A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 15 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 15Christendom in the Middle Ages (part 2)
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Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 15
Christendom in the Middle Ages (part 2)
RobertsonEnglish
1. In addition to the Paulician and other movements of religious rationalism above noted, the Languedoc region was a centre of semi-popular literary culture, which was to no small extent anti-clerical, and by consequence somewhat anti-religious. The Latin-speaking jongleurs or minstrels, known as Goliards, possessing as they did a clerical culture, were by their way of life committed to a joyous rather than an ascetic philosophy; and though given to blending the language of devotion with that of the drinking-table, very much after the fashion of Hafiz, they were capable of burlesquing the mass, the creed, hymns to the Virgin, the Lord's Prayer, confessions, and parts of the gospels, as well as of keenly satirizing the endless abuses of the Church. "One is astonished to meet, in the Middle Ages, in a time always represented as crushed under the yoke of authority, such incredible audacities on the papacy, the episcopacy, chivalry, on the most revered dogmas of religion, such as paradise, hell, etc." The rhymers escaped simply because there was no police that could catch them. Denounced by some of the stricter clergy, they were protected by others. They were, in fact, the minstrels of the free-living churchmen.
Of this type is Guiot of Provence, a Black Friar, the author of La Bible Guiot, written between 1187 and 1206. He is a lover of good living, a champion of aristocrats, a foe of popular movements, and withal a little of a buffoon. But it is to be counted to him for righteousness that he thought the wealth devoured by the clergy might be more usefully spent on roads, bridges, and hospitals. He has also a good word for the old pagans who lived "according to reason"; and as to his own time, he is sharply censorious alike of princes, pope, and prelates. The princes are rascals who "do not believe in God," and depress their nobility; and the breed of the latter has sadly degenerated. The pope is to be prayed for; but he is ill counselled by his cardinals, who conform to the ancient tendency of Rome to everything evil; many of the archbishops and bishops are no better; and the clergy in general are eaten up by greed and simony. This is in fact the common note.
A kindred spirit is seen in much of the verse alike of the northern Trouvères and the southern Troubadours. A modern Catholic historian of medieval literature complains that their compositions "abound with the severest ridicule of such persons and of such things as, in the temper of the age, were highly estimated and most generally revered," and notes that in consequence they were ranked by the devout as "lewd and impious libertines." In particular they satirized the practice of excommunication and the use made by the Church of hell and purgatory as sources of revenue. Their anti-clerical poetry having been as far as possible destroyed by the Inquisition, its character has to be partly inferred from the remains of the northern trouvères--e.g., Ruteboeuf and Raoul de Houdan, of whom the former wrote a Voya de Paradis, in which Sloth is a canon and Pride a bishop, both on their way to heaven; while Raoul has a Songe d'enfer in which hell is treated in a spirit of the most audacious burlesque. In a striking passage of the old tale Aucassin et Nicolette there is naïvely revealed the spontaneous revolt against pietism which underlay all these flings of irreverence. "Into paradise," cries Aucassin, "go none but ... those aged priests, and those old cripples, and the maimed, who all day long and all night cough before the altars, and in the crypts beneath the churches; those ... who are naked and barefoot and full of sores.... Such as these enter in paradise, and with them have I nought to do. But in hell will I go. For to hell go the fair clerks and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney and the great wars, and the stout archer and the loyal man. With them will I go. And there go the fair and courteous ladies [of many loves]; and there pass the gold and the silver, the ermine and all rich furs, harpers and minstrels, and the happy of the world. With these will I go...." It was such a temper, rather than reasoned unbelief, that inspired the blasphemous parodies in Reynard the Fox and other popular works of the Middle Ages.
The Provençal literature, further, was from the first influenced by the culture of the Saracens, who held Sicily and Calabria in the ninth and tenth centuries, and had held part of Languedoc itself for a few years in the eighth. On the passing of the duchy of Provence to Raymond Berenger, Count of Barcelona, at the end of the eleventh century, not only were the half-Saracenized Catalans mixed with the Provençals, but Raymond and his successors freely introduced the arts and science of the Saracens into their dominion. In the Norman kingdom of Sicily too the Saracen influence was great even before the time of Frederick II; and thence it reached afresh through Italy to Provence, carrying with it everywhere, by way of poetry, an element of anti-clerical and even of anti-Christian rationalism. Though this spirit was not that of the Cathari and Waldenses, yet the fact that the latter strongly condemned the Crusades was a point in common between them and the sympathizers with Saracen culture. And as the tolerant Saracen schools of Spain or the Christian schools of the same region, which copied their curriculum, were in that age resorted to by youth from each of the countries of western Europe for scientific teaching --all the latest medical and most other scientific knowledge being in their hands--the influence of such culture must have been peculiarly strong in Provence.
The medieval mystery-plays and moralities, already common in Provence, mixed at times with the normal irreverence of illiterate faith a vein of surprisingly pronounced skeptical criticism, which at the least was a stimulus to critical thought among the auditors, even if they were supposed to take it as merely dramatic. Inasmuch as the drama was hereditarily pagan, and had been continually denounced and ostracized by Fathers and Councils, it would be natural that its practitioners, even when in the service of the Church, should be unbelievers.
The philosophy and science of both the Arabs and the Spanish Jews were specially cultivated in the Provence territory. The college of Montpellier practised on Arab lines medicine, botany, and mathematics; and the Jews, who had been driven from Spain by the Almohades, had flourishing schools at Narbonne, Beziers, Nîmes, and Carcassonne, as well as Montpellier, and spread alike the philosophy of Averroës and the semi-rational theology of the Jewish thinker Maimonides, whose school held broadly by Averroïsm.
For the rest, every one of the new literary influences that were assailing the Church would tend to flourish in such a civilization as that of Languedoc, which had been peaceful and prosperous for over two hundred years. Unable to lay hold of the popular poets and minstrels who propagated anti-clericalism, the papacy could hope to put down by brute force the social system in which they flourished, crushing the pious and more hated heretic with the scoffer. And Languedoc was a peculiarly tempting field for such operations. Its relative lack of military strength, as well as its pre-eminence in heresy, led Innocent III, a peculiarly zealous assertor of the papal power, to attack it in preference to other and remoter centres of enmity. In the first year of his pontificate, 1198, he commenced a new and zealous Inquisition in the doomed region; and in the year 1207, when as much persecution had been accomplished as the lax faith of the nobility and many of the bishops would consent to--an appeal to the King of France to interfere being disregarded--the scheme of a crusade against the dominions of Raymond Count of Toulouse was conceived and gradually matured. The alternate weakness and obstinacy of Raymond, and the fresh provocation given by the murder, in 1208, of the arrogant papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, permitted the success of the scheme in such hands. The crusade was planned exactly on the conditions of those against the Saracens--the heretics at home being declared far worse than they. The crusaders were freed from payment of interest on their debts, exempted from the jurisdiction of all law courts, and absolved from all their sins past or future. To earn this reward they were to give only forty days' service --a trifle in comparison with the hardships of the crusades to Palestine. "Never therefore had the cross been taken up with a more unanimous consent." Bishops and nobles in Burgundy and France, the English Simon de Montfort, the Abbot of Citeaux, and the Bernardine monks throughout Europe, combined in the cause; and recruits came from Austria and Saxony, from Bremen, even from Slavonia, as well as from northern France. The result was such a campaign of crime and massacre as European history cannot match. Despite the abject submission of the Count of Toulouse, who was publicly stripped and scourged, and despite the efforts of his nephew the Count of Albi to make terms, village after village was fired, all heretics caught were burned, and on the capture of the city and castle of Beziers (1209), every man, woman, and child within the walls was slaughtered, many of them in the churches, whither they had run for refuge. The legate, Arnold abbot of Citeaux, being asked at an early stage how the heretics were to be distinguished from the faithful, gave the never-to-be-forgotten answer, "Kill all; God will know his own." Seven thousand dead bodies were counted in the great church of St. Mary Magdalene. The legate in writing estimated the total quarry at 15,000; others put the number at sixty thousand. When all in the place were slain, and all the plunder removed, the town was burned to the ground, not one house being left standing. Warned by the fate of Beziers, the people of Carcassonne, after defending themselves for many days, secretly evacuated their town; but the legate contrived to capture a number of the fugitives, of whom he burned alive four hundred, and hanged fifty. Systematic treachery, authorized and prescribed by the Pope, completed the success of the undertaking. The Church had succeeded, in the name of religion, in bringing half of Europe to the attainment of the ideal height of wickedness, in that it had learned to make evil its good; and the papacy had on the whole come nearer to destroying the moral sense of all Christendom than any conceivable combination of other causes could ever have done in any age.
According to a long current fiction, it was the Pope who first faltered when "the whole of Christendom demanded the renewal of those scenes of massacre" (Sismondi, Crusades, p. 95); but this is disproved by the discovery of two letters in which, shortly before his death, he excitedly takes on himself the responsibility for all the bloodshed (Michelet, Hist. de France, vii, introd. note to § iv). Michelet had previously accepted the legend which he here rejects. The bishops assembled in council at Lavaur, in 1213, demanded the extermination of the entire population of Toulouse. Finally, the papal policy is expressly decreed in the third canon of the Fourth General Council of Lateran, 1215. On that canon see The Statutes of the Fourth General Council of Lateran, by the Rev. John Evans, 1843. On the crusade in general, cp. Lea, History of the Inquisition, bk. i, ch. iv; Gieseler, Per. III, Div. iii, § 89.
The first crusade was followed by others, in which Simon de Montfort reached the maximum of massacre, varying his procedure by tearing out eyes and cutting off noses when he was not hanging victims by dozens or burning them by scores or putting them to the sword by hundreds (all being done "with the utmost joy") ; though the "White Company" organized by the Bishop of Toulouse maintained a close rivalry. The Church's great difficulty was that as soon as an army had bought its plenary indulgence for all possible sin by forty days' service, it disbanded. Nevertheless, "the greater part of the population of the countries where heresy had prevailed was exterminated." Organized Christianity had contrived to murder the civilization of Provence and Languedoc while the fanatics of Islam in their comparatively bloodless manner were doing as much for that of Moorish Spain. Heresy indeed was not rooted out: throughout the whole of the thirteenth century the Inquisition met with resistance in Languedoc ; but the preponderance of numbers which alone could sustain freethinking had been destroyed, and in course of time it was eliminated by the sleepless engines of the Church.
It was owing to no lack of the principle of evil in the Christian system, but simply to the much greater and more uncontrollable diversity of the political elements of Christendom, that the whole culture and intelligence of Europe did not undergo the same fate. The dissensions and mutual injuries of the crusaders ultimately defeated their ideal ; after Simon de Montfort had died in the odour of sanctity the crusade of Louis VIII of France in 1226 seems to have been essentially one of conquest, there being practically no heretics left; and the disasters of the expedition, crowned by the king's death, took away the old prestige of the movement. Meanwhile, the heresy of the Albigenses, and kindred ideas, had been effectually driven into other parts of Europe ; and about 1231 we find Gregory IX burning a multitude of them at the gates of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome and compassing their slaughter in France and Germany. In Italy the murderous pertinacity of the Dominicans gradually destroyed organized heresy despite frequent and desperate resistance. About 1230 we hear of one eloquent zealot, chosen podestà by the people of Verona, using his power to burn in one day sixty heretics, male and female. The political heterogeneity of Europe, happily, made variation inevitable; though the papacy, by making the detection and persecution of heresy a means of gain to a whole order of its servants, had set on foot a machinery for the destruction of rational thought such as had never before existed.
It is still common to speak of the personnel of the Inquisition as disinterested, and to class its crimes as "conscientious." Buckle set up such a thesis, without due circumspection, as a support to one of his generalizations. (See the present writer's ed. of his Introduction to the History of Civilization in England, pp. 105-108, notes, and the passages in McCrie and Llorente there cited.) Dr. Lea, whose History of the Inquisition is the greatest storehouse of learning on the subject, takes up a similar position, arguing (i, 239): "That the men who conducted the Inquisition, and who toiled sedulously in its arduous, repulsive, and often dangerous labour, were thoroughly convinced that they were furthering the kingdom of God, is shown by the habitual practice of encouraging them with the remission of sins, similar to that offered for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land"--a somewhat surprising theorem. Parallel reasoning would prove that soldiers never plunder and are always Godly; that the crusaders were all conscientious men; and that policemen never take bribes or commit perjury. The interpretation of history calls for a less simple-minded psychology. That there were devoted fanatics in the Inquisition as in the Church is not to be disputed; that both organizations had economic bases is certain; and that the majority of office-bearers in both, in the ages of faith, had regard to gain, is demonstrated by all ecclesiastical history.
Dr. Lea's own History shows clearly enough (i, 471-533) that the Inquisition, from the first generation of its existence, lived upon its fines and confiscations. "Persecution, as a steady and continuous policy, rested, after all, upon confiscation.... When it was lacking, the business of defending the faith lagged lamentably" (i, 529). "But for the gains to be made out of fines and confiscations its [the Inquisition's] work would have been much less thorough, and it would have sunk into comparative insignificance as soon as the first frantic zeal of bigotry had exhausted itself" (pp. 532-33). Why, in the face of these avowals, "it would be unjust to say that greed and thirst for plunder were the impelling motives of the Inquisition" (p. 532) is not very clear. See below, ch. x, § 3, as to the causation in Spain. Cp. Mocatta, The Jews and the Inquisition, pp. 37, 44, 52. On the Inquisition in Portugal, in turn, Professor W. E. Collins sums up that "it was founded for reasons ostensibly religious but actually fiscal" (in the "Cambridge Modern History," vol. ii, The Reformation, ch. xii, p. 415). Every charge of economic motive that Catholicism can bring against Protestantism is thus balanced by the equivalent charge against its own Inquisition.
§ 5. FREETHOUGHT IN THE SCHOOLS
The indestructibility of freethought, meanwhile, was being proved even in the philosophic schools, under all their conformities to faith. Already in the ninth century we have seen Scotus Erigena putting the faith in jeopardy by his philosophic defence of it. Another thinker, Roscelin (or Roussellin: fl. 1090), is interesting as having made a critical approach to freethought in religion by way of abstract philosophy. With him definitely begins the long academic debate between the Nominalists and Realists so called. In an undefined way, it had existed as early as the ninth century, the ground being the Christian adoption of Plato's doctrine of ideas--that individual objects are instances or images of an ideal universal, which is a real existence, and prior to the individual thing: "universalia ante rem." To that proposition Aristotle had opposed the doctrine that the universal is immanent in the thing--"universalia in re"--the latter alone being matter of knowledge; and in the Middle Ages those who called Aristotle master carried his negation of Plato to the extent of insisting that the "universal" or "abstract," or the "form" or "species," is a mere subjective creation, a name, having no real existence. This, the Nominalist position--mistakenly ascribed to Aristotle --was ultimately expressed in the formula, "universalia post rem."
Such reasonings obviously tend to implicate theology; and Roscelin was either led or helped by his Nominalist training to deny either explicitly or implicitly the unity of the Trinity, arguing in effect that, as only individuals are real existences, the actuality of the persons of the Trinity involves their disunity. The thesis, of course, evoked a storm, the English Archbishop Anselm and others producing indignant answers. Of Roscelin's writing only one letter is extant; and even Anselm, in criticizing his alleged doctrine, admits having gathered it only from his opponents, whose language suggests perversion. But if the testimony of his pupil Abailard be truthful, he was at best a confused reasoner; and in his theology he got no further than tritheism, then called ditheism. Thus, though "Nominalism, by denying any objective reality to general notions, led the way directly to the testimony of the senses and the conclusions of experience," it did so on lines fatally subordinate to the theology it sought to correct. Roscelin's thesis logically led to the denial not only of trinity-in-unity but of the Incarnation and transubstantiation; yet neither he nor his opponents seem to have thought even of the last consequence, he having in fact no consciously heretical intention. Commanded to recant by the Council of Soissons in 1092, he did so, and resumed his teaching as before; whereafter he was ordered to leave France. Coming to England, he showed himself so little of a rebel to the papacy as to contend strongly for priestly celibacy, arguing that all sons of priests and all born out of wedlock should alike be excluded from clerical office. Expelled from England in turn for these views, by a clergy still anti-celibate, he returned to Paris, to revive the old philosophic issue, until general hostility drove him to Aquitaine, where he spent his closing years in peace.
Such handling of the cause of Nominalism gave an obvious advantage to Realism. That has been justly described by one clerical scholar as "Philosophy held in subordination to Church-Authority"; and another has avowed that "the spirit of Realism was essentially the spirit of dogmatism, the disposition to pronounce that truth was already known," while "Nominalism was essentially the spirit of progress, of inquiry, of criticism." But even a critical philosophy may be made to capitulate to authority, as even à priori metaphysic may be to a certain extent turned against it. Realism had been markedly heretical in the hands of John Scotus; and in a later age the Realist John Huss was condemned to death--perhaps on political grounds, but not without signs of sectarian hate--by a majority of Nominalists at the Council of Constance. Everything depended on the force of the individual thinker and the degree of restraint put upon him by the authoritarian environment. The world has even seen the spectacle of a professed indifferentist justifying the massacre of St. Bartholomew; and the Platonist Marsilio Ficino vilified Savonarola, basely enough, after his execution, adjusting a pantheistic Christianity to the needs of the political situation in Medicean Florence. Valid freethinking is a matter of thoroughness and rectitude, not of mere theoretic assents.
Tried by that test, the Nominalism of the medieval schools was no very potent emancipator of the human spirit, no very clear herald of freedom or new concrete truth. A doctrine which was so far adjusted to authority as to affirm the unquestionable existence of three deities, Father, Son, and Spirit, and merely disputed the not more supra-rational theorem of their unity, yielded to the rival philosophy a superiority in the kind of credit it sought for itself. Nominalism was thus "driven to the shade of the schools," where it was "regarded entirely in a logical point of view, and by no means in its actual philosophic importance as a speculation concerning the grounds of human knowledge." For Roscelin himself the question was one of dialectics, not of faith, and he made no practical rationalists. The popular heresies bit rather deeper into life.
It is doubtless true of the Paulicians that "there was no principle of development in their creed: it reflected no genuine freedom of thought" (Poole, Illustrations, p. 95); but the same thing, as we have seen, is clearly true of scholasticism itself. It may indeed be urged that "the contest between Ratramn and Paschase on the doctrine of the Eucharist; of Lanfranc with Berengar on the same subject; of Anselm with Roscelin on the nature of Universals; the complaints of Bernard against the dialectical theology of Abelard; are all illustrations of the collision between Reason and Authority ... varied forms of rationalism--the pure exertions of the mind within itself ... against the constringent force of the Spiritual government" (Hampden, Bampton Lectures on The Scholastic Philosophy, 3rd ed. p. 37; cp. Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, p. 203); but none of the scholastics ever professed to set Authority aside. None dared. John Scotus indeed affirmed the identity of true religion with true philosophy, without professing to subordinate the latter; but the most eminent of the later scholastics affirmed such a subordination. "The vassalage of philosophy consisted in the fact that an impassable limit was fixed for the freedom of philosophizing in the dogmas of the Church" (Ueberweg, i, 357); and some of the chief dogmas were not allowed to be philosophically discussed; though, "with its territory thus limited, philosophy was indeed allowed by theology a freedom which was rarely and only by exception infringed upon" (ib. Cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ix, 151). "The suspicion of originality was fatal to the reputation of the scholastic divine" (Hampden, pp. 46-47). The popular heresy, indeed, lacked the intellectual stimulus that came to the schools from the philosophy of Averroës; but it was the hardier movement of the two.
Already in the eleventh century, however, the simple fact of the production of a new argument for the existence of God by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, is a proof that, apart from the published disputes, a measure of doubt on the fundamental issue had arisen in the schools. It is urged that, though the argumentation of Anselm seems alien to the thought of his time, there is no proof that the idea of proving the existence of God was in any way pressed on him from the outside. It is, however, inconceivable that such an argument should be framed if no one had raised a doubt. And as a matter of fact the question was discussed in the schools, Anselm's treatise being a reproduction of his teaching. The monks of Bec, where he taught, urged him to write a treatise wherein nothing should be proved by mere authority, but all by necessity of reason or evidence of truth, and with an eye to objections of all sorts. In the preface to his Cur Deus Homo, again, he says that his first book is an answer to the objections of infidels who reject Christianity as irrational. Further, the nature of part of Anselm's theistic argument and the very able but friendly reply of Gaunilo (a Count of Montigni, who entered a convent near Tours, 1044-1083) show that the subject was within the range of private discussion. Anselm substantially follows St. Augustine; and men cannot have read the ancient books which so often spoke of atheism without confronting the atheistic idea. It is not to be supposed that Gaunilo was an unbeliever; but his argumentation is that of a man who had pondered the problem.
Despite the ostensibly rationalistic nature of his argument, however, Anselm stipulated for absolute submission of the intellect to the creed of the Church; so that the original subtitle of his Proslogium, Fides quaerens intellectum, in no way admits rational tests. In the next century we meet with new evidence of sporadic unbelief, and new attempts to deal with it on the philosophic side. John of Salisbury (1120-1180) tells of having heard many discourse on physics "otherwise than faith may hold"; and the same vivacious scholar put in his list of "things about which a wise man may doubt, so ... that the doubt extend not to the multitude," some "things which are reverently to be inquired about God himself." Giraldus Cambrensis (1147-1223), whose abundant and credulous gossip throws so much light on the inner life of the Church and the laity in his age, tells that the learned Simon of Tournay "thought not soundly on the articles of the faith," saying privately, to his intimates, things that he dared not utter publicly, till one day, in a passion, he cried out, "Almighty God! how long shall this superstitious sect of Christians and this upstart invention endure?"; whereupon during the night he lost the power of speech, and remained helpless till his death. Other ecclesiastical chroniclers represent Simon as deriding alike Jesus, Moses, and Mahomet--an ascription to him of the "three impostors" formula. Again, Giraldus tells how an unnamed priest, reproved by another for careless celebration of the mass, angrily asked whether his rebuker really believed in transubstantiation, in the incarnation, in the Virgin Birth, and in resurrection; adding that it was all carried on by hypocrites, and assuredly invented by cunning ancients to hold men in terror and restraint. And Giraldus comments that inter nos there are many who so think in secret. As his own picture of the Church exhibits a gross and almost universal rapacity pervading it from the highest clergy to the lowest, the statement is entirely credible. Yet again, in the Romance of the Holy Grail, mention is twice made of clerical doubters on the doctrine of the Trinity; and on that side, in the crusading period, both the monotheistic doctrine of Islam and the Arab philosophy of Averroës were likely to set up a certain amount of skepticism. In the twelfth century, accordingly, we have Nicolas of Amiens producing his tractate De articulis (or arte) catholicæ fidei in the hope of convincing by his arguments men "who disdain to believe the prophecies and the gospel."
To meet such skepticism too was one of the undertakings of the renowned Abailard (1079-1142), himself persecuted as a heretic for the arguments with which he sought to guard against unbelief. Of the details of his early life it concerns us here to note only that he studied under Roscelin, and swerved somewhat in philosophy from his master's theoretic Nominalism, which he partly modified on Aristotelian lines, though knowing little of Aristotle. After his retirement from the world to the cloister, he was induced to resume philosophic teaching; and his pupils, like those of Anselm, begged their master to give them rational arguments on the main points of the faith. He accordingly rashly prepared a treatise, De Unitate et Trinitate divina, in which he proceeded "by analogies of human reason," avowing that the difficulties were great. Thereupon envious rivals, of whom he had made many by his arrogance as well as by his fame, set up against him a heresy hunt; and for the rest of his life he figured as a dangerous person. While, however, he took up the relatively advanced position that reason must prepare the way for faith, since otherwise faith has no certitude, he was in the main dependent on the authority either of second-hand Aristotle or of the Scriptures, though he partly set aside that of the Fathers. When St. Bernard accused him of Arianism and of heathenism he was expressing personal ill-will rather than criticizing. Abailard himself complained that many heresies were current in his time ; and as a matter of fact "more intrepid views than his were promulgated without risk by a multitude of less conspicuous masters." For instance, Bernard Sylvester (of Chartres), in his cosmology, treated theological considerations with open disrespect ; and William of Conches, who held a similar tone on physics, taught, until threatened with punishment, that the Holy Ghost and the Universal Soul were convertible terms. This remarkably rational theologian further rejected the literal interpretation of the creation of Eve; in science he adopted the Demokritean doctrine of atoms; and in New Testament matters he revived the old rationalistic heresy that the three Persons of the Trinity are simply three aspects of the divine personality--power, wisdom, and will--which doctrine he was duly forced to retract. It is clear from his works that he lived in an atmosphere of controversy, and had to fight all along with the pious irrationalists who, "because they know not the forces of nature, in order that they may have all men comrades in their ignorance, suffer not that others should search out anything, and would have us believe like rustics and ask no reason." "If they perceive any man to be making search, they at once cry out that he is a heretic." The history of a thousand years of struggle between reason and religion is told in those sentences.
As to William's doctrines and writings see Poole, pp. 124-30, 346-59. His authorship of one treatise is only latterly cleared up. In the work which under the title of Elementa Philosophiae is falsely ascribed to Bede, and under the title De Philosophia Mundi to Honorius of Autun (see Poole, pp. 340-42, 347 sq.), but which is really the production of William of Conches, there occurs the passage: "What is more pitiable than to say that a thing is, because God is able to do it, and not to show any reason why it is so; just as if God did everything that he is able to do! You talk like one who says that God is able to make a calf out of a log. But did he ever do it? Either, then, show a reason why a thing is so, or a purpose wherefore it is so, or else cease to declare it so." Migne, Patrolog. Latin. xc, 1139. It is thus an exaggeration to say of Abailard, as does Cousin, that "il mit de côté la vieille école d'Anselme de Laon, qui exposait sans expliquer, et fonda ce qu'on appelle aujourd'hui le rationalisme" (Ouvr. inédits d'Abélard, 1836, intr. p. ii).
Abailard was not more explicit on concrete issues than this contemporary--who survived him, and studied his writings. If, indeed, as is said, he wrote that "a doctrine is believed not because God has said it, but because we are convinced by reason that it is so," he went as far on one line as any theologian of his time; but his main service to freethought seems to have lain in the great stimulus he gave to the practice of reasoning on all topics. His enemy, St. Bernard, on the contrary, gave an "immense impulse to the growth of a genuinely superstitious spirit among the Latin clergy."
Dr. Rashdall pronounces Abailard "incomparably the greatest intellect of the Middle Ages; one of the great minds which mark a period in the world's intellectual history"; and adds that "Abailard (a Christian thinker to the very heart's core, however irredeemable (sic) the selfishness and overweening vanity of his youth) was at the same time the representative of the principle of free though reverent inquiry in matters of religion and individual loyalty to truth." (The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 1895, i, 56-57.) If the praise given be intended to exalt Abailard above John Scotus, it seems excessive.
On a survey of Abailard's theological teachings, a modern reader is apt to see the spirit of moral reason most clearly in one set forth in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, to the effect that Jesus was not incarnate to redeem men from damnation, but solely to instruct them by precept and example, and that he suffered and died only to show his charity towards men. The thesis was implicit if not explicit in the teaching of Pelagius; and for both men it meant the effort to purify their creed from the barbaric taint of the principle of sacrifice. In our own day, revived by such theologians as the English Maurice, it seems likely to gain ground, as an accommodation to the embarrassed moral sense of educated believers. But it is heresy if heresy ever was, besides being a blow at the heart of Catholic sacerdotalism; and Abailard on condemnation retracted it as he did his other Pelagian errors. Retractation, however, is publication; and to have been sentenced to retract such teaching in the twelfth century is to leave on posterity an impression of moral originality perhaps as important as the fame of a metaphysician. In any case, it is a careful judge who thus finally estimates him: "When he is often designated as the rationalist among the schoolmen, he deserves the title not only on account of the doctrine of the Trinity, which approaches Sabellianism in spite of all his polemics against it, and not only on account of his critical attempts, but also on account of his ethics, in which he actually completely agrees in the principal point with many modern rationalists." And it is latterly his singular fate to be valued at once by many sympathetic Catholics, who hold him finally vindicated alike in life and doctrine, and by many freethinkers.
How far the stir set up in Europe by his personal magnetism and his personal record may have made for rational culture, it is impossible to estimate; but some consequence there must have been. John of Salisbury was one of Abailard's disciples and admirers; and, as we saw, he not only noted skepticism in others but indicated an infusion of it in his own mind--enough to earn for him from a modern historian the praise of being a sincere skeptic, as against those false skeptics who put forward universal doubt as a stalking horse for their mysticism. But he was certainly not a universal skeptic ; and his denunciation of doubt as to the goodness and power of God sounds orthodox enough. What he gained from Abailard was a concern for earnest dialectic.
The worst side of scholasticism at all times was that it was more often than not a mere logical expatiation in vacuo; this partly for sheer lack of real knowledge. John of Salisbury probably did not do injustice to the habit of verbiage it developed ; and the pupils of Abailard seem to have expressed themselves strongly to him concerning the wordy emptiness of most of what passed current as philosophic discourse; speaking of the teachers as blind leaders of the blind. One version of the legend against Simon of Tournay is to the effect that, after demonstrating by the most skilful arguments the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity, he went on to say, when enraptured listeners besought him to dictate his address so that it might be preserved, that if he had been evilly minded he could refute the doctrine by yet better arguments. Heresy apart, this species of dialectical insincerity infected the whole life of the schools, even the higher spirits going about their work with a certain amount of mere logical ceremony.
§ 6. SARACEN AND JEWISH INFLUENCES
Even in the schools, however, over and above the influence of the more original teachers, there rises at the close of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth some measure of a new life, introduced into philosophy through the communication of Aristotle to the western world by the Saracens, largely by the mediation of the Jews. The latter, in their free life under the earlier Moorish toleration, had developed something in the nature of a school of philosophy, in which the Judaic Platonism set up by Philo of Alexandria in the first century was blended with the Aristotelianism of the Arabs. As early as the eighth and ninth centuries, anti-Talmudic (the Karaïtes) and pro-Talmudic parties professed alike to appeal to reason ; and in the twelfth century the mere production of the Guide of the Perplexed by the celebrated Moses Maimonides (1130-1205) tells of a good deal of practical rationalism (of the kind that reduced miracle stories to allegories), of which, however, there is little direct literary result save of a theosophic kind. Levi ben Gershom (1286-1344), commonly regarded as the greatest successor of Maimonides, is like him guardedly rationalistic in his commentaries on the Scriptures. But the doctrine which makes Aristotle a practical support to rationalism, and which was adopted not only by Averroës but by the Motazilites of Islam--the eternity of matter--was rejected by Maimonides (as by nearly all other Jewish teachers, with the partial exception of Levi ben Gershom), on Biblical grounds; though his attempts to rationalize Biblical doctrine and minimize miracles made him odious to the orthodox Jews, some of whom, in France, did not scruple to call in the aid of the Christian inquisition against his partisans. The long struggle between the Maimonists and the orthodox is described as ending in the "triumph of peripatetism" or Averroïsm in the synagogue ; but Averroïsm as modified by Maimonides is only a partial accommodation of scripture to common sense. It would appear, in fact, that Jewish thought in the Saracen world retrograded as did that of the Saracens themselves; for we find Maimonides exclaiming over the apparent disbelief in creatio ex nihilo in the "Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great," believed by him to be ancient, but now known to be a product of the eighth century. The pantheistic teaching of Solomon ben Gebirol or Ibn Gebirol, better known as Avicebron, who in point of time preceded the Arab Avempace, and who later acquired much Christian authority, was orthodox on the side of the creation dogma even when many Jews were on that head rationalistic. The high-water mark, among the Jews, of the critical rationalism of the time, is the perception by Aben or Ibn Ezra (1119-1174) that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses--a discovery which gave Spinoza his cue five hundred years later; but Ibn Ezra, liberioris ingenii vir, as Spinoza pronounced him, had to express himself darkly.
Thus the Jewish influence on Christian thought in the Middle Ages was chiefly metaphysical, carrying on Greek and Arab impulses; and to call the Jewish people, as does Renan, "the principal representative of rationalism during the second half of the Middle Age" is to make too much of the academic aspects of freethinking. On the side of popular theology it is difficult to believe that they had much Unitarian influence; though Joinville in his Life of Saint Louis tells how, in a debate between Churchmen and Jews at the monastery of Cluny, a certain knight saw fit to break the head of one of the Jews with his staff for denying the divinity of Jesus, giving as his reason that many good Christians, listening to the Jewish arguments, were in a fair way to go home unbelievers. It was in this case that the sainted king laid down the principle that when a layman heard anyone blaspheme the Christian creed his proper course was not to argue, but to run the blasphemer through with his sword. Such admitted inability on the part of the laity to reason on their faith, however, was more likely to accompany a double degree of orthodoxy than to make for doubt; and the clerical debating at the Abbey of Cluny, despite the honourable attitude of the Abbot, who condemned the knight's outrage, was probably a muster of foregone conclusions.
For a time, indeed, in the energetic intellectual life of northern France the spirit of freethought went far and deep. After the great stimulus given in Abailard's day to all discussion, we find another Breton teacher, Amaury or Amalrich of Bène or Bena (end of twelfth century) and his pupil David of Dinant, partly under the earlier Arab influence, partly under that of John the Scot, teaching a pronounced pantheism, akin to that noted as flourishing later among the Brethren of the Free Spirit and some of the Franciscan Fraticelli. Such a movement, involving disregard for the sacraments and ceremonies of the Church, was soon recognized as a dangerous heresy, and dealt with accordingly. The Church caused Amaury to abjure his teachings; and after his death, finding his party still growing, dug up and burned his bones. At the same time (1209) a number of his followers were burned alive; David of Dinant had to fly for his life; and inasmuch as the new heresy had begun to make much of Aristotle, presumably as interpreted by Averroës, a Council held at Paris vetoed for the university the study alike of the pagan master and his commentators, interdicting first the Physics and soon after the Metaphysics. This veto held until 1237, when the school which adapted the lore of Aristotle to Christian purposes began to carry the day.
The heretical Aristotelianism and the orthodox system which was to overpower it were alike radiated from the south, where the Arab influence spread early and widely. There, as we shall see, the long duel between the Emperor Frederick II and the papacy made a special opportunity for speculative freethought; and though this was far from meaning at all times practical enmity to Christian doctrine, that was not absent. It is clear that before Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) a Naturalist and Averroïst view of the universe had been much discussed, since he makes the remark that "God is by some called Natura naturans" --Nature at work--an idea fundamental alike to pantheism and to scientific naturalism. And throughout his great work--a marvel of mental gymnastic which better than almost any other writing redeems medieval orthodoxy from the charge of mere ineptitude--Thomas indicates his acquaintance with unorthodox thought. In particular he seems to owe the form of his work as well as the subject-matter of much of his argument to Averroës. Born within the sphere of the Saracen-Sicilian influence, and of high rank, he must have met with what rationalism there was, and he always presupposes it. "He is nearly as consummate a skeptic, almost atheist, as he is a divine and theologian," says one modern ecclesiastical dignitary; and an orthodox apologist more severely complains that "Aquinas presented ... so many doubts on the deepest points ... so many plausible reasons for unbelief ... that his works have probably suggested most of the skeptical opinions which were adopted by others who were trained in the study of them.... He has done more than most men to put the faith of his fellow-Christians in peril." Of course he rejects Averroïsm. Yet he, like his antagonist Duns Scotus, inevitably gravitates to pantheism when he would rigorously philosophize.
What he did for his church was to combine so ingeniously the semblance of Aristotelian method with constant recurrence to the sacred books as to impose their authority on the life of the schools no less completely than it dominated the minds of the unlearned. Meeting method with method, and showing himself well aware of the lore he circumvented, he built up a system quite as well fitted to be a mere gymnastic of the mind; and he thereby effected the arrest for some three centuries of the method of experimental science which Aristotle had inculcated. He came just in time. Roger Bacon, trained at Paris, was eagerly preaching the scientific gospel; and while he was suffering imprisonment at the hands of his Franciscan superiors for his eminently secular devotion to science, the freer scholars of the university were developing a heresy that outwent his.
Now, however, began to be seen once for all the impossibility of rational freedom in or under a church which depended for its revenue on the dogmatic exploitation of popular credulity. For a time the Aristotelian influence, as had been seen by the churchmen who had first sought to destroy it, tended to be Averroïst and rationalist. In 1269, however, there begins a determined campaign, led by the bishop of Paris, against the current Averroïst doctrines, notably the propositions "that the world is eternal"; "that there never was a first man"; "that the intellect of man is one"; "that the mind, which is the form of man, constituting him such, perishes with the body"; "that the acts of men are not governed by divine providence"; "that God cannot give immortality or incorruptibility to a corruptible or mortal thing." On such doctrines the bishop and his coadjutors naturally passed an anathema (1270); and at this period it was that Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas wrote their treatises against Averroïsm.
Still the freethinkers held out, and though in 1271 official commands were given that the discussion of such matters in the university should cease, another process of condemnation was carried out in 1277. This time the list of propositions denounced includes the following: "that the natural philosopher as such must deny the creation of the world, because he proceeds upon natural causes and reasons; while the believer (fidelis) may deny the eternity of the world, because he argues from supernatural causes"; "that creation is not possible, although the contrary is to be held according to faith"; "that a future resurrection is not to be believed by the philosopher, because it cannot be investigated by reason"; "that the teachings of the theologians are founded on fables"; "that there are fables and falsities in the Christian religion as in others"; "that nothing more can be known, on account of theology"; "that the Christian law prevents from learning"; "that God is not triune and one, for trinity is incompatible with perfect simplicity"; "that ecstatic states and visions take place naturally, and only so." Such vital unbelief could have only one fate; it was reduced to silence by a papal Bull, administered by the orthodox majority; and the memory of the massacres of the year 1209, and of the awful crusade against the Albigenses, served to cow the thinkers of the schools into an outward conformity.
Henceforward orthodox Aristotelianism, placed on a canonical footing in the theological system of Thomas Aquinas, ruled the universities; and scholasticism counts for little in the liberation of European life from either dogma or superstition. The practically progressive forces are to be looked for outside. In the thirteenth century in England we find the Franciscan friars in the school of Robert Grosstête at Oxford discussing the question "Whether there be a God?" but such a dispute was an academic exercise like another; and in any case the authorities could be trusted to see that it came to nothing. The work of Thomas himself serves to show how a really great power of comprehensive and orderly thought can be turned to the subversion of judgment by accepting the prior dominion of a fixed body of dogma and an arbitrary rule over opinion. And yet, so strong is the principle of ratiocination in his large performance, and so much does it embody of the critical forces of antiquity and of its own day, that while it served the Church as a code of orthodoxy its influence can be seen in the skeptical philosophy of Europe as late as Spinoza and Kant. It appears to have been as a result of his argumentation that there became established in the later procedure of the Church the doctrine that, while heretics who have once received the faith and lapsed are to be coerced and punished, other unbelievers (as Moslems and Jews) are not. This principle also, it would appear, he derived from the Moslems, as he did their rule that those of the true faith must avoid intimacy with the unbelievers, though believers firm in the faith may dispute with them "when there is greater expectation of the conversion of the infidels than of the subversion of the fidels." And to the rule of non-inquisition into the faith of Jews and Moslems the Church professed to adhere while the Inquisition lasted, after having trampled it under foot in spirit by causing the expulsion of the Jews and the Moriscoes from Spain.
We shall perhaps best understand the inner life of the schools in the Middle Ages by likening it to that of the universities of our own time, where there is unquestionably much unbelief among teachers and taught, but where the economic and other pressures of the institution suffice to preserve an outward acquiescence. In the Middle Ages it was immeasurably less possible than in our day for the unbeliever to strike out a free course of life and doctrine for himself. If, then, to-day the scholarly class is in large measure tied to institutions and conformities, much more so was it then. The cloister was almost the sole haven of refuge for studious spirits, and to attain the haven they had to accept the discipline and the profession of faith. We may conclude, accordingly, that such works as Abailard's Sic et Non, setting forth opposed views of so many doctrines and problems, stood for and made for a great deal of quiet skepticism; that the remarkable request of the monks of Bec for a ratiocinative teaching which should meet even extravagant objections, covered a good deal of resigned unfaith; and that in the Franciscan schools at Oxford the disputants were not all at heart believers. Indeed, the very existence of the doctrine of a "twofold truth"--one truth for religion and another for philosophy--was from the outset a witness for unbelief. But the unwritten word died, the litera scripta being solely those of faith, and liberation had to come, ages later, from without. Even when a bold saying won general currency--as that latterly ascribed, no doubt falsely, to King Alfonso the Wise of Castile, that "if he had been of God's council when he made the world he could have advised him better"--it did but crystallize skepticism in a jest, and supply the enemy with a text against impiety.
