their career of scepticism and sacrilegious discussion concerning
the divinity of Jesus Christ during the second and third centuries.
After throwing doubt upon the divine essence of the three persons of
the Trinity, others still more daring, such as Sabellius and Praxeas,
attempted to show that these three persons in God were but three
symbolic names given to the same substance. The Council of Alexandria
(261) punished these culpable errors. Soon after, an Egyptian priest
named Arius took them up and propagated them very widely, maintaining
that Jesus Christ was a created being, perfect no doubt and almost
like unto God, but not himself God. His doctrine also contained secret
heresies which were condemned by the Œcumenical Council of Nice (325).
Nevertheless this doctrine, known as Arianism, made great progress; it
was adopted and supported by several emperors, it spread throughout
Europe, and, in spite of the authority of councils, and the efforts
of popes and bishops, it seemed destined to lay the foundation of
a new Christianity in which the divinity of Christ was to find no
place. But the most radical attack upon Christianity was undoubtedly
the conspiracy of divergent sects under the leadership of the Emperor
Julian (331–362), surnamed the Apostate because he abjured the
Christian faith with the view of re-establishing paganism. His plan
for arriving at this result was very skilfully conceived. Perceiving
that it would be necessary to combine all the forces directed against
the Church, he showed favour to the heresies and the schools of
philosophy which, after obtaining a certain notoriety under Plotinus
and Porphyrius, had lapsed into the ridiculous fancies of evocations
and of demonology. But, under the protection of the emperor, matters
assumed a different aspect, as is pointed out by M. Jules Simon in his
“Histoire de l’Ecole d’Alexandrie.” This school, “humiliated by the
triumphs of Christianity, reduced to silence and obscurity, without
any fixed purpose, devoid of credit and influence, all at once took up
a fresh attitude at the accession of Julian, and attempted to employ
the sovereign power, with which one of its followers was clothed, for
extinguishing Christianity.” The struggle was a terrible one, and the
Church seemed to have lost all human means of defence. Her children
implored for help from on high, and the premature death of Julian was
attributed to the divine intervention. Ecclesiastical writers relate
that St. Basilius the Great, while praying God to protect his Church
against the persecutor, was transported in a dream: he saw Christ in
heaven and heard him say to St. Mercurius (the martyr of Cesarea, in
Cappadocia), “Go and smite the enemy of those who believe in me.” The
holy martyr at once sped on his mission, and, returning in a short
space of time, said to his Divine Master, “Your orders are executed,
Julian is no more.” St. Basilius had this vision on the night of the
emperor’s death. Several writers assert that the emperor, knowing
whence came the blow which was to prove fatal to him, collected in the
palm of his hand the blood which issued from the wound, and scattering
it towards the heavens, exclaimed, “Thou hast vanquished, Galilean.”
These stories, popularised by the Byzantine art (Fig. 308), testify to
the importance attached by the Christians to the struggle in which they
were engaged with Julian.
The fathers of the Church endeavoured to oppose to the schools
of philosophy, which had done so much harm to religion, purely
ecclesiastical schools, for the teaching of the faithful and in order
to protect them from the seductions of heretical learning. The school
of Edessa was the most flourishing of these Eastern schools during the
third and fourth centuries.
[Illustration: Fig. 308.--Dream of St. Basilius the Great.--The
Martyr of Cesarea, St. Mercurius, sent from heaven by Christ, is
in the act of stabbing the Emperor Julian the Apostate, whom he
has thrown to the ground (see the text, p. 399).--After a Greek
Painting of the Sixteenth Century, though the style is that of
the Eleventh, in the Library of M. Firmin-Didot. The matters
relating to this subject will be found collected in the “Mélanges
d’Archéologie” of P. Cahier, vol. i., p. 39 _et seq._]
The part taken by the emperors themselves in the dogmatic disputes of
the Christians, and the notoriety acquired by the rhetoricians who
attacked or defended the truth, had made a number of vain nonentities
rival each other in extravagance and recklessness in their endeavours
to become celebrated: they tried to attract public notice by an excess
of zeal against the heretics, by the austerity of their habits, by
some eccentric practice, or by the rashness of their attacks against
the discipline of the Church, notably against the worship paid to the
Virgin. Such were Coluthus, Aetius, Bonosus, Helvidius, Jovinian, the
Barefooted Friars, the Messalians, the Priscillianists, &c. Civil
dissensions broke out and blood was shed, and the Court of Byzantium
felt, through the great officers of the empire--and especially through
the women, who took a passionate interest in these abstractions of
dogma--the effect of every religious collision.
During the fourth century Arianism, which only saw in the Word a
superior being created to intervene between God and man, was the
prevailing heresy. The fifth century was agitated by the Pelagians,
disciples of Pelagius, a native of Great Britain. This man, who was
wanting neither in talent nor in ability, endeavoured to promulgate
his doctrine, based upon the negation of original sin; he maintained
that _man_ could observe the commandments of God and work out his
own salvation without the supernatural aid of divine grace--this was
a virtual denial of Christ’s word, “Without me ye can do nothing.”
Celestius, one of his followers, promulgated this heresy in Africa,
where it was eloquently combated by St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippona.
The council of Carthage (415) condemned it, and, upon the demand
of the Fathers there present, Pope Innocent I. issued his anathema
against Pelagius and his adherents. It was then that St. Augustine
pronounced the celebrated sentence, “Rome has spoken, the judgment
of the African bishops is confirmed by letters from the pope, the
cause is at an end--pray God that the error may be also!” (_Roma
locuta est, causa finita est_). But the leader of the sect wrote to
Zosimus, Innocent’s successor, a respectful letter of justification,
and, his envoy Celestius having presented to the new pope an insidious
profession of faith, by which he undertook to condemn anything which
should be reprobated by the Holy See, Zosimus intervened with the
African bishops on behalf of Pelagius, whom he sincerely believed
to be attached to the true faith. Those bishops represented to the
pontiff that his credulity had been imposed upon, and that the heretic,
before receiving absolution, ought to be made to abjure his errors
formally and explicitly. The pope then saw the trickery which had been
attempted, and again condemned Pelagius and his followers. The latter
appealed to the Council, but St. Augustine proved that the heresy
imputed to them had been fully inquired into by the African bishops
and irrevocably condemned by the Holy See, and that all that remained
to be done was to put it down. The Emperor Honorius, considering the
political troubles which were engendered, in the East more especially,
by religious dissensions, decreed that whoever should persist in
upholding the errors of Pelagianism should be punished with exile.
The heresy did not, however, altogether disappear, but underwent a
modification of form, and the semi-Pelagians, whose doctrine was
formally expounded by Cassianus the monk, while admitting original sin,
maintained that God had given to man the innate and natural power of
walking in the way of salvation, of believing and of freeing himself
from the fetters of sin without the help of divine grace. This was
appropriating the religious to the philosophical notion of free-will.
These abstract questions may to us seem very subtle, but in these early
centuries they were the great questions which occupied the attention
of society. A new heretic, Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople,
created a vast sensation throughout Christianity by maintaining that
Jesus Christ embodied two distinct persons. Hitherto all Christians
had believed as the Church taught them, that the divine and the human
nature of Jesus Christ belonged to one person--the Word, the second
person of the Trinity. Nestorius attacked this fundamental dogma
indirectly, declaring that the Virgin should be called the _Mother of
Christ_, but not the _Mother of God_. This doctrine, implying
that in Christ there were two distinct persons, was so repulsive to the
faithful that, when the bishop expounded it to them for the first time,
they immediately left the church for fear of seeming to approve this
new heresy. The Emperor Theodosius the younger, seeing what disturbance
the preaching of Nestorius was giving rise to in Constantinople,
assembled a council at Ephesus, which was presided over by St. Cyril,
Bishop of Alexandria, on behalf of the pope. The heresiarch refused to
appear, and his doctrine was examined, discussed, and condemned.
The people of Ephesus gave marked evidence of their satisfaction
when they found that the title of Mother of God was confirmed to the
Virgin. But the ambassador of Theodosius, a devoted ally of Nestorius,
intercepted the despatch of the proceedings of the Council, and sent
to Constantinople a garbled account. The approaches to the imperial
palace were so well guarded, that there seemed to be little hope of
acquainting the emperor with what had really taken place, until a
deputy of the council resorted to the ruse of disguising himself as
a beggar and conveying the true written report in the hollow of his
staff. Theodosius then shut up Nestorius in a monastery at Antioch,
and, as he continued to promulgate his dogma, exiled him to Egypt.
A zealous monk, Eutyches, superior of a monastery near Constantinople,
while combating the heresy of Nestorius, fell into the opposite error,
alike contrary to orthodox teaching. Instead of respecting the letter
of the dogma, he in his turn became a schismatic, as he maintained
that there was only one nature in Jesus Christ--the divine; that this
had absorbed the human nature as the ocean absorbs a drop of water.
Condemned at Constantinople, he appealed from the sentence to another
council assembled at Ephesus, the decrees of which were confirmed by
Theodosius II. At the accession of Justinian, the orthodox religion
regained all its authority; Eutychianism no longer dared to attack it,
but Arianism extended even into Gaul in the track of the victorious
armies of Theodoric, Egidius, Odoacer, Totila, and the long-haired
kings.
The reign of Leo the Isaurian opened up fresh opportunities for
error. The sacred images, which had been held in veneration from the
earliest ages, became a cause of dispute in the East, where they were
disapproved of by Mahomet and forbidden by the Koran. It was alleged
that the figurative representation of human beings was subjected to
certain astral and diabolical influences, and that it was contrary to
religion, not to say sacrilegious, thus to disturb the quiet repose of
their souls. Leo the Isaurian, who had imbibed this idea, which was,
moreover, taught in oriental magic, issued against all kinds of images
the celebrated edict which was excommunicated by the pope, and which
convulsed the whole Eastern world. Luitprand, King of the Lombards,
the Venetians, Charles Martel and his Franks, were summoned to the
aid of the Eternal City, menaced by the forces of the empire, which
was determined to impose the condemnation of images upon the Western
Church. Charles Martel, by his overthrow of the victorious Saracens on
the plains of Poitiers (732), rendered a service of inestimable value
to the Christian religion as well as to France, for Islamism was upon
the point of subjugating all Christian Europe.
[Illustration: Fig. 309.--Amaury’s Disciples burnt by order
of Philip Augustus (1208).--Fac-simile of a Miniature in
the “Chroniques de St. Denis” (Manuscript of the Fourteenth
Century).--Burgundian Library, Brussels.]
[Illustration: Fig. 310.--Episode in the Siege of Toulouse,
representing, according to tradition, the death of Simon de
Montfort, who was killed on the 25th of June, 1218.--Bas-relief
in stone in the Church of St. Nazaire, in Carcassonne (Thirteenth
Century).]
During the reign of the Empress Irene, the second Council of Nice had
re-established the worship of images (787), but, until the accession
of the Empress Theodora, who enforced the decisions of the Council,
the Iconoclasts upon the one side, and the Manicheans upon the other,
continued to disturb the East as well as the various provinces of
Western and Southern Europe. In this great civil war a hundred thousand
persons perished; and those who succeeded in escaping took refuge in
the solitude of remote valleys and inaccessible mountains, where they
entrenched themselves and incessantly made inroads upon and ravaged the
territory of the empire. The separation of the Greek and the Latin
Churches, prepared if not actually affected under the Emperor Bardas
(854-866), served to further the spread of heresy. No new sect arose in
the eleventh century, but schisms broke out in the Church, some due to
individual pride and ambition, others emanating from the dialectics of
Aristotle, from the strange abuse of syllogism, and the substitution
of reasoning for faith. The mysteries were radically changed by the
endeavours to reconcile them with ordinary ideas, to interpret and
accommodate them to the vulgar understanding. Bérenger (tenth century),
in endeavouring to explain the dogma of the eucharist, himself fell
into heresy, and Roscelin, the chief of the Nominalists (eleventh
century), in his efforts to clear up the mystery of the Trinity, was
led to assert that it was but a name which did not correspond with
any actual fact. The Manicheans had made their way into Europe; they
affected a love of poverty and humble conduct which predisposed people
in their favour and won them adherents. Many of them were burnt at the
stake, but the sect was not crushed out, often reappearing in different
cities of Europe under various names, now in one shape and now in
another.
The civil tribunals also condemned to be burnt the disciples of a
theologian named Amaury of Paris, who promulgated his dogma during
the reign of Philip Augustus (Fig. 309). He taught that God is the
first cause, and that the law of Jesus Christ was to terminate in
the year 1200, and to make way for the law of the Holy Ghost, which
would sanctify men without any external act; by his denial of the
resurrection of the dead and of hell, he destroyed the essential basis
of morality. This doctrine, as convenient as it was dangerous, found
many warm partisans.
Abelard, the most talented dialectician of his day, gifted with
wonderful learning, and armed with a rational theology which he made
intelligible, assigned a different origin and a different mode of
action to each of the three persons of the Trinity. The divines at once
prepared to combat his views, and St. Bernard constituted himself their
champion. Abelard, when condemned, repented, and, on his knees before
his judges, burnt the books which contained his heretical theories; he
showed himself, indeed, even a greater man by this expiatory act than
he had ever done by the brilliancy of his teaching. Bishop Gilbert de
la Porrée, a scholastic heresiarch like Abelard, also met a terrible
antagonist in the gifted Abbot of Clairvaux, and, bowing his head,
he confessed his guilt, leaving his disciples to maintain that the
attributes of God ought to be considered as distinct from his essence.
Arnold of Brescia attacked the temporal power, upon the ground that
the Church should be stripped of her property, that the wallet of St.
Peter should be given back to the pope, and the ancient Roman Republic
proclaimed in the pontifical city. Valdo went still further; he advised
the Christians to renounce all kinds of property, in order to render
their lives more spiritual. The Albigenses (Figs. 310 and 311) and the
Waldenses, who were Manicheans under another name, eventually embodied
in themselves all the heresies which, towards the close of the twelfth
century, had spread over Europe and chiefly throughout the south of
France. In the following chapter (“The Inquisition”), the account of
the crusade preached against them is related at length. From every
quarter of Christendom, but chiefly from Germany, Flanders, and France,
crusaders were enlisted beneath the banner of the faith.
[Illustration: Fig. 311.--Entry of Louis VIII., King of France,
and of Cardinal St. Angelo, the Pope’s Legate, upon the 12th of
September, 1226, into Avignon, which had just capitulated after
a three months’ siege.--After a Miniature in the “Chroniques de
Hainaut” (Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Burgundian
Library, Brussels).]
[Illustration: Fig. 312.--Heresy of the Flagellants.--The Latin
inscription upon the streamer borne by the Bishop of Hippona
signifies, “They sacrifice to Satan, and not to God.”--Fac-simile
of a Miniature in the “Cité de Dieu,” by St. Augustine
(Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in St. Geneviève Library,
Paris).]
This campaign was begun in 1196. The council which condemned the new
Manichean heresy met at Montpellier in December of that year, and the
first effect of the repressive measures which it very promptly employed
was to drive back into the Cevennes, the Alps, and the Vosges, and
towards the Rhône, the Moselle, and the Rhine, a host of heretics who
endeavoured to teach publicly in the free towns of Germany.
An excess of devotion, which had its origin in the wish to avert the
wrath of God, gave birth in Italy quite spontaneously to the sect
known as the Flagellants. This strange infatuation for scourging began
at Perugia, whence it passed to Rome and afterwards to Germany and
Poland. The nobles, the elders, the people of all classes, the poor and
even the children, traversed the streets of the towns and the country
districts with bare shoulders, scourging themselves mercilessly with
whips having leathern thongs (Fig. 312). These fanatics who travelled
through all Europe, firmly believed that an angel had brought a missive
from Jesus Christ, which declared that there was only one way for a
Christian to obtain pardon for his sins, viz. to leave his native
country and scourge himself for thirty-three consecutive days, in
commemoration of the thirty-three years which Christ had passed upon
earth. The Apostolicals, the Dulcinists, the Beghards, the Flagellants,
the Spiritual Brothers, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Turlupins,
&c., adopted these superstitious ideas, and constituted distinct sects
which were condemned by the Church as heretical. The sectaries appealed
from the sentence: the civil tribunals backed up the ecclesiastical
ones; the faggots were kindled and a vast number of heretics perished;
many, however, escaped, and, joining the Albigenses, they formed
the sect of the Lollards. The Englishman Wickliff, whose heresy had
pervaded all Britain (1368–1384), openly attacked the Court of Rome,
the upper clergy, the liturgy, and the sacraments, with an audacity
all the greater because he felt that he had the support of the people
at large and of several sovereigns. The University of Oxford made a
critical examination of Wickliff’s books, and found them to contain
two hundred and seventy-eight reprehensible propositions, which it
submitted for censure to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop
of London. After he had declaimed against the Church, its customs and
its institutions, Wickliff attacked the very foundations of civil
society, by his doctrine that, to possess any right or authority
upon earth, it was necessary to be in a state of grace. Consequently
kings, nobles, and the landowners were to lose their political and
domanial rights, since they were in a state of mortal sin, just as
the pope, the bishops, and the priests through sin were to lose their
spiritual powers. He moreover denied the existence of free-will; and
his allegation that everything which man did he was necessarily obliged
to do, implied that all punishment was unjust, for no one is guilty
who acts under compulsion. Lastly, he only recognised the existence
of God to make Him responsible for evil, maintaining that God also
is moved by an invincible necessity, that He looks with approval on
those who sin, that He even constrains men to commit sin; “so that,”
as Bossuet remarks, “the religion of this so-called Reformer was worse
than atheism.” It is true that with Wickliff God counted for little,
for, according to his system, “every creature is God, everything is
God.” It is easy to understand the effect of such doctrines as these
upon the masses; the religious dispute was transformed into a social
question. The followers of Wickliff, when condemned, refused to bow to
the decisions of the ecclesiastical authority. Their books were burnt,
their apostles were sent to the stake, while others were imprisoned or
exiled. But, in spite of this rigorous treatment, Wickliff’s doctrines
made a deep impression in England, obtained shortly afterwards the
protection of the House of Commons, and disposed men’s minds to bend
beneath the despotic will of Henry VIII.
[Illustration: Fig. 313.--John Wickliff, a theologian Heresiarch,
the Precursor of Luther, born at Wickliff, in England, about
1324, died in 1387.--After the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes
Illustres:” 4to, Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581.]
The staunchest Catholic writers admit that the clergy are themselves
responsible for the triumph of the heretics. Moeller says--“The
relaxation of ecclesiastical discipline amongst the clergy and that
in a great many religious communities, from which the pontifical
court itself was not always exempt, gave the sectaries of the
sixteenth century a pretext for their rebellion against the Church,
its doctrines, its hierarchy, and its institutions. To this moral
decadence of a great part of the clergy must further be added the
profound ignorance of the upper clergy; and even those who cultivated
literature and science confined themselves almost exclusively to the
study of Greek and Latin literature, which directed the whole course of
scientific research from the fifteenth century downwards. Many pagan
ideas had pervaded men’s minds, and had contributed to create a feeling
of contempt both for Christianity and for that beautiful Christian
literature which had shed a lustre on the Church from the very
earliest times. This condition of the clergy had a baneful influence
upon the mass of the people, who lived in utter ignorance of religion,
and who had lost their attachment to the Church and all respect for its
pastors.”
This religious indifference of the clergy and of the people explains
the success, not only of the heresiarchs who presented themselves as
reformers of manners and discipline, but even of the sects held in the
lowest esteem, the sorcerers, for instance. The facts are too numerous
and too well-authenticated to admit of any doubt upon this head. There
existed throughout all Europe, in the Middle Ages, numerous sects
of sorcerers and witches who in all seriousness professed to give
themselves over to the devil in exchange for the gift of magic power.
The Spanish Inquisition was not the only body which sent them to the
stake, after having submitted them to trial and received the confession
of their misdeeds; the French tribunals pronounced sentence of death in
similar cases when the accused, after long and minute interrogatories,
but without being put to the torture, made a confession of their
satanic orgies known by the name of _sabbat_ (Fig. 314). This kind
of heresy eluded all the steps taken by the civil and the religious
powers to put it down. The “Histoire des Procès de Sorcellerie,” by
Soldam, tells us that, even at the close of the sixteenth century, from
1590 to 1594, thirty-five witches were condemned to be burnt, out of
a total population of six thousand, in the small Protestant town of
Nordling, in Germany. The enormities of the sect of sorcerers attest,
no doubt, a profound depravation of morals, but they contained no germ
of social revolution; such, however, was not the case with the theories
expounded by the great heresiarchs.
[Illustration: Fig. 314.--The “Sabbat,” reprint of the legend
contained in a sentence of the Arras Tribunal in 1460.--Engraving
of the Sixteenth Century, preserved in the National Library,
Paris.]