and commercial life. The German notion of the king as representative of
the nation was easily combined with the theocratic theory of the Old
Testament. David's court, with his mighty men (II Sam. 23), furnished a
good example for any royal court of this period. Feudalism seemed to
agree with the stories of the patriarchs, as when Abraham led forth his
trained men, three hundred and eighteen in number, and pursued the
invaders who had taken captive his brother's son Lot. Bondage, serfdom,
even slavery, seemed to be sanctioned by the Bible. The church did not
object to slavery provided the Christian faith of the slave was
respected; he was never to be sold to a Jew or a pagan. The opposition
against slavery in the Middle Ages came from the monasteries. Here the
ancient Stoic doctrine that all men are equal and no man is to be
treated as a brute animal had been combined with the Christian view of
brotherhood that all are children of God, and with the doctrine of the
simple life. But this theory, championed by the monasteries, spread only
slowly. It did not put an end to slavery in the northern countries of
Europe before the thirteenth century. In the eastern and southern
countries, where Christianity bordered on Mohammedanism, slavery did not
die out before the sixteenth century, and bondage remained everywhere
until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Bible defined the
position of the Jews, who as murderers of Jesus were thought of as
living under the divine punishment. Whatever happened to them was
regarded as a penalty due to the crime of their fathers. So they were
exposed to all kinds of insults if they were not protected by the king,
whose personal serfs they were held to be. A large part of this general
hatred of the Jews was due to the fact that they were making money out
of their trade and their medical science, being allowed by their own law
to take usury from the Christians. The law of Moses (in Deut. 23 : 20)
expressly says that a Jew may lend upon usury to a foreigner, while he
is forbidden to do so dealing with a brother. Now, as we have already
seen, the Christian church adopted this law as forbidding the Christians
to lend at interest. The fatal result was that trade on the basis of
credit was made almost impossible, and that the Jew was the only one who
could lend money at interest. As he abused this opportunity by taking
enormous usury, it became evident that the one remedy to be used from
time to time was to take away from him by force all the money he had
made, thus restoring it to its proper source. The Jew might be thankful
if he got off with his life. Among the many accusations brought against
the Jews on such occasions, one of the most effective was the indictment
that they had falsified their Bibles, putting in curses against the
Christians, or that they had insulted and destroyed Christian Bibles.
The criminal charge of falsifying the holy Scriptures had been raised
against many heretics, too, and in most cases had been proved to be
untrue. It could be retorted that the Christian church itself, during
the first centuries, had "improved" the Psalter in many a place by
slight Christian interpolations. Destroying books by fire was at this
time one of the most common means used by the church in fighting Jews
and heretics, and vice versa. The Bible recorded not only the burning of
the magical books at Ephesus but also the burning of the holy Scriptures
by Antiochus Epiphanes. So this also was "Bible tradition."
To sum up our survey of mediaeval civilisation we find the Bible
recognised as one, if not as the one, foundation. Its influence was to
be seen in every department: the view of the world, the view of history,
arts and sciences, social life and commerce. It was to the Bible that
people referred, even if the thing had not been deduced from the Bible;
they made it appear Biblical, though it was not so in itself, because
they felt that it had to be Biblical if it was to be recognised as an
integral part of Christian civilisation. That is what makes it so
difficult for us to define the real influence of the Bible, there is so
much artificial Biblicality.
The Bible was the leading norm, and it was recognised as such. Never had
the Bible had a higher estimation or a more undisputed influence.
And yet the real influence of the Bible was a limited one. It had not
only to face the rivalry of the classics on one side but of the
Apocrypha, legends, ecclesiastical traditions on the other. Its real
influence was mostly indirect. Biblical ideas had been incorporated into
the works on the world and nature; Biblical history had been used for
the text-books of history, and now these books came to be substitutes
for the Bible. All read the _Historia Scholastica_ of Peter Comestor;
very few read the Bible. And those few again read mostly the historical
parts of the Bible without caring for the books of the prophets and the
letters of the apostles. A wide-spread substitute for the Bible was the
so-called _Biblia Historialis_, which gave the Biblical history in a
convenient not to say entertaining and even amusing form. Another
well-known substitute was the so-called _Biblia Pauperum_ ("Bible of the
poor)," showing the most important features of the life of Christ,
together with typical scenes from the Old Testament and some verses from
the Bible. By means of all these substitutes the people became very
familiar with Biblical history, but they knew nothing about doctrines.
Theologians, of course, did, but their eyes were blinded by the
tradition of the church, the doctrine of the fathers. They interpreted
the Bible according to tradition. That is the great demerit of this
age; the people had free access to the Bible, but the Bible became alien
to them by reason of its many substitutes and its successful rivals. The
reaction against this will furnish the subject for our next chapter.
V
THE BIBLE STIRS NON-CONFORMIST MOVEMENTS (1150-1450)
Mediaeval civilisation has a twofold aspect. It looks backward, to the
old church and the old Roman empire; so far it is Biblical and
classical. But it also looks forward, to the development of the nations
and later to the development of the individual personality, as this has
been realised in the Renaissance; so far it is secular and, in a way,
modern. In the earlier part of the Middle Ages the nations did not feel
strong enough by themselves. They were parts of the empire, and all
children of the one mother church. The church was training them, and it
fulfilled this task in an admirable way. But the children grew up and
the church lost its power over them. They declared themselves of age and
independent at the very moment when the church seemed to have the
largest and most undoubted influence.
The church was training the nations by means of the Bible, and now it is
the Bible which stirs the anti-ecclesiastical movements. The Bible had
been used by the church chiefly in an indirect way; parts of the Bible
or substitutes for it had taken its place. Now the complete Bible made
its appeal to the people and gave directions which were exactly opposite
to the training given by the church.
The Bible had originally been accessible to everybody. In the first
centuries the church itself had insisted upon this publicity, as we have
seen in the first chapter. Then came a time when almost no one could
read and the clergy had the Bible practically to themselves. They did
not take away the Bible from the hands of the laymen; the laymen
themselves did not care for it because they could not read it; they were
totally dependent on the clergy. But now civilisation had made a new
start; the art of reading became again popular. And suddenly a desire
for reading the Bible spread among the people. The clergy were
astonished to find the laymen using their right of reading the Bible
themselves. That was something new, and we see the clergy puzzled, we
hear them complain. They did not want people to read the Bible, for--as
they said--this would introduce them to heresy. And so it proved.
The movement starts from the south of France. As early as the eleventh
century we hear of people here who gather in order to hear the Bible
read. It is the cardinal Pietro Damiani, a friend of Gregory VII, who
complains of their presumption. They are plain, simple folk,
shopkeepers, farmers, women, having no theological education, and yet
aiming at understanding the Bible. The theologians of this period
treated the Bible as a book of secrets. In order to understand it aright
one had to be initiated into the art of interpreting everything by
allegory according to the authority of the fathers. They used to quote
Saint Jerome, that the Bible was a mysterious stream; one man can walk
through in safety while another would be drowned. They therefore
disapproved earnestly of this reading of the Bible by unprepared
tradesmen, women, and children. But reading did not stop. The same
complaint occurs again and again during the next decades. We hear of
people in the diocese of Metz, simple country folk, reading the Bible.
The church authorities already began to be alarmed and to take a more
severe attitude toward the offenders.
The main movement, to be mentioned here, is the one connected with the
name of Peter Waldo, a merchant of Lyons, who was a zealous reader of
the Bible himself, and travelling about held frequent meetings with
people of the same sort. The story of his "conversion," as given by the
best authorities, runs as follows. It was in 1176, the year of a great
famine, that one Sunday afternoon he listened to a jongleur reciting the
famous legend of Saint Alexis the poor. He was struck by this heroism of
poverty, and the next day he asked a well-known master of theology what
was the surest way to God. The master, following the best tradition of
the mediaeval church, told him to follow Christ's advice: "If thou
wouldst be perfect, go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the
poor." So Peter separates himself from wife and children and begins to
live the life of a poor man--a beggar. Others join him; two by two, on
foot, they go preaching the gospel. They are not anxious for the morrow;
they do not work; they have faith that whatever they need will be
supplied to them. Thus they try to fulfil Christ's commandments and to
imitate his disciples. They refuse to take an oath; they censure lying
as a deadly sin; they condemn all shedding of blood either in war or in
the execution of justice. The fraternity called itself the Poor in
Spirit. At the beginning they thought themselves to be true members of
the church; only later, when the church denied to them the right of
preaching, did they form a sect, Peter being ordained bishop and giving
orders to other members of the community.
Meanwhile a similar fraternity of poor men, or _humiliati_ as they were
called here, had made their appearance in the north of Italy. It was a
kind of workmen's union. So far as we know there was no connection at
the beginning between this movement and the one at Lyons. Both started
independently, and it was only later that they came into contact,
without, however, amalgamating. The Italian fraternity spread from Milan
all through that region and was rapidly extended into Germany, while
from Lyons the Poor went through France and even through Spain. It was
an enormous movement among the laity, and it was stirred by the Bible.
Peter Waldo desired to have the Bible translated into his own
vernacular; and it was by reading the Bible that these people got their
enthusiasm and their eagerness even to suffer persecution and death.
Many scholars in former days treated this Waldensian movement as truly
Protestant; they used to call Peter Waldo and his followers reformers
before the Reformation. The Protestant church in Italy, calling itself
Waldensian and growing in our own day more and more vigorously in the
spirit of Calvinistic Protestantism, seemed to support this view. And
yet it is wrong. The true Protestantism of the Waldensians dates only
from the sixteenth century, when they came in contact with Geneva, and
then went over to Calvinism. Before this they had been something quite
different, a purely mediaeval form of Christianity. The characteristic
point is that they take the gospel as a law, exactly as the monks did.
If the monks kept to poverty, fasting, praying, and so on, in order to
fulfil the gospel's commands, these people did the same; only they did
not become monks and enter a monastery; they continued to live in the
world, carrying on their ordinary business, because, they said, the
commands of the gospel were not given to the monks only, but to every
Christian. They abolished the double standard of morality which the
church had established, the standard of perfection, reached only by the
clergy and monks, and the standard of secular morality, kept by the
average Christian; but they abolished it in the opposite way from the
reformers, by making the ascetic ideal the rule for every Christian. It
was from the Bible that they deduced this ideal and its binding force
for every Christian, but it was, of course, the mediaeval understanding
of the Bible which they followed.
It is important to distinguish clearly this Waldensian movement from the
so-called Albigensian one. This also has to do with the Bible, and
sometimes seems closely akin to the former, but is based on an entirely
different principle. It goes back to a very early time and originates
outside of Christianity. It was in the third century after Christ in
Persia, that a certain Mani tried to reform the religion of Zoroaster by
adding Gnostic speculations. He failed, and was put to death together
with some of his adherents. But the movement spread and reached as far
as Gaul and North Africa in the West. Here this Gnostic doctrine of
Persian origin took the form of a Christian heresy. Manicheism, as it
was called, accepted the Christian Bible, or at least some parts of it.
It accepted still more heartily the Christian Apocrypha, which seemed to
be written for the very purpose of supporting its favourite doctrines.
Saint Augustine, having been for a long time an adherent of Manicheism,
afterward spent a great deal of his energy in arguing with this sect and
refuting their theories and their criticism. The leading idea was a
strictly dualistic conception of the world such as is characteristic of
Persian religion: there are two gods, a good one and a bad one; in other
words, God and the devil are of the same rank. The devil is the author
of this bodily creation; whatsoever is material comes from him; while
God, the good god, is purely spiritual and does not create anything but
spiritual beings. So man, who is of a mixed nature, having a divine soul
in a material body, is bound to defy the devil by weakening the
material part of his being. He has to refrain from meat and wine, from
marriage, and from a number of things which belong to the devil's
dominion. This highest degree of perfection only few could reach.
Therefore the Manicheans had several classes of members: the lower
classes living in the world had to support the higher by their manual
labour; the higher class of the so-called "perfect" lived entirely for
prayer and spiritual exercises. It was a well-organised body, extending
over all the countries. They had their own Pope, residing usually in the
East. They were persecuted in Persia, persecuted in the Roman empire,
persecuted later both by the church and by the secular powers; but in
spite of all difficulties they kept on, living in secrecy and trying to
conform as much as possible in outward appearance to the requirements
for church members. They went to the Catholic church, even attended mass
and took the holy communion--one charge brought against them was that
instead of eating the consecrated bread they concealed it in their mouth
and spit it out afterward--but they had their own clandestine
congregations, often by night, often outside of the town. They appear
here and there under different names. They call themselves Cathari, or
the pure ones, from which is derived "Ketzer," the German word for
heretics. In the East they often are called Bogomils or Paulicians; in
the West the usual name given to them was Albigensians, from a town,
Albi, in the south of France, where they had their headquarters.
The attitude of these Albigensians toward the Bible was a somewhat
divided one. They accepted the New Testament and interpreted it
according to their dualistic theory as a law of asceticism, herein
corresponding to the church's interpretation. They praised exceedingly
the fourth Gospel, and used its opening verses at their solemn
initiation, the so-called _consolamentum_, by which an adherent got the
degree of "perfect" and became a member of the highest class. But they
rejected the Old Testament, either the whole of it or the greater part,
some admitting that the Psalter, Job, the books of Solomon, and the
books of the prophets were inspired by the good god or (as they used to
say) were written in heaven. The rest, they said, came from the devil,
and they criticised strongly the historical parts of the Old Testament,
in particular the account of the creation given in Genesis. They took
this and all the other stories in a strictly literal sense, not allowing
for any allegorical interpretation. It was in the discussions against
the Manicheans that Saint Augustine, and through him the Western church,
learned to value the allegorical method of interpretation. It was the
easiest way of evading all the difficulties which were raised by the
criticism of the Manicheans.
This Manichean or, to use the mediaeval expression, Albigensian heresy
could hardly be defined as a movement incited by the Bible. It was
wholly different from the Waldensian movement and its allies. The
Waldensians were at the beginning loyal members of the Catholic church,
and were driven into opposition only by the resistance of the clergy,
not being allowed to read and to use their Bible and being opposed and
disturbed in their harmless meetings; but after having been separated
from the church they kept aloof from it. The Albigensians, on the other
hand, were at heart opposed to everything in Christianity. They were, in
fact, adherents of another religion, pretending for the sake of safety
to be members of the Catholic church. Yet just this attitude of the
Albigensians was what made it so difficult to distinguish between the
two movements, and has caused a curious confusion. The Waldensians, with
their frank and open opposition to certain institutions of the church,
were taken by many to be the more dangerous, and were therefore attacked
and persecuted more severely than the Albigensians, who knew how to
conform themselves to the outward appearance of church life.
What was the attitude of the church toward these non-conformist
movements? According to the current theory of the time there was no
salvation outside the church; there was no room for various
denominations. A man belonged to the church by the very fact that he was
born in a Catholic community and consequently was baptised. He _had_ to
attend the church, which procured for him eternal salvation, and if he
neglected his duties, he was compelled to perform them by the church
authorities perhaps with the help of the secular power. A man had no
right to try his own way to salvation; he was forced to use the means
provided for him by the church. And if he did not submit he was to be
extinguished in order that his devilish spirit of heresy might not
infect others; possibly he himself could be saved by being deprived of
his sinful body and godless life. This theory gave a legal sanction for
using all kinds of persuasion by force, for applying cruel tortures, and
for inflicting death by burning, hanging, beheading.
But the church found that the movements could not be mastered in this
way. In order to extirpate the evil, the underlying cause had to be
rooted out or else its energy turned in another direction.
The first method was tried for the Bible. It was the Bible which had
stirred the Waldensian and similar movements; so the Bible was to be
kept away from the people. When asked by the bishop of Metz what he
ought to do with regard to the associations of Bible readers in his
diocese, Pope Innocent III replies (1199) that of course the study of
the Bible is to be encouraged among the clergy, but that all laymen are
to be kept from it, the Bible being so profound in its mysteries that
even scholars sometimes get beyond their depth and are drowned. At the
end of his letter he refers to the holiness of Mount Sinai as expressed
in Ex. 19 : 12, 13: "Take heed to yourselves, that ye go not up into the
mount, or touch the border of it: whosoever toucheth the mount shall be
surely put to death: no hand shall touch him, but he shall surely be
stoned, or shot through; whether it be beast or man, it shall not live."
Likewise, the Pope says, if a layman touches the Bible he is guilty of
sacrilege and ought to be stoned or shot through. This amounts to a
general prohibition of Bible reading for the laity. It was especially
against the translations of the Bible into the vernacular tongues that
the church's ordinances were directed. In the later centuries of the
Middle Ages the prohibitions against Bible reading by the laity, against
translating the Bible, and against selling the Bible became more
frequent. But it is exactly this frequent repetition which makes it
evident that the prohibitions were for the most part neglected. The best
known is a book ordinance, issued by Bishop Berthold of Mainz in 1485-6,
in which the bishop forbids the printing and selling of Bibles unless
they are annotated by approved church theologians, the Bibles in the
vernacular language being forbidden altogether. We know of a Strassburg
printer who was at work printing a German Bible at the very time this
ordinance was issued. He did not stop printing, he only took care not to
mention his name in the book. Evidently he was sure that he could find a
sale for his book.
There was another way of overcoming these non-conformist tendencies, and
it proved to be more successful; the church tried to direct them and put
them to its own service. A good example of this method is given in the
history of the movement started by Saint Francis of Assisi. At the
beginning this was exactly like the Waldensian movement that spread
through the south of France and the north of Italy, and may have
received some influence from it; for we know that the family of Saint
Francis had French relations and that the business of his father brought
him into contact with people from the North. But the conversion of Saint
Francis was independent, so far as we know. It again was caused by the
Bible. Once at mass he heard the lesson from the Gospel, and was struck
by the same words which had struck so many thoughtful Christians before
him: "If thou wouldest be perfect, go, sell that which thou hast and
give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come
follow me." He at once throws away stick, bag, purse, shoes to become
the true follower of the poor Jesus and of his poor apostles, to be
himself the apostle of the gospel of poverty, the lover of his good lady
Poverty, as he likes to call her. When the first two disciples had
joined him he takes them at daybreak to a small chapel, takes from the
altar the book of the Gospels, and (so the legend tells us), opening it
three times, every time comes upon the words quoted above. Therefore
they were made the basis of Saint Francis' rule for his community,
together with the instruction given to Christ's disciples in
Luke 9 : 1-6, and Matt. 16 : 24-27: "If any man would come after me, let
him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me; for whosoever
would save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for
my sake shall find it; for what shall a man be profited if he shall gain
the whole world and forfeit his life, or what shall a man give in
exchange for his life?" It was the desire for martyrdom inspired by this
passage which caused Saint Francis to go to Palestine and preach the
gospel to the Moslems. In his retreat at Mount Alverno he assiduously
read the history of the passion, until he became so deeply impressed by
it that it had a corporal effect upon him. He became stigmatised, the
five wounds of Christ appeared on his body. Saint Francis composed an
interesting paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, and his famous hymn to the
sun is nothing else than a beautiful reproduction of the 148th Psalm.
When dying he asked for John 13 to be read to him. Thus all his life is
accompanied and profoundly affected by the Bible. His preaching is an
attempt at bringing the pure gospel of poverty before the people as
simply and plainly as he found it in the Gospels according to the
ascetic understanding of that time.
Now this would have turned into a non-conformist movement, like that of
the Poor of Lyons or the Poor of Milan, had not the bishop from the
beginning protected Saint Francis from his father's wrath. Then at a
later period Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia, known from his later life as
Pope Gregory IX, became a protector of Saint Francis and his fraternity
and managed to make of it a regular order in the service of the church.
It was not Saint Francis who founded the order of the Franciscans or
Friars, but some of his first pupils and friends, and certain high
dignitaries of the church abused him for their own purposes. They put
upon Saint Francis and his fraternity the whole machinery of a religious
body of the church. There was to be a general, and numerous provincials,
and an annual meeting of delegates; there were monasteries ruled by
abbots or guardians, and later these monasteries received endowments.
Besides the monks and the nuns who formed the first and second orders,
there was a third order of Saint Francis including those laymen who
wished to belong to the order and enjoy its religious benefits but were
prevented by their families from entering the monastery. This comes very
near to the ideal put forth by the Poor of Lyons, but the organisation
kept the whole body always in touch with the church and its authority.
The non-conformist tendency of the movement had been taken out and it
had been turned into an instrument of ecclesiastical policy.