A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 14 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 14Christendom in the Middle Ages (part 1)
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Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 14
Christendom in the Middle Ages (part 1)
RobertsonEnglish
It would be an error, in view of the biological generalization proceeded on and the facts noted in this inquiry, to suppose that even in the Dark Ages, so called, the spirit of critical reason was wholly absent from the life of Christendom. It had simply grown very rare, and was the more discountenanced where it strove to speak. But the most systematic suppression of heresies could not secure that no private heresy should remain. As Voltaire has remarked, there was "nearly always a small flock separated from the great." Apart too from such quasi-rationalism as was involved in semi-Pelagianism, critical heresy chronically arose even in the Byzantine provinces, which by the curtailment of the Empire had been left the most homogeneous and therefore the most manageable of the Christian States. It is necessary to note those survivals of partial freethinking, when we would trace the rise of modern thought.
§ 1. HERESY IN BYZANTIUM
It was probably from some indirect influence of the new anti-idolatrous religion of Islam that in the eighth century the soldier-emperor, Leo the Isaurian, known as the Iconoclast, derived his aversion to the image-worship which had long been as general in the Christian world as ever under polytheism. So gross had the superstition become that particular images were frequently selected as god-parents; of others the paint was partly scratched off to be mixed with the sacramental wine; and the bread was solemnly put in contact with them. Leo began (726) by an edict simply causing the images to be placed so high that they could not be kissed, but on being met with resistance and rebellion he ordered their total removal (730). One view is that he saw image-worship to be the main hindrance to the spread of the faith among Jews and Moslems, and took his measures accordingly. Save on this one point he was an orthodox Christian and Trinitarian, and his long effort to put down images and pictures was in itself rather fanatical than rationalistic, though a measure of freethinking was developed among the religious party he created. Of this spirit, as well as of the aversion to image-worship, something must have survived the official restoration of idolatry; but the traces are few. The most zealous iconoclasts seem never to have risen above the flat inconsistency of treating the cross and the written gospels with exactly the same adoration that their opponents paid to images; and their appeal to the scriptures--which was their first and last argument--was accordingly met by the retort that they themselves accepted the authority of tradition, as did the image-worshippers. The remarkable hostility of the army to the latter is to be explained, apparently, by the local bias of the eastern regions from which the soldiers were mainly recruited.
In the ninth century, when Saracen rivalry had stung the Byzantines into some partial revival of culture and science, the all-learned Patriarch Photius (c. 820-891), who reluctantly accepted ecclesiastical office, earned a dangerous repute for freethinking by declaring from the pulpit that earthquakes were produced by earthly causes and not by divine wrath. But this was an almost solitary gleam of reason in a generation wholly given up to furious strife over the worship of images, and Photius was one of the image-worshippers. The battle swung from extreme to extreme. The emperor Michael II, "the Stammerer" (820-828), held a medium position, and accordingly acquired the repute of a freethinker. A general under Leo V, "the Armenian," he had conspired against him, and when on the verge of execution had been raised to the throne in place of Leo, who was assassinated at the altar. The new emperor aimed above all things at peace and quietness; but his methods were thoroughly Byzantine, and included the castration of the four sons of Leo. Michael himself is said to have doubted the future resurrection of men, to have maintained that Judas was saved, and to have doubted the existence of Satan because he is not named in the Pentateuch --a species of freethinking not far removed from that of the Iconoclasts, whose grounds were merely Biblical. A generation later came Michael IV, "the Sot," bred a wastrel under the guardianship of his mother, Theodora (who in 842 restored image-worship and persecuted the Paulicians), and her brother Bardas, who ultimately put her in a convent. Michael, repeatedly defeated by the Saracens, long held his own at home. Taking into favour Basil, who married his (Michael's) mistress, he murdered Bardas, and a year later (867) was about to murder Basil in turn, when the latter anticipated him, murdered the emperor, and assumed the purple. It was under Basil, who put down the Iconoclasts, that Photius, after formally deposing and being deposed by the Pope of Rome (864-66) was really deposed and banished (868), to be restored to favour and office ten years later. In 886, on the death of Basil, he was again deposed, dying about 891. In that kaleidoscope of plot and faction, fanaticism and crime, there is small trace of sane thinking. Michael IV, in his disreputable way, was something of a freethinker, and could even with impunity burlesque the religious processions of the clergy, the orthodox populace joining in the laugh; but there was no such culture at Constantinople as could develop a sober rationalism, or sustain it against the clergy if it showed its head. Intelligence in general could not rise above the plane of the wrangle over images. While the struggle lasted, it was marked by all the ferocity that belonged from the outset to Christian strifes; and in the end, as usual, the more irrational bias triumphed.
It was in a sect whose doctrine at one point coincided with iconoclasm that there were preserved such rude seeds of oriental rationalism as could survive the rule of the Byzantine emperors, and carry the stimulus of heresy to the west. The rise of the Paulicians in Armenia dates from the seventh century, and was nominally by way of setting up a creed on the lines of Paul as against the paganized system of the Church. Rising as they did on the borders of Persia, they were probably affected from the first by Mazdean influences, as the dualistic principle was always affirmed by their virtual founder, Constantine, afterwards known as Sylvanus. Their original tenets seem to have been anti-Manichean, anti-Gnostic (though partly Marcionite), opposed to the worship of images and relics, to sacraments, to the adoration of the Virgin, of saints, and of angels, and to the acceptance of the Old Testament; and in an age in which the reading of the Sacred Books had already come to be regarded as a privilege of monks and priests, they insisted on reading the New Testament for themselves. In this they were virtually founding on the old pagan conception of religion, under which all heads of families could offer worship and sacrifice without the intervention of a priest, as against the Judæo-Christian sacerdotalism, which vetoed anything like a private cultus. In the teaching of Sylvanus, further, there were distinct Manichean and Gnostic characteristics--notably, hostility to Judaism; the denial that Christ had a real human body, capable of suffering; and the doctrine that baptism and the communion were properly spiritual and not physical rites. In the ninth century, when they had become a powerful and militant sect, often at war with the empire, they were still marked by their refusal to make any difference between priests and laymen. Anti-ecclesiasticism was thus a main feature of the whole movement; and the Byzantine Government, recognizing in its doctrine a particularly dangerous heresy, had at once bloodily attacked it, causing Sylvanus to be stoned to death. Still it grew, even to the length of exhibiting the usual phenomena of schism within itself. One section obtained the protection of the first iconoclastic emperor, who agreed with them on the subject of images; and a later leader, Sergius or Tychicus, won similar favour from Nicephorus I; but Leo the Armenian (suc. 813), fearing the stigma of their other heresies, and having already trouble enough from his iconoclasm, set up against them, as against the image-worshippers, a new and cruel persecution. They were thus driven over to the Saracens, whose advance-guard they became as against the Christian State; but the iconoclast Constantine Copronymus sympathetically transplanted many of them to Constantinople and Thrace, thus introducing their doctrine into Europe. The Empress Theodora (841-855), who restored image-worship, sought to exterminate those left in Armenia, slaying, it is said, a hundred thousand. Many of the remnant were thus forced into the arms of the Saracens; and the sect did the empire desperate mischief during many generations.
Meantime those planted in Thrace, in concert with the main body, carried propaganda into Bulgaria, and these again were further reinforced by refugees from Armenia in the ninth century, and in the tenth by a fresh colony transplanted from Armenia by the emperor John Zimisces, who valued them as a bulwark against the barbarous Slavs. Fresh persecution under Alexius I at the end of the eleventh century failed to suppress them; and imperial extortion constantly drove to their side numbers of fresh adherents, while the Bulgarians for similar reasons tended in mass to adopt their creed as against that of Constantinople. So greatly did the cult flourish that at its height it had a regular hierarchy, notably recalling that of the early Manicheans--with a pope, twelve magistri, and seventy-two bishops, each of whom had a filius major and filius minor as his assistants. Withal the democratic element remained strong, the laying on of the hands of communicants on the heads of newcomers being part of the rite of reception into full membership. Thus it came about that from Bulgaria there passed into western Europe, partly through the Slavonic sect called Bogomiles or Bogomilians (= Theophiloi, "lovers of God"), who were akin to the Paulicians, partly by more general influences, a contagion of democratic and anti-ecclesiastical heresy; so that the very name Bulgar became the French bougre = heretic--and worse. It specified the most obvious source of the new anti-Romanist heresies of the Albigenses, if not of the Vaudois (Waldenses).
§ 2. CRITICAL HERESY IN THE WEST
In the west, meanwhile, where the variety of social elements was favourable to new life, heresy of a rationalistic kind was not wholly lacking. About the middle of the eighth century we find one Feargal or Vergilius, an Irish priest in Bavaria, accused by St. Boniface, his enemy, of affirming, "in defiance of God and his own soul," the doctrine of the antipodes, which must have reached him through the ancient Greek lore carried to Ireland in the primary period of Christianization of that province. Of that influence we have already seen a trace in Pelagius and Coelestius; and we shall see more later in John the Scot. After being deposed by the Pope, Vergilius was reinstated; was made Bishop of Salzburg, and held the post till his death; and was even sainted afterwards; but the doctrine disappeared for centuries from the Christian world.
Other heresies, however, asserted themselves. Though image-worship finally triumphed there as in the east, it had strong opponents, notably Claudius, bishop of Turin (fl. 830) under the emperor Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, and his contemporary Agobard, bishop of Lyons. It is a significant fact that both men were born in Spain; and either to Saracen or to Jewish influence--the latter being then strong in the Moorish and even in the Christian world--may fairly be in part attributed their marked bias against image-worship. Claudius was slightly and Agobard well educated in Latin letters, so that an early impression would seem to have been at work in both cases. However that may be, they stood out as singularly rationalistic theologians in an age of general ignorance and superstition. Claudius vehemently resisted alike image-worship, saint-worship, and the Papal claims, and is recorded to have termed a council of bishops which condemned him "an assembly of asses." Agobard, in turn, is quite extraordinary in the thoroughness of his rejection of popular superstition, being not only an iconoclast but an enemy to prayer for change in the weather, to belief in incantations and the power of evil spirits, to the ordeal by fire, to the wager of battle, and to the belief in the verbal inspiration of the Sacred Books. In an age of enormous superstition and deep ignorance, he maintained within the Church that Reason was the noble gift of God. He was a rationalist born out of due time.
A grain of rationalism, as apart from professional self-interest, may also have entered into the outcry made at this period by the clergy against the rigidly predestinarian doctrine of the monk Gottschalk. His enemy, Rabanus or Hrabanus (called "the Moor"), seems again to represent some Saracen influence, inasmuch as he reproduced the scientific lore of Isidore of Seville. But the philosophic semi-rationalism of John Scotus (d. 875), later known as Erigena (John the Scot = of Ireland--the original "Scots" being Irish), seems to be traceable to the Greek studies which had been cherished in Christianized Ireland while the rest of western Europe lost them, and represents at once the imperfect beginning of the relatively rationalistic philosophy of Nominalism and the first western revival of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, howbeit by way of accommodation to the doctrine of the Church.
That John the Scot was an Irishman remains practically certain, even if we give up the term "Erigena," which, as has been shown by Floss, the most careful editor of his works, is not found in the oldest MSS. The reading there is Ierugena, which later shades into Erugena and Eriugena. (Cp. Ueberweg, i, 359; Poole, pp. 55-56, note; Dr. Th. Christlieb, Leben und Lehre des Johannes Scotus Erigena, 1860, p. 14 sq.; and Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie im Mittelalter, 1861, pp. 38-40.) From this elusive cognomen no certain inference can be drawn, too many being open; though the fact that John had himself coined the term Graiugena for a late Greek writer makes it likely that he called himself Ierugena in the sense of "born in the holy (island)" = Ireland. But the name Scotus, occurring without the Ierugena, is common in old MSS.; and it is almost impossible that any save a Scot of Ireland should have possessed the scholarship of John in the ninth century. In the west, Greek scholarship and philosophy had been special to Ireland from the time of Pelagius; and it is from Greek sources that John draws his inspiration and cast of thought. M. Taillandier not unjustly calls the Ireland of that era "l'île des saints, mais aussi l'île des libres penseurs." (Scot Érigène et la philosophie scolastique, 1843, p. 64.) To the same effect Huber, pp. 40-41. In writing that Johannes "was of Scottish nationality, but was probably born and brought up in Ireland," Ueberweg (i, 358) obscures the fact that the people of Ireland were the Scoti of that period. All the testimony goes to show "that Ireland was called Scotia, and its ruling people Scoti, from the first appearance of these names down to the eleventh century. But that [the] present Scotland was called Scotia, or its people Scoti, before the eleventh century, not so much as one single authority can be produced" (Pinkerton, Enquiry into the History of Scotland, 1789, ii, 237). Irish Scots gave their name to Scotland, and it was adopted by the Teutonic settlers.
While the land of John the Scot's birth is thus fairly certain, the place of his death remains a mystery. Out of a statement by Asser that King Alfred made one John, a priest, Abbot of Athelney, and that the said Abbot was murdered at the altar by hired assassins, there grew a later story that Alfred made John the Scot Abbot of Malmesbury, and that he was slain with the styli of two of his pupils. It is clear that the John of Asser was an "Old Saxon," and not the philosopher; and it is difficult to doubt that the second story, which arises in the twelfth century, is a hearsay distortion of the first. Cp. Christlieb, who argues (p. 42 sq.) for two Johns, one of them Scotus, and both assassinated, with Huber, who sets forth (p. 108 sq.) the view here followed. There is really no adequate ground for believing that John the Scot was ever a priest. We know not where or when he died; but the presumption is that it was in France, and not long after the death of his patron Charles--877. (Huber, p. 121.)
Called in by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, himself a normally superstitious believer, to answer Gottschalk, John Scotus in turn was accused of heresy, as he well might be on many points of his treatise, De Praedestinatione (851). He fiercely and not very fairly condemned Gottschalk as a heretic, charging him with denying both divine grace and freewill, but without disposing of Gottschalk's positive grounds; and arguing that God could not be the cause of sin, as if Gottschalk had not said the same thing. His superior speculative power comes out in his undertaking to show that for the Divine Being sin is non-ens; and that therefore that Being cannot properly be said either to foreknow or to predestinate, or to punish. But the argument becomes inconsistent inasmuch as it further affirms Deity to have so constituted the order of things that sin punishes itself. It is evident that in assimilating his pantheistic conceptions he had failed to think out their incompatibility with any theistic dogma whatever; his reasoning, on the whole, being no more coherent than Gottschalk's. He had in fact set out from an arbitrary theistic position that was at once Judaic, Christian, and Platonic, and went back on one line to the Gnostics; while on another his argument that sin has no real existence is a variant from an old thesis--made current, as we saw, by Euclides of Megara--with which orthodoxy had met the Manicheans. But to the abstract doctrine he gave a new practical point by declaring that the doctrine of hell-fire was a mere allegory; that heaven and hell alike were states of consciousness, not places. And if such concrete freethinking were not enough to infuriate the orthodox, they had from him the most explicit declarations that authority is derivable solely from reason.
In philosophy proper he must be credited, despite his inconsistency, with deep and original thought. Like every theologian of philosophic capacity before and since, he passes into pantheism as soon as he grapples closely with the difficulties of theism, and "the expressions which he uses are identical with those which were afterwards employed by Spinoza.... It was a tradition of the fourth or fifth century transferred to the ninth, an echo from Alexandria." Condemned by Pope Nicholas I and by two Church Councils, his writings none the less availed to keep that echo audible to later centuries.
The range and vigour of his practical rationalism may be gathered from his attitude in the controversy begun by the abbot Paschasius Radbert (831) on the nature of the Eucharist. Paschasius taught that there was a real transformation of the bread and wine into the divine body and blood; and the doctrine, thus nakedly put, startled the freer scholars of the time, who were not yet habituated to Latin orthodoxy. Another learned monk, Ratramnus, who had written a treatise on predestination at the request of the rationalizing emperor, Charles the Bald (discussing the problem in Gottschalk's sense without naming him), produced on the same monarch's invitation a treatise in which transubstantiation was denied, and the "real presence" was declared to be spiritual --a view already known to Paschasius as being held by some. John Scotus, also asked by the emperor to write on the subject, went so far as to argue that the bread and wine were merely symbols and memorials. As usual, the irrational doctrine became that of the Church; but the other must have wrought for reason in secret. For the rest, he set forth the old "modal" view of the Trinity, resolving it into the different conceptual aspects of the universe, and thus propounding one more vital heresy.
Nothing but a succession of rationalizing emperors could have secured continuance for such teaching as that of Ratramnus and John the Scot. For a time, the cruelty meted out to Gottschalk kept up feeling in favour of his views; Bishop Remigius of Lyons condemned Hincmar's treatment of him; and others sought to maintain his positions, with modifications, though Hincmar carried resolutions condemning them at the second Synod of Chiersy. On the other hand, Archbishop Wenilo of Sens, Bishop Prudentius of Troyes, and Florus, a deacon of Lyons, all wrote against the doctrines of John the Scot; and the second Synod of Valence (855), while opposing Hincmar and affirming duplex predestination, denounced with fury the reasonings of John the Scot, ascribing them to his nation as a whole. The pope taking the same line, the fortunes of the rationalistic view of the eucharist and of hell-fire were soon determined for the Middle Ages, though in the year 950 we find the Archbishop of Canterbury confronted by English ecclesiastics who asserted that there was no transubstantiation, the elements being merely a figure of the body and blood of Christ.
The economic explanation clearly holds alike as regards the attack on John and the condemnation of Gottschalk for a doctrine which had actually been established for centuries, on the authority of Augustine, as strict orthodoxy. In Augustine's time, the determining pressures were not economic: a bankrupt world was seeking to explain its fate; and Augustine had merely carried a majority with him against Pelagius, partly by his personal influence, partly by force of the fatalist mood of the time. But in the renascent world of Gottschalk's day the economic exploitation of fear had been carried several stages forward by the Church; and the question of predestination had a very direct financial bearing. The northern peoples, accustomed to compound for crimes by money payments, had so readily played into the hands of the priesthood by their eagerness to buy surcease of purgatorial pain that masses for the dead and "penitential certificates" were main sources of ecclesiastical revenue. Therefore the condemnations of such abuses passed by the Councils, on the urging of the more thoughtful clergy, were constantly frustrated by the plain pecuniary interest of the priests. It even appears that the eucharist was popularly regarded not as a process of religious "communion," but as a magical rite objectively efficacious for bodily preservation in this life and the next. Thus it came about that often "priests presented the offering of the mass alone and by themselves, without any participation of the congregation."
If then it were to be seriously understood that the future lot of all was foreordained, all expenditure on masses for the dead, or to secure in advance a lightening of purgatorial penance, or even to buy off penance on earth, was so much waste; and the Teutons were still as ready as other barbarians to make their transactions with Church, God, and the saints a matter of explicit bargain. Gottschalk, accordingly, had to be put down, in the general interests of the Church. It could not truthfully be pretended that he deviated from Augustine, for he actually held by the "semi-Pelagian" inconsistency that God predestinates good, but merely foreknows evil. There was in fact no clear opposition between his affirmations and those of Rabanus Maurus, who also professed to be an Augustinian; but the latter laid forensic stress on the "desire" of God that all men should be saved, and on the formula that Christ died for all; while Gottschalk, more honestly, insisted that predestination is predestination, and applied the principle not merely, as had been customary, to the future state of the good, but to that of the bad, insisting on a prædestinatio duplex. His own fate was thus economically predestinate; and he was actually tortured by the scourge till he cast into the fire his written defence, "a document which contained nothing but a compilation of testimonies from Scripture, and from the older church-teachers."
Gottschalk later challenged a fourfold ordeal of "boiling water, oil, and pitch." His primary doctrine had been the immutability of the divine will; but he brought himself to the belief that God would work a miracle in his favour. His conception of "foreordination" was thus framed solely with regard to the conception of a future state. The ordeal was not granted, the orthodox party fearing to try conclusions, and he died without the sacraments, rather than recant. Then began the second reaction of feeling against his chief persecutor, Hincmar. Neander, vi, 190.
A recent writer, who handles very intelligently and temperately the problem of persecution, urges that in that connection "one ought not to lay great stress on the old argument of the Hallam and Macaulay school as to the strength of vested interests, though it has a certain historical importance, because the priest must subsist somehow" (Religious Persecution: a Study in Psychology, by E. S. P. Haynes, 1904, p. 4). If the "certain importance" be in the ratio of the certainty of the last adduced fact, the legitimate "stress" on the argument in question would seem sufficient for most purposes. The writer adds the note: "It is not unfair, however, to quote the case of Dr. Middleton, who, writing to Lord Radnor in 1750 in respect of his famous work on Miracles, admits frankly enough that he would never have given the clergy any trouble, had he received some good appointment in the church." If the essayist has met with no other historic fact illustrative of the play of vested interests in ecclesiastical history, it is extremely candid of him to mention that one. Later on, however, he commits himself to the proposition that "the history of medieval persecution leads one to infer that the clergy as a whole were roused to much greater activity by menaces to their material comforts in this world than by an altruistic anxiety for the fate of lay souls in the next" (id. p. 60. Cp. p. 63). This amount of "stress" on vested interests will probably satisfy most members of the Hallam and Macaulay school; and is ample for the purposes of the present contention.
From this point onward, the slow movement of new ideas may for a time be conveniently traced on two general lines--one that of the philosophic discussion in the schools, reinforced by Saracen influences, the other that of partially rationalistic and democratic heresy among the common people, by way first of contagion from the East. The latter was on the whole as influential for sane thought as the former, apart from such ecclesiastical freethinking as that of Berengar of Tours and Roscelin (Rousselin), Canon of Compiègne. Berengar (c. 1050) was led by moral reflection to doubt the priestly miracle of the Eucharist, and thenceforth he entered into a stormy controversy on the subject, in the course of which he twice recanted under bodily fear, but passionately returned to his original positions. Fundamentally sincere, and indignantly resentful of the gross superstition prevailing in the Church, he struck fiercely in his writings at Popes Leo IX and Nicholas II and Archbishop Lanfranc, all of whom had opposed him. At length, after much strife, he threw up the contest, spending the latter part of his long life in seclusion; Pope Gregory VII, who was personally friendly to him, having finally shielded him from persecution. It seems clear that, though accused, with others of his school, of rejecting certain of the gospel miracles, he never became a disbeliever; his very polemic testifying to the warmth of his belief on his own lines. His teaching, however, which went far by reason of the vividness of his style, doubtless had the effect of promoting not only the rationalistic-Christian view of the Eucharist, but a criticism which went further, inasmuch as his opponents forced on the bystanders the question as to what reality there was in the Christian creed if his view were true. All such influences, however, were but slight in total mass compared with the overwhelming weight of the economic interest of the priesthood; and not till the Reformation was Berengar's doctrine accepted by a single organized sect. The orthodox doctrine, in fact, was all-essential to the Catholic Church. Given the daily miracle of the "real presence," the Church had a vital hold on the Christian world, and the priest was above all lay rivalry. Seeing as much, the Council of the Lateran (1059) met the new criticism by establishing the technical doctrine of the real presence for the first time as an article of faith; and as such it will doubtless stand while there is a Catholic priesthood. Berengar's original view must have been shared by thousands; but no Catholic carried on his propaganda. The question had become one of life and death.
Berengar's forced prevarications, which are unsympathetically set forth by Mosheim (11 Cent., pt. ii, ch. iii, §§ 13-18), are made much more intelligible in the sympathetic survey of Neander (vi, 225-60). See also the careful inquiry of Reuter, Gesch. der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, i, 91 sq. As to Berengar's writings, see further Murdock's note to Mosheim, last cit., § 18. The formal compromise forced on him by Pope Hildebrand, who was personally friendly to him, consisted in adding to his denial of the change of the bread and wine into "body and blood" the doctrine that the body and blood were "superadded to the bread and wine in and by their consecration." This formula, of course, did not represent the spirit of Berengar's polemic. As to the disputes on the subject, which ran to the most unseemly length of physiological detail, see Voltaire, Essai sur les Moeurs, ch. xlv. It is noteworthy that Augustine had very expressly set forth a metaphorical interpretation of the Eucharist--De doctrina christiana, l. iii, c. 16. But just as the Church later set aside the verdict of Thomas Aquinas that the Virgin Mary was "born in sin," so did it reverse Augustine's judgment on the Eucharist. Always the more irrational view carried the day, as being more propitious to sacerdotal claims.
So far as the Church by her keenly self-regarding organization could attain it, all opinion was kept within the strict bounds of her official dogma, in which life in the Middle Ages so long stagnated. For centuries, despite the turmoil of many wars--which, indeed, helped to arrest thought--the life of the mind presented a uniformity hardly now conceivable. The common expectation of the ending of the world, in the year 1000, in particular had an immense prepotency of paralysing men's spirits; and the grooves of habit thus fixed were hard to alter. For most men, the notion of possible innovation in thought did not exist: the usual was the sacred: the very ideal of an improvement or reformation, when it arose, was one of reaching back to a far-away perfection of the past, never of remoulding things on lines laid down by reason. Yet even into this half-stifled world there entered, by eastern ways, and first in the guise of rude demotic departures from priestly prescription, the indestructible spirit of change.
§ 3. POPULAR ANTI-CLERICAL HERESY
The first Western traces of the imported Paulician heresy are about the year 1000, when a rustic of Châlons is heard of as destroying a cross and a religious picture, and asserting that the prophets are not wholly to be believed. From this time forward, the world having begun to breathe again after the passing of the year 1000 without any sign of the Day of Judgment, heresy begins to multiply, the chief movers being "distinguished by a tendency to rationalism." In 1010 there is a trace of it in Aquitaine. In the year 1022 (or, as the date is sometimes put, in 1017) we hear of the unveiling of a secret society of rationalizing mystics at Orleans, ten canons of one church being members. An Italian woman was said to be the founder, and thirteen were burned alive on their refusal to recant. According to the records, they denied all miracles, including the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection; rejected baptism and the miracle of the Eucharist; took the old "Docetic" view of Jesus, denying his actual humanity; and affirmed the eternity of matter and the non-creation of the world. They were also accused, like the first Christians, of promiscuous nocturnal orgies and of eating sacrificed infants; but unless such charges are to be held valid in the other case, they cannot be here. The stories told of the Manichean community who lived in the castle of Monforte, near Asti in Lombardy, in the years 1025-1040, and who at length were likewise burned alive, are similarly mixed with fable. On this case it is recorded that, while the Archbishop of Milan investigated the heresy, the burning of the victims was the work of the fanatical populace of Milan, and was done against his will.
A less savage treatment may have made possible the alleged success of Gerhard, bishop of Cambray and Arras, in reconciling to the Church at Arras, in 1025 or 1030, a number of laymen--also said to have been taught by an Italian--who as a body rejected all external worship, setting aside priestly baptism and the sacraments, penance and images, funeral rites, holy oil, church bells, cross-worship, altars, and even churches, and denied the necessity of an order of priests. Few of the Protestants of a later age were so thorough-going; but the fact that many of the sect stood to the old Marcionite veto on marriage and the sexual instinct gives to their propaganda its own cast of fanaticism. This last tenet it seemingly was that gave the Paulicians their common Greek name of cathari, "the pure," corrupted or assimilated in Italian to gazzari, whence presumably the German word for heretic, Ketzer. Such a doctrine had the double misfortune that if acted on it left the sect without the normal recruitment of members' children, while if departed from it brought on them the stigma of wanton hypocrisy; and as a matter of fact every movement of the kind, ancient and modern, seems to have contained within it the two extremes of asceticism and licence, the former generating the latter.
It could hardly, however, have been the ascetic doctrine that won for the new heresy its vogue in medieval Europe; nor is it likely that the majority of the heretics even professed it. If, on the other hand, we ask how it was that in an age of dense superstition so many uneducated people were found to reject so promptly the most sacrosanct doctrines of the Church, it seems hardly less difficult to account for the phenomenon on the bare ground of their common sense. Critical common sense there must have been, to allow of it at all; but it is reasonable to suppose that then, as clearly happened later at the Reformation, common sense had a powerful stimulus in pecuniary interest.
With the evidence as to Christian practice in the fourth century on the one hand, and the later evidence as to clerical life on the other, we are certain of a common play of financial motive throughout the Middle Ages. And whereas it is intelligible that such rapacity as we have seen described by Libanius should evoke a heresy which rejected alike religious ceremonial and the claims of the priest, it is further reasonable to surmise that resentment of priestly rapacity and luxury helped men to similar heresy in Western Europe when the doctrine reached them. If any centuries are to be singled out as those of maximum profligacy and extortion among the clergy, they are the ninth and the three following. It had been part of the policy of Charlemagne everywhere to strengthen the hands of the clergy by way of checking the power of the nobles; and in the disorder after his death the conflicting forces were in semi-anarchic competition. The feudal habit of appointing younger sons and underlings to livings wherever possible; the disorders and strifes of the papacy; and the frequent practice of dispossessing priests to reward retainers, thereby driving the dispossessed to plunder on their own account, must together have created a state of things almost past exaggeration. It was a matter of course that the clergy on their part should make the utmost possible use of their influence over men's superstitious fears in order to acquire bequests of lands; and such bequests in turn exasperated the heirs thus disinherited.
Thus orthodoxy and heterodoxy alike had strong economic motives; and in these may be placed a main part of the explanation of the gross savagery of persecution now normal in the Church. Such a heresy as that of Gottschalk, we saw, by denying to the priest all power of affecting the predestined course of things here or hereafter, logically imperilled the very existence of the whole hierarchy, and was by many resented accordingly. The same principle entered into the controversies over the Eucharist. Still more would the clergy resent the new Manichean heresy, of which every element, from the Euchite tenet of the necessity of personal prayer and mortification, as against the innate demon, to the rejection of all the rites of normal worship and all the pretensions of priests, was radically hostile to the entire organization of the Church. When the heretics in due course developed a priestly system of their own, the hostility was only the more embittered.
The crisis was the more acute, finally, because in the latter part of the tenth century the common expectation that the world would end with the year 1000 had inspired enormous donations to the Church, with a proportionally oppressive effect on the general population, moving them to economic self-defence. It is in fact clear that an anti-clerical element entered largely into the beginnings of the communal movement in France in the eleventh century. In 1024 we find the citizens of Cambrai forming a league to drive out the canons; and though that beginning of revolt was crushed out by massacre, the same spirit expressed itself in heresy. The result was that religious persecution ere long eclipsed political. Bishop Wazon of Lüttich (d. 1048) in vain protested against the universal practice of putting the heretics to death. Manicheans who were detected in 1052 at Goslar, in Germany, were hanged, a precedent being thus established in the day of small things.
All this went on while the course of the papacy was so scandalous to the least exacting moral sense that only the ignorance of the era could sustain any measure of reverence for the Church as an institution. In the year 963 the ablest of the emperors of that age, Otto the Great, had the consent of the people of Rome to his deposition of Pope John XII, a disorderly youth of twenty-five, "the most profligate if not the most guilty of all who have worn the tiara," and to his appointing the Pope in future; but Teutonic administration soon drove the populace to repeated revolt, quenched by massacre, till at length John returned, speedily to be slain by a wronged husband. Economic interest entered largely into the subsequent attempts of the Romans to choose their own Pope and rule their own city, and into the contrary claim of the emperors to do both; and in the nature of things the usually absent emperors could only spasmodically carry their point. The result was an epoch of riotous disorder in the papacy. Between John and Leo IX (955-1048) six popes were deposed, two murdered, and one mutilated; and the Church was a mere battle-ground of the factions of the Roman and Italian nobility. At last, in 1047, "a disgraceful contest between three claimants of the papal chair shocked even the reckless apathy of Italy"; and the emperor Henry III deposed them all and appointed a pope of his own choosing, the clergy again consenting. Soon, however, as before, the local claim was revived; and in the papacy of the powerful Gregory VII, known as Hildebrand, the head of the Church determinedly asserted its autonomy and his own autocracy. Then came the long "war of the investitures" between the popes and the emperors, in which the former were substantially the gainers. The result was, in addition to the endless miseries set up by war, a systematic development of that financial corruption which already had been scandalous enough. The cathedral chapters and the nobles traded in bishoprics; the popes sold their ratifications for great sums; the money was normally borrowed by the bishops from the papal usurers; and there was witnessed throughout Europe the spectacle of the Church denouncing all usury as sin, while its own usurers were scrupulously protected, the bishops paying to them their interest from the revenues they were able to extort. Satirical comment naturally abounded wherever men had any knowledge of the facts; and what current literature there was reflected the feeling on all sides.
The occurrence of the first and second crusades, the work respectively of Peter the Hermit and St. Bernard, created a period of new fanaticism, somewhat unfavourable to heresy; but even in that period the new sects were at work, and in the twelfth century, when crusading had become a mere feudal conspiracy of conquest and plunder, heresy reappeared, to be duly met by slaughter. A perfect ferment of anti-clerical heresy had arisen in Italy, France, and Flanders. At Orvieto, in Italy, the heretics for a time actually had the mastery, and were put down only after a bloody struggle. In France, for a period of twenty years from 1106, Peter de Brueys opposed infant baptism, the use of churches, holy crosses, prayers for the dead (the great source of clerical income), and the doctrine of the Real Presence in the eucharist (the main source of their power), and so set up the highly heretical sect of Petrobrussians. Driven from his native district of Vallonise, he long maintained himself in Gascony, till at length he was seized and burned (1126 or 1130). The monk Henry (died in prison 1148) took a similar line, directly denouncing the clergy in Switzerland and France; as did Tanquelin in Flanders (killed by a priest, 1125); though in his case there seems to have been as much of religious hallucination as of the contrary. A peasant, Eudo of Stella (who died in prison), is said to have half-revolutionized Brittany with his anti-ecclesiastical preaching. The more famous monk Arnold of Brescia (strangled and burned in 1155), a pupil of Abailard, but orthodox in his theology and austere in his life, simplified his plan of reform (about 1139) into a proposal that the whole wealth of the clergy, from the pope to the monks, should be transferred to the civil power, leaving churchmen to lead a spiritual life on voluntary offerings. For fifteen years the stir of his movement lasted in Lombardy, till at length his formation of a republic at Rome forced the papacy to combine with the Emperor Frederick II, who gave Arnold up to death. But though his movement perished, anti-clericalism did not; and heretical sects of some kind persisted here and there, in despite of the Church, till the age of the Reformation. In Italy, during the age of the Renaissance, all alike were commonly called paterini or patarini--a nickname which seems to come from pataria, a Milanese word meaning "popular faction" or "rowdies." Thus in the whole movement of fresh popular thought there is a manifest connection with the democratic movement in politics, though in the schools the spirit of discussion and dialectic had no similar relationship.
During the first half of the century its warfare with the emperors, and the frequent appointment of anti-popes, prevented any systematic policy on the part of the Holy See, repression being mostly left to the local ecclesiastical authorities. It was in 1139 that Innocent II issued the first papal decree against Cathari, expelling them from the Church and calling on the temporal power to give full effect to their excommunication. In 1163 Pope Alexander III, being exiled from Rome by Frederick I and the anti-pope Victor, called a great council at Tours, where again a policy of excommunication was decided on, the secular authorities being commanded to imprison the excommunicated and confiscate their property, but not to slay them. In the same year some Cathari arrested at Cologne had been sentenced to be burned; but the Council did not go so far. As a result the decree had little or no effect.
So powerless was the Church at this stage that in 1167 the Cathari held a council of their own near Toulouse; a bishop of their order, Nicetas, coming from Constantinople to preside; and a whole system of French sees was set on foot. So numerous had the Cathari now become that their highest grade, the perfecti, alone was reckoned to number 4,000; and from this time it is of Cathari that we read in the rolls of persecution. About 1170 four more of them, from Flanders, were burned at Cologne; and others, of the higher grade called bos homes (= boni homines, "good men"), at Toulouse. In 1179, the heresy still gaining ground, an oecumenical council (the Third Lateran) was held at Rome under Pope Alexander III, decreeing afresh their excommunication, and setting up a new machinery of extirpation by proclaiming a crusade at once against the orderly heretics of southern France and the companies of openly irreligious freebooters who had arisen as a result of many wars and much misgovernment. To all who joined in the crusade was offered an indulgence of two years. In the following year Henry of Clairvaux, Cardinal of Albano, took the matter in hand as papal plenipotentiary; and in 1181 he raised a force of horse and foot and fell upon the ill-defended territory of the Viscount of Beziers, where many heretics, including the daughter of Raymond of Toulouse, had taken refuge. The chief stronghold was captured, with two Catharist bishops, who renounced their heresy, and were promptly given prebends in Toulouse. Many others submitted; but as soon as the terms for which the crusaders had enlisted were over and the army disbanded, they returned to their heretical practices. Two years later an army collected in central France made a campaign against the freebooters, slaying thousands in one battle, hanging fifteen hundred after another, and blinding eighty more. But freebooting also continued.
The first crusade against heresy having failed, it was left by the papacy for a number of years to itself; though anti-pope Lucius III in 1184 sought to set up an Inquisition; and in 1195 a papal legate held a council at Montpellier, seeking to create another crusade. The zeal of the faithful was mainly absorbed in Palestine; while the nobles at home were generally at war with each other. Heresy accordingly continued to flourish, though there was never any suspension of local persecution outside of Provence, where the heretics were now in a majority, having more theological schools and scholars than the Church. In France in particular, in the early years of the reign of Philip Augustus (suc. 1180), many paterini were put to death by burning; and the clergy at length persuaded the king to expel the Jews, the work being done almost as cruelly as it was two centuries later in Spain. In England, where there was thus far little heresy, it was repressed by Henry II. Some thirty rustics came from Flanders in 1166, fleeing persecution, and vainly sought to propagate their creed. Zealous to prove his orthodoxy in the period of his quarrel with Becket, Henry presided over a council of bishops called by him at Oxford to discuss the case; and the heretics were condemned to be scourged, branded in the face, and driven forth--to perish in the winter wilds. "England was not hospitable to heresy;" and practically her orthodoxy was "unsullied until the rise of Wiclif."
In southern Europe and northern Italy in the last quarter of the century a foremost place began to be taken by the sect of the Waldenses, or Vaudois (otherwise the Poor Men of Lyons), which--whether deriving from ancient dissent surviving in the Vaux or Valleys of Piedmont, or taking its name and character from the teaching of the Lyons merchant, Peter Waldus, or an earlier Peter of Vaux or Valdis --conforms substantially to the general heretical tendencies of that age, in that it rejected the papal authority, contended for the reading of the Bible by the laity, condemned tithes, disparaged fasting, stipulated for poverty on the part of priests and denied their special status, opposed prayers for the dead, and preached peace and non-resistance. In 1199, at Metz, they were found in possession of a French translation of the New Testament, the Psalms, and the book of Job--a new and startling invasion of the priestly power in the west. Above all, their men and women alike went about preaching in the towns, in the houses, and in the churches, and administered the eucharist without priests. Thus Cathari, Paterini, Manicheans, and non-Manichean Albigenses and Waldenses were on all fours for the Church, as opponents of its economic claims; and when at length, under Celestine III and Innocent III, the Holy See began to be consolidated after a long period of incessant change, desperate measures began to be contemplated. Organized heresy was seen to be indestructible save by general extirpation; and on economic grounds it was not to be tolerated. At Orvieto the heresy stamped out with blood in 1125 was found alive again in 1150; was again put down in 1163 by burning, hanging, and expulsion; and yet was again found active at the close of the century. In 1198 Innocent III is found beginning a new Inquisition among the Albigenses; and in 1199, while threatening them with exile and confiscation, he made a last diplomatic attempt to force the obstinately heretical people of Orvieto to take an oath of fidelity in the year 1199. It ended in the killing of his representative by the people. The papacy accordingly laid plans to destroy the enemy at its centre of propagation.
§ 4. HERESY IN SOUTHERN FRANCE
In Provence and Languedoc, the scene of the first great papal crusade against anti-clerical heresy, there were represented all the then existing forces of popular freethought; and the motives of the crusade were equally typical of the cause of authority.
