A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 17 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 17Christendom in the Middle Ages (part 4)
18
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 17
Christendom in the Middle Ages (part 4)
RobertsonEnglish
At this stage of his life Bacon revealed that, whatever were his wrongs, he was inclined to go halfway to meet them. In a new writing of similar purport with the others, the Compendium Philosophiæ, written in 1271, he not only attacked in detail the ecclesiastical system, but argued that the Christians were incomparably inferior to pagans in morals, and therefore in science; that there was more truth in Aristotle's few chapters on laws than in the whole corpus juris; that the Christian religion, as commonly taught, was not free of errors; and that philosophy truly taught, and not as in the schools, was perhaps the surer way to attain both truth and salvation.
Again he was prosecuted; and this time, after much delay, it was decided that the entire Order should deal with the case. Not till 1277 did the trial come off, under the presidency of the chief of the Order, Jerome of Ascoli. Bacon was bracketed with another insubordinate brother, Jean d'Olive; and both were condemned. In Bacon's case his doctrine was specified as continentem aliquas novitates suspectas, propter quas fuit idem Rogerius carceri condempnatus. This time Bacon seems to have undergone a real imprisonment, which lasted fourteen years. During that time four more popes held office, the last of them being the said Jerome, elevated to the papal chair as Nicholas IV. Not till his death in 1292 was Bacon released--to die two years later.
He was in fact, with all his dogmatic orthodoxy, too essentially in advance of his age to be otherwise than suspect to the typical ecclesiastics of any time. The marvel is that with his radical skepticism as to all forms of human knowledge; his intense perception of the fatality of alternate credulity and indifference which kept most men in a state of positive or negative error on every theme; his insatiable thirst for knowledge; his invincible repugnance to all acknowledgment of authority, and his insistence on an ethical end, he should have been able to rest as he did in the assumption of a divine infallibility vested in what he knew to be a corruptible text. It was doubtless defect of strictly philosophic thought, as distinguished from practical critical faculty, that enabled him to remain orthodox in theology while anti-authoritarian in everything else. As it was, his recalcitrance to authority in such an age sufficed to make his life a warfare upon earth. And it is not surprising that, even as his Franciscan predecessor Robert Grosstête, bishop of Lincoln, came to be reputed a sorcerer on the strength of having written many treatises on scientific questions--as well as on witchcraft--Roger Bacon became a wizard in popular legend, and a scandal in the eyes of his immediate superiors, for a zest of secular curiosity no less uncommon and unpriestlike. "It is sometimes impossible to avoid smiling," says one philosophic historian of him, "when one sees how artfully this personified thirst for knowledge seeks to persuade himself, or his readers, that knowledge interests him only for ecclesiastical ends. No one has believed it: neither posterity ... nor his contemporaries, who distrusted him as worldly-minded."
Worldly-minded he was in a noble sense, as seeking to know the world of Nature; and perhaps the most remarkable proof of his originality on this side is his acceptance of the theory of the earth's sphericity. Peter de Alliaco, whose Imago Mundi was compiled in 1410, transcribed from Roger Bacon's Opus Majus almost literally, but without acknowledgment, a passage containing quotations from Aristotle, Pliny, and Seneca, all arguing for the possibility of reaching India by sailing westward. Columbus, it is known, was familiar with the Imago Mundi; and this passage seems greatly to have inspired him in his task. This alone was sufficient practical heresy to put Bacon in danger; and yet his real orthodoxy can hardly be doubted. He always protested against the scholastic doctrine of a "twofold truth," insisting that revelation and philosophy were at one, but that the latter also was divine. It probably mattered little to his superiors, however, what view he took of the abstract question: it was his zeal for concrete knowledge that they detested. His works remain to show the scientific reach of which his age was capable, when helped by the lore of the Arabs; for he seems to have drawn from Averroës some of his inspiration to research; but in the England of that day his ideals of research were as unattainable as his wrath against clerical obstruction was powerless; and Averroïsm in England made little for innovation. The English Renaissance properly sets-in in the latter half of the sixteenth century, when the glory of that of Italy is passing away.
In the fourteenth century, indeed, a remarkable new life is seen arising in England in the poetry and prose of Chaucer, from contact with the literature of Italy and France; but while Chaucer reflects the spontaneous medieval hostility to the self-seeking and fraudulent clergy, and writes of deity with quite medieval irreverence, he tells little of the Renaissance spirit of critical unbelief, save when he notes the proverbial irreligion of the physicians, or smiles significantly over the problem of the potency of clerical cursing and absolution, or shrugs his shoulders over the question of a future state. In such matters he is noticeably undevout; and though it is impossible to found on such passages a confident assertion that Chaucer had no belief in immortality, it is equally impossible in view of them to claim that he was a warm believer.
Prof. Lounsbury, who has gone closely and critically into the whole question of Chaucer's religious opinions, asks concerning the lines in the Knight's Tale on the passing of Arcite: "Can modern agnosticism point to a denial more emphatic than that made in the fourteenth century of the belief that there exists for us any assurance of the life that is lived beyond the grave?" (Studies in Chaucer, 1892, ii, 514-15). Prof. Skeat, again, affirms (Notes to the Tales, Clar. Press Compl. Chaucer, v, 92) that "the real reason why Chaucer could not here describe the passage of Arcite's soul to heaven is because he had already copied Boccaccio's description, and had used it with respect to the death of Troilus" (see Troil. v, 1807-27; stanzas 7, 8, 9 from the end). This evades the question as to the poet's faith. In point of fact, the passage in Troilus and Criseyde is purely pagan, and tells of no Christian belief, though that poem, written before the Tales, seems to parade a Christian contempt for pagan lore. (Cp. Lounsbury, as cited, p. 512.)
The ascription of unbelief seems a straining of the evidence; but it would be difficult to gainsay the critic's summing-up: "The general view of all his [Chaucer's] production leaves upon the mind the impression that his personal religious history was marked by the dwindling devoutness which makes up the experience of so many lives--the fallings from us, the vanishings, we know not how or when, of beliefs in which we have been bred. One characteristic which not unusually accompanies the decline of faith in the individual is in him very conspicuous. This is the prominence given to the falsity and fraud of those who have professedly devoted themselves to the advancement of the cause of Christianity.... Much of Chaucer's late work, so far as we know it to be late, is distinctly hostile to the Church.... It is, moreover, hostile in a way that implies an utter disbelief in certain of its tenets, and even a disposition to regard them as full of menace to the future of civilization" (Lounsbury, vol. cited, pp. 519-20).
Against this general view is to be set that which proceeds on an unquestioning acceptance of the "Retractation" or confession at the close of the Canterbury Tales, as to the vexed question of the genuineness of which see the same critic, work cited, i, 412-15; iii, 40. The fact that the document is appended to the concluding "Parson's Tale" (also challenged as to authenticity), which is not a tale at all, and to which the confession refers as "this little treatise or rede," suggests strongly a clerical influence brought to bear upon the aging poet.
To infer real devotion on his part from his sympathetic account of the good parson, or from the dubious Retractation appended to the Tales, is as unwarrantable as is the notion, dating from the Reformation period, that he was a Wicliffite. Even if the Retractation be of his writing, under pressure in old age, it points to a previous indifferentism; and from the great mass of his work there can be drawn only the inference that he is essentially non-religious in temper and habit of mind. But he is no disputant, no propagandist, whether on ecclesiastical or on intellectual grounds; and after his day there is social retrogression and literary relapse in England for two centuries. That there was some practical rationalism in his day, however, we gather from the Vision of Piers Ploughman, by the contemporary poet Langland (fl. 1360-90), where there is a vivid account of the habit among anti-clerical laymen of arguing against the doctrine of original sin and the entailment of Adam's offence on the whole human race. To this way of thinking Chaucer probably gave a stimulus by his translation of the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius, where is cited the "not unskilful" dilemma: "If God is, whence come wicked things? And if God is not, whence come good things?" The stress of the problem is hard upon theism; and to ponder it was to resent the doctrine of inherited guilt. The Church had, in fact, visibly turned this dogma to its own ends, insisting on the universal need of ghostly help even as it repelled the doctrine of unalterable predestination. In both cases, of course, the matter was settled by Scripture and authority; and Langland's reply to the heretics is mere angry dogmatism.
There flourished, further, a remarkable amount of heresy of the species seen in Provence and Northern Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such sectaries being known in England under the generic name of "Lollards," derived from the Flemish, in which it seems to have signified singers of hymns. Lollards or "Beghards," starting from the southern point of propagation, spread all over civilized Northern Europe, meeting everywhere persecution alike from the parish priests and the mendicant monks; and in England as elsewhere their anti-clericalism and their heresy were correlative. In the formal Lollard petition to Parliament in 1395, however, there is evident an amount of innovating opinion which implies more than the mere stimulus of financial pressure. Not only the papal authority, monasteries, clerical celibacy, nuns' vows, transubstantiation, exorcisms, bought blessings, pilgrimages, prayers for the dead, offerings to images, confessions and absolutions, but war and capital punishment and "unnecessary trades," such as those of goldsmiths and armourers, are condemned by those early Utopists. In what proportion they really thought out the issues they dealt with we can hardly ascertain; but a chronicler of Wiclif's time, living at Leicester, testifies that you could not meet two men in the street but one was a Lollard. The movement substantially came to nothing, suffering murderous persecution in the person of Oldcastle (Lord Cobham) and others, and disappearing in the fifteenth century in the demoralization of conquest and the ruin of the civil wars; but apart from Chaucer's poetry it is more significant of foreign influences in England than almost any other phenomenon down to the reign of Henry VIII.
It is still doubtful, indeed, whence the powerful Wiclif derived his marked Protestantism as to some Catholic dogmas; but it would seem that he too may have been reached by the older Paulician or other southern heresy. As early as 1286 a form of heresy approaching the Albigensian and the Waldensian is found in the province of Canterbury, certain persons there maintaining that Christians were not bound by the authority of the Pope and the Fathers, but solely by that of the Bible and "necessary reason." It is true that Wiclif never refers to the Waldenses or Albigenses, or any of the continental reformers of his day, though he often cites his English predecessor, Bishop Grosstête; but this may have been on grounds of policy. To cite heretics could do no good; to cite a bishop was helpful. The main reason for doubting a foreign influence in his case is that to the last he held by purgatory and absolute predestination. In any case, Wiclif's practical and moral resentment of ecclesiastical abuses was the mainspring of his doctrine; and his heresies as to transubstantiation and other articles of faith can be seen to connect with his anti-priestly attitude. He, however, was morally disinterested as compared with the would-be plunderers who formed the bulk of the anti-Church party of John of Gaunt; and his failure to effect any reformation was due to the fact that on one hand there was not intelligence enough in the nation to respond to his doctrinal common sense, while on the other he could not so separate ecclesiastical from feudal tyranny and extortion as to set up a political movement which should strike at clerical evils without inciting some to impeach the nobility who held the balance of political power. Charged with setting vassals against tyrant lords, he was forced to plead that he taught the reverse, though he justified the withholding of tithes from bad curates. The revolt led by John Ball in 1381, which was in no way promoted by Wiclif, showed that the country people suffered as much from lay as from clerical oppression.
The time, in short, was one of common ferment, and not only were there other reformers who went much farther than Wiclif in the matter of social reconstruction, but we know from his writings that there were heretics who carried their criticism as far as to challenge the authority and credibility of the Scriptures. Against these accusatores and inimici Scripturae he repeatedly speaks in his treatise De veritate Scripturae Sacrae, which is thus one of the very earliest works in defence of Christianity against modern criticism. His position, however, is almost wholly medieval. One qualification should perhaps be made, in respect of his occasional resort to reason where it was least to be expected, as on the question of restrictions on marriage. But on such points he wavered; and otherwise he is merely scripturalist. The infinite superiority of Christ to all other men, and Christ's virtual authorship of the entire Scriptures, are his premisses--a way of begging the question so simple-minded that it is clear the other side was not heard in reply, though these arguments had formed part of his theological lectures, and so pre-supposed a real opposition. Wiclif was in short a typical Protestant in his unquestioning acceptance of the Bible as a supernatural authority; and when his demand for the publication of the Bible in English was met by "worldly clerks" with the cry that it would "set Christians in debate, and subjects to rebel against their sovereigns," he could only protest that they "openly slander God, the author of peace, and his holy law." Later English history proved that the worldly clerks were perfectly right, and Wiclif the erring optimist of faith. For the rest, his essentially dogmatic view of religion did nothing to counteract the spirit of persecution; and the passing of the Statute for the Burning of Heretics in 1401, with the ready consent of both Houses of Parliament, constituted the due dogmatic answer to dogmatic criticism. Yet within a few years the Commons were proposing to confiscate the revenues of the higher clergy: so far was anti-clericalism from implying heterodoxy.
§ 11. THOUGHT IN FRANCE
As regards France, the record of intellectual history between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries is hardly less scanty than as regards England. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the intellectual life of the French philosophic schools, as we saw, was more vigorous and expansive than that of any other country; so that, looking further to the Provençal literature and to the French beginnings of Gothic architecture, France might even be said to prepare the Renaissance. Outside of the schools, too, there was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a notable dissemination of partially philosophical thought among the middle-class laity. At that period the anti-clerical tendency was strongest in France, where in the thirteenth century lay scholarship stood highest. In the reign of Philippe le Bel (end of thirteenth century) was composed the poem Fauvel, by François de Rues, which is a direct attack on pope and clergy; and in the famous Roman de la Rose, as developed by Jean le Clopinel (= the Limper) of Meung-sur-Loire, there enters, without any criticism of the Christian creed, an element of all-round Naturalism which indirectly must have made for reason. Begun by Guillaume de Lorris in the time of St. Louis in a key of sentiment and lyricism, the poem is carried on by Jean de Meung under Philippe le Bel in a spirit of criticism, cynicism, science, and satire, which tells of many developments in forty years. The continuation can hardly have been written, as some literary historians assume, about its author's twenty-fifth year; but it may be dated with some certainty between 1270 and 1285. To the work of his predecessor, amounting to less than 5,000 lines, he added 18,000, pouring forth a medley of scholarship, pedantry, philosophic reflection, speculation on the process of nature and the structure and ills of society, on property, morals, marriage, witchcraft, the characters of women, monks, friars, aristocrats--the whole pageant of medieval knowledge and fancy.
The literary power of the whole is great, and may be recommended to the general reader as comparing often with that shown in the satirical and social-didactic poems of Burns, though without much of the breath of poetry. Particularly noteworthy, in the historic retrospect, is the assimilization of the ancient Stoic philosophy of "living according to Nature," set forth in the name of a "Reason" who is notably free from theological prepossessions. It is from this standpoint that Jean de Meung assails the mendicant friars and the monks in general: he would have men recognize the natural laws of life; and he carries the principle to the length of insisting on the artificial nature of aristocracy and monarchy, which are justifiable only as far as they subserve the common good. Thus he rises above the medieval literary prejudice against the common people, whose merit he recognizes as Montaigne did later. On the side of science, he expressly denies that comets carry any such message as was commonly ascribed to them alike by popular superstition and by theology--a stretch of freethinking perhaps traceable to Seneca, but nonetheless centuries in advance of the Christendom of the time. On the side of religion, again, he is one of the first to vindicate the lay conception of Christian excellence as against the ecclesiastical. His Naturalism, so far, worked consistently in making him at once anti-ascetic and anti-supernaturalist.
It is not to be inferred, however, that Jean de Meung had learned to doubt the validity of the Christian creed. His long poem, one of the most popular books in Europe for two hundred years, could never have had its vogue if its readers could have suspected it to be even indirectly anti-Christian. He can hardly have held, as some historians believe, the status of a preaching friar; but he claims that he neither blames nor defames religion, respecting it in all forms, provided it be "humble and loyal." He was in fact a man of some wealth, much culture, and orderly in life, thus standing out from the earlier "Goliard" type. When, then, he pronounces Nature "the minister of this earthly state," "vicar and constable of the eternal emperor," he has no thought of dethroning Deity, or even of setting aside the Christian faith. In his rhymed Testament he expresses himself quite piously, and lectures monks and women in an edifying fashion.
To say therefore that Jean de Meung's part of the Roman de la Rose is a "popular satire on the beliefs of Romanism" (Owen, Skeptics of Ital. Renais. p. 44) is to misstate the case. His doctrine is rather an intellectual expression of the literary reaction against asceticism (cp. Bartoli, Storia della letteratura italiana, i, 319, quoting Lenient) which had been spontaneously begun by the Goliards and Troubadours. At the same time the poem does stand for the new secular spirit alike in "its ingrained religion and its nascent freethought" (Saintsbury, p. 87); and with the Reynard epic it may be taken as representing the beginning of "a whole revolution, the resurgence and affirmation of the laity, the new force which is to transform the world, against the Church" (Bartoli, Storia, i, 308; cp. Demogeot, Hist. de la litt. fr. 5e éd. pp. 130-31, 157; Lanson, pp. 132-36). The frequent flings at the clergy (cp. the partly Chaucerian English version, Skeat's ed. of Chaucer's Works, i, 234; Bell's ed. iv, 230) were sufficient to draw upon this as upon other medieval poems of much secular vogue the anger of "the Church" (Sismondi, Lit. of South. Europe, i, 216); but they were none the less relished by believing readers. "The Church" was in fact not an entity of one mind; and some of its sections enjoyed satire directed against the others.
When, then, we speak of the anti-clerical character of much medieval poetry, we must guard against exaggerated implications. It is somewhat of a straining of the facts, for instance, to say of the humorous tale of Reynard the Fox, so widely popular in the thirteenth century, that it is essentially anti-clerical to the extent that "Reynard is laic: Isengrim [the wolf] is clerical" (Bartoli, Storia della letteratura italiana, i, 307; cp. Owen, Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, p. 44). The Reynard epic, in origin a simple humorous animal-story, had various later forms. Some of these, as the Latin poem, and especially the version attributed to Peter of St. Cloud, were markedly anti-clerical, the latter exhibiting a spirit of all-round profanity hardly compatible with belief (cp. Gervinus, Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, 5te Ausg. i, 227-28; Gebhart, Les Origines de la Renais. en Italie, 1874, p. 39); but the version current in the Netherlands, which was later rendered into English prose by Caxton, is of a very different character (Gervinus, p. 229 sq.). In Caxton's version it is impossible to regard Reynard as laic and Isengrim as clerical; though in the Latin and other versions the wolf figures as monk or abbot. (See also the various shorter satires published by Grimm in his Reinhart Fuchs, 1834.) Often the authorship is itself clerical, one party or order satirizing another; sometimes the spirit is religious, sometimes markedly irreverent. (Gervinus, pp. 214-21). "La plupart de ces satires sont l'oeuvre des moines et des abbés" (Lenient, La Satire en France au moyen âge, 1859, préf. p. 4); and to say that these men were often irreligious is not to say that they were rationalists. It is to be remembered that nascent Protestantism in England under Henry VIII resorted to the weapons of obscene parody (Blunt, Ref. of Ch. of England, ed. 1892, i, 273, note).
"In fine," we may say with a judicious French historian, "one cannot get out of his time, and the time was not come to be non-Christian. Jean de Meung did not perceive that his thought put him outside the Church, and upset her foundations. He is believing and pious, like Rutebeuf.... The Gospel is his rule: he holds it; he defends it; he disputes with those who seem to him to depart from it; he makes himself the champion of the old faith against the novelties of the Eternal Gospel.... His situation is that of the first reformers of the sixteenth century, who believed themselves to serve Jesus Christ in using their reason, and who very sincerely, very piously, hoped for the reform of the Church through the progress of philosophy." "Nevertheless," adds the same historian, "one cannot exaggerate the real weight of the work. By his philosophy, which consists essentially in the identity, the sovereignty, of Nature and Reason, he is the first link in the chain which connects Rabelais, Montaigne, Molière; to which Voltaire also links himself, and even in certain regards Boileau."
Men could not then see whither the principle of "Nature" and Reason was to lead, yet even in the age of Jean de Meung the philosophic heads went far, and he can hardly have missed knowing as much, if, as is supposed, he studied at Paris, as he certainly lived and died there. In the latter part of the thirteenth century, as before noted, rationalism at the Paris university was frequently carried in private to a rejection of all the dogmas peculiar to Christianity. At that great school Roger Bacon seems to have acquired his encyclopædic learning and his critical habit; and there it was that in the first half of the fourteenth century William of Occam nourished his remarkable philosophic faculty. From about the middle of the fourteenth century, however, there is a relative arrest of French progress for some two centuries. Three main conditions served to check intellectual advance: the civil wars which involved the loss of the communal liberties which had been established in France between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries; the exhaustion of the nation by the English invasion under Edward III; the repressive power of the Church; and the general devotion of the national energies to war. After the partial recovery from the ruinous English invasion under Edward III, civil strifes and feudal tyranny wrought new impoverishment, making possible the still more destructive invasion under Henry V; so that in the first half of the fifteenth century France was hardly more civilized than England. It is from the French invasion of Italy under Charles VIII that the enduring renascence in France broadly dates. Earlier impulses had likewise come from Italy: Lanfranc, Anselm, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and others of lesser note, had gone from Italy to teach in France or England; but it needed the full contact of Italian civilization to raise monarchic France to the stage of general and independent intellectual life.
During the period in question, there had been established the following universities: Paris, 1200; Toulouse, 1220; Montpellier, 1289; Avignon, 1303; Orléans, 1312; Cahors, 1332; Angers, 1337; Orange, 1367; Dôle, 1422; Poitiers, 1431; Caen, 1436; Valence, 1454; Nantes, 1460; Bourges, 1463; Bordeaux, 1472 (Desmaze, L'Université de Paris, 1876, p. 2. Other dates for some of these are given on p. 31). But the militarist conditions prevented any sufficient development of such opportunities. In the fourteenth century, says Littré (Études sur les barbares, p. 419), "the university of Paris ... was more powerful than at any other epoch.... Never did she exercise such a power over men's minds." But he also decides that in that epoch the first florescence of French literature withered away (p. 387). The long location of the anti-papacy at Avignon (1305-1376) doubtless counted for something in French culture (V. Le Clerc, Hist. Litt. de la France au XIVe siècle, i, 37; Gebhart, pp. 221-26); but the devastation wrought by the English invasion was sufficient to countervail that and more. See the account of it by Petrarch (letter of the year 1360) cited by Littré, Études, pp. 416-17; and by Hallam, Middle Ages, i, 59, note. Cp. Michelet, Hist. de France, vi, ch. iii; Dunton, England in the Fifteenth Century, 1888, pp. 79-84. As to the consequences of the English invasion of the fifteenth century see Martin, Hist. de France, 4e édit. vi, 132-33; Sismondi, Hist. des Français, 1831, xii, 582; Hallam, Middle Ages, i, 83-87.
In northern France of the fourteenth century, as in Provence and Italy and England, there was a manifold stir of innovation and heresy: there as elsewhere the insubordinate Franciscans, with their Eternal Gospel, the Paterini, the Beghards, fought their way against the Dominican Inquisition. But the Inquisitors burned books as well as men; and much anti-ecclesiastical poetry, some dating even from the Carlovingian era, shared the fate of many copies of the Talmud, translations of the Bible, and, à fortiori, every species of heretical writing. In effect, the Inquisition for the time "extinguished freethought" in France. As in England, the ferment of heresy was mixed with one of democracy; and in the French popular poetry of the time there are direct parallels to the contemporary English couplet, "When Adam delved and Eve span, Where was then the gentleman?" Such a spirit could no more prosper in feudal France than in feudal England; and when France emerged from her mortal struggle with the English, to be effectively solidified by Louis XI, there was left in her life little of the spirit of free inquiry. It has been noted that whereas the chronicler Joinville, in the thirteenth century, is full of religious feeling, Froissart, in the fourteenth, priest as he is, exhibits hardly any; and again Comines, in the fifteenth, reverts to the orthodoxy of the twelfth and thirteenth. The middle period was one of indifference, following on the killing out of heresy: the fifteenth century is a resumption of the Middle Ages, and Comines has the medieval cast of mind, although of a superior order. There seems to be no community of thought between him and his younger Italian contemporaries, Machiavelli and Guicciardini; though, "even while Comines was writing, there were unequivocal symptoms of a great and decisive change."
The special development in France of the spirit of "chivalry" had joined the normal uncivilizing influence of militarism with that of clericalism; the various knightly orders, as well as knighthood pure and simple, being all under ecclesiastical sanctions, and more or less strictly vowed to "defend the church," while supremely incompetent to form an intelligent opinion. It is the more remarkable that in the case of one of the crusading orders heresy of the most blasphemous kind was finally charged against the entire organization, and that it was on that ground annihilated (1311). It remains incredible, however, that the order of the Templars can have systematically practised the extravagances or held the tenets laid to their charge. They had of course abused their power and departed from their principles like every other religious order enabled to amass wealth; and the hostility theirs aroused is perfectly intelligible from what is known of the arrogance of its members and the general ruffianism of the Crusaders. Their wealth alone goes far to explain the success of their enemies against them; for, though the numbers of the order were much smaller than tradition gives out, its possessions were considerable. These were the true ground of the French king's attack. But that its members were as a rule either Cathari or anti-Christians, either disguised Moslems or deists, or that they practised obscenity by rule, there is no reason to believe. What seems to have happened was a resort by some unbelieving members to more or less gross burlesque of the mysteries of initiation--a phenomenon paralleled in ancient Greece and in the modern Catholic world, and implying rather hardy irreligion than any reasoned heresy whatever.
The long-continued dispute as to the guilt of the Knights Templars is still chronically re-opened. Hallam, after long hesitation, came finally to believe them guilty, partly on the strength of the admissions made by Michelet in defending them (Europe in the Middle Ages, 11th ed. i, 138-42--note of 1848). He attaches, however, a surprising weight to the obviously weak "architectural evidence" cited by Hammer-Purgstall. Heeren (Essai sur l'influence des croisades, 1808, pp. 221-22) takes a more judicial view. The excellent summing-up of Lea (Hist. of the Inquis. bk. iii, ch. v, pp. 263-76) perhaps gives too little weight to the mass of curious confirmatory evidence cited by writers on the other side (e.g., F. Nicolai, Versuch über die Beschuldigungen welche dem Tempelherrenorden gemacht worden, 1782); but his conclusion as to the falsity of the charges against the order as a whole seems irresistible.
The solution that offensive practices occurred irregularly (Lea, pp. 276-77) is pointed to even by the earlier hostile writers (Nicolai, p. 17). It seems to be certain that the initiatory rites included the act of spitting on the crucifix--presumptively a symbolic display of absolute obedience to the orders of those in command (Jolly, Philippe le Bel, pp. 264-68). That there was no Catharism in the order seems certain (Lea, p. 249). The suggestion that the offensive and burlesque practices were due to the lower grade of "serving brethren," who were contemned by the higher, seems, however, without firm foundation. The courage for such freaks, and the disposition to commit them, were rather more likely to arise among the crusaders of the upper class, who could come in contact with Moslem-Christian unbelief through those of Sicily.
For the further theory that the "Freemasons" (at that period really cosmopolitan guilds of masons) were already given to freethinking, there is again no evidence. That they at times deliberately introduced obscene symbols into church architecture is no proof that they were collectively unbelievers in the Church's doctrines; though it is likely enough that some of them were. Obscenity is the expression not of an intellectual but of a physical and unreasoning bias, and can perfectly well concur with religious feeling. The fact that the medieval masons did not confine obscene symbols to the churches they built for the Templars (Hallam, as cited, pp. 140-41) should serve to discredit alike the theory that the Templars were systematically anti-Christian, and the theory that the Freemasons were so. That for centuries the builders of the Christian churches throughout Europe formed an anti-Christian organization is a grotesque hypothesis. At most they indulged in freaks of artistic satire on the lines of contemporary satirical literature, expressing an anti-clerical bias, with perhaps occasional elements of blasphemy. (See Menzel, Gesch. der Deutschen, Cap. 252, note.) It could well be that there survived among the Freemasons various Gnostic ideas; since the architectural art itself came in a direct line from antiquity. Such heresy, too, might conceivably be winked at by the Church, which depended so much on the heretics' services. But their obscenities were the mere expression of the animal imagination and normal salacity of all ages. Only in modern times, and that only in Catholic countries, has the derivative organization of Freemasonry been identified with freethought propaganda. In England in the seventeenth century the Freemasonic clubs--no longer connected with any trade--were thoroughly royalist and orthodox (Nicolai, pp. 196-98), as they have always remained.
Some remarkable intellectual phenomena, however, do connect with the French university life of the first half of the fourteenth century. William of Occam (d. 1347), the English Franciscan, who taught at Paris, is on the whole the most rationalistic of medieval philosophers. Though a pupil of the Realist Duns Scotus, he became the renewer of Nominalism, which is the specifically rationalistic as opposed to the religious mode of metaphysic; and his anti-clerical bias was such that he had to fly from France to Bavaria for protection from the priesthood. His Disputatio super potestate ecclesiastica, and his Defensorium directed against Pope John XXII (or XXI), were so uncompromising that in 1323 the Pope gave directions for his prosecution. What came of the step is not known; but in 1328 we find him actually imprisoned with two Italian comrades in the papal palace at Avignon. Thence they made their escape to Bavaria. To the same refuge fled Marsiglio of Padua, author (with John of Jandun) of the Defensor Pacis (1324), "the greatest and most original political treatise of the Middle Ages," in which it is taught that, though monarchy may be expedient, the sovereignty of the State rests with the people, and the hereditary principle is flatly rejected; while it is insisted that the Church properly consists of all Christians, and that the clergy's authority is restricted to spiritual affairs and moral suasion. Of all medieval writers on politics before Machiavelli he is the most modern.
Only less original is Occam, who at Paris came much under Marsiglio's influence. His philosophic doctrines apparently derive from Pierre Aureol (Petrus Aureolus, d. 1321), who with remarkable clearness and emphasis rejected both Realism and the doctrine that what the mind perceives are not realities, but formæ speculares. Pierre it was who first enounced the Law of Parsimony in philosophy and science--that causes are not to be multiplied beyond mental necessity--which is specially associated with the name of Occam. Both anticipated modern criticism alike of the Platonic and the Aristotelian philosophy; and Occam in particular drew so decided a line between the province of reason and that of faith that there can be little doubt on which side his allegiance lay. His dialectic is for its time as remarkable as is that of Hume, four centuries later. The most eminent orthodox thinker of the preceding century had been the Franciscan John Duns Scotus (1265 or 1274-1308), who, after teaching great crowds of students at Oxford, was transferred in 1304 to Paris, and in 1308 to Cologne, where he died. A Realist in his philosophy, Duns Scotus opposed the Aristotelian scholasticism, and in particular criticized Thomas Aquinas as having unduly subordinated faith and practice to speculation and theory. The number of matters of faith which Thomas had held to be demonstrable by reason, accordingly, was by Duns Scotus much reduced; and, applying his anti-rationalism to current belief, he fought zealously for the dogma that Mary, like Jesus, was immaculately conceived. But Occam, turning his predecessor's tactic to a contrary purpose, denied that any matter of faith was demonstrable by reason at all. He granted that on rational grounds the existence of a God was probable, but denied that it was strictly demonstrable, and rejected the ontological argument of Anselm. As to matters of faith, he significantly observed that the will to believe the indemonstrable is meritorious.
It is difficult now to recover a living sense of the issues at stake in the battle between Nominalism and Realism, and of the social atmosphere in which the battle was carried on. Broadly speaking, the Nominalists were the more enlightened school, the Realists standing for tradition and authority; and it has been alleged that "the books of the Nominalists, though the art of printing tended strongly to preserve them, were suppressed and destroyed to such a degree that it is now exceedingly difficult to collect them, and not easy to obtain copies even of the most remarkable." On the other hand, while we have seen Occam a fugitive before clerical enmity, we shall see Nominalists agreeing to persecute a Realist to the death in the person of Huss in the following century. So little was there to choose between the camps in the matter of sound civics; and so easily could the hierarchy wear the colours of any philosophical system.
Contemporary with Occam was Durand de St. Pourçain, who became a bishop (d. 1332), and, after ranking as of the school of Thomas Aquinas, rejected and opposed its doctrine. With all this heresy in the air, the principle of "double truth," originally put in currency by Averroïsm, came to be held in France as in Italy, in a sense which implied the consciousness that theological truth is not truth at all. Occam's pupil, Buridan, rector of the University of Paris (fl. 1340), substantially avoided theology, and dealt with moral and intellectual problems on their own merits. It is recorded by Albert of Saxony, who studied at Paris in the first half of the century, that one of his teachers held by the theory of the motion of the earth. Even a defender of Church doctrines, Pierre d'Ailly, accepted Occam's view of theism, and it appears to be broadly true that Occam had at Paris an unbroken line of successors down to the Reformation. In a world in which the doctrine of a two-fold truth provided a safety-valve for heresy, such a philosophical doctrine as his could not greatly affect lay thought; but at Paris University in the year 1376 there was a startling display of freethinking by the philosophical students, not a little suggestive of a parody of the Averroïst propositions denounced by the Bishop of Paris exactly a century before. Under cover of the doctrine of two-fold truth they propounded a list of 219 theses, in which they (1) denied the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, and the immortality of the soul; (2) affirmed the eternity of matter and the uselessness of prayer, but also posited the principles of astrology; (3) argued that the higher powers of the soul are incapable of sin, and that voluntary sexual intercourse between the unmarried is not sinful; and (4) suggested that there are fables and falsehoods in the gospels as in other books. The element of youthful gasconnade in the performance is obvious, and the Archbishop sharply scolded the students; but there must have been much free discussion before such a manifesto could have been produced. Nevertheless, untoward political conditions prevented any dissemination of the freethinking spirit in France; and not for some two centuries was there such another growth of it. The remarkable case of Nicolaus of Autricuria, who in 1348 was forced to recant his teaching of the atomistic doctrine, illustrates at once the persistence of the spirit of reason in times of darkness, and the impossibility of its triumphing in the wrong conditions.
§ 12. THOUGHT IN THE TEUTONIC COUNTRIES
The life of the rest of Europe in the later medieval period has little special significance in the history of freethought. France and Italy, by German admission, were the lands of the medieval Aufklärung. The poetry of the German Minnesingers, a growth from that of the Troubadours, presented the same anti-clerical features; and the story of Reynard the Fox was turned to anti-ecclesiastical purpose in Germany as in France. The relative freethinking set up by the crusaders' contact with the Saracens seems to be the source of doubt of the Minnesinger Freidank concerning the doom of hell-fire on heretics and heathens, the opinion of Walter der Vogelweide that Christians, Jews, and Moslems all serve the same God, and still more mordant heresy. But such bold freethinking did not spread. Material prosperity rather than culture was the main feature of German progress in the Middle Ages; architecture being the only art greatly developed. Heresy of the anti-ecclesiastical order indeed abounded, and was duly persecuted; but the higher freethinking developments were in the theosophic rather than the rationalistic direction. Albert the Great (fl. 1260), "the universal Doctor," the chief German teacher of the Middle Ages, was of unimpeached orthodoxy.
The principal German figure of the period is Master Eckhart (d. 1329), who, finding religious beliefs excluded from the sphere of reason by the freer philosophy of his day, undertook to show that they were all matters of reason. He was, in fact, a mystically reasoning preacher, and he taught in the interests of popular religion. Naturally, as he philosophized on old bases, he did not really subject his beliefs to any skeptical scrutiny, but took them for granted and proceeded speculatively upon them. This sufficed to bring him before the Inquisition at Cologne, where he recanted conditionally on an appeal to the Pope. Dying soon after, he escaped the papal bull condemning twenty-eight of his doctrines. His school later divided into a heretical and a Church party, of which the former, called the "false free spirits," seems to have either joined or resembled the antinomian Brethren of the Free Spirit, then numerous in Germany. The other section became known as the "Friends of God," a species of mystics who were "faithful to the whole medieval imaginative creed, Transubstantiation, worship of the Virgin and Saints, Purgatory." Through Tauler and others, Eckhart's pietistic doctrine gave a lead to later Protestant evangelicalism; but the system as a whole can never have been held by any popular body.
Dr. Lasson pronounces (Ueberweg, i, 483) that the type of Eckhart's character and teaching "was derived from the innermost essence of the German national character." At the same time he admits that all the offshoots of the school departed more or less widely from Eckhart's type--that is, from the innermost essence of their own national character. It would be as plausible to say that the later mysticism of Fénelon derived from the innermost essence of the French character. The Imitatio Christi has been similarly described as expressing the German character, on the assumption that it was written by Thomas à Kempis. Many have held that the author was the Frenchman Gerson (Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872, i, 139-40). It was in all probability, as was held by Suarez, the work of several hands, one a monk of the twelfth century, another a monk of the thirteenth, and the third a theologian of the fifteenth; neither Gerson nor Thomas à Kempis being concerned (Le Clerc, Hist. Litt. du XIVe Siècle, 2e édit. pp. 384-85; cp. Neale's Hist. of the so-called Jansenist Church of Holland, 1858, pp. 97-98).
The Imitatio Christi (1471), the most popular Christian work of devotion ever published, tells all the while of the obscure persistence of the search for knowledge and for rational satisfactions. Whatever be the truth as to its authorship, it belongs to all Christendom in respect of its querulous strain of protest against all manner of intellectual curiosity. After the first note of world-renunciation, the call to absorption in the inner religious life, there comes the sharp protest against the "desire to know." "Surely an humble husbandman that serveth God is better than a proud philosopher who, neglecting himself, laboureth to understand the course of the heavens.... Cease from an inordinate desire of knowing." No sooner is the reader warned to consider himself the frailest of all men than he is encouraged to look down on all reasoners. "What availeth it to cavil and dispute much about dark and hidden things, when for being ignorant of them we shall not be so much as reproved at the day of judgment? It is a great folly to neglect the things that are profitable and necessary, and give our minds to that which is curious and hurtful.... And what have we to do with genus and species, the dry notions of logicians?" The homily swings to and fro between occasional admissions that "learning is not to be blamed," perhaps interpolated by one who feared to have religion figure as opposed to knowledge, and recurrent flings--perhaps also interpolated--at all who seek book-lore or physical science; but the note of distrust of reason prevails. "Where are all those Doctors and Masters whom thou didst well know whilst they lived and flourished in learning? Now others have their livings, and perchance scarce ever think of them. While they lived they seemed something, but now they are not spoken of." It belongs to the whole conception of retreat and aloofness that the devout man should "meddle not with curiosities, but read such things as may rather yield compunction to his heart than occupation to his head"; and the last chapter of the last book closes on the note of the abnegation of reason. "Human reason is feeble and may be deceived, but true faith cannot be deceived. All reason and natural search ought to follow faith, not to go before it, nor to break in upon it.... If the works of God were such that they might be easily comprehended by human reason, they could not be justly called marvellous or unspeakable." Thus the very inculcation of humility, by its constant direction against all intellectual exercise, becomes an incitement to a spiritual arrogance; and all manner of science finds in the current ideal of piety its pre-ordained antagonist.
