In judging of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, account must always be taken of the fact that their earlier literature is mainly religious and ecclesiastical, and that such literature often gives a very faint idea of the higher mental life of the educated laity. In our own time, and still more in the last two centuries, the literature of devotion and of the Church seldom suggests the play of intelligence that actually goes on in the world: taken by itself, indeed, it would often imply intellectual decline. As we have seen and shall see, the Middle Ages had an intellectual life apart from the Church; and in the period we term the Renaissance that life was far-reaching; there is reason therefore to question whether at a time when authors were mostly clerics there was not some sane thinking of which we read little or nothing. But even if such allowance be made, the fact remains that the period of clerical supremacy in literature is a period of enormous superstition.

Under that term even religious people now include a habitual belief in diabolical agency, a constant affirmation of miracles, portents, divine and fiendish apparitions; and the Protestant adds to the definition saint-worship, belief in the supernatural virtue of relics, and the acceptance of the daily miracle of transubstantiation. But even if questions of doctrine be put aside, we may sum up that the average Christian in the Middle Ages was more credulous as to daily prodigies, saintly and fiendish, than even the average Catholic peasant of to-day in the more backward European countries. Doubters and unbelievers there must always have been; but in the medieval period it was dangerous to utter doubt, unless by way of attack on priests and monks in circles where they were not popular. Ribald doubt, besides, came off best; grave disbelief incurred suspicion; and where men cannot speak their thought they are hindered in their thinking. The most unseemly debates, such as that as to whether the eucharist when eaten passed through the normal process of digestion (“stercoranism” was the name given to the heresy that it did), and that set up by Ratramnus as to how the impregnation of the Virgin actually took place—such discussions could go on freely; but more decent controversy could not. Beyond question, the influence of clerical literature was mainly for gross credulity. The lives of the saints in general, from Gregory I onwards, tell constantly of a puerility of judgment which to a Periclean Greek would have been inconceivable, and which was incompatible not only with rational thought but with tolerable veracity. Language and the art of writing had become means of destroying common sense. In the hands of the hagiographers, the use of miracle so far outgoes the older tradition that it must have finally failed to suggest anything divine—even to a believer. To a skeptic it suggests burlesque.

On the other hand, medieval life was in the main as much ridden by fear of evil spirits as that of any savages of our own time; for every people had kept the notion of their hostile sprites, and the Christian devil was simply made the God of that kingdom. Life, too, was shorter than moderns can well realize; so high was the normal death-rate, so frequent was pestilence, so little understood was disease; and the nearness of death made men either reckless or afraid. Where ignorance and fear go hand in hand, is the realm of superstition. Average religion was summed up in a perfectly superstitious use of the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist; a devout hope in the intercession and protection of the saints; an ever-present fear of the activity of the fiend; a singularly mechanical use of formularies; an intense anxiety to possess or benefit by holy relics, the easy manufacture of which must have enriched myriads; a chronic fear of sorcery; and a conception of hell and purgatory so literal that its general failure to amend or control conduct is a revelation of the inconsequence of average morality. It is often hard to distinguish in medieval religion between devotional and criminal motives. In the life of the Italian St. Romuald (tenth century) it is told that when he insisted on leaving the retreat in Catalonia where he had won a saintly repute, the Catalans proposed to kill him in order to possess his relics. He in turn cudgelled his father nearly to death to make him adhere to his profession of the religious life. Such ethical ideas expressed themselves in the monastic caste not only in austerities but in systematic self-flagellation; and in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the principle evolved the chronic movements of the Flagellants, specially so-called, whose wild and public self-tortures neither Church nor State could put down while the mania lasted.

In such a world, primed by a great caste of priests, intolerance had its ideal habitat. Aversion to innovating thought is as natural to man as egoism; and an innovating religion is no sooner established than it finds equilibrium in denouncing innovation. Thus, even apart from clerical action, and apart too from the ethnic animosity to Mohammedanism, the medieval laity, knowing nothing of the long intellectual and sectarian struggles which have forced tolerance on modern polity, were spontaneous persecutors of heresy save where it appealed primarily to their anti-clerical economic interests, or carried them away by mere contagion of physical excitement. The Flagellants, for instance, seem positively to have hypnotized many by their procedure, as did the partly kindred and partly contrary sect of Dancers, who flourished in Flanders and Germany late in the fourteenth century. It is thus credible that some were cured by incantations, which were hypnotic with a difference. But all such eccentrics were normally liable to cruel ill-treatment from their conforming fellows; and it is clear that in the fourteenth century the mystical and communistic heresies of Beghards and Beguins, male and female, were promptly persecuted by the general laity. The religion which categorically taught men to love their enemies never seems to have prepared them to endure in their neighbours a difference of doctrine.

It is probable, too, that during the Dark Ages thousands of helpless souls were put to death as sorcerers by mobs without process of law, apart from those executed under the old laws against magic or divination, and the Teutonic codes of the same order. In a similar spirit, Christian mobs in all countries and ages had chronically wreaked a half-religious, half-economic hatred on the Jews, of whom enormous numbers died by massacre. Here the motive was not wholly religious, since their unfortunate specialization in usury—albeit forced upon them by Christian exclusiveness—had set up ill-will against the Jews in the period of the pagan empire, and even among the Moors, who had given them religious toleration. But Christian animus certainly counted for much, and carried the passion to lengths rarely reached in antiquity. Thus the common run of Christian life was grossly intolerant. It was left to the Church as such, however, to frame for the suppression of free thought in religion a machinery never paralleled in human history.

Though all the heresy hunts of the ancient Church had implied an inquisitorial ideal, nothing in the nature of a “Holy Office” had existed in the Church till the second quarter of the thirteenth century. It was felt that the faithful could as a rule be trusted to raise the cry of heresy wherever it could be scented. Such prompt action we have seen taken in the cases of Jovinian, Pelagius, Gottschalk, and Berengar. But in the twelfth century the spirit of militant orthodoxy, as seen in zealots like St. Bernard, had reached a strength which pointed to some systematic action on the part of the now much aggrandized papacy. St. Bernard’s attitude to Abailard is that of the true Inquisitor: he suspects, to begin with, the accursed spirit of independent thought, and he is straightway determined to make an example of the upstart who dares to reason on all doctrines for himself. But even St. Bernard, eager as he was for the blood of Moslems, could hardly have anticipated the spirit in which the papacy acted from the Albigensian crusade onwards. Coincident with that crusade was the digging up of Amalrich’s bones, the burning of his followers, and the veto on the study of Aristotle at Paris. Intolerance had entered on a new era.

The first steps towards a systematic and centralized Inquisition were taken about 1178, when, under Pope Alexander III, the Church began moving against the “Manichean” heretics of Languedoc. A papal legate at that time forced from the Count of Toulouse and his nobles a promise on oath to resist heresy; and in a council of the following year orthodox princes in general were invited to use force for the purpose. The pope proceeded not only to excommunicate the heretics and their backers but to declare, in the fashion already consecrated by the Crusades, that no one need keep faith with them; further offering indulgences for two years to all who should make war on them, and calling on their lords to reduce them to slavery. As a result, a crusade was made in 1181, so little marked by bloodshed as to be insignificant in comparison with those of the next generation, but sufficient to force an abjuration of heresy from the lords concerned. Thereafter, in 1184, a Council held at Verona prescribed with a new precision and emphasis a systematic search for heresy by all bishops, and called upon the nobles to lend their support in the way of the necessary violence. Innocent III had thus had the way marked out for him, alike in suppression and in prevention; and the Inquisition as such dates from the close of his crusade against the Albigenses, when Pope Gregory IX took from the bishops the business of heresy-hunting and made it a special task of the Dominican order (1233). After “ManichÆism” had been stamped out there was a lull in persecution as in heresy; but the institution remained, to prevent new growths.

The broad outcome of its work was that whereas the twelfth century had been one of intellectual dawn, and the thirteenth, despite its murderous beginning, one of diffusion of light, the fourteenth was on the whole one of stationary knowledge, save in Italy itself, where the growing energies of the Renaissance for the time eluded repression. Indeed the Church cared little about mere unbelief, as distinct from anti-clerical heresy, where its political rule was not thereby affected; and in Italy, when anti-clericalism was once put down, its wealth made it secure. Even in Italy the literary life of the fourteenth century was rather artistic than intellectual, science and serious thought making little progress; while in northern Europe they were visibly arrested. It was in the outlying States, where heresy might mean a cessation of papal revenue, that the Dominicans were specially hounded on to their work. In England, in the latter part of the thirteenth century, the great spirit of Roger Bacon was cabined and confined by inquisitorial enmities; and in France in the fourteenth there was a signal suspension of intellectual life, in the face of the activities of original thinkers such as William of Occam. The throttling of the civilization of the south had reacted on the north. Doubtless the desperate wars to which crusading experience had given a new incitement counted for much, and the constant political intrigues of the papacy for more, in arresting mental growth. “When a city for any political proceeding had given offence to its political head, emperor or king, or had irritated a Roman bishop by opposition, the usual punishment, by command or interdict, was to inhibit its professors from teaching, and to disperse its scholars.” All the political causes wrought together for the hindrance of human advancement. The immense destruction of population by the Black Death, finally, was a great incitement to superstition.

The main effect of the Inquisition is seen in Spain, which in the Saracen period had been one of the great sources of new thought and knowledge. There, despite the element of intellectual curiosity set up in the period of Moorish supremacy, when the Christians were in general treated with tolerance, the spirit of fanaticism was in some measure ingrained by the long struggle between Christians and Moslems for the land, though there were also contrary developments; and an inquisitorial war on Jewish and Moorish ideas was part of the Christian campaign. As the Christians gained ground, ecclesiasticism gained with them; yet when the Inquisition, not yet a permanent Spanish tribunal, was set up in Spain in 1236, it was received by a large part of the population with fear and dislike. It is an error to suppose that there was something in “Spanish character” specially prone to the methods of the Inquisition. Spanish orthodoxy is a manufactured product, and represents the triumph, under special conditions, of the fanatical element which belongs to every nation. Not only did many eminent Spaniards detest and denounce the Inquisition in its first and imperfectly destructive form: the common people rioted against it when, in its permanent and more murderous form, it was constituted in 1478–83, and put under Torquemada. That memorable persecutor long felt his life to be in danger from the people, both in Aragon and in Castile; and the first inquisitor-general of Aragon was actually killed by them.

Yet even the “ancient” Inquisition had been fatally successful. In the two centuries from its establishment, while Averroism was rife in Italy and France, Christian Spain must have been well nigh rid of the other forms of heretical thought; and the first step of Ferdinand and Isabella after their crowning triumph was to expel all Jews who would not apostatize. On the remaining Moors the New Inquisition went to work in a similar spirit, persecuting them, baptizing them by force, burning their books, and driving them repeatedly to revolts, which were always murderously put down. Finally, after the failure of the great Armada against England, the Inquisitors decided that the cause of the divine wrath was their undue toleration of heresy, and a million of nonconforming Moriscoes were miserably driven out of Spain, as a hundred and sixty thousand Jews had been a century before.

As all civilization lives by the play of intellectual variation, Spain was now stripped of a large part of her mental as well as her material resources; and the continued work of the Inquisition at length clinched the arrest of her brilliant literature for centuries, keeping her devoid of science while the rest of Europe was gathering it. In introducing the Inquisition the Church had destroyed the specific civilization of southern France, thereby laming that of northern France; and in thereafter applying the machine to the civilization of Spain she reduced that to inanition.

It should be remembered that the Inquisition’s purpose was to destroy books no less than men; and until printing overpowered the effort, the check thus put on the spread of rational thought bade fair to be fatal. In a single auto-da-fÉ (“act of faith”) at Salamanca, near the end of the fifteenth century, six thousand volumes were burned, on the pretence that they contained Judaic errors, or were concerned with magic and witchcraft. It is certain that many of them were of another character. Elsewhere the work of destruction was less ostentatiously done, but it was constant.

In the matter of torture and slaughter, however, the work of the Inquisition has become a proverb; and after all corrections have been made on the earlier estimates by Llorente and other historians, the figures remain frightful. In “a few years” the New Inquisition burned alive, in Castile alone, nearly two thousand persons, and variously penalized some twenty thousand more. At this rate, many thousands must have been burned in a generation; and the statement that nearly two hundred thousand passed through the Spanish Inquisition’s hands in thirty-six years is sadly credible. Its methods were the negation of every principle of justice. Any evidence, including that of criminals, children, and even idiots, was valid against an accused person, while only that of the most unimpeachable kind was heard in his favour; all proceedings were strictly private; false informers were almost never punished; and the general principle was that anyone who was tried must be somehow guilty, the Inquisition being like the pope infallible. Thus, if a man could not be convicted of real heresy, he could be punished for an error in the repetition of a prayer or a creed. But the torture-chamber can seldom have failed to yield whatever proof was sought for. No such reign of terror and horror has occurred in any other period of European history; and only in the practices of witch-finders among savages can its systematic atrocity be anywhere paralleled.

Ancient literature, as we have seen, was nearing its nadir when Christianity was becoming supreme in the decadent Roman Empire; and with the formal extinction of classic paganism came the virtual extinction of fine letters, science, and philosophy, in the Byzantine State no less than in the West. The last Christian writers of any philosophic importance were really products of classic culture and the ancient civilization. When that civilization had been outwardly transformed to a Christian guise, the mental life shrank to the field of theology, with a few fenced and meagre plots of scholastic drilling-ground. Of the decayed discipline of ancient culture Christian civilization preserved only the most mechanical formulas; and the mental training of the Dark Ages consisted in a few handbooks (notably those by Martianus Capella and Cassiodorus) of what was then encyclopedic knowledge—the rules of Latin grammar, dialectics or elementary logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, elementary geometry, and some traditional astronomy. The first three constituted the trivium or introductory course in the medieval schools; the others the quadrivium: together “the seven liberal arts.” The larger Encyclopedia of Isidore of Seville, the standard authority for centuries, is as mechanical, as devoid of living thought, as empty of scientific knowledge, as any of the others. In the way of literature, there was left to most Westerns little beyond a few of the later Latin writers, such as Boethius, who could pass muster as being Christians. Gregory the Great had set the note of theological anathema against the pagan poets and philosophers; and classic history survived only in bad abstracts.

Wherever in the Dark Ages we meet with any power of thought, it is to be traced either to the influence of Saracen contacts or, as in John Scotus, to the Greek scholarship that had been preserved in Ireland while the western empire was being dissolved in barbarism. The English Alcuin, who had loyally aided Charlemagne in his efforts to spread education in the new “Holy Roman” empire, got his culture in an atmosphere where that influence had partly survived. Beyond this, the Latin world had preserved from the past, in the law schools which never wholly died out in Italy, a professional knowledge of the Justinian code, which the Lombards and Franks had allowed to subsist for those who claimed to be judged by it, and which remained the proper law of the papal territory after Charlemagne. In the sphere of such special knowledge, though it was strictly monopolized, there was doubtless an intellectual life largely independent of religion; and there some classical culture probably always flourished.

The first effectual movements of new mental life, however, come from contact with the Saracens of Spain. While the Byzantine world let the treasures of old Greek knowledge fall from its hands, the Mohammedans in the East early acquired, at first through the Nestorian Christians, some knowledge of Aristotle and of Greek mathematics, medicine, and astronomy; and this in the progressive Saracen period was passed on to the Moors of Spain. Thence came into the Latin world the beginnings of science, as anciently known, with the beginnings of chemistry, an Arab creation. After the period of John Scotus, all culture had for centuries decayed: the few who cared to read were monks, taught to hold pagan lore in horror; so that at the end of the ninth century even such schooling as the trivium and quadrivium was rare in what had been the realm of Charlemagne; and the later manuals, such as that of St. Remi, were even more puerile than the older. Only from new culture-contacts could new culture arise.

One of the most fruitful impulses to such life was the introduction, late in the tenth century, by Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II, of an intermediate form of the Arabic notation, making possible the decimal method. Gerbert had acquired in his youthful sojourn on the Spanish march—not among the Moors, as the tradition has it—some knowledge of Arab mathematics and of the logic of Aristotle; and where his predecessors in the cathedral school at Rheims had for the most part shunned the Latin classics, he used them freely in teaching rhetoric. But the impulse he gave to the science of number, so vital alike for astronomy and for chemistry, was his greatest practical service. Those who used his method of calculating were called Gerbertists; and in that still dark age even such knowledge as his gave rise to the belief that he had dealings with the devil.

The new life was slow to take root; and when in the eleventh century the English monk Adelhard translated from the Arabic, which he had learned in his travels in Spain and Egypt, the Elements of Euclid, he found little welcome for it. Not till a century later did a fresh translation of Euclid from the Arabic, by Campanus, make its way in the schools. Algebra came from the same source, through a travelling merchant of Pisa, about the beginning of the thirteenth century. Thenceforth the infant sciences of physics held their ground, and from those beginnings became possible the lore of Roger Bacon. A genuine scientific spirit indeed was slow to grow; the ideals and ethics of religion had almost atrophied among Christians the instinct for simple truth; but the passion for astrology promoted astronomy, and the passion for gold promoted chemistry, all its practitioners hoping for the philosopher’s stone, which should transmute lead into gold. Always it is from the Arabs that the impulse comes. Under the emperor Frederick II, who in his Sicilian seat gave free course to Saracen culture and thought, was first translated from the Arabic the Greek Ptolemy’s great work on astronomy; and for Alphonso X of Castile, by Moorish means, were compiled new astronomical tables. From the Arabs, too, came trigonometry, which even for the Greeks had not been a separate science; and only in the fifteenth century did MÜller of KÖnigsberg (“Regiomontanus”), who perfected the decimal notation, first give it new developments.

New philosophic thought came by the same paths. Between the philosophy of the Arab AverroËs, with its Aristotelian basis and its lead to pantheism and materialism on the one hand, and the moral reaction set up by the Crusades on the other, the bases of Christian orthodoxy were shaken. The legend that Frederick II wrote a treatise entitled The Three Impostors, dealing with Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, is a fable; there was probably no such book in the Middle Ages, for it would have meant death at the hands of the Inquisition to possess it; but the very phrase showed what men had become capable of thinking and saying.

As the Renaissance proceeded in Italy in the teeth of the strifes which ultimately destroyed Italian liberty, men turned with all the zest of new intelligence to the remains of Latin literature. Virgil had become for the Middle Ages a beneficent magician, a kind of classic Merlin, and as such he is framed by Dante in his great poem of the other world. Religion in Italy had been brought into something like contempt by the lives and deeds of its ministers; and only in the literature of civilized antiquity could intellectual men find at once stimulus and satisfaction. It is to be said for the popes and cardinals of Rome, now among the wealthiest princes of Christendom, that they too promoted the revival of learning by their rewards. On their urging, scholars retrieved classics from the garrets and cellars of a hundred monasteries, or from the scrolls from which they had been partly obliterated to make way for a theology that the scholars despised. Popes and cardinals themselves, indeed, were commonly held in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to care little about theology and to know less—a state of things which ultimately aided their heretical adversaries, as did the scholarship they helped to spread.

With the fall of Constantinople came the final decisive impulse to new culture in western Europe. Ecclesiastical hates, and those aroused by the crusading conquest of Byzantium, had for centuries sundered the Greek and Latin worlds more completely than even those of Christian Europe and Islam, setting up a Chinese wall where paganism, albeit by fatal means, had effected mutual intercourse. But on the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1452 numbers of despairing Greek scholars sought refuge in the West, and were eagerly welcomed by students who desired Greek, not to acquire the theology of the Byzantines, but to read in the original the great pagan masters. Thenceforth the forces of culture in Europe became too strong for the forces of repression. It was thus by a return to the thought and science of buried paganism that Christian civilization so-called was put on a progressive footing. So long as Aristotle, known through Latin translations made from the Arabic, was a university text-book for students of theology under ecclesiastical supervision, he was but a modified instrument of dogmatism; and his limitations were made the measure of knowledge even as the Bible had been. With the free return to the recovered lore of free Greece came a new spirit of freedom, destined to break down the reign of all dogmatisms, and to build up a lore of its own.

On one line, happily, the Church of the Renaissance was able to do a service to civilization while following its own ends. Among the apophthegms which stand critical tests is that to the effect that art has always been the handmaid of religion. So true is it that even Protestant Christianity, which at its start set its face against all pictorial expression of religious ideas, is in our own time visibly much indebted to art for the preservation and cultivation of religious sentiment.

In antiquity, save in the anti-idolatrous cults, religion had been the great patron of imitative art, inasmuch as it made the most constant economic demand for sculptures and paintings. This law held good from Hindostan to Rome; and even Judaism and Mazdeism had perforce to subsidize architecture. That common need for splendid temples preserved architectural ideals in Byzantium when the art of the higher sculpture had utterly disappeared; and as the loss of skill in sculpture, no less than the old aversion to statues as symbols of paganism, prevented activity on that line, the Byzantines devoted themselves to the carving and painting of wooden icons, and to mosaics, pictures, and manuscript illuminations, for religious purposes. The results were constrained and unprogressive; but hence, in the Dark Ages, and during the short-lived Latin empire of Constantinople, came the models for the first pictorial art of Italy; and from that beginning, under the economic encouragement given by a priesthood whose wealth was always increasing, and whose churches and palaces constantly gained in splendour, came the immense artistic flowering of the Renaissance. After the Reformation had cut off half the sources of Italian ecclesiastical wealth, and Spanish rule had begun to ruin industry, the artistic life of Italy rapidly died away; even as in Protestant Holland, where the economic demand was non-clerical, coming mainly from a wealthy trading class who sought portraits and secular pictures, there was a rapid decline from the period of political and economic contraction.

It needed, however, the conditions of free civic life, such as prevailed in the earlier part of the Renaissance, to raise ecclesiastical art from the bondage of convention in which it had been kept by the Byzantine Church, as by the priesthood of ancient Egypt. It was the multiform intellectual competition of the Italian States in their period of free growth, and even under their native despots, that bred artistic spirits such as those who perpetually widened the bounds of the arts of colour and form, from Giotto to Michel Angelo and Titian.

Under equivalent conditions took place the great evolution of architectural art in France and northern Europe. It was mainly the economic demand of the Church that evolved the admirable architecture called “Gothic”—a misnomer first applied by the later artificial taste which could see beauty only in classical symmetry, and disdained the wild grace and power of the medieval architecture as mere barbarism. It was really a special development of artistic faculty. Modern fancy has ascribed to the guilds of cathedral-builders on the one hand a passion for occult lore, supposed to be the source of the modern mummery of “Freemasonry,” and on the other hand a deep religious feeling, of which the cathedral is supposed to be the expression. How far this is from the truth may be gathered from a closer study of their sculptures in many of the older cathedrals and churches, which reveal not only a riotous irreverence and indecency, but at times a positive derision for the faith. Nonetheless, organized Christianity had, by its demand for their work, provided a wonderful artistic environment for a cult which could no more than those of antiquity evolve a humanity worthy of beautiful things.