplus for the State. For all practical purposes they
too were wiped out.
Resistance never amounted to more than the murder of an inquisitor
here and there—which affected the activities of the institution not
at all, for new recruits filled every gap. The Inquisition thus
completed the task begun by the Albigensian Crusade of preserving the
moral unity of Europe. Seriously threatened in the early thirteenth
century, that moral unity remained unbroken until the great cataclysm
of the sixteenth.
The question posed by the Inquisition to the student is twofold.
First, was the moral unity of Europe worth preserving or no, and
second, were or were not the means by which the Inquisition helped
to preserve it worse than the disease in the long run? Naturally, if
it is decided that the end sought was of little value, then it is
probable that anyone so deciding will also disapprove of the means
used to attain it. But the contrary does not follow. It is by no
means impossible that anyone experienced in life may decide in any
given case that, although the end proposed was good, nevertheless the
means by which it was attained were evil.
On the first point, the answer is prompt. Emphatically, the mediæval
world was worth preserving. In fact, with Periclean Greece, the
Empire under the Antonines, and possibly the world of the Victorian
age, the thirteenth century marks one of the culminating points of
human history. It is true that the word “mediæval” is still popularly
used in derision. But, on the other hand, such usage is recognized
as hasty and superficial by virtually all educated men acquainted
with the period. The Middle Ages attract us by the excellence of
their arts and handicrafts, by the vividness and picturesqueness
of their life, their spontaneity of feeling, their absence of
hypocrisy, the order and clarity of their intellectual life, above
all by their freedom from serious internal strain. From our world
of alternatively drab and garish machine-made ugliness, haphazard
and inconsequent thinking, and torment of chronic industrial civil
war, we look back upon them with regret. In the literature of the
thirteenth century we see the European mind happy and creative ...
as it is to-day uncertain and near despair. We see our typical
institutions, such as representative government, sounder and more
vigorous than they are to-day. Such eager worshippers of the spirit
of our own time as H. G. Wells and Henry Adams, to name only two
at random, bear their testimony. The confession of the volatile
socialist Wells is interesting. In 1914 he casually wrote of “...
the finished and enriched normal social life of Western European
in the Middle Ages....” I have taken Wells as important merely
because (with his human sensitive-plate of a mind capable of so many
discordant impressions) he puts the thing so neatly. With such men as
Chesterton and Belloc in England and Cram in America the appreciation
of mediævalism is the very core of their thinking. It would be easy
to weary the reader with examples. The Middle Ages draw us if we but
look at them.
The weakness of the Middle Ages lay in four things. First, there was
insufficient organization of public powers and of communications,
a subject discussed elsewhere in this book. Second, there was very
little “natural science,” i.e., detailed knowledge of the properties
of the material world. Thus it was ignorance of medicine and
sanitation that brought about the great fourteenth century calamity
of pestilence, the “Black Death” which gave the mediæval system a
shock from which it never fully recovered. Third, there was cruelty,
and fourth, there was the contrast between the vast assumptions
made by the Church and the shortcomings and weaknesses of man
himself—layman and churchman alike. Both cruelty and the claims of
the Church are intimately connected with our subject.
The cruelty of the Inquisition appears most in the use of torture
and in the executions by fire. Questions as to the form of procedure
and withholding names of witnesses are subordinate. It is well
enough for a modern civilized government, strong in the perfection
of communications and of all public powers, to safeguard elaborately
those accused of crime. Mediæval conditions were in many ways like
those of frontier regions where the criminal can easily slip away.
When this is so, justice must make herself swift and terrible by
“rough and ready” methods. Otherwise she does not exist. In their
franker moments, lawyers will usually admit that nine-tenths of
the clients they defend are “as guilty as hell.” The elaborate
safeguards of our procedure are defensible only on the theory that
it is better to err by letting many culprits escape rather than by
punishing one innocent man. And this theory, in turn, is tenable only
on the assumption that no serious harm is done the community by the
escape from punishment, through the legal safeguards aforesaid, of a
considerable proportion of criminals. Where, on the other hand, the
life or death of the community is felt to be at stake, then matters
must take a different course. Perhaps as good an example as our own
time can furnish is that of military justice. Clearly it is supremely
important to keep up the discipline of an army. Accordingly, courts
martial are given wide latitude. And yet the almost unanimous opinion
of those competent to judge is that, when administered by experienced
officers, miscarriages of justice under the court-martial system are
exceedingly rare, and that, on the other hand, such a procedure as
that followed in the civil courts would be destructive of all proper
discipline; the maintenance of which, after all, is the necessary
end sought. With reference to the Inquisition, besides the temporal
welfare of the community, there is also the doctrine of exclusive
salvation to be considered, as we shall see in a moment. The wide
latitude allowed Inquisitors undoubtedly produced cases of injustice,
but probably no system permitting the “disputatious wrangling of
lawyers” (as the Inquisitorial manuals put it) could have answered
the purpose.
In accusing the Inquisition of physical cruelty in examinations and
executions, the modern world does not come into court with absolutely
clean hands. Even leaving out of account Russia and Asia does not
altogether mend matters. For instance, cruelty appears, more or less
frankly, when the white man is in contact with those he considers
lower races.
With respect to the examination of prisoners, Kipling’s fictitious
hero, the lovable Mulvaney, flogging his captured Burman with a
cleaning rod to find out the whereabouts of the bandit-friends of the
sufferer, may serve as a fictitious example of the sort of cruelty
frequently practised by civilized armies operating against savages.
The American Army in the Philippines, instead of falling back on
such primitive methods as flogging, took over the water torture from
the natives there, who in turn had learned it from the Spaniards. In
fact, it was one of the favourite tortures of the Spanish Inquisition
of late mediæval and early modern days. The officer who introduced
the “water cure” into the American Army happens to be known to the
writer, who can warrant him a most kindly man who would not hurt so
much as an insect, except in line of duty. It is a well-known fact
that the American mind is more hospitable than the British to new and
unfamiliar ideas. Even in the great modern cities, in which (by a
curious reversion) degraded, criminal, types analogous to the savage
appear, torture in the examination of prisoners is not altogether
unknown. I refer to the police “third degree.” Here the facts are not
public property, but there is good reason to believe that torture in
various forms is used in examining prisoners to force them to confess
and to name their accomplices. Into the merits and demerits of these
practices it is unnecessary to enter here. The point is merely that
the world has not yet found a way to dispense altogether with the use
of torture in the examination of prisoners.
A real difference, nevertheless, remains between the modern and
the mediæval use of torture in examinations. To-day it is furtive,
then it was an acknowledged, customary thing. And while this
difference is partly a matter of our greater security, and partly
a matter of hypocrisy born of our characteristic, almost feminine,
modern disinclination to face disagreeable facts; still it is true
that there has been a real change in the minds of men of European
stock with reference to this matter of torture. We are revolted by
cruelties which not so very long ago seem to have been taken almost
as a matter of course, so much so that, as we have seen, they
permitted even priests to be present in the torture chamber. Our
nerves are more sensitive than those of our ancestors, as Nietzsche
and Huysmans have pointed out, but that does not altogether account
for the moral change involved.
With respect to burning alive the position is somewhat similar. Here
also we have a conspicuous modern example occurring in a region
where the white man finds himself confronted with great numbers of
men of a race which he feels to be inferior to his own. I refer to
the lynching of negroes, usually those accused of rape upon a white
woman, in the Southern States. Here the combination of rape and race
feeling has produced a condition very like that found in Western
Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when heretics, instead
of negro rapists, were similarly burned by mobs. Here again, together
with striking resemblances, there are also important differences.
The practice shows no signs of becoming a formal written law. On the
contrary, there is formidable, organized protest against it, even in
the communities concerned. Whereas in the early Middle Ages only a
part of the higher clergy can be found in opposition, and even then
not in particular opposition to burning alive, but opposed in general
to any death penalty for heretics.
The striking contrast between the mediæval attitude, after burning
alive had become written law, and modern feeling on the subject,
has been discussed in the second chapter. Belloc uses the fact of
this contrast as an illustration of one of the chief difficulties of
history, that is the elusiveness of the “time spirit” of past ages,
the fact that they took for granted certain primary assumptions which
seemed to them too obvious even to be worth recording. Considering
it, he remarks upon the distortion which this unseizable spirit of
the time ... “appears to produce in morals when one is looking at it
through the medium of another spirit belonging to another time, our
own.”[32] His first illustrations of this truth are drawn from the
French Revolution, from which he proceeds to a discussion of burning
alive in the Middle Ages and early modern period, which has, in part,
been quoted elsewhere in this book.
Frazer in the “Golden Bough” has a passage reinforcing Belloc’s
contention as to the symbolic and quasi-sacramental spirit in which
burning alive was regarded. Fire was the sovereign remedy against
witchcraft. It was customary to burn objects to prevent their being
bewitched, or objects or animals which had been bewitched, so that
the contagion might not spread, or, finally, to burn the witches
themselves. Our contemporary Southern lynchings by fire should warn
us against over-subtlety. Further, it is true that burning alive had
been the Roman punishment for high treason as well as for sorcery,
and was in grisly conformity with the Church’s traditional abhorrence
of bloodshed—it shed no blood. Still it is possible that the Middle
Ages saw relationship between witchcraft and heresy, since both were
connected with ideas of intensely harmful spiritual forces—were, in
short, favourite offspring of the devil himself.
Certainly, later on, the burning of criminals became a solemn
ceremony by no means accompanied by hatred of the victim. This is
proved by the examples of those strangled before burning, like
Savonarola. It is proved even more strongly by the celebrated case of
Gilles de Rais. This case has been referred to in the second chapter,
but it is so pertinent here that it merits fuller repetition. Gilles
was a Breton nobleman and had been one of the lieutenants of Joan of
Arc, but later fell into sorcery, sexual perversion, and all sorts of
refinements of cruelty. When the Inquisition condemned him to be hung
and burned alive, on charges of worshipping demons, he suffered a
violent change of heart. Among other edifying signs of contrition, he
begged the people whose little boys he had kidnapped, then debauched,
and then tortured to death by hundreds, to pray for his soul.
Whereupon they marched in procession, vehemently praying for the
eternal salvation of this monster with his taste for extremes in both
directions of the spiritual life. After which he was duly executed.
“We are far from American lynch law here,”[33] as M. Huysmans remarks
in recounting this scene. It is possible, in the light of such case,
to believe with Belloc and Frazer that what seems to us the atrocious
cruelty involved in burning alive may have been merely incidental to
other considerations uppermost in the minds of those who ordered such
things. To himself, man is an inscrutable mystery.
Finally, we come to the question of the claims of the Church. It
is not my purpose to debate the propositions involved, but merely
to state them as they affect the moral problem of the Inquisition.
Obviously, the Church’s sole reason for being is the belief that she
has, in the Christian revelation, something of supreme and unique
value for mankind. The Athanasian creed, whether or not it is to be
taken as pronouncing the damnation of the heathen and of “heretics
in good faith,” certainly must be interpreted to mean that those
who “culpably persist” in heretical belief cannot be saved. In the
Middle Ages, Christian scholars expanded this irreducible minimum so
as to make the Church’s teaching include the damnation of both the
heathen and of all heretics, more especially as the possibility of
heresy existing without a definite renunciation of the Catholic faith
by the individual heretic hardly occurred to people in a society
universally Catholic. As we have seen, the Church was the cement of
that society. Marriage was one of her sacraments and had nothing to
do with any civil ceremony. Break the Church, therefore, and you
broke up family life. To deny her right to sanction an oath was to
destroy the all-important feudal oath of allegiance. Therefore men
accepted without hesitation the idea that to counterfeit the faith
was worse than to counterfeit earthly coin, to betray God through
heresy was viler than to betray an earthly sovereign by committing
treason. This note is sounded again and again in the grim formulas
establishing torture and the stake. Since human justice fiercely
punished the lesser crimes against men, how much the more it ought
to punish the greater crimes against God. Given the savage criminal
law of the time, given also the Athanasian creed tracing back to our
Lord saying: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; and
he that believeth not shall be condemned” (St. Mark xvi), and the
logical sequence is complete.
Nevertheless, even in times of clear, logical thinking such as the
Middle Ages, men seldom act from logic alone. To act so is the
mark of the fanatic, and although the fanatic often is powerful,
still most men are not fanatics, and no society can long be ruled
by fanaticism pure and simple. After some years of study and
reflection upon the point, my own conclusion is that the Church and
the Governments of the thirteenth century were determined in their
action not only by the formal logic of the situation but also by
the peculiarly repulsive nature of the Albigensian (“Catharan,” or
Manichean) heresy, the leading heresy of the age.
Whatever might have happened, it did happen that the laws repressing
heresy were codified by the acute legal minds of the new time under
the stress of a particular heresy of a most hateful sort. Symonds
has recorded two Milanese epitaphs, dating from the mid-thirteenth
century. In one an archbishop is praised for having “... cut the
throats of the heretics (... jugulavit haereses).” In the other a
Podesta (chief executive magistrate) of the city is also praised
because “He did his duty and burned the Catharans (Catharos ut debuit
ussit).”[34] Historians seem to have failed to notice the connection
of the two sentiments. Whether or not heresy in general would
have been as rigorously stamped out had the particular Manichean,
Albigensian, or Catharan heresy never existed is mere speculation.
The striking fact is that the time that could praise an archbishop
for having cut heretical throats thought of heresy as typified by
this particular sect. Another illustration is a well-known story
of St. Thomas Aquinas. It seems that the greatest of Christian
philosophers, one day seated at dinner with St. Louis and his court,
suddenly rolled out (no doubt in a deep voice corresponding to his
massive frame), “I have a conclusive argument against the Manicheans
(Conclusum est contra Manicheos).”[35] Many students have smiled over
the feeling of the courtiers; for our purposes the point is that no
such contemporary anecdote has come down to us concerning Waldenses,
Arnaldists, or any other of the numerous heresies of the time.
Theologians taught that all heresy was sin, hence anti-heretical
legislation, and the corresponding task of enforcing it. The enormous
force of the attack upon the Albigenses came because the average
Christian, once face to face with them, decided that duty was
pleasure.
It is true that the huge engine first set in motion by anger against
this inhuman sect was soon turned against all heretics, and the fact
will surprise no one who has the remotest knowledge of practical
politics. The historian, when he plots the course of the ship of
State, is at ease in his study. But the ship herself, when that
run was made, was blown upon, this side and that, by the fiercest
passions of man, and is so to-day. Rare, indeed, are the officers
and crew that, when those gales are at their height, can hold the
vessel steady. More often her course is as viciously jagged as that
of lightning. It is not for the American, with our treatment of the
South and the negro question since the Civil War before him, to cast
a stone at the thirteenth century.
In thirteenth century Languedoc, as in nineteenth century America,
war made an end of nice distinctions. At the time of the Conference
of Pamiers, in 1207, before the Crusade had begun, Peter de
Vaux-Cernay could distinguish clearly between Waldensians and
“heretics” par excellence: that is Manicheans. In 1226, nineteen
years later, we find a Cardinal-Legate of the Holy See persuading
Louis VIII of France to attack the city of Avignon because there
were many Waldenses there, and this in spite of the fact that it was
a fief of the Empire. From the first the theory of the Church had
been that heresy itself, and not any one particular kind of heresy,
however repulsive, was the enemy. Before the Albigensian Crusade is
ended, we find that this theory is being worked out in fact.
What, then, are we to say of the statesmen and their peoples who
encouraged or permitted the adoption into law of this sweeping
theory promulgated by the Church? Clearly the men of the thirteenth
century saw no moral problem in the matter, but only the doing of
a necessary task. No other assumption can account for the success
with which the difficulties in the way of the new inquisitorial
institution were gotten over. For instance, there was the exceedingly
delicate question of the precise relation of inquisitors to the
local bishops. Had there been the slightest desire on the part of
the secular governments to hinder the Inquisition, it would have
been easy to play off one against the other, for it was a poor
mediæval ruler who could not get some of his bishops to support him
on practically any proposition. We hear of nothing of the sort. On
the contrary, the thorny point of Inquisitorial versus Episcopal
authority is triumphantly solved, in practice, without any serious
hitch whatsoever. It is the same with popular resistance. At long
intervals we sometimes hear of little riots, or even of the murder
of an inquisitor here and there. But such things are the rarest
of exceptions to the rule. This is easier to understand when we
realize that only in the few centres of heretical resistance were
inquisitorial activities of a drastic nature. Thus in Roussillon,
just over the border from Languedoc, the atmosphere changes
altogether. Here the minute research of the indefatigable M. Brutails
has brought to light only four sentences of the Inquisition.[36] All
are directed against robber barons, of the pestilential tribe whose
activities we have noted. What happened to two of these wretches is
not clear. Those whose fate is known suffered only the penalty of
having their dead bones dug up and solemnly burnt, forty years after
death in one case. The severities of the Inquisition, enormous though
they bulk on the voluminous pages of Lea, were infrequent and local
throughout thirteenth century Christendom as a whole. Furthermore,
these infrequent and local severities were normally exercised against
the “Albigensian” heretics who were deservedly detested. Not until
two hundred years later—in the fantastic and stagnant close of the
Middle Ages—do we find anything like a reign of terror. Nevertheless,
the underlying idea of the whole business is so alien from us that we
can scarcely understand it.
Even to approach understanding of such a thing, it is necessary to
speak in parables. Let us, therefore, imagine a scene among the
shades. The ghost of a thirteenth century scholastic is in converse
with other ghosts, an ancient Roman, a sage of Hindustan, a mandarin
from China, and an American citizen.
“Government is government,” say these last four, “and religion is
religion. For men to agree, in general, to live peaceably with each
other and to obey law, they need not also agree concerning divine
things, and this is proved by what we ourselves have seen and known.
If anyone offend against law let him be punished. But let him worship
any God, or no God, as pleases him, granted only that he offend
not the religious feeling and sense of decency of his neighbours,
particularly if a great majority of them be agreed upon such matters.”
To whom the scholastic: “From you of the East and of old Rome these
words mean little. No law of natural right informed your States.
When did any one of you maintain that there was a God in whose
sight all men were equal? Instead, you held to slavery and to the
deepest inequalities among men. We strove more greatly than you
because we sought to build upon eternal justice. In our eyes, it was
justice that every man should enjoy the whole fruit of his labours,
saving only a tax, as it were, paid to those who fought, judged, or
governed. And in order that such justice might prevail it was needful
that the Church be strong to lay down, precept upon clear precept,
what was every man’s duty to his neighbour.”
“The conquered Saracen, in Spain and Sicily, was but an exception,
to tolerate him did no harm. A graver exception was the Jew, for
the weakness of men made it convenient that he be permitted usuries
anathema to Christians. Nevertheless he was a race apart. But
that the sword of the gospel should lose its edge, being blunted
and chipped away by the unblessed interpretations of men calling
themselves Christians, was to us a thing intolerable. For among such
a babel of tongues we feared that men would listen to none, but would
follow their own greeds and lusts, wheresoever these last might lead,
until the strife among them ceased only from weariness.”
After he had done speaking there is a little silence. Then the
American answers and says: “It is true that men must agree, after
a fashion, as to that what is right, and it is true that this is
hard. But faith is faith and men are facts. Moreover, since we speak
of faith, there is a civic faith which seeks to bind men together
upon the earth, no matter whence they came there and whither they
shall go. But faith or no faith, men as citizens must sink or swim
together, and if they cannot agree about the things of this world,
they will certainly perish. About God they can never agree, therefore
let them differ as peaceably as they can.”
“But is it not true,” says the scholastic, “that you have failed?
For shades lately come hither out of the sunlight, say that more and
more, in the upper world, there is strife in the cities between rich
and poor. There are so many, even in your own country, who are called
free and yet own nothing.”
“That is so,” replied the American, “but a friend of mine came here
only the other day, and he said that they had not failed yet.”
FOOTNOTES:
[32] “On Anything,” Hilaire Belloc, p. 72 _et seq._
[33] Huysmans’ “Là-bas,” p. 439.
[34] “The Renaissance in Italy,” by John Addington Symonds, publ.
Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1904. Footnote to p. 129 of Vol. I of
the treatise on “The Catholic Reaction.”
[35] “Mont St. Michel and Chartres,” Adams, _supra_, p. 348.
[36] “Etude sur la Condition des Populations rurales en Roussillon.”
Pp. 297, 298.