A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 16 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 16Christendom in the Middle Ages (part 3)
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Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 16
Christendom in the Middle Ages (part 3)
RobertsonEnglish
All the while, the Church was forging new and more murderous weapons against reason. It is one of her infamies to have revived the use in Christendom of the ancient practice of judicial torture, and this expressly for the suppression of heresy. The later European practice dates from the Bull of Innocent IV, Ad extirpanda, dated 1252. At first a veto was put on its administration by clerical hands; but in 1256 Alexander IV authorized the inquisitors and their associates to absolve one another for such acts. By the beginning of the fourteenth century torture was in use not only in the tribunals of the Inquisition but in the ordinary ecclesiastical courts, whence it gradually entered into the courts of lay justice. It is impossible to estimate the injury thus wrought at once to culture and to civilization, at the hands of the power which claimed specially to promote both.
§ 7. FREETHOUGHT IN ITALY
Apart from the schools, there was a notable amount of hardy freethinking among the imperialist nobles of northern Italy, in the time of the emperors Henry IV and V, the attitude of enmity to the Holy See having the effect of encouraging a rude rationalism. In 1115, while Henry V was vigorously carrying on the war of investitures begun by his father, and formerly condemned by himself, the Countess Matilda of Tuscany bequeathed her extensive fiefs to the papacy; and in the following year Henry took forcible possession of them. At this period the strife between the papal and the imperial factions in the Tuscan cities was at its fiercest; and the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani alleges that among many other heretics in 1115 and 1117 were some "of the sect of the Epicureans," who "with armed hand defended the said heresy" against the orthodox. But it is doubtful whether the heresy involved was anything more than imperialist anti-papalism. Another chronicler speaks of the heretics as Paterini; and even this is dubious. The title of Epicurean in the time of Villani and Dante stood for an unbeliever in a future state; but there was an avowed tendency to call all Ghibellines Paterini; and other heretical aspersions were likely to be applied in the same way. As the Averroïst philosophy had not yet risen, and rationalistic opinions were not yet current among the western Saracens, any bold heresy among the anti-papalists of Florence must be assigned either to a spontaneous growth of unbelief or to the obscure influence of the great poem of Lucretius, never wholly lost from Italian hands. But the Lucretian view of things among men of the world naturally remained a matter of private discussion, not of propaganda; and it was on the less rationalistic but more organized anti-clericalism that there came the doom of martyrdom. So with the simple deism of which we find traces in the polemic of Guibert de Nogent (d. 1124), who avowedly wrote his tract De Incarnatione adversus Judæos rather as an apology against unbelievers among the Christians; and again among the pilgrim community founded later in France in commemoration of Thomas à Becket. Such doubters said little, leaving it to more zealous reformers to challenge creed with creed.
Freethought in south-western Europe, however, had a measure of countenance in very high places. In the thirteenth century the Emperor Frederick II had the repute of being an infidel in the double sense of being semi-Moslem and semi-atheist. By Pope Gregory IX he was openly charged, in a furious afterthought, with saying that the world had been deceived by three impostors (baratores)--Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed; also with putting Jesus much below the other two, and with delighting to call himself the forerunner of Antichrist.
The Pope's letter, dated July 1, 1239, is given by Matthew Paris (extracts in Gieseler, vol. iii, § 55), and in Labbe's Concilia, t. xiii, col. 1157. Cp. the other references given by Renan, Averroès, 3e édit. pp. 296-97. As Voltaire remarks (Essai sur les Moeurs, ch. lii), the Pope's statement is the basis for the old belief that Frederick had written a treatise dealing with Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as The Three Impostors. The story is certainly a myth; and probably no such book existed in his century. Cp. Maclaine's note to Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. i, end; Renan, Averroès, pp. 280-81, 295. The authorship of such a book has nevertheless been ascribed by Catholic writers successively to Averroës, Simon of Tournay, Frederick, his Minister, Pierre des Vignes, Arnaldo de Villanueva, Boccaccio, Poggio, Pietro Aretino, Machiavelli, Symphorien, Champier, Pomponazzi, Cardan, Erasmus, Rabelais, Ochinus, Servetus, Postel, Campanella, Muret, Geoffroi Vallée, Giordano Bruno, Dolet, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Vanini (cp. Sentimens sur le traité des trois imposteurs in the French ed. of 1793; and Lea, Hist. of the Inquis. iii, 560); and the seventeenth-century apologist Mersenne professed to have seen it in Arabic (Lea, iii, 297). These references may be dismissed as worthless. In 1654 the French physician and mathematician Morin wrote an Epistola de tribus impostoribus under the name of Panurge, but this attacked the three contemporary writers Gassendi, Neure, and Bernier; and in 1680 Kortholt of Kiel published under the title De tribus impostoribus magnis an attack on Herbert, Hobbes, and Spinoza. The Three Impostors current later, dealing with Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, may have been written about the same time, but, as we shall see later, is identical with L'Esprit de Spinoza, first published in 1719. A Latin treatise purporting to be written de tribus famosissimis deceptoribus, and addressed to an Otho illustrissimus (conceivably Otho Duke of Bavaria, 13th c.), came to light in MS. in 1706, and was described in 1716, but was not printed. The treatise current later in French cannot have been the same. On the whole subject see the note of R. C. Christie (reprinted from Notes and Queries) in his Selected Essays and Papers, 1902, pp. 309, 315; and the full discussion in Reuter's Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung, ii, 251-96. The book De tribus impostoribus, bearing the date 1598, of which several copies exist, seems to have been really published, with its false date, at Vienna in 1753.
Frederick was in reality superstitious enough; he worshipped relics; and he was nearly as merciless as the popes to rebellious heretics and Manicheans; his cruelty proceeding, seemingly, on the belief that insubordination to the emperor was sure to follow intellectual as distinguished from political revolt against the Church. He was absolutely tolerant to Jews and Moslems, and had trusted Moslem counsellors, thereby specially evoking the wrath of the Church. Greatly concerned to acquire the lore of the Arabs, he gave his favour and protection to Michael Scotus, the first translator of portions of Averroës into Latin, and presumptively himself a heretic of the Averroïst stamp; whence the legend of his wizardry, adopted by Dante. Thus the doubting and persecuting emperor assisted at the birth of the philosophic movement which for centuries was most closely associated with unbelief in Christendom. For the rest, he is recorded to have ridiculed the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, the viaticum, and other dogmas, "as being repugnant to reason and to nature"; and his general hostility to the Pope would tend to make him a bad Churchman. Indeed the testimonies, both Christian and Moslem, as to his freethinking are too clear to be set aside. Certainly no monarch of that or any age was more eagerly interested in every form of culture, or did more, on tyrannous lines, to promote it; and to him rather than to Simon de Montfort Europe owes the admission of representatives of cities to Parliaments. Of his son Manfred it is recorded that he was a thorough Epicurean, believing neither in God nor in the saints. But positive unbelief in a future state, mockery of the Christian religion, and even denial of deity--usually in private, and never in writing--are frequently complained of by the clerical writers of the time in France and Italy; while in Spain Alfonso the Wise, about 1260, speaks of a common unbelief in immortality, alike as to heaven and hell; and the Council of Tarragona in 1291 decrees punishments against such unbelievers. In Italy, not unnaturally, they were most commonly found among the Ghibelline or imperial party, the opponents of the papacy, despite imperial orthodoxy. "Incredulity, affected or real, was for the oppressed Ghibellines a way among others of distinguishing themselves from the Guelph oppressors."
The commonest form of rationalistic heresy seems to have been unbelief in immortality. Thus Dante in the Inferno estimates that among the heretics there are more than a thousand followers of Epicurus, "who make the soul die with the body," specifying among them the Emperor Frederick II, a cardinal, the Ghibelline noble Farinata degli Uberti, and the Guelph Cavalcante Cavalcanti. He was thinking, as usual, of the men of his own age; but, as we have seen, this particular heresy had existed in previous centuries, having indeed probably never disappeared from Italy. Other passages in Dante's works show, in any case, that it was much discussed in his time; and it is noteworthy that, so far as open avowal went, Italian freethought had got no further two hundred years later. In the period before the papacy had thoroughly established the Inquisition, and diplomacy supervened on the tempestuous strifes of the great factions, there was a certain hardihood of speech on all subjects, which tended to disappear alongside of even a more searching unbelief.
"Le 16e siècle n'a eu aucune mauvaise pensée que le 13e n'ait eue avant lui" (Renan, Averroès, p. 231). Renan, however, seems astray in stating that "Le Poème de la Descente de Saint Paul aux enfers parle avec terreur d'une société secrète qui avait juré la destruction de Christianisme" (id. p. 284). The poem simply describes the various tortures of sinners in hell, and mentions in their turn those who "en terre, à sainte Iglise firent guerre," and in death "Verbe Deu refusouent"; also those "Ki ne croient que Deu fust nez (né), ne que Sainte Marie l'eust portez, ne que por le peuple vousist (voulait) mourir, ne que peine deignast soffrir." See the text as given by Ozanam, Dante, ed. 6ième, Ptie. iv--the version cited by Renan.
So, with regard to the belief in magic, there was no general advance in the later Renaissance on the skepticism of Pietro of Abano, a famous Paduan physician and Averroïst, who died, at the age of 80, in 1305. He appears to have denied alike magic and miracles, though he held fast by astrology, and ascribed the rise and progress of all religions to the influence of the stars. Himself accused of magic, he escaped violent death by dying naturally before his trial was ended; and the Inquisition burned either his body or his image. After him, superstition seems to have gone step for step with skepticism.
Dante's own poetic genius, indeed, did much to arrest intellectual evolution in Italy. Before his time, as we have seen, the trouvères of northern France and the Goliards of the south had handled hell in a spirit of burlesque; and his own teacher, Brunetto Latini, had framed a poetic allegory, Il Tesoretto, in which Nature figures as the universal power, behind which the God-idea disappeared. But Dante's tremendous vision ultimately effaced all others of the kind; and his intellectual predominance in virtue of mere imaginative art is at once the great characteristic and the great anomaly of the early Renaissance. Happily the inseparable malignity of his pietism was in large part superseded by a sunnier spirit; but his personality and his poetry helped to hold the balance of authority on the side of faith. Within a few years of his death there was burned at Florence (1327) one of the most daring heretics of the later Middle Ages, Cecco Stabili d'Ascoli, a professor of philosophy and astrology at Bologna, who is recorded to have had some intimacy with Dante, and to have been one of his detractors. Cecco has been described as "representing natural science, against the Christian science of Dante"; and though his science was primitive, the summing-up is not unwarranted. Combining strong anti-Christian feeling with the universal belief in astrology, he had declared that Jesus lived as a sluggard (come un poltrone) with his disciples, and died on the cross, under the compulsion of his star. In view of the blasphemer's fate, such audacity was not often repeated.
As against Dante, the great literary influence for tolerance and liberalism if not rationalism of thought was Boccaccio (1313-1375), whose Decameron anticipates every lighter aspect of the Renaissance--its levity, its licence, its humour, its anti-clericalism, its incipient tolerance, its irreverence, its partial freethinking, as well as its exuberance in the joy of living. On the side of anti-clericalism, the key-note is struck so strongly and so defiantly in some of the opening tales that the toleration of the book by the papal authorities can be accounted for only by their appreciation of the humour of the stories therein told against them, as that of the Jew who, after seeing the utter corruption of the clergy at Rome, turned Christian on the score that only by divine support could such a system survive. No Protestant ever passed a more scathing aspersion on the whole body of the curia than is thus set in the forefront of the Decameron. Still more deeply significant of innovating thought, however, is the famous story of The Three Rings, embodied later by Lessing in his Nathan the Wise as an apologue of tolerance. Such a story, introduced with whatever parade of orthodox faith, could not but make for rational skepticism, summarizing as it does the whole effect of the inevitable comparison of the rival creeds made by the men of Italy and those of the east in their intercourse. The story itself, centring on Saladin, is of eastern origin, and so tells of even more freethinking than meets the eye in the history of Islam. It is noteworthy that the Rabbi Simeon Duran (1360-1444), who follows on this period, appears to be the first Jewish teacher to plead for mutual toleration among the conflicting schools of his race.
Current in Italy before Boccaccio, the tale had been improved from one Italian hand to another; and the main credit for its full development is Boccaccio's. Though the Church never officially attempted to suppress the book--leaving it to Savonarola to destroy as far as possible the first edition--the more serious clergy naturally resented its hostility, first denouncing it, then seeking to expurgate all the anti-clerical passages; and the personal pressure brought to bear upon Boccaccio had the effect of dispiriting and puritanizing him; so that the Decameron finally wrought its effect in its author's despite. So far as we can divine the deeper influence of such a work on medieval thought, it may reasonably be supposed to have tended, like that of Averroïsm, towards Unitarianism or deism, inasmuch as a simple belief in deity is all that is normally implied in its language on religious matters. On that view it bore its full intellectual fruit only in the two succeeding centuries, when deism and Unitarianism alike grew up in Italy, apparently from non-scholastic roots.
It is an interesting problem how far the vast calamity of the Black Death (1348-49) told either for skepticism or for superstition in this age. In Boccaccio's immortal book we see a few refined Florentines who flee the pest giving themselves up to literary amusement; but there is also mention of many who had taken to wild debauchery, and there are many evidences as to wild outbreaks of desperate licence all over Europe. On the other hand, many were driven by fear to religious practices; and in the immense destruction of life the Church acquired much new wealth. At the same time the multitudes of priests who died had as a rule to be replaced by ill-trained persons, where the problem was not solved by creating pluralities, the result being a general falling-off in the culture and the authority of the clergy. But there seems to have been little or no growth of such questioning as came later from the previously optimistic Voltaire after the earthquake of Lisbon; and the total effect of the immense reduction of population all over Europe seems to have been a lowering of the whole of the activities of life. Certainly the students of Paris in 1376 were surprisingly freethinking on scriptural points; but there is nothing to show that the great pestilence had set up any new movement of ethical thought. In some ways it grievously deepened bigotry, as in regard to the Jews, who were in many regions madly impeached as having caused the plague by poisoning the wells, and were then massacred in large numbers.
Side by side with Boccaccio, his friend Petrarch (1304-1374), who with him completes the great literary trio of the late Middle Ages, belongs to freethought in that he too, with less aggressiveness but also without recoil, stood for independent culture and a rational habit of mind as against the dogmatics and tyrannies of the Church. He was in the main a practical humanist, not in accord with the verbalizing scholastic philosophy of his time, and disposed to find his intellectual guide in the skeptical yet conservative Cicero. The scholastics had become as fanatical for Aristotle or Averroës as the churchmen were for their dogmas; and Petrarch made for mental freedom by resisting all dogmatisms alike. The general liberality of his attitude has earned him the titles of "the first modern man" and "the founder of modern criticism" --both somewhat high-pitched. He represented in reality the sobering and clarifying influence of the revived classic culture on the fanaticisms developed in the Middle Ages; and when he argued for the rule of reason in all things it was not that he was a deeply searching rationalist, but that he was spontaneously averse to all the extremes of thought around him, and was concerned to discredit them. For himself, having little speculative power, he was disposed to fall back on a simple and tolerant Christianity. Thus he is quite unsympathetic in his references to those scholars of his day who privately indicated their unbelief. Knowing nothing of the teaching of Averroës, he speaks of him, on the strength of Christian fictions, as "that mad dog who, moved by an execrable rage, barks against his Lord Christ and the Catholic faith." Apart from such conventional odium theologicum, his judgment, like his literary art, was clear and restrained; opening no new vistas, but bringing a steady and placid light to bear on its chosen sphere.
Between such humanistic influences and that of more systematic and scholastic thought, Italy in that age was the chief source of practical criticism of Christian dogmas; and the extent to which a unitarian theism was now connected with the acceptance of the philosophy of Averroës brought it about, despite the respectful attitude of Dante, who gave him a tranquil place in hell, that he came to figure as Antichrist for the faithful. Petrarch in his letters speaks of much downright hostility to the Christian system on the part of Averroïsts; and the association of Averroïsm with the great medical school of Padua must have promoted practical skepticism among physicians. Being formally restricted to the schools, however, it tended there to undergo the usual scholastic petrifaction; and the common-sense deism it encouraged outside had to subsist without literary discipline. In this form it probably reached many lands, without openly affecting culture or life; since Averroïsm itself was professed generally in the Carmelite order, who claimed for it orthodoxy.
Alongside, however, of intellectual solvents, there were at work others of a more widely effective kind, set up by the long and sinister historic episode of the Great Papal Schism. The Church, already profoundly discredited in the eleventh century by the gross disorders of the papacy, continued frequently throughout the twelfth to exhibit the old spectacle of rival popes; and late in the fourteenth (1378) there broke out the greatest schism of all. Ostensibly beginning in a riotous coercion of the electing cardinals by the Roman populace, it was maintained on the one side by the standing interest of the clergy in Italy, which called for an Italian head of the Church, and on the other hand by the French interest, which had already enforced the residence of the popes at Avignon from 1305 to 1376. It was natural that, just after the papal chair had been replaced in Italy by Gregory IX, the Romans should threaten violence to the cardinals if they chose any but an Italian; and no less natural that the French court should determine to restore a state of things in which it controlled the papacy in all save its corruption. During the seventy years of "the Captivity," Rome had sunk to the condition of a poor country town; and to the Italian clergy the struggle for a restoration was a matter of economic life and death. For thirty-nine years did the schism last, being ended only by the prolonged action of the great Council of Constance in deposing the rivals of the moment and appointing Martin V (1417); and this was achieved only after there had slipped into the chair of Peter "the most worthless and infamous man to be found." During the schism every species of scandal had flourished. Indulgences had been sold and distributed at random; simony and venality abounded more than ever; the courts of Rome and Avignon were mere rivals in avarice, indecorum, and reciprocal execration; and in addition to the moral occasion for skepticism there was the intellectual, since no one could show conclusively that the administration of sacraments was valid under either pope.
§ 8. SECTS AND ORDERS
Despite, therefore, the premium put by the Church on devotion to its cause and doctrine, and despite its success in strangling specific forms of heresy, hostility to its own pretensions germinated everywhere, especially in the countries most alien to Italy in language and civilization. An accomplished Catholic scholar sums up that "from about the middle of the twelfth century the whole secular and religious literature of Europe grew more and more hostile to the papacy and the curia." The Church's own economic conditions, constantly turning its priesthood, despite all precautions, into a money-making and shamelessly avaricious class, ensured it a perpetuity of ill-will and denunciation. The popular literature which now began to grow throughout Christendom with the spread of political order was everywhere turned to the account of anti-clerical satire; and only the defect of real knowledge secured by the Church's own policy prevented such hostility from developing into rational unbelief. As it was, a tendency to criticize at once the socio-economic code and practice and the details of creed and worship is seen in a series of movements from the thirteenth century onwards; and some of the most popular literature of that age is deeply tinged with the new spirit. After the overthrow of the well-organized anti-clericalism of the Cathari and other heretics in Languedoc, however, no movement equally systematic and equally heretical flourished on any large scale; and as even those heresies on their popular side were essentially supernaturalist, and tended to set up one hierarchy in place of another, it would be vain to look for anything like a consistent or searching rationalism among the people in the period broadly termed medieval, including the Renaissance.
It would be a bad misconception to infer from the abundant signs of popular disrespect for the clergy that the mass of the laity even in Italy, for instance, were unbelievers. They never were anything of the kind. At all times they were deeply superstitious, easily swayed by religious emotion, credulous as to relics, miracles, visions, prophecies, responsive to pulpit eloquence, readily passing from derision of worldly priests to worship of austere ones. When Machiavelli said that religion was gone from Italy, he was thinking of the upper classes, among whom theism was normal, and the upper clergy, who were often at once superstitious and corrupt. As for the common people, it was impossible that they should be grounded rationalists as regarded the great problems of life. They were merely the raw material on which knowledge might work if it could reach them, which it never did. And the common people everywhere else stood at or below the culture level of those of Italy.
For lack of other culture than Biblical, then, even the popular heresy tended to run into mysticisms which were only so far more rational than the dogmas and rites of the Church that they stood for some actual reflection. A partial exception, indeed, may be made in the case of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a sect set up in Germany in the early years of the thirteenth century, by one Ortlieb, on the basis of the pantheistic teachings of Amaury of Bène and David of Dinant. Their doctrines were set forth in a special treatise or sacred book, called The Nine Rocks. The Fratres liberi spiritus seem to have been identical with the sect of the "Holy Spirit"; but their tenets were heretical in a high degree, including as they did a denial of personal immortality, and consequently of the notions of heaven, hell, and purgatory. Even the sect's doctrine of the Holy Spirit was heretical in another way, inasmuch as it ran, if its opponents can be believed, to the old antinomian assertion that anyone filled with the Spirit was sinless, whatever deeds he might do. As always, such antinomianism strengthened the hands of the clergy against the heresy, though the Brethren seem to have been originally very ascetic; and inasmuch as their pantheism involved the idea that Satan also had in him the divine essence, they were duly accused of devil-worship. On general principles they were furiously persecuted; but all through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and even in the fifteenth, they are found in various parts of central and western Europe, often in close alliance with the originally orthodox communities known in France and Holland by the names of Turlupins and Beguins or Beguines, and in Germany and Belgium as Beguttæ or Beghards, akin to the Lollards.
These in turn are to be understood in connection with developments which took place in the thirteenth century within the Church--notably the rise of the great orders of Mendicant Friars, of which the two chief were founded about 1216 by Francis of Assisi and the Spanish Dominic, the latter a fierce persecutor in the Albigensian crusade. Nothing availed more to preserve or restore for a time the Church's prestige. The old criticism of priestly and monastic avarice and worldliness was disarmed by the sudden appearance and rapid spread of a priesthood and brotherhood of poverty; and the obvious devotion of thousands of the earlier adherents went to the general credit of the Church. Yet the descent of the new orders to the moral and economic levels of the old was only a question of time; and no process could more clearly illustrate the futility of all schemes of regenerating the world on non-rational principles. Apart from the vast encouragement given to sheer mendicancy among the poor, the orders themselves substantially apostatized from their own rules within a generation.
The history of the Franciscans in particular is like that of the Church in general--one of rapid lapse into furious schism, with a general reversion to gross self-seeking on the part of the majority, originally vowed to utter poverty. Elias, the first successor of Francis, appointed by the Saint himself, proved an intolerable tyrant; and in his day began the ferocious strife between the "Spirituals," who insisted on the founder's ideal of poverty, and the majority, who insisted on accepting the wealth which the world either bestowed or could be cajoled into bestowing on the order. The majority, of course, ultimately overbore the Spirituals, the papacy supporting them. They followed the practically universal law of monastic life. The Humiliati, founded before the thirteenth century, had to be suppressed by the Pope in the sixteenth, for sheer corruption of morals; and the Franciscans and Dominicans, who speedily became bitterly hostile to each other, were in large measure little better. Even in the middle of the thirteenth century they were attacked by the Sorbonne doctor, William of St. Amour, in a book on The Perils of the Latter Times; and in England in the fourteenth century we find Wiclif assailing the begging friars as the earlier satirists had assailed the abbots and monks. That all this reciprocal invective was not mere partizan calumny, but broadly true as against both sides, is the conclusion forced upon a reader of the Philobiblon ascribed to Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and Treasurer and Chancellor under Edward III. In that book, written either by the bishop or by one of his chaplains, Robert Holkot, the demerits of all orders of the clergy from the points of view of letters and morals are set forth with impartial emphasis; and the character of the bishop in turn is no less effectively disposed of after his death by Adam Murimuth, a distinguished lawyer and canon of St. Paul's.
The worst of the trouble for the Church was that the mendicants were detested by bishops and the beneficed priests, whose credit they undermined, and whose revenues they intercepted. That the Franciscans and Dominicans remained socially powerful till the Reformation was due to the energy developed by their corporate organization and the measure of education they soon secured on their own behalf; not to any general superiority on their part to the "secular" clergy so-called. Indeed it was to the latter, within the Church, that most pre-Reformation reformers looked for sympathy. At the outset, however, the movement of the Mendicant Friars gave a great impulsion to the lay communities of the type of the Beguines and Beghards who had originated in the Netherlands, and who practised at once mendicancy and charity very much on the early Franciscan lines; and the spirit of innovation led in both cases to forms of heresy. That of the Beguines and Beghards arose mainly through their association with the Brethren of the Free Spirit; and they suffered persecution as did the latter; while among the "Spiritual" Franciscans, who were despisers of learning, there arose a species of new religion. At the beginning of the century, Abbot Joachim, of Flora or Flores in Calabria (d. 1202), who "may be regarded as the founder of modern mysticism," had earned a great reputation by devout austerities, and a greater by his vaticinations, which he declared to be divine. One of his writings was condemned as heretical, thirteen years after his death, by the Council of Lateran; but his apocalyptic writings, and others put out in his name, had a great vogue among the rebellious Franciscans.
At length, in 1254, there was produced in Paris a book called The Everlasting Gospel, consisting of three of his genuine works, with a long and audacious Introduction by an anonymous hand, which expressed a spirit of innovation and revolt, mystical rather than rational, that seemed to promise the utter disruption of the Church. It declared that, as the dispensation of the Son had followed on that of the Father, so Christ's evangel in turn was to be superseded by that of the "Holy Spirit." Adopted by the "Spiritual" section of the Franciscans, it brought heresy within the organization itself, the Introduction being by many ascribed--probably in error--to the head of the order, John of Parma, a devotee of Joachim. On other grounds, he was ultimately deposed; but the ferment of heresy was great. And while the Franciscans are commonly reputed to have been led by small-minded generals, their order, as Renan notes, not only never lost the stamp of its popular and irregular origin, but was always less orthodox in general than the Dominican. But its deviations were rather ultra-religious than rational; and some of its heresies have become orthodoxy. Thus it was the Franciscans, notably Duns Scotus, who carried the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin against the Dominicans, who held by the teaching of Thomas Aquinas that she was conceived "in sin." Mary was thus deified on a popular impulse, dating from paganism, at the expense of Christism; and, considering that both Thomas and St. Bernard had flatly rejected the Immaculate Conception, its ultimate adoption as dogma is highly significant.
In the year 1260, when, according to the "Eternal Gospel," the new dispensation of the Holy Spirit was to begin, there was an immense excitement in northern Italy, marked by the outbreak of the order of Flagellants, self-scourgers, whose hysteria spread to other lands. Gherardo Segarelli, a youth of Parma, came forward as a new Christ, had himself circumcised, swaddled, cradled, and suckled; and proceeded to found a new order of "Apostolicals," after the manner of a sect of the previous century, known by the same name, who professed to return to primitive simplicity and to chastity, and reproduced what they supposed to be the morals of the early Church, including the profession of ascetic cohabitation. Some of their missionaries got as far as Germany; but Segarelli was caught, imprisoned, reduced to the status of a bishop's jester, and at length, after saving his life for a time by abjuration, burned at Parma, in the year 1300.
Despite much persecution of the order, one of its adherents, Fra Dolcino, immediately began to exploit Segarelli's martyrdom, and renewed the movement by an adaptation of the "Eternal Gospel," announcing that Segarelli had begun a new era, to last till the Day of Judgment. Predicting the formation of native states, as well as the forcible purification of the papacy, he ultimately set up an armed movement, which held out in the southern Alps for two years, till the Apostolicals were reduced to cannibalism. At length (1307) they were overpowered and massacred, and Dolcino was captured, with his beautiful and devoted companion, Margherita di Trank. She was slowly burned to death before his eyes, refusing to abjure; and he in turn was gradually tortured to death, uttering no cry.
The order subsisted for a time in secret, numbers cherishing Dolcino's memory, and practising a priestless and riteless religion, prohibiting oaths, and wholly repudiating every claim of the Church. Yet another sect, called by the name of "The Spirit of Liberty"--probably the origin of the name libertini, later applied to freethinkers in France--was linked on the one hand to the Apostolicals and on the other to the German Brethren of the Free Spirit, as well as to the Franciscan Fraticelli. This sect is heard of as late as 1344, when one of its members was burned. And there were yet others; till it seemed as if the Latin Church were to be resolved into an endless series of schisms. But organization, as of old, prevailed; the cohesive and aggressive force of the central system, with the natural strifes of the new movements, whether within or without the Church, sufficed to bring about their absorption or their destruction. It needed a special concurrence of economic, political, and culture forces to disrupt the fabric of the papacy.
§ 9. THOUGHT IN SPAIN
Of all the chapters in the history of the Inquisition, the most tragical is the record of its work in Spain, for there a whole nation's faculty of freethought was by its ministry strangled for a whole era. There is a prevalent notion that in Spain fanaticism had mastered the national life from the period of the overthrow of Arianism under the later Visigothic kings; and that there the extirpation of heresy was the spontaneous and congenial work of the bulk of the nation, giving vent to the spirit of intolerance ingrained in it in the long war with the Moors. "Spain," says Michelet, "has always felt herself more Catholic than Rome." But this is a serious misconception. Wars associated with a religious cause are usually followed rather by indifference than by increased faith; and the long wars of the Moors and the Christians in Spain had some such sequel, as had the Crusades, and the later wars of religion in France and Germany. It is true that for a century after the (political) conversion of the Visigothic king Recared (587) from Arianism to Catholicism--an age of complete decadence--the policy of the Spanish Church was extremely intolerant, as might have been expected. The Jews, in particular, were repeatedly and murderously persecuted; but after the fall of the Visigoths before the invading Moors, the treatment of all forms of heresy in the Christian parts of the Peninsula, down to the establishment of the second or New Inquisition under Torquemada, was in general rather less severe than elsewhere.
An exception is to be noted in the case of the edicts of 1194 and 1197, by Alfonso II and Pedro II ("the Catholic") of Aragon, against the Waldenses. The policy in the first case was that of wholesale expulsion of the heretics anathematized by the Church; and, as this laid the victims open to plunder all round, there is a presumption that cupidity was a main part of the motive. Peter the Catholic, in turn, who decreed the stake for the heretics that remained, made a signally complete capitulation to the Holy See; but the nation did not support him; and the tribute he promised to pay to the Pope was never paid. In the thirteenth century, when the Moors had been driven out of Castile, rationalistic heresy seems to have been as common in Spain as in Italy. Already Arab culture had spread, Archbishop Raymond of Toledo (1130-50) having caused many books to be translated from Arabic into Latin; and inasmuch as racial warfare had always involved some intercourse between Christians and Moors, the Averroïst influence which so speedily reached Sicily from Toledo through Michael Scot must have counted for something in Spain. About 1260 Alfonso X, "the Wise" king of Castile, describes the heresies of his kingdom under two main divisions, of which the worse is the denial of a future state of rewards and punishments. This heresy, further, is proceeded against by the Council of Tarragona in 1291. And though Alfonso was orthodox, and in his legislation a persecutor, his own astronomic and mathematical science, so famous in the after times, came to him from the Arabs and the Jews whom he actually called in to assist him in preparing his astronomic tables. Such science was itself a species of heresy in that age; and to it the orthodox king owes his Catholic reputation as a blasphemer, as Antichrist, and as one of the countless authors of the fabulous treatise on the "Three Impostors." He would further rank as a bad Churchman, inasmuch as his very laws against heresy took no account of the Roman Inquisition (though it was nominally established by a papal rescript in 1235), but provided independently for the treatment of offenders. Needless to say, they had due regard to finance, non-believers who listened to heresy being fined ten pounds weight of gold, with the alternative of fifty lashes in public; while the property of lay heretics without kin went to the fisc. The law condemning to the stake those Christians who apostatized to Islam or Judaism had also a financial motive.
Such laws, however, left to unsystematic application, were but slightly operative; and the people fiercely resisted what attempts were made to enforce them. At the end of the thirteenth century the heresies of the French Beguines and the Franciscan "Spirituals" spread in Aragon, both by way of books and of preaching, and even entered Portugal. Against these, in the years 1314-1335, the Inquisitors maintained a persecution. But it has been put on record by the famous Arnaldo of Villanueva--astronomer, scholar, alchemist, reformer, and occultist (d. 1314)--whose books were at that period condemned by a council of friars because of his championship of the Spirituals, that King Frederick II of Aragon had confessed to him his doubts as to the truth of the Christian religion--doubts set up by the misconduct of priests, abbots, and bishops; the malignities of the heads of the friar orders; and the worldliness and political intrigues of the Holy See. Such a king was not likely to be a zealous inquisitor; and the famous Joachite Franciscan Juan de Pera-Tallada (Jean de la Rochetaillade), imprisoned at Avignon for his apocalyptic teachings about 1349, seems to have died in peace in Spain long afterwards. It cannot even be said that the ordinary motive of rapacity worked strongly against heresy in Spain in the Middle Ages, since there the Templars, condemned and plundered everywhere else, were acquitted; and their final spoliation was the work of the papacy, the Spanish authorities resisting. We shall find, further, the orthodox Spanish king of Naples in the fifteenth century protecting anti-papal scholarship. And though Dominic, the primary type of the Inquisitor, had been a Castilian, no Spaniard was Pope from the fourth to the fourteenth century, and very few were cardinals.
As late as the latter half of the fifteenth century, within a generation of the setting-up of the murderous New Inquisition, Spain seems to have been on the whole as much given to freethinking as France, and much more so than England. On the one hand, Averroïsm tinged somewhat the intellectual life through the Moorish environment, so that in 1464 we find revolted nobles complaining that King Enrique IV is suspected of being unsound in the faith because he has about him both enemies of Catholicism and nominal Christians who avow their disbelief in a future state. On the other hand, it had been noted that many were beginning to deny the need or efficacy of priestly confession; and about 1478 a Professor at Salamanca, Pedro de Osma, actually printed an argument to that effect, further challenging the power of the Pope. So slight was then the machinery of inquisition that he had to be publicly tried by a council, which merely ordered him to recant in public; and he died peacefully in 1480.
It was immediately after this, in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, that the Inquisition was newly and effectively established in Spain; and the determining motive was the avarice of the king and queen, not the Catholic zeal of the people. The Inquisitor-General of Messina came to Madrid in 1477 in order to obtain confirmation of a forged privilege, pretended to have been granted to the Dominicans in Sicily by Frederick II in 1233--that of receiving one-third of the property of every heretic they condemned. To such a ruler as Ferdinand, such a system readily appealed; and as soon as possible a new Inquisition was established in Spain, Isabella consenting. From the first it was a system of plunder. "Men long dead, if they were represented by rich descendants, were cited before the tribunal, judged, and condemned; and the lands and goods that had descended to their heirs passed into the coffers of the Catholic kings." The solemn assertion by Queen Isabella, that she had never applied such money to the purposes of the crown, has been proved from State papers to be "a most deliberate and daring falsehood." The revenue thus iniquitously obtained was enormous; and it is inferrible that the pecuniary motive underlay the later expulsion of the Jews and the Moriscoes as well as the average practice of the Inquisition.
The error as to the original or anciently ingrained fanaticism of the Spanish people, first made current by Ticknor (Hist. Spanish Lit., 6th ed. i, 505), has been to some extent diffused by Buckle, who at this point of his inquiry reasoned à priori instead of inductively as his own principles prescribed. See the notes to the present writer's edition of his Introduction (Routledge, 1904), pp. 107, 534-50. The special atrocity of the Inquisition in Spain was not even due directly to the papacy (cp. Burke, ii, 78): it was the result first of the rapacity of Ferdinand, utilizing a papal institution; and later of the political fanaticisms of Charles V and Philip II, both of Teutonic as well as Spanish descent. Philip alleged that the Inquisition in the Netherlands was more severe than in Spain (ed. of Buckle cited, p. 107, note). In the words of Bishop Stubbs: "To a German race of sovereigns Spain finally owed the subversion of her national system and ancient freedom" (id. p. 550, note).
Such a process, however, would not have been possible in any country, at any stage of the world's history, without the initiative and the support of some such sacrosanct organization as the Catholic Church, wielding a spell over the minds even of those who, in terror and despair, fought against it. As in the thirteenth century, so at the end of the fifteenth, the Inquisition in Spain was spasmodically resisted in Aragon and Castile, in Catalonia, and in Valencia; the first Inquisitor-General in Aragon being actually slain in the cathedral of Saragossa in 1487, despite his precaution of wearing a steel cap and coat of mail. Vigorous protests from the Cortès even forced some restraint upon the entire machine; but such occasional resistance could not long countervail the steady pressure of regal and official avarice and the systematic fanaticism of the Dominican order.
It was thus the fate of Spain to illustrate once for all the power of a dogmatic religious system to extirpate the spirit of reason from an entire nation for a whole era. There and there only, save for a time in Italy, did the Inquisition become all-powerful; and it wrought for the evisceration of the intellectual and material life of Spain with a demented zeal to which there is no parallel in later history. In the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, after several random massacres and much persecution of the "New Christians" or doubtful converts from Judaism, the unconverted Jews of Spain were in 1489 penned into Ghettos, and were in 1492 expelled bodily from the country, with every circumstance of cruelty, so far as Church and State could compass their plans. By this measure at least 160,000 subjects of more than average value were lost to the State. Portugal and other Christian countries took the same cruel step a few years later; but Spain carried the policy much further. From the year of its establishment, the Inquisition was hotly at work destroying heresy of every kind; and the renowned Torquemada, the confessor of Isabella, is credited with having burned over ten thousand persons in his eighteen years of office as Grand Inquisitor, besides torturing many thousands. Close upon a hundred thousand more were terrified into submission; and a further six thousand burned in effigy in their absence or after death. The destruction of books was proportionally thorough; and when Lutheran Protestantism arose it was persistently killed out; thousands leaving the country in view of the hopelessness of the cause. At this rate, every vestige of independent thought must soon have disappeared from any nation in the world. If she is to be judged by the number of her slain and exiled heretics, Spain must once have been nearly as fecund in reformative and innovating thought as any State in northern Europe; but the fatal conjunction of the royal and the clerical authority sufficed for a whole era to denude her of every variety of the freethinking species.
§ 10. THOUGHT IN ENGLAND
Lying on the outskirts of the world of culture, England in the later Middle Ages and the period of the Italian Renaissance lived intellectually, even where ministered to by the genius of Chaucer, for the most part in dependence on Continental impulses; yet not without notable outcrops of native energy. There is indeed no more remarkable figure in the Middle Ages than Roger Bacon (? 1214-1294), the English Franciscan friar, schooled at Paris. His career remains still in parts obscure. Born at or near Ilchester, in Somersetshire, he studied at Oxford under Edmund Rich, Richard Fitzacre, Robert Grosstête, and Adam de Marisco; and later, for a number of years, at Paris, where he is supposed to have held a chair. On his return he was lionized; but a few years afterwards, in 1257, we find him again in Paris, banished thither by his Order. He was not absolutely imprisoned, but ordered to live under official surveillance in a dwelling where he was forbidden to write, to speak to novices, or observe the stars--rules which, it is pretty clear, he broke, one and all. After some eight years of this durance, Cardinal Guido Falcodi (otherwise Guy Foucaud or De Foulques), who while acting as papal legate in England at the time of the rising of Simon de Montfort may have known or heard of Bacon, became interested in him through his chaplain, Raymond of Laon, who spoke (in error) of the imprisoned friar as having written much on science. The cardinal accordingly wrote asking to see the writings in question. Bacon sent by a friend an explanation to the effect that he had written little, and that he could not devote himself to composition without a written mandate and a papal dispensation. About this time the Cardinal was elevated to the papacy as Clement IV; and in that capacity, a year later (1266), he wrote to Bacon authorizing him to disobey his superior, but exhorting him to do it secretly. Bacon, by his own account, had already spent in forty years of study 2,000 libri in addition to purchases of books and instruments and teacher's fees; and it is not known whether the Pope furnished the supplies he declared he needed. To work, however, he went with an astonishing industry, and in the course of less than eighteen months he had produced his chief treatise, the Opus Majus; the Opus Minus, designed as a summary or sample of the former; and the later Opus Tertium, planned to serve as a preamble to the two others.
Through all three documents there runs the same inspiration, the Opus Tertium and the Majus constituting a complete treatise, which gives at once the most vivid idea of the state of culture at the time, and the most intimate presentment of a student's mind, that survive from the thirteenth century. It was nothing less than a demand, such as was made by Francis Bacon three hundred and fifty years later, and by Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century, for a reconstruction of all studies and all tuition. Neither pope nor emperor could have met it; but Clement gave Roger his freedom, and he returned to Oxford, papally protected, at the end of 1267. Four years later Clement died, and was succeeded by Gregory X, a Franciscan.
