J. M. Robertson

It would be an error, in view of the biological generalization proceeded on and the facts noted in this inquiry, to suppose that even in the Dark Ages, so called,1 the spirit of critical reason was wholly absent from the life of Christendom. It had simply grown very rare, and was the more discountenanced where it strove to speak. But the most systematic suppression of heresies could not secure that no private heresy should remain. As Voltaire has remarked, there was “nearly always a small flock separated from the great.”2 Apart too from such quasi-rationalism as was involved in semi-Pelagianism,3 critical heresy chronically arose even in the Byzantine provinces, which by the curtailment of the Empire had been left the most homogeneous and therefore the most manageable of the Christian States. It is necessary to note those survivals of partial freethinking, when we would trace the rise of modern thought.

It was probably from some indirect influence of the new anti-idolatrous religion of Islam that in the eighth century the soldier-emperor, Leo the Isaurian, known as the Iconoclast, derived his aversion to the image-worship4 which had long been as general in the Christian world as ever under polytheism. So gross had the superstition become that particular images were frequently selected as god-parents; of others the paint was partly scratched off to be mixed with the sacramental wine; and the bread was solemnly put in contact with them.5 Leo began (726) by an edict simply causing the images to be placed so high that they could not be kissed, but on being met with resistance and rebellion he ordered their total removal (730). One view is that he saw image-worship to be the main hindrance to the spread of the faith among Jews and Moslems, and took his measures accordingly.6 Save on this one point he was an orthodox Christian and Trinitarian, and his long effort to put down images and pictures was in itself rather fanatical7 than rationalistic, though a measure of freethinking was developed among the religious party he created.8 Of this spirit, as well as of the aversion to image-worship,9 something must have survived the official restoration of idolatry; but the traces are few. The most zealous iconoclasts seem never to have risen above the flat inconsistency of treating the cross and the written gospels with exactly the same adoration that their opponents paid to images;10 and their appeal to the scriptures—which was their first and last argument—was accordingly met by the retort that they themselves accepted the authority of tradition, as did the image-worshippers. The remarkable hostility of the army to the latter is to be explained, apparently, by the local bias of the eastern regions from which the soldiers were mainly recruited.

In the ninth century, when Saracen rivalry had stung the Byzantines into some partial revival of culture and science,11 the all-learned Patriarch Photius (c. 820–891), who reluctantly accepted ecclesiastical office, earned a dangerous repute for freethinking by declaring from the pulpit that earthquakes were produced by earthly causes and not by divine wrath.12 But this was an almost solitary gleam of reason in a generation wholly given up to furious strife over the worship of images, and Photius was one of the image-worshippers. The battle swung from extreme to extreme. The emperor Michael II, “the Stammerer” (820–828), held a medium position, and accordingly acquired the repute of a freethinker. A general under Leo V, “the Armenian,” he had conspired against him, and when on the verge of execution had been raised to the throne in place of Leo, who was assassinated at the altar. The new emperor aimed above all things at peace and quietness; but his methods were thoroughly Byzantine, and included the castration of the four sons of Leo. Michael himself is said to have doubted the future resurrection of men, to have maintained that Judas was saved, and to have doubted the existence of Satan because he is not named in the Pentateuch13—a species of freethinking not far removed from that of the Iconoclasts, whose grounds were merely Biblical. A generation later came Michael IV, “the Sot,” bred a wastrel under the guardianship of his mother, Theodora (who in 842 restored image-worship and persecuted the Paulicians), and her brother Bardas, who ultimately put her in a convent. Michael, repeatedly defeated by the Saracens, long held his own at home. Taking into favour Basil, who married his (Michael’s) mistress, he murdered Bardas, and a year later (867) was about to murder Basil in turn, when the latter anticipated him, murdered the emperor, and assumed the purple. It was under Basil, who put down the Iconoclasts, that Photius, after formally deposing and being deposed by the Pope of Rome (864–66) was really deposed and banished (868), to be restored to favour and office ten years later. In 886, on the death of Basil, he was again deposed, dying about 891. In that kaleidoscope of plot and faction, fanaticism and crime, there is small trace of sane thinking. Michael IV, in his disreputable way, was something of a freethinker, and could even with impunity burlesque the religious processions of the clergy,14 the orthodox populace joining in the laugh; but there was no such culture at Constantinople as could develop a sober rationalism, or sustain it against the clergy if it showed its head. Intelligence in general could not rise above the plane of the wrangle over images. While the struggle lasted, it was marked by all the ferocity that belonged from the outset to Christian strifes; and in the end, as usual, the more irrational bias triumphed.

It was in a sect whose doctrine at one point coincided with iconoclasm that there were preserved such rude seeds of oriental rationalism as could survive the rule of the Byzantine emperors, and carry the stimulus of heresy to the west. The rise of the Paulicians in Armenia dates from the seventh century, and was nominally by way of setting up a creed on the lines of Paul as against the paganized system of the Church. Rising as they did on the borders of Persia, they were probably affected from the first by Mazdean influences, as the dualistic principle was always affirmed by their virtual founder, Constantine, afterwards known as Sylvanus.15 Their original tenets seem to have been anti-Manichean, anti-Gnostic (though partly Marcionite), opposed to the worship of images and relics, to sacraments, to the adoration of the Virgin, of saints, and of angels, and to the acceptance of the Old Testament; and in an age in which the reading of the Sacred Books had already come to be regarded as a privilege of monks and priests, they insisted on reading the New Testament for themselves.16 In this they were virtually founding on the old pagan conception of religion, under which all heads of families could offer worship and sacrifice without the intervention of a priest, as against the JudÆo-Christian sacerdotalism, which vetoed anything like a private cultus. In the teaching of Sylvanus, further, there were distinct Manichean and Gnostic characteristics—notably, hostility to Judaism; the denial that Christ had a real human body, capable of suffering; and the doctrine that baptism and the communion were properly spiritual and not physical rites.17 In the ninth century, when they had become a powerful and militant sect, often at war with the empire, they were still marked by their refusal to make any difference between priests and laymen. Anti-ecclesiasticism was thus a main feature of the whole movement; and the Byzantine Government, recognizing in its doctrine a particularly dangerous heresy, had at once bloodily attacked it, causing Sylvanus to be stoned to death.18 Still it grew, even to the length of exhibiting the usual phenomena of schism within itself. One section obtained the protection of the first iconoclastic emperor, who agreed with them on the subject of images; and a later leader, Sergius or Tychicus, won similar favour from Nicephorus I; but Leo the Armenian (suc. 813), fearing the stigma of their other heresies, and having already trouble enough from his iconoclasm, set up against them, as against the image-worshippers, a new and cruel persecution.19 They were thus driven over to the Saracens, whose advance-guard they became as against the Christian State; but the iconoclast Constantine Copronymus sympathetically20 transplanted many of them to Constantinople and Thrace, thus introducing their doctrine into Europe. The Empress Theodora (841–855), who restored image-worship,21 sought to exterminate those left in Armenia, slaying, it is said, a hundred thousand.22 Many of the remnant were thus forced into the arms of the Saracens; and the sect did the empire desperate mischief during many generations.23

Meantime those planted in Thrace, in concert with the main body, carried propaganda into Bulgaria, and these again were further reinforced by refugees from Armenia in the ninth century, and in the tenth by a fresh colony transplanted from Armenia by the emperor John Zimisces, who valued them as a bulwark against the barbarous Slavs.24 Fresh persecution under Alexius I at the end of the eleventh century failed to suppress them; and imperial extortion constantly drove to their side numbers of fresh adherents,25 while the Bulgarians for similar reasons tended in mass to adopt their creed as against that of Constantinople. So greatly did the cult flourish that at its height it had a regular hierarchy, notably recalling that of the early Manicheans—with a pope, twelve magistri, and seventy-two bishops, each of whom had a filius major and filius minor as his assistants. Withal the democratic element remained strong, the laying on of the hands of communicants on the heads of newcomers being part of the rite of reception into full membership. Thus it came about that from Bulgaria there passed into western Europe,26 partly through the Slavonic sect called Bogomiles or Bogomilians27 (= Theophiloi, “lovers of God”), who were akin to the Paulicians, partly by more general influences,28 a contagion of democratic and anti-ecclesiastical heresy; so that the very name Bulgar became the French bougre = heretic—and worse.29 It specified the most obvious source of the new anti-Romanist heresies of the Albigenses, if not of the Vaudois (Waldenses).

In the west, meanwhile, where the variety of social elements was favourable to new life, heresy of a rationalistic kind was not wholly lacking. About the middle of the eighth century we find one Feargal or Vergilius, an Irish priest in Bavaria, accused by St. Boniface, his enemy, of affirming, “in defiance of God and his own soul,” the doctrine of the antipodes,30 which must have reached him through the ancient Greek lore carried to Ireland in the primary period of Christianization of that province. Of that influence we have already seen a trace in Pelagius and Coelestius; and we shall see more later in John the Scot. After being deposed by the Pope, Vergilius was reinstated; was made Bishop of Salzburg, and held the post till his death; and was even sainted afterwards; but the doctrine disappeared for centuries from the Christian world.

Other heresies, however, asserted themselves. Though image-worship finally triumphed there as in the east, it had strong opponents, notably Claudius, bishop of Turin (fl. 830) under the emperor Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, and his contemporary Agobard, bishop of Lyons.31 It is a significant fact that both men were born in Spain; and either to Saracen or to Jewish influence—the latter being then strong in the Moorish and even in the Christian32 world—may fairly be in part attributed their marked bias against image-worship. Claudius was slightly and Agobard well educated in Latin letters, so that an early impression33 would seem to have been at work in both cases. However that may be, they stood out as singularly rationalistic theologians in an age of general ignorance and superstition. Claudius vehemently resisted alike image-worship, saint-worship, and the Papal claims, and is recorded to have termed a council of bishops which condemned him “an assembly of asses.”34 Agobard, in turn, is quite extraordinary in the thoroughness of his rejection of popular superstition, being not only an iconoclast but an enemy to prayer for change in the weather, to belief in incantations and the power of evil spirits, to the ordeal by fire, to the wager of battle,35 and to the belief in the verbal inspiration of the Sacred Books. In an age of enormous superstition and deep ignorance, he maintained within the Church that Reason was the noble gift of God.36 He was a rationalist born out of due time.37

A grain of rationalism, as apart from professional self-interest, may also have entered into the outcry made at this period by the clergy against the rigidly predestinarian doctrine of the monk Gottschalk.38 His enemy, Rabanus or Hrabanus (called “the Moor”), seems again to represent some Saracen influence, inasmuch as he reproduced the scientific lore of Isidore of Seville.39 But the philosophic semi-rationalism of John Scotus (d. 875), later known as Erigena (John the Scot = of Ireland—the original “Scots” being Irish), seems to be traceable to the Greek studies which had been cherished in Christianized Ireland while the rest of western Europe lost them, and represents at once the imperfect beginning of the relatively rationalistic philosophy of Nominalism40 and the first western revival of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, howbeit by way of accommodation to the doctrine of the Church.41

Called in by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, himself a normally superstitious believer,42 to answer Gottschalk, John Scotus in turn was accused of heresy, as he well might be on many points of his treatise, De Praedestinatione43 (851). He fiercely and not very fairly condemned Gottschalk as a heretic, charging him with denying both divine grace and freewill, but without disposing of Gottschalk’s positive grounds; and arguing that God could not be the cause of sin, as if Gottschalk had not said the same thing. His superior speculative power comes out in his undertaking to show that for the Divine Being sin is non-ens; and that therefore that Being cannot properly be said either to foreknow or to predestinate, or to punish. But the argument becomes inconsistent inasmuch as it further affirms Deity to have so constituted the order of things that sin punishes itself.44 It is evident that in assimilating his pantheistic conceptions he had failed to think out their incompatibility with any theistic dogma whatever; his reasoning, on the whole, being no more coherent than Gottschalk’s. He had in fact set out from an arbitrary theistic position that was at once Judaic, Christian, and Platonic, and went back on one line to the Gnostics; while on another his argument that sin has no real existence is a variant from an old thesis—made current, as we saw, by Euclides of Megara—with which orthodoxy had met the Manicheans.45 But to the abstract doctrine he gave a new practical point by declaring that the doctrine of hell-fire was a mere allegory; that heaven and hell alike were states of consciousness, not places.46 And if such concrete freethinking were not enough to infuriate the orthodox, they had from him the most explicit declarations that authority is derivable solely from reason.47

In philosophy proper he must be credited, despite his inconsistency, with deep and original thought.48 Like every theologian of philosophic capacity before and since, he passes into pantheism as soon as he grapples closely with the difficulties of theism, and “the expressions which he uses are identical with those which were afterwards employed by Spinoza.... It was a tradition of the fourth or fifth century transferred to the ninth, an echo from Alexandria.”49 Condemned by Pope Nicholas I and by two Church Councils,50 his writings none the less availed to keep that echo audible to later centuries.

The range and vigour of his practical rationalism may be gathered from his attitude in the controversy begun by the abbot Paschasius Radbert (831) on the nature of the Eucharist. Paschasius taught that there was a real transformation of the bread and wine into the divine body and blood; and the doctrine, thus nakedly put, startled the freer scholars of the time, who were not yet habituated to Latin orthodoxy. Another learned monk, Ratramnus, who had written a treatise on predestination at the request of the rationalizing emperor, Charles the Bald (discussing the problem in Gottschalk’s sense51 without naming him), produced on the same monarch’s invitation a treatise in which transubstantiation was denied, and the “real presence” was declared to be spiritual52—a view already known to Paschasius as being held by some.53 John Scotus, also asked by the emperor to write on the subject, went so far as to argue that the bread and wine were merely symbols and memorials.54 As usual, the irrational doctrine became that of the Church;55 but the other must have wrought for reason in secret. For the rest, he set forth the old “modal” view of the Trinity, resolving it into the different conceptual aspects of the universe, and thus propounding one more vital heresy.56

Nothing but a succession of rationalizing emperors could have secured continuance for such teaching as that of Ratramnus and John the Scot. For a time, the cruelty meted out to Gottschalk kept up feeling in favour of his views; Bishop Remigius of Lyons condemned Hincmar’s treatment of him; and others sought to maintain his positions, with modifications, though Hincmar carried resolutions condemning them at the second Synod of Chiersy. On the other hand, Archbishop Wenilo of Sens, Bishop Prudentius of Troyes, and Florus, a deacon of Lyons, all wrote against the doctrines of John the Scot; and the second Synod of Valence (855), while opposing Hincmar and affirming duplex predestination, denounced with fury the reasonings of John the Scot, ascribing them to his nation as a whole.57 The pope taking the same line, the fortunes of the rationalistic view of the eucharist and of hell-fire were soon determined for the Middle Ages, though in the year 950 we find the Archbishop of Canterbury confronted by English ecclesiastics who asserted that there was no transubstantiation, the elements being merely a figure of the body and blood of Christ.58

The economic explanation clearly holds alike as regards the attack on John and the condemnation of Gottschalk for a doctrine which had actually been established for centuries, on the authority of Augustine, as strict orthodoxy. In Augustine’s time, the determining pressures were not economic: a bankrupt world was seeking to explain its fate; and Augustine had merely carried a majority with him against Pelagius, partly by his personal influence, partly by force of the fatalist mood of the time. But in the renascent world of Gottschalk’s day the economic exploitation of fear had been carried several stages forward by the Church; and the question of predestination had a very direct financial bearing. The northern peoples, accustomed to compound for crimes by money payments, had so readily played into the hands of the priesthood by their eagerness to buy surcease of purgatorial pain that masses for the dead and “penitential certificates” were main sources of ecclesiastical revenue. Therefore the condemnations of such abuses passed by the Councils, on the urging of the more thoughtful clergy, were constantly frustrated by the plain pecuniary interest of the priests.59 It even appears that the eucharist was popularly regarded not as a process of religious “communion,” but as a magical rite objectively efficacious for bodily preservation in this life and the next. Thus it came about that often “priests presented the offering of the mass alone and by themselves, without any participation of the congregation.”60

If then it were to be seriously understood that the future lot of all was foreordained, all expenditure on masses for the dead, or to secure in advance a lightening of purgatorial penance, or even to buy off penance on earth, was so much waste; and the Teutons were still as ready as other barbarians to make their transactions with Church, God, and the saints a matter of explicit bargain.61 Gottschalk, accordingly, had to be put down, in the general interests of the Church. It could not truthfully be pretended that he deviated from Augustine, for he actually held by the “semi-Pelagian” inconsistency that God predestinates good, but merely foreknows evil.62 There was in fact no clear opposition between his affirmations and those of Rabanus Maurus, who also professed to be an Augustinian; but the latter laid forensic stress on the “desire” of God that all men should be saved, and on the formula that Christ died for all; while Gottschalk, more honestly, insisted that predestination is predestination, and applied the principle not merely, as had been customary, to the future state of the good, but to that of the bad,63 insisting on a prÆdestinatio duplex. His own fate was thus economically predestinate; and he was actually tortured by the scourge till he cast into the fire his written defence, “a document which contained nothing but a compilation of testimonies from Scripture, and from the older church-teachers.”64

From this point onward, the slow movement of new ideas may for a time be conveniently traced on two general lines—one that of the philosophic discussion in the schools, reinforced by Saracen influences, the other that of partially rationalistic and democratic heresy among the common people, by way first of contagion from the East. The latter was on the whole as influential for sane thought as the former, apart from such ecclesiastical freethinking as that of Berengar of Tours and Roscelin (Rousselin), Canon of CompiÈgne. Berengar (c. 1050) was led by moral reflection65 to doubt the priestly miracle of the Eucharist, and thenceforth he entered into a stormy controversy on the subject, in the course of which he twice recanted under bodily fear, but passionately returned to his original positions. Fundamentally sincere, and indignantly resentful of the gross superstition prevailing in the Church, he struck fiercely in his writings at Popes Leo IX and Nicholas II and Archbishop Lanfranc,66 all of whom had opposed him. At length, after much strife, he threw up the contest, spending the latter part of his long life in seclusion; Pope Gregory VII, who was personally friendly to him, having finally shielded him from persecution. It seems clear that, though accused, with others of his school, of rejecting certain of the gospel miracles,67 he never became a disbeliever; his very polemic testifying to the warmth of his belief on his own lines. His teaching, however, which went far by reason of the vividness of his style, doubtless had the effect of promoting not only the rationalistic-Christian view of the Eucharist,68 but a criticism which went further, inasmuch as his opponents forced on the bystanders the question as to what reality there was in the Christian creed if his view were true.69 All such influences, however, were but slight in total mass compared with the overwhelming weight of the economic interest of the priesthood; and not till the Reformation was Berengar’s doctrine accepted by a single organized sect. The orthodox doctrine, in fact, was all-essential to the Catholic Church. Given the daily miracle of the “real presence,” the Church had a vital hold on the Christian world, and the priest was above all lay rivalry. Seeing as much, the Council of the Lateran (1059) met the new criticism by establishing the technical doctrine of the real presence for the first time as an article of faith; and as such it will doubtless stand while there is a Catholic priesthood. Berengar’s original view must have been shared by thousands; but no Catholic carried on his propaganda. The question had become one of life and death.

So far as the Church by her keenly self-regarding organization could attain it, all opinion was kept within the strict bounds of her official dogma, in which life in the Middle Ages so long stagnated. For centuries, despite the turmoil of many wars—which, indeed, helped to arrest thought—the life of the mind presented a uniformity hardly now conceivable. The common expectation of the ending of the world, in the year 1000, in particular had an immense prepotency of paralysing men’s spirits; and the grooves of habit thus fixed were hard to alter. For most men, the notion of possible innovation in thought did not exist: the usual was the sacred: the very ideal of an improvement or reformation, when it arose, was one of reaching back to a far-away perfection of the past, never of remoulding things on lines laid down by reason. Yet even into this half-stifled world there entered, by eastern ways, and first in the guise of rude demotic departures from priestly prescription, the indestructible spirit of change.

The first Western traces of the imported Paulician heresy are about the year 1000,70 when a rustic of ChÂlons is heard of as destroying a cross and a religious picture, and asserting that the prophets are not wholly to be believed.71 From this time forward, the world having begun to breathe again after the passing of the year 1000 without any sign of the Day of Judgment, heresy begins to multiply, the chief movers being “distinguished by a tendency to rationalism.”72 In 1010 there is a trace of it in Aquitaine.73 In the year 1022 (or, as the date is sometimes put, in 1017) we hear of the unveiling of a secret society of rationalizing mystics at Orleans, ten canons of one church being members.74 An Italian woman was said to be the founder, and thirteen were burned alive on their refusal to recant. According to the records, they denied all miracles, including the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection; rejected baptism and the miracle of the Eucharist; took the old “Docetic” view of Jesus, denying his actual humanity; and affirmed the eternity of matter and the non-creation of the world. They were also accused, like the first Christians, of promiscuous nocturnal orgies and of eating sacrificed infants; but unless such charges are to be held valid in the other case, they cannot be here.75 The stories told of the Manichean community who lived in the castle of Monforte, near Asti in Lombardy, in the years 1025–1040, and who at length were likewise burned alive, are similarly mixed with fable.76 On this case it is recorded that, while the Archbishop of Milan investigated the heresy, the burning of the victims was the work of the fanatical populace of Milan, and was done against his will.

A less savage treatment may have made possible the alleged success of Gerhard, bishop of Cambray and Arras, in reconciling to the Church at Arras, in 1025 or 1030, a number of laymen—also said to have been taught by an Italian—who as a body rejected all external worship, setting aside priestly baptism and the sacraments, penance and images, funeral rites, holy oil, church bells, cross-worship, altars, and even churches, and denied the necessity of an order of priests.77 Few of the Protestants of a later age were so thorough-going; but the fact that many of the sect stood to the old Marcionite veto on marriage and the sexual instinct gives to their propaganda its own cast of fanaticism. This last tenet it seemingly was that gave the Paulicians their common Greek name of cathari,78 “the pure,” corrupted or assimilated in Italian to gazzari, whence presumably the German word for heretic, Ketzer.79 Such a doctrine had the double misfortune that if acted on it left the sect without the normal recruitment of members’ children, while if departed from it brought on them the stigma of wanton hypocrisy; and as a matter of fact every movement of the kind, ancient and modern, seems to have contained within it the two extremes of asceticism and licence, the former generating the latter.

It could hardly, however, have been the ascetic doctrine that won for the new heresy its vogue in medieval Europe; nor is it likely that the majority of the heretics even professed it. If, on the other hand, we ask how it was that in an age of dense superstition so many uneducated people were found to reject so promptly the most sacrosanct doctrines of the Church, it seems hardly less difficult to account for the phenomenon on the bare ground of their common sense. Critical common sense there must have been, to allow of it at all; but it is reasonable to suppose that then, as clearly happened later at the Reformation, common sense had a powerful stimulus in pecuniary interest.

With the evidence as to Christian practice in the fourth century on the one hand, and the later evidence as to clerical life on the other, we are certain of a common play of financial motive throughout the Middle Ages. And whereas it is intelligible that such rapacity as we have seen described by Libanius should evoke a heresy which rejected alike religious ceremonial and the claims of the priest, it is further reasonable to surmise that resentment of priestly rapacity and luxury helped men to similar heresy in Western Europe when the doctrine reached them. If any centuries are to be singled out as those of maximum profligacy and extortion among the clergy, they are the ninth and the three following.80 It had been part of the policy of Charlemagne everywhere to strengthen the hands of the clergy by way of checking the power of the nobles;81 and in the disorder after his death the conflicting forces were in semi-anarchic competition. The feudal habit of appointing younger sons and underlings to livings wherever possible; the disorders and strifes of the papacy; and the frequent practice of dispossessing priests to reward retainers, thereby driving the dispossessed to plunder on their own account, must together have created a state of things almost past exaggeration. It was a matter of course that the clergy on their part should make the utmost possible use of their influence over men’s superstitious fears in order to acquire bequests of lands;82 and such bequests in turn exasperated the heirs thus disinherited.

Thus orthodoxy and heterodoxy alike had strong economic motives; and in these may be placed a main part of the explanation of the gross savagery of persecution now normal in the Church. Such a heresy as that of Gottschalk, we saw, by denying to the priest all power of affecting the predestined course of things here or hereafter, logically imperilled the very existence of the whole hierarchy, and was by many resented accordingly. The same principle entered into the controversies over the Eucharist. Still more would the clergy resent the new Manichean heresy, of which every element, from the Euchite tenet of the necessity of personal prayer and mortification, as against the innate demon, to the rejection of all the rites of normal worship and all the pretensions of priests, was radically hostile to the entire organization of the Church. When the heretics in due course developed a priestly system of their own,83 the hostility was only the more embittered.

The crisis was the more acute, finally, because in the latter part of the tenth century the common expectation that the world would end with the year 1000 had inspired enormous donations to the Church,84 with a proportionally oppressive effect on the general population, moving them to economic self-defence. It is in fact clear that an anti-clerical element entered largely into the beginnings of the communal movement in France in the eleventh century. In 1024 we find the citizens of Cambrai forming a league to drive out the canons;85 and though that beginning of revolt was crushed out by massacre, the same spirit expressed itself in heresy. The result was that religious persecution ere long eclipsed political. Bishop Wazon of LÜttich (d. 1048) in vain protested against the universal practice of putting the heretics to death.86 Manicheans who were detected in 1052 at Goslar, in Germany, were hanged,87 a precedent being thus established in the day of small things.

All this went on while the course of the papacy was so scandalous to the least exacting moral sense that only the ignorance of the era could sustain any measure of reverence for the Church as an institution. In the year 963 the ablest of the emperors of that age, Otto the Great, had the consent of the people of Rome to his deposition of Pope John XII, a disorderly youth of twenty-five, “the most profligate if not the most guilty of all who have worn the tiara,”88 and to his appointing the Pope in future; but Teutonic administration soon drove the populace to repeated revolt, quenched by massacre, till at length John returned, speedily to be slain by a wronged husband. Economic interest entered largely into the subsequent attempts of the Romans to choose their own Pope and rule their own city, and into the contrary claim of the emperors to do both; and in the nature of things the usually absent emperors could only spasmodically carry their point. The result was an epoch of riotous disorder in the papacy. Between John and Leo IX (955–1048) six popes were deposed, two murdered, and one mutilated;89 and the Church was a mere battle-ground of the factions of the Roman and Italian nobility.90 At last, in 1047, “a disgraceful contest between three claimants of the papal chair shocked even the reckless apathy of Italy”;91 and the emperor Henry III deposed them all and appointed a pope of his own choosing, the clergy again consenting. Soon, however, as before, the local claim was revived; and in the papacy of the powerful Gregory VII, known as Hildebrand, the head of the Church determinedly asserted its autonomy and his own autocracy. Then came the long “war of the investitures” between the popes and the emperors, in which the former were substantially the gainers. The result was, in addition to the endless miseries set up by war, a systematic development of that financial corruption which already had been scandalous enough. The cathedral chapters and the nobles traded in bishoprics; the popes sold their ratifications for great sums; the money was normally borrowed by the bishops from the papal usurers; and there was witnessed throughout Europe the spectacle of the Church denouncing all usury as sin, while its own usurers were scrupulously protected, the bishops paying to them their interest from the revenues they were able to extort.92 Satirical comment naturally abounded wherever men had any knowledge of the facts; and what current literature there was reflected the feeling on all sides.

The occurrence of the first and second crusades, the work respectively of Peter the Hermit and St. Bernard, created a period of new fanaticism, somewhat unfavourable to heresy; but even in that period the new sects were at work,93 and in the twelfth century, when crusading had become a mere feudal conspiracy of conquest and plunder,94 heresy reappeared, to be duly met by slaughter. A perfect ferment of anti-clerical heresy had arisen in Italy, France, and Flanders.95 At Orvieto, in Italy, the heretics for a time actually had the mastery, and were put down only after a bloody struggle.96 In France, for a period of twenty years from 1106, Peter de Brueys opposed infant baptism, the use of churches, holy crosses, prayers for the dead (the great source of clerical income), and the doctrine of the Real Presence in the eucharist (the main source of their power), and so set up the highly heretical sect of Petrobrussians.97 Driven from his native district of Vallonise, he long maintained himself in Gascony, till at length he was seized and burned (1126 or 1130). The monk Henry (died in prison 1148) took a similar line, directly denouncing the clergy in Switzerland and France; as did Tanquelin in Flanders (killed by a priest, 1125); though in his case there seems to have been as much of religious hallucination as of the contrary.98 A peasant, Eudo of Stella (who died in prison), is said to have half-revolutionized Brittany with his anti-ecclesiastical preaching.99 The more famous monk Arnold of Brescia (strangled and burned in 1155), a pupil of Abailard, but orthodox in his theology and austere in his life, simplified his plan of reform (about 1139) into a proposal that the whole wealth of the clergy, from the pope to the monks, should be transferred to the civil power, leaving churchmen to lead a spiritual life on voluntary offerings.100 For fifteen years the stir of his movement lasted in Lombardy, till at length his formation of a republic at Rome forced the papacy to combine with the Emperor Frederick II, who gave Arnold up to death. But though his movement perished, anti-clericalism did not; and heretical sects of some kind persisted here and there, in despite of the Church, till the age of the Reformation. In Italy, during the age of the Renaissance, all alike were commonly called paterini or patarini—a nickname which seems to come from pataria, a Milanese word meaning “popular faction” or “rowdies.”101 Thus in the whole movement of fresh popular thought there is a manifest connection with the democratic movement in politics, though in the schools the spirit of discussion and dialectic had no similar relationship.

During the first half of the century its warfare with the emperors, and the frequent appointment of anti-popes, prevented any systematic policy on the part of the Holy See,102 repression being mostly left to the local ecclesiastical authorities. It was in 1139 that Innocent II issued the first papal decree against Cathari, expelling them from the Church and calling on the temporal power to give full effect to their excommunication.103 In 1163 Pope Alexander III, being exiled from Rome by Frederick I and the anti-pope Victor, called a great council at Tours, where again a policy of excommunication was decided on, the secular authorities being commanded to imprison the excommunicated and confiscate their property, but not to slay them. In the same year some Cathari arrested at Cologne had been sentenced to be burned; but the Council did not go so far. As a result the decree had little or no effect.104

So powerless was the Church at this stage that in 1167 the Cathari held a council of their own near Toulouse; a bishop of their order, Nicetas, coming from Constantinople to preside; and a whole system of French sees was set on foot.105 So numerous had the Cathari now become that their highest grade, the perfecti, alone was reckoned to number 4,000;106 and from this time it is of Cathari that we read in the rolls of persecution. About 1170 four more of them, from Flanders, were burned at Cologne; and others, of the higher grade called bos homes (= boni homines, “good men”), at Toulouse. In 1179, the heresy still gaining ground, an oecumenical council (the Third Lateran) was held at Rome under Pope Alexander III, decreeing afresh their excommunication, and setting up a new machinery of extirpation by proclaiming a crusade at once against the orderly heretics of southern France and the companies of openly irreligious freebooters who had arisen as a result of many wars and much misgovernment. To all who joined in the crusade was offered an indulgence of two years. In the following year Henry of Clairvaux, Cardinal of Albano, took the matter in hand as papal plenipotentiary; and in 1181 he raised a force of horse and foot and fell upon the ill-defended territory of the Viscount of Beziers, where many heretics, including the daughter of Raymond of Toulouse, had taken refuge. The chief stronghold was captured, with two Catharist bishops, who renounced their heresy, and were promptly given prebends in Toulouse. Many others submitted; but as soon as the terms for which the crusaders had enlisted were over and the army disbanded, they returned to their heretical practices.107 Two years later an army collected in central France made a campaign against the freebooters, slaying thousands in one battle, hanging fifteen hundred after another, and blinding eighty more. But freebooting also continued.108

The first crusade against heresy having failed, it was left by the papacy for a number of years to itself; though anti-pope Lucius III in 1184 sought to set up an Inquisition; and in 1195 a papal legate held a council at Montpellier, seeking to create another crusade. The zeal of the faithful was mainly absorbed in Palestine; while the nobles at home were generally at war with each other. Heresy accordingly continued to flourish, though there was never any suspension of local persecution outside of Provence, where the heretics were now in a majority, having more theological schools and scholars than the Church.109 In France in particular, in the early years of the reign of Philip Augustus (suc. 1180), many paterini were put to death by burning;110 and the clergy at length persuaded the king to expel the Jews, the work being done almost as cruelly as it was two centuries later in Spain. In England, where there was thus far little heresy, it was repressed by Henry II. Some thirty rustics came from Flanders in 1166, fleeing persecution, and vainly sought to propagate their creed. Zealous to prove his orthodoxy in the period of his quarrel with Becket, Henry presided over a council of bishops called by him at Oxford to discuss the case; and the heretics were condemned to be scourged, branded in the face, and driven forth—to perish in the winter wilds. “England was not hospitable to heresy;” and practically her orthodoxy was “unsullied until the rise of Wiclif.”111

In southern Europe and northern Italy in the last quarter of the century a foremost place began to be taken by the sect of the Waldenses, or Vaudois (otherwise the Poor Men of Lyons), which—whether deriving from ancient dissent surviving in the Vaux or Valleys of Piedmont,112 or taking its name and character from the teaching of the Lyons merchant, Peter Waldus, or an earlier Peter of Vaux or Valdis113—conforms substantially to the general heretical tendencies of that age, in that it rejected the papal authority, contended for the reading of the Bible by the laity, condemned tithes, disparaged fasting, stipulated for poverty on the part of priests and denied their special status, opposed prayers for the dead, and preached peace and non-resistance. In 1199, at Metz, they were found in possession of a French translation of the New Testament, the Psalms, and the book of Job—a new and startling invasion of the priestly power in the west. Above all, their men and women alike went about preaching in the towns, in the houses, and in the churches, and administered the eucharist without priests.114 Thus Cathari, Paterini, Manicheans, and non-Manichean Albigenses and Waldenses were on all fours for the Church, as opponents of its economic claims; and when at length, under Celestine III and Innocent III, the Holy See began to be consolidated after a long period of incessant change,115 desperate measures began to be contemplated. Organized heresy was seen to be indestructible save by general extirpation; and on economic grounds it was not to be tolerated. At Orvieto the heresy stamped out with blood in 1125 was found alive again in 1150; was again put down in 1163 by burning, hanging, and expulsion; and yet was again found active at the close of the century.116 In 1198 Innocent III is found beginning a new Inquisition among the Albigenses; and in 1199, while threatening them with exile and confiscation,117 he made a last diplomatic attempt to force the obstinately heretical people of Orvieto to take an oath of fidelity in the year 1199. It ended in the killing of his representative by the people.118 The papacy accordingly laid plans to destroy the enemy at its centre of propagation.

In Provence and Languedoc, the scene of the first great papal crusade against anti-clerical heresy, there were represented all the then existing forces of popular freethought; and the motives of the crusade were equally typical of the cause of authority.

1. In addition to the Paulician and other movements of religious rationalism above noted, the Languedoc region was a centre of semi-popular literary culture, which was to no small extent anti-clerical, and by consequence somewhat anti-religious. The Latin-speaking jongleurs or minstrels, known as Goliards,119 possessing as they did a clerical culture, were by their way of life committed to a joyous rather than an ascetic philosophy; and though given to blending the language of devotion with that of the drinking-table, very much after the fashion of Hafiz, they were capable of burlesquing the mass, the creed, hymns to the Virgin, the Lord’s Prayer, confessions, and parts of the gospels, as well as of keenly satirizing the endless abuses of the Church.120 “One is astonished to meet, in the Middle Ages, in a time always represented as crushed under the yoke of authority, such incredible audacities on the papacy, the episcopacy, chivalry, on the most revered dogmas of religion, such as paradise, hell, etc.”121 The rhymers escaped simply because there was no police that could catch them. Denounced by some of the stricter clergy, they were protected by others. They were, in fact, the minstrels of the free-living churchmen.122

Of this type is Guiot of Provence, a Black Friar, the author of La Bible Guiot, written between 1187 and 1206. He is a lover of good living, a champion of aristocrats, a foe of popular movements,123 and withal a little of a buffoon. But it is to be counted to him for righteousness that he thought the wealth devoured by the clergy might be more usefully spent on roads, bridges, and hospitals.124 He has also a good word for the old pagans who lived “according to reason”; and as to his own time, he is sharply censorious alike of princes, pope, and prelates. The princes are rascals who “do not believe in God,” and depress their nobility; and the breed of the latter has sadly degenerated. The pope is to be prayed for; but he is ill counselled by his cardinals, who conform to the ancient tendency of Rome to everything evil; many of the archbishops and bishops are no better; and the clergy in general are eaten up by greed and simony.125 This is in fact the common note.126

A kindred spirit is seen in much of the verse alike of the northern TrouvÈres and the southern Troubadours. A modern Catholic historian of medieval literature complains that their compositions “abound with the severest ridicule of such persons and of such things as, in the temper of the age, were highly estimated and most generally revered,” and notes that in consequence they were ranked by the devout as “lewd and impious libertines.”127 In particular they satirized the practice of excommunication and the use made by the Church of hell and purgatory as sources of revenue.128 Their anti-clerical poetry having been as far as possible destroyed by the Inquisition, its character has to be partly inferred from the remains of the northern trouvÈres—e.g., Ruteboeuf and Raoul de Houdan, of whom the former wrote a Voya de Paradis, in which Sloth is a canon and Pride a bishop, both on their way to heaven; while Raoul has a Songe d’enfer in which hell is treated in a spirit of the most audacious burlesque.129 In a striking passage of the old tale Aucassin et Nicolette there is naÏvely revealed the spontaneous revolt against pietism which underlay all these flings of irreverence. “Into paradise,” cries Aucassin, “go none but ... those aged priests, and those old cripples, and the maimed, who all day long and all night cough before the altars, and in the crypts beneath the churches; those ... who are naked and barefoot and full of sores.... Such as these enter in paradise, and with them have I nought to do. But in hell will I go. For to hell go the fair clerks and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney and the great wars, and the stout archer and the loyal man. With them will I go. And there go the fair and courteous ladies [of many loves]; and there pass the gold and the silver, the ermine and all rich furs, harpers and minstrels, and the happy of the world. With these will I go....”130 It was such a temper, rather than reasoned unbelief, that inspired the blasphemous parodies in Reynard the Fox and other popular works of the Middle Ages.

The ProvenÇal literature, further, was from the first influenced by the culture of the Saracens,131 who held Sicily and Calabria in the ninth and tenth centuries, and had held part of Languedoc itself for a few years in the eighth. On the passing of the duchy of Provence to Raymond Berenger, Count of Barcelona, at the end of the eleventh century, not only were the half-Saracenized Catalans mixed with the ProvenÇals, but Raymond and his successors freely introduced the arts and science of the Saracens into their dominion.132 In the Norman kingdom of Sicily too the Saracen influence was great even before the time of Frederick II; and thence it reached afresh through Italy to Provence,133 carrying with it everywhere, by way of poetry, an element of anti-clerical and even of anti-Christian rationalism.134 Though this spirit was not that of the Cathari and Waldenses, yet the fact that the latter strongly condemned the Crusades135 was a point in common between them and the sympathizers with Saracen culture. And as the tolerant Saracen schools of Spain or the Christian schools of the same region, which copied their curriculum,136 were in that age resorted to by youth from each of the countries of western Europe for scientific teaching137—all the latest medical and most other scientific knowledge being in their hands—the influence of such culture must have been peculiarly strong in Provence.138

The medieval mystery-plays and moralities, already common in Provence, mixed at times with the normal irreverence of illiterate faith139 a vein of surprisingly pronounced skeptical criticism,140 which at the least was a stimulus to critical thought among the auditors, even if they were supposed to take it as merely dramatic. Inasmuch as the drama was hereditarily pagan, and had been continually denounced and ostracized by Fathers and Councils,141 it would be natural that its practitioners, even when in the service of the Church, should be unbelievers.

The philosophy and science of both the Arabs and the Spanish Jews were specially cultivated in the Provence territory. The college of Montpellier practised on Arab lines medicine, botany, and mathematics; and the Jews, who had been driven from Spain by the Almohades, had flourishing schools at Narbonne, Beziers, NÎmes, and Carcassonne, as well as Montpellier, and spread alike the philosophy of AverroËs and the semi-rational theology of the Jewish thinker Maimonides,142 whose school held broadly by AverroÏsm.

For the rest, every one of the new literary influences that were assailing the Church would tend to flourish in such a civilization as that of Languedoc, which had been peaceful and prosperous for over two hundred years. Unable to lay hold of the popular poets and minstrels who propagated anti-clericalism, the papacy could hope to put down by brute force the social system in which they flourished, crushing the pious and more hated heretic with the scoffer. And Languedoc was a peculiarly tempting field for such operations. Its relative lack of military strength, as well as its pre-eminence in heresy, led Innocent III, a peculiarly zealous assertor of the papal power,143 to attack it in preference to other and remoter centres of enmity. In the first year of his pontificate, 1198, he commenced a new and zealous Inquisition144 in the doomed region; and in the year 1207, when as much persecution had been accomplished as the lax faith of the nobility and many of the bishops would consent to—an appeal to the King of France to interfere being disregarded—the scheme of a crusade against the dominions of Raymond Count of Toulouse was conceived and gradually matured. The alternate weakness and obstinacy of Raymond, and the fresh provocation given by the murder, in 1208, of the arrogant papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau,145 permitted the success of the scheme in such hands. The crusade was planned exactly on the conditions of those against the Saracens—the heretics at home being declared far worse than they.146 The crusaders were freed from payment of interest on their debts, exempted from the jurisdiction of all law courts, and absolved from all their sins past or future.147 To earn this reward they were to give only forty days’ service148—a trifle in comparison with the hardships of the crusades to Palestine. “Never therefore had the cross been taken up with a more unanimous consent.”149 Bishops and nobles in Burgundy and France, the English Simon de Montfort, the Abbot of Citeaux, and the Bernardine monks throughout Europe, combined in the cause; and recruits came from Austria and Saxony, from Bremen, even from Slavonia, as well as from northern France.150 The result was such a campaign of crime and massacre as European history cannot match.151 Despite the abject submission of the Count of Toulouse, who was publicly stripped and scourged, and despite the efforts of his nephew the Count of Albi to make terms, village after village was fired, all heretics caught were burned, and on the capture of the city and castle of Beziers (1209), every man, woman, and child within the walls was slaughtered, many of them in the churches, whither they had run for refuge. The legate, Arnold abbot of Citeaux, being asked at an early stage how the heretics were to be distinguished from the faithful, gave the never-to-be-forgotten answer, “Kill all; God will know his own.”152 Seven thousand dead bodies were counted in the great church of St. Mary Magdalene. The legate in writing estimated the total quarry at 15,000; others put the number at sixty thousand.153 When all in the place were slain, and all the plunder removed, the town was burned to the ground, not one house being left standing. Warned by the fate of Beziers, the people of Carcassonne, after defending themselves for many days, secretly evacuated their town; but the legate contrived to capture a number of the fugitives, of whom he burned alive four hundred, and hanged fifty.154 Systematic treachery, authorized and prescribed by the Pope,155 completed the success of the undertaking. The Church had succeeded, in the name of religion, in bringing half of Europe to the attainment of the ideal height of wickedness, in that it had learned to make evil its good; and the papacy had on the whole come nearer to destroying the moral sense of all Christendom156 than any conceivable combination of other causes could ever have done in any age.

The first crusade was followed by others, in which Simon de Montfort reached the maximum of massacre, varying his procedure by tearing out eyes and cutting off noses when he was not hanging victims by dozens or burning them by scores or putting them to the sword by hundreds157 (all being done “with the utmost joy”)158; though the “White Company” organized by the Bishop of Toulouse159 maintained a close rivalry. The Church’s great difficulty was that as soon as an army had bought its plenary indulgence for all possible sin by forty days’ service, it disbanded. Nevertheless, “the greater part of the population of the countries where heresy had prevailed was exterminated.”160 Organized Christianity had contrived to murder the civilization of Provence and Languedoc161 while the fanatics of Islam in their comparatively bloodless manner were doing as much for that of Moorish Spain. Heresy indeed was not rooted out: throughout the whole of the thirteenth century the Inquisition met with resistance in Languedoc162; but the preponderance of numbers which alone could sustain freethinking had been destroyed, and in course of time it was eliminated by the sleepless engines of the Church.

It was owing to no lack of the principle of evil in the Christian system, but simply to the much greater and more uncontrollable diversity of the political elements of Christendom, that the whole culture and intelligence of Europe did not undergo the same fate. The dissensions and mutual injuries of the crusaders ultimately defeated their ideal163; after Simon de Montfort had died in the odour of sanctity164 the crusade of Louis VIII of France in 1226 seems to have been essentially one of conquest, there being practically no heretics left; and the disasters of the expedition, crowned by the king’s death, took away the old prestige of the movement. Meanwhile, the heresy of the Albigenses, and kindred ideas, had been effectually driven into other parts of Europe165; and about 1231 we find Gregory IX burning a multitude of them at the gates of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome166 and compassing their slaughter in France and Germany.167 In Italy the murderous pertinacity of the Dominicans gradually destroyed organized heresy despite frequent and desperate resistance. About 1230 we hear of one eloquent zealot, chosen podestÀ by the people of Verona, using his power to burn in one day sixty heretics, male and female.168 The political heterogeneity of Europe, happily, made variation inevitable; though the papacy, by making the detection and persecution of heresy a means of gain to a whole order of its servants, had set on foot a machinery for the destruction of rational thought such as had never before existed.

The indestructibility of freethought, meanwhile, was being proved even in the philosophic schools, under all their conformities to faith. Already in the ninth century we have seen Scotus Erigena putting the faith in jeopardy by his philosophic defence of it. Another thinker, Roscelin (or Roussellin: fl. 1090), is interesting as having made a critical approach to freethought in religion by way of abstract philosophy. With him definitely begins the long academic debate between the Nominalists and Realists so called. In an undefined way, it had existed as early as the ninth century,169 the ground being the Christian adoption of Plato’s doctrine of ideas—that individual objects are instances or images of an ideal universal, which is a real existence, and prior to the individual thing: “universalia ante rem.” To that proposition Aristotle had opposed the doctrine that the universal is immanent in the thing—“universalia in re”—the latter alone being matter of knowledge;170 and in the Middle Ages those who called Aristotle master carried his negation of Plato to the extent of insisting that the “universal” or “abstract,” or the “form” or “species,” is a mere subjective creation, a name, having no real existence. This, the Nominalist position—mistakenly ascribed to Aristotle171—was ultimately expressed in the formula, “universalia post rem.”

Such reasonings obviously tend to implicate theology; and Roscelin was either led or helped by his Nominalist training to deny either explicitly or implicitly the unity of the Trinity, arguing in effect that, as only individuals are real existences, the actuality of the persons of the Trinity involves their disunity.172 The thesis, of course, evoked a storm, the English Archbishop Anselm and others producing indignant answers. Of Roscelin’s writing only one letter is extant; and even Anselm, in criticizing his alleged doctrine, admits having gathered it only from his opponents, whose language suggests perversion.173 But if the testimony of his pupil Abailard be truthful,174 he was at best a confused reasoner; and in his theology he got no further than tritheism, then called ditheism.175 Thus, though “Nominalism, by denying any objective reality to general notions, led the way directly to the testimony of the senses and the conclusions of experience,”176 it did so on lines fatally subordinate to the theology it sought to correct. Roscelin’s thesis logically led to the denial not only of trinity-in-unity but of the Incarnation and transubstantiation; yet neither he nor his opponents seem to have thought even of the last consequence, he having in fact no consciously heretical intention. Commanded to recant by the Council of Soissons in 1092, he did so, and resumed his teaching as before; whereafter he was ordered to leave France. Coming to England, he showed himself so little of a rebel to the papacy as to contend strongly for priestly celibacy, arguing that all sons of priests and all born out of wedlock should alike be excluded from clerical office. Expelled from England in turn for these views, by a clergy still anti-celibate, he returned to Paris, to revive the old philosophic issue, until general hostility drove him to Aquitaine, where he spent his closing years in peace.177

Such handling of the cause of Nominalism gave an obvious advantage to Realism. That has been justly described by one clerical scholar as “Philosophy held in subordination to Church-Authority”;178 and another has avowed that “the spirit of Realism was essentially the spirit of dogmatism, the disposition to pronounce that truth was already known,” while “Nominalism was essentially the spirit of progress, of inquiry, of criticism.”179 But even a critical philosophy may be made to capitulate to authority, as even À priori metaphysic may be to a certain extent turned against it. Realism had been markedly heretical in the hands of John Scotus; and in a later age the Realist John Huss was condemned to death—perhaps on political grounds, but not without signs of sectarian hate—by a majority of Nominalists at the Council of Constance. Everything depended on the force of the individual thinker and the degree of restraint put upon him by the authoritarian environment.180 The world has even seen the spectacle of a professed indifferentist justifying the massacre of St. Bartholomew; and the Platonist Marsilio Ficino vilified Savonarola, basely enough, after his execution, adjusting a pantheistic Christianity to the needs of the political situation in Medicean Florence. Valid freethinking is a matter of thoroughness and rectitude, not of mere theoretic assents.

Tried by that test, the Nominalism of the medieval schools was no very potent emancipator of the human spirit, no very clear herald of freedom or new concrete truth. A doctrine which was so far adjusted to authority as to affirm the unquestionable existence of three deities, Father, Son, and Spirit, and merely disputed the not more supra-rational theorem of their unity, yielded to the rival philosophy a superiority in the kind of credit it sought for itself. Nominalism was thus “driven to the shade of the schools,” where it was “regarded entirely in a logical point of view, and by no means in its actual philosophic importance as a speculation concerning the grounds of human knowledge.”181 For Roscelin himself the question was one of dialectics, not of faith, and he made no practical rationalists. The popular heresies bit rather deeper into life.182

Already in the eleventh century, however, the simple fact of the production of a new argument for the existence of God by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, is a proof that, apart from the published disputes, a measure of doubt on the fundamental issue had arisen in the schools. It is urged183 that, though the argumentation of Anselm seems alien to the thought of his time, there is no proof that the idea of proving the existence of God was in any way pressed on him from the outside. It is, however, inconceivable that such an argument should be framed if no one had raised a doubt. And as a matter of fact the question was discussed in the schools, Anselm’s treatise being a reproduction of his teaching. The monks of Bec, where he taught, urged him to write a treatise wherein nothing should be proved by mere authority, but all by necessity of reason or evidence of truth, and with an eye to objections of all sorts.184 In the preface to his Cur Deus Homo, again, he says that his first book is an answer to the objections of infidels who reject Christianity as irrational.185 Further, the nature of part of Anselm’s theistic argument and the very able but friendly reply of Gaunilo (a Count of Montigni, who entered a convent near Tours, 1044–1083) show that the subject was within the range of private discussion. Anselm substantially follows St. Augustine;186 and men cannot have read the ancient books which so often spoke of atheism without confronting the atheistic idea. It is not to be supposed that Gaunilo was an unbeliever; but his argumentation is that of a man who had pondered the problem.187

Despite the ostensibly rationalistic nature of his argument, however, Anselm stipulated for absolute submission of the intellect to the creed of the Church;188 so that the original subtitle of his Proslogium, Fides quaerens intellectum, in no way admits rational tests. In the next century we meet with new evidence of sporadic unbelief, and new attempts to deal with it on the philosophic side. John of Salisbury (1120–1180) tells of having heard many discourse on physics “otherwise than faith may hold”;189 and the same vivacious scholar put in his list of “things about which a wise man may doubt, so ... that the doubt extend not to the multitude,” some “things which are reverently to be inquired about God himself.”190 Giraldus Cambrensis (1147–1223), whose abundant and credulous gossip throws so much light on the inner life of the Church and the laity in his age, tells that the learned Simon of Tournay “thought not soundly on the articles of the faith,” saying privately, to his intimates, things that he dared not utter publicly, till one day, in a passion, he cried out, “Almighty God! how long shall this superstitious sect of Christians and this upstart invention endure?”; whereupon during the night he lost the power of speech, and remained helpless till his death.191 Other ecclesiastical chroniclers represent Simon as deriding alike Jesus, Moses, and Mahomet—an ascription to him of the “three impostors” formula.192 Again, Giraldus tells how an unnamed priest, reproved by another for careless celebration of the mass, angrily asked whether his rebuker really believed in transubstantiation, in the incarnation, in the Virgin Birth, and in resurrection; adding that it was all carried on by hypocrites, and assuredly invented by cunning ancients to hold men in terror and restraint. And Giraldus comments that inter nos there are many who so think in secret.193 As his own picture of the Church exhibits a gross and almost universal rapacity pervading it from the highest clergy to the lowest, the statement is entirely credible.194 Yet again, in the Romance of the Holy Grail, mention is twice made of clerical doubters on the doctrine of the Trinity;195 and on that side, in the crusading period, both the monotheistic doctrine of Islam and the Arab philosophy of AverroËs were likely to set up a certain amount of skepticism. In the twelfth century, accordingly, we have Nicolas of Amiens producing his tractate De articulis (or arte) catholicÆ fidei in the hope of convincing by his arguments men “who disdain to believe the prophecies and the gospel.”196

To meet such skepticism too was one of the undertakings of the renowned Abailard (1079–1142), himself persecuted as a heretic for the arguments with which he sought to guard against unbelief. Of the details of his early life it concerns us here to note only that he studied under Roscelin, and swerved somewhat in philosophy from his master’s theoretic Nominalism, which he partly modified on Aristotelian lines, though knowing little of Aristotle.197 After his retirement from the world to the cloister, he was induced to resume philosophic teaching; and his pupils, like those of Anselm, begged their master to give them rational arguments on the main points of the faith.198 He accordingly rashly prepared a treatise, De Unitate et Trinitate divina, in which he proceeded “by analogies of human reason,” avowing that the difficulties were great.199 Thereupon envious rivals, of whom he had made many by his arrogance as well as by his fame, set up against him a heresy hunt; and for the rest of his life he figured as a dangerous person. While, however, he took up the relatively advanced position that reason must prepare the way for faith, since otherwise faith has no certitude,200 he was in the main dependent on the authority either of second-hand Aristotle201 or of the Scriptures, though he partly set aside that of the Fathers.202 When St. Bernard accused him of Arianism and of heathenism he was expressing personal ill-will rather than criticizing. Abailard himself complained that many heresies were current in his time203; and as a matter of fact “more intrepid views than his were promulgated without risk by a multitude of less conspicuous masters.”204 For instance, Bernard Sylvester (of Chartres), in his cosmology, treated theological considerations with open disrespect205; and William of Conches, who held a similar tone on physics,206 taught, until threatened with punishment, that the Holy Ghost and the Universal Soul were convertible terms.207 This remarkably rational theologian further rejected the literal interpretation of the creation of Eve; in science he adopted the Demokritean doctrine of atoms; and in New Testament matters he revived the old rationalistic heresy that the three Persons of the Trinity are simply three aspects of the divine personality—power, wisdom, and will—which doctrine he was duly forced to retract. It is clear from his works that he lived in an atmosphere of controversy, and had to fight all along with the pious irrationalists who, “because they know not the forces of nature, in order that they may have all men comrades in their ignorance, suffer not that others should search out anything, and would have us believe like rustics and ask no reason.” “If they perceive any man to be making search, they at once cry out that he is a heretic.” The history of a thousand years of struggle between reason and religion is told in those sentences.

Abailard was not more explicit on concrete issues than this contemporary—who survived him, and studied his writings. If, indeed, as is said, he wrote that “a doctrine is believed not because God has said it, but because we are convinced by reason that it is so,”208 he went as far on one line as any theologian of his time; but his main service to freethought seems to have lain in the great stimulus he gave to the practice of reasoning on all topics.209 His enemy, St. Bernard, on the contrary, gave an “immense impulse to the growth of a genuinely superstitious spirit among the Latin clergy.”210

On a survey of Abailard’s theological teachings, a modern reader is apt to see the spirit of moral reason most clearly in one set forth in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, to the effect that Jesus was not incarnate to redeem men from damnation, but solely to instruct them by precept and example, and that he suffered and died only to show his charity towards men. The thesis was implicit if not explicit in the teaching of Pelagius; and for both men it meant the effort to purify their creed from the barbaric taint of the principle of sacrifice. In our own day, revived by such theologians as the English Maurice, it seems likely to gain ground, as an accommodation to the embarrassed moral sense of educated believers. But it is heresy if heresy ever was, besides being a blow at the heart of Catholic sacerdotalism; and Abailard on condemnation retracted it as he did his other Pelagian errors. Retractation, however, is publication; and to have been sentenced to retract such teaching in the twelfth century is to leave on posterity an impression of moral originality perhaps as important as the fame of a metaphysician. In any case, it is a careful judge who thus finally estimates him: “When he is often designated as the rationalist among the schoolmen, he deserves the title not only on account of the doctrine of the Trinity, which approaches Sabellianism in spite of all his polemics against it, and not only on account of his critical attempts, but also on account of his ethics, in which he actually completely agrees in the principal point with many modern rationalists.”211 And it is latterly his singular fate to be valued at once by many sympathetic Catholics, who hold him finally vindicated alike in life and doctrine, and by many freethinkers.

How far the stir set up in Europe by his personal magnetism and his personal record may have made for rational culture, it is impossible to estimate; but some consequence there must have been. John of Salisbury was one of Abailard’s disciples and admirers; and, as we saw, he not only noted skepticism in others but indicated an infusion of it in his own mind—enough to earn for him from a modern historian the praise of being a sincere skeptic, as against those false skeptics who put forward universal doubt as a stalking horse for their mysticism.212 But he was certainly not a universal skeptic213; and his denunciation of doubt as to the goodness and power of God214 sounds orthodox enough. What he gained from Abailard was a concern for earnest dialectic.

The worst side of scholasticism at all times was that it was more often than not a mere logical expatiation in vacuo; this partly for sheer lack of real knowledge. John of Salisbury probably did not do injustice to the habit of verbiage it developed215; and the pupils of Abailard seem to have expressed themselves strongly to him concerning the wordy emptiness of most of what passed current as philosophic discourse; speaking of the teachers as blind leaders of the blind.216 One version of the legend against Simon of Tournay is to the effect that, after demonstrating by the most skilful arguments the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity, he went on to say, when enraptured listeners besought him to dictate his address so that it might be preserved, that if he had been evilly minded he could refute the doctrine by yet better arguments.217 Heresy apart, this species of dialectical insincerity infected the whole life of the schools, even the higher spirits going about their work with a certain amount of mere logical ceremony.

Even in the schools, however, over and above the influence of the more original teachers, there rises at the close of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth some measure of a new life, introduced into philosophy through the communication of Aristotle to the western world by the Saracens, largely by the mediation of the Jews.218 The latter, in their free life under the earlier Moorish toleration, had developed something in the nature of a school of philosophy, in which the Judaic Platonism set up by Philo of Alexandria in the first century was blended with the Aristotelianism of the Arabs. As early as the eighth and ninth centuries, anti-Talmudic (the KaraÏtes) and pro-Talmudic parties professed alike to appeal to reason219; and in the twelfth century the mere production of the Guide of the Perplexed by the celebrated Moses Maimonides (1130–1205)220 tells of a good deal of practical rationalism (of the kind that reduced miracle stories to allegories), of which, however, there is little direct literary result save of a theosophic kind.221 Levi ben Gershom (1286–1344), commonly regarded as the greatest successor of Maimonides, is like him guardedly rationalistic in his commentaries on the Scriptures.222 But the doctrine which makes Aristotle a practical support to rationalism, and which was adopted not only by AverroËs but by the Motazilites of Islam—the eternity of matter—was rejected by Maimonides (as by nearly all other Jewish teachers, with the partial exception of Levi ben Gershom),223 on Biblical grounds; though his attempts to rationalize Biblical doctrine and minimize miracles made him odious to the orthodox Jews, some of whom, in France, did not scruple to call in the aid of the Christian inquisition against his partisans.224 The long struggle between the Maimonists and the orthodox is described as ending in the “triumph of peripatetism” or AverroÏsm in the synagogue225; but AverroÏsm as modified by Maimonides is only a partial accommodation of scripture to common sense. It would appear, in fact, that Jewish thought in the Saracen world retrograded as did that of the Saracens themselves; for we find Maimonides exclaiming over the apparent disbelief in creatio ex nihilo in the “Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great,” believed by him to be ancient, but now known to be a product of the eighth century.226 The pantheistic teaching of Solomon ben Gebirol or Ibn Gebirol, better known as Avicebron,227 who in point of time preceded the Arab Avempace, and who later acquired much Christian authority, was orthodox on the side of the creation dogma even when many Jews were on that head rationalistic.228 The high-water mark, among the Jews, of the critical rationalism of the time, is the perception by Aben or Ibn Ezra (1119–1174) that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses—a discovery which gave Spinoza his cue five hundred years later; but Ibn Ezra, liberioris ingenii vir, as Spinoza pronounced him, had to express himself darkly.229

Thus the Jewish influence on Christian thought in the Middle Ages was chiefly metaphysical, carrying on Greek and Arab impulses; and to call the Jewish people, as does Renan, “the principal representative of rationalism during the second half of the Middle Age” is to make too much of the academic aspects of freethinking. On the side of popular theology it is difficult to believe that they had much Unitarian influence; though Joinville in his Life of Saint Louis tells how, in a debate between Churchmen and Jews at the monastery of Cluny, a certain knight saw fit to break the head of one of the Jews with his staff for denying the divinity of Jesus, giving as his reason that many good Christians, listening to the Jewish arguments, were in a fair way to go home unbelievers. It was in this case that the sainted king laid down the principle that when a layman heard anyone blaspheme the Christian creed his proper course was not to argue, but to run the blasphemer through with his sword.230 Such admitted inability on the part of the laity to reason on their faith, however, was more likely to accompany a double degree of orthodoxy than to make for doubt; and the clerical debating at the Abbey of Cluny, despite the honourable attitude of the Abbot, who condemned the knight’s outrage, was probably a muster of foregone conclusions.

For a time, indeed, in the energetic intellectual life of northern France the spirit of freethought went far and deep. After the great stimulus given in Abailard’s day to all discussion, we find another Breton teacher, Amaury or Amalrich of BÈne or Bena (end of twelfth century) and his pupil David of Dinant, partly under the earlier Arab influence,231 partly under that of John the Scot,232 teaching a pronounced pantheism, akin to that noted as flourishing later among the Brethren of the Free Spirit233 and some of the Franciscan Fraticelli. Such a movement, involving disregard for the sacraments and ceremonies of the Church, was soon recognized as a dangerous heresy, and dealt with accordingly. The Church caused Amaury to abjure his teachings; and after his death, finding his party still growing, dug up and burned his bones. At the same time (1209) a number of his followers were burned alive; David of Dinant had to fly for his life;234 and inasmuch as the new heresy had begun to make much of Aristotle, presumably as interpreted by AverroËs, a Council held at Paris vetoed for the university the study alike of the pagan master and his commentators, interdicting first the Physics and soon after the Metaphysics.235 This veto held until 1237, when the school which adapted the lore of Aristotle to Christian purposes began to carry the day.

The heretical Aristotelianism and the orthodox system which was to overpower it were alike radiated from the south, where the Arab influence spread early and widely. There, as we shall see, the long duel between the Emperor Frederick II and the papacy made a special opportunity for speculative freethought; and though this was far from meaning at all times practical enmity to Christian doctrine,236 that was not absent. It is clear that before Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) a Naturalist and AverroÏst view of the universe had been much discussed, since he makes the remark that “God is by some called Natura naturans”237—Nature at work—an idea fundamental alike to pantheism and to scientific naturalism. And throughout his great work—a marvel of mental gymnastic which better than almost any other writing redeems medieval orthodoxy from the charge of mere ineptitude—Thomas indicates his acquaintance with unorthodox thought. In particular he seems to owe the form of his work as well as the subject-matter of much of his argument to AverroËs.238 Born within the sphere of the Saracen-Sicilian influence, and of high rank, he must have met with what rationalism there was, and he always presupposes it.239 “He is nearly as consummate a skeptic, almost atheist, as he is a divine and theologian,” says one modern ecclesiastical dignitary;240 and an orthodox apologist241 more severely complains that “Aquinas presented ... so many doubts on the deepest points ... so many plausible reasons for unbelief ... that his works have probably suggested most of the skeptical opinions which were adopted by others who were trained in the study of them.... He has done more than most men to put the faith of his fellow-Christians in peril.” Of course he rejects AverroÏsm. Yet he, like his antagonist Duns Scotus, inevitably gravitates to pantheism when he would rigorously philosophize.242

What he did for his church was to combine so ingeniously the semblance of Aristotelian method with constant recurrence to the sacred books as to impose their authority on the life of the schools no less completely than it dominated the minds of the unlearned. Meeting method with method, and showing himself well aware of the lore he circumvented, he built up a system quite as well fitted to be a mere gymnastic of the mind; and he thereby effected the arrest for some three centuries of the method of experimental science which Aristotle had inculcated. He came just in time. Roger Bacon, trained at Paris, was eagerly preaching the scientific gospel; and while he was suffering imprisonment at the hands of his Franciscan superiors for his eminently secular devotion to science, the freer scholars of the university were developing a heresy that outwent his.

Now, however, began to be seen once for all the impossibility of rational freedom in or under a church which depended for its revenue on the dogmatic exploitation of popular credulity. For a time the Aristotelian influence, as had been seen by the churchmen who had first sought to destroy it,243 tended to be AverroÏst and rationalist.244 In 1269, however, there begins a determined campaign, led by the bishop of Paris, against the current AverroÏst doctrines, notably the propositions “that the world is eternal”; “that there never was a first man”; “that the intellect of man is one”; “that the mind, which is the form of man, constituting him such, perishes with the body”; “that the acts of men are not governed by divine providence”; “that God cannot give immortality or incorruptibility to a corruptible or mortal thing.”245 On such doctrines the bishop and his coadjutors naturally passed an anathema (1270); and at this period it was that Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas wrote their treatises against AverroÏsm.246

Still the freethinkers held out, and though in 1271 official commands were given that the discussion of such matters in the university should cease, another process of condemnation was carried out in 1277. This time the list of propositions denounced includes the following: “that the natural philosopher as such must deny the creation of the world, because he proceeds upon natural causes and reasons; while the believer (fidelis) may deny the eternity of the world, because he argues from supernatural causes”; “that creation is not possible, although the contrary is to be held according to faith”; “that a future resurrection is not to be believed by the philosopher, because it cannot be investigated by reason”; “that the teachings of the theologians are founded on fables”; “that there are fables and falsities in the Christian religion as in others”; “that nothing more can be known, on account of theology”; “that the Christian law prevents from learning”;247 “that God is not triune and one, for trinity is incompatible with perfect simplicity”; “that ecstatic states and visions take place naturally, and only so.” Such vital unbelief could have only one fate; it was reduced to silence by a papal Bull,248 administered by the orthodox majority; and the memory of the massacres of the year 1209, and of the awful crusade against the Albigenses, served to cow the thinkers of the schools into an outward conformity.

Henceforward orthodox Aristotelianism, placed on a canonical footing in the theological system of Thomas Aquinas, ruled the universities; and scholasticism counts for little in the liberation of European life from either dogma or superstition.249 The practically progressive forces are to be looked for outside. In the thirteenth century in England we find the Franciscan friars in the school of Robert GrosstÊte at Oxford discussing the question “Whether there be a God?”250 but such a dispute was an academic exercise like another; and in any case the authorities could be trusted to see that it came to nothing. The work of Thomas himself serves to show how a really great power of comprehensive and orderly thought can be turned to the subversion of judgment by accepting the prior dominion of a fixed body of dogma and an arbitrary rule over opinion. And yet, so strong is the principle of ratiocination in his large performance, and so much does it embody of the critical forces of antiquity and of its own day, that while it served the Church as a code of orthodoxy its influence can be seen in the skeptical philosophy of Europe as late as Spinoza and Kant. It appears to have been as a result of his argumentation that there became established in the later procedure of the Church the doctrine that, while heretics who have once received the faith and lapsed are to be coerced and punished, other unbelievers (as Moslems and Jews) are not. This principle also, it would appear, he derived from the Moslems, as he did their rule that those of the true faith must avoid intimacy with the unbelievers, though believers firm in the faith may dispute with them “when there is greater expectation of the conversion of the infidels than of the subversion of the fidels.” And to the rule of non-inquisition into the faith of Jews and Moslems the Church professed to adhere while the Inquisition lasted, after having trampled it under foot in spirit by causing the expulsion of the Jews and the Moriscoes from Spain.251

We shall perhaps best understand the inner life of the schools in the Middle Ages by likening it to that of the universities of our own time, where there is unquestionably much unbelief among teachers and taught, but where the economic and other pressures of the institution suffice to preserve an outward acquiescence. In the Middle Ages it was immeasurably less possible than in our day for the unbeliever to strike out a free course of life and doctrine for himself. If, then, to-day the scholarly class is in large measure tied to institutions and conformities, much more so was it then. The cloister was almost the sole haven of refuge for studious spirits, and to attain the haven they had to accept the discipline and the profession of faith. We may conclude, accordingly, that such works as Abailard’s Sic et Non, setting forth opposed views of so many doctrines and problems, stood for and made for a great deal of quiet skepticism;252 that the remarkable request of the monks of Bec for a ratiocinative teaching which should meet even extravagant objections, covered a good deal of resigned unfaith; and that in the Franciscan schools at Oxford the disputants were not all at heart believers. Indeed, the very existence of the doctrine of a “twofold truth”—one truth for religion and another for philosophy—was from the outset a witness for unbelief. But the unwritten word died, the litera scripta being solely those of faith, and liberation had to come, ages later, from without. Even when a bold saying won general currency—as that latterly ascribed, no doubt falsely, to King Alfonso the Wise of Castile, that “if he had been of God’s council when he made the world he could have advised him better”—it did but crystallize skepticism in a jest, and supply the enemy with a text against impiety.

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.253 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.254

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.255 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;256 but there was an avowed tendency to call all Ghibellines Paterini; and other heretical aspersions were likely to be applied in the same way.257 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;258 and again among the pilgrim community founded later in France in commemoration of Thomas À Becket.259 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-Moslem260 and semi-atheist. By Pope Gregory IX he was openly charged, in a furious afterthought,261 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.

Frederick was in reality superstitious enough; he worshipped relics; and he was nearly as merciless as the popes to rebellious heretics and Manicheans;262 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,263 and had trusted Moslem counsellors, thereby specially evoking the wrath of the Church. Greatly concerned to acquire the lore of the Arabs,264 he gave his favour and protection to Michael Scotus, the first translator of portions of AverroËs into Latin,265 and presumptively himself a heretic of the AverroÏst stamp; whence the legend of his wizardry, adopted by Dante.266 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”;267 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.268 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;269 and to him rather than to Simon de Montfort Europe owes the admission of representatives of cities to Parliaments.270 Of his son Manfred it is recorded that he was a thorough Epicurean, believing neither in God nor in the saints.271 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;272 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.273 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.”274

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,”275 specifying among them the Emperor Frederick II, a cardinal,276 the Ghibelline noble Farinata degli Uberti, and the Guelph Cavalcante Cavalcanti.277 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 works278 show, in any case, that it was much discussed in his time;279 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.

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.280 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.281 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;282 but his personality and his poetry helped to hold the balance of authority on the side of faith.283 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.284 Cecco has been described as “representing natural science, against the Christian science of Dante”;285 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.286 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 Decameron287 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 that288 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,289 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,290 and so tells of even more freethinking than meets the eye in the history of Islam.291 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.292

Current in Italy before Boccaccio, the tale had been improved from one Italian hand to another;293 and the main credit for its full development is Boccaccio’s.294 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;295 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.296 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.297 On the other hand, many were driven by fear to religious practices;298 and in the immense destruction of life the Church acquired much new wealth. At the same time the multitudes of priests who died299 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.300 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;301 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.302 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;303 and Petrarch made for mental freedom by resisting all dogmatisms alike.304 The general liberality of his attitude has earned him the titles of “the first modern man”305 and “the founder of modern criticism”306—both somewhat high-pitched.307 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 things308 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.”309 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,310 that he came to figure as Antichrist for the faithful.311 Petrarch in his letters speaks of much downright hostility to the Christian system on the part of AverroÏsts;312 and the association of AverroÏsm with the great medical school of Padua313 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.314

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.”315 During the schism every species of scandal had flourished. Indulgences had been sold and distributed at random;316 simony and venality abounded more than ever;317 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.318

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,319 especially in the countries most alien to Italy in language and civilization. An accomplished Catholic scholar320 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;321 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.322 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.323 When Machiavelli said that religion was gone from Italy, he was thinking of the upper classes, among whom theism was normal,324 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.325 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”;326 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.327 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.328 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,329 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,330 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.331 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;332 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,333 the demerits of all orders of the clergy from the points of view of letters and morals are set forth with impartial emphasis;334 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.335

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.336 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;337 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,”338 had earned a great reputation by devout austerities, and a greater by his vaticinations,339 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.”340 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;341 but the ferment of heresy was great. And while the Franciscans are commonly reputed to have been led by small-minded generals,342 their order, as Renan notes,343 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.”344 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.345

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;346 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.347 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.348

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.349 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.350 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 without351 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.

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.”352 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,353 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;354 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.355

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.356 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.357 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;358 and inasmuch as racial warfare had always involved some intercourse between Christians and Moors,359 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.360 This heresy, further, is proceeded against by the Council of Tarragona in 1291. And though Alfonso was orthodox, and in his legislation a persecutor,361 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.362 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,363 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),364 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.365 The law condemning to the stake those Christians who apostatized to Islam or Judaism366 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.367 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.368 But it has been put on record by the famous Arnaldo of Villanueva—astronomer, scholar, alchemist, reformer, and occultist369 (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.370 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.371 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.372 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.373

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.374 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 1480.375

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.376 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.”377 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.”378 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.

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,379 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.380 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,381 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 subjects382 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.383 The destruction of books was proportionally thorough;384 and when Lutheran Protestantism arose it was persistently killed out; thousands leaving the country in view of the hopelessness of the cause.385 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.386

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.387 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.388 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 libri389 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.390 To work, however, he went with an astonishing industry, and in the course of less than eighteen months391 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.392

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.

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 1271,393 he not only attacked in detail the ecclesiastical system,394 but argued that the Christians were incomparably inferior to pagans in morals, and therefore in science;395 that there was more truth in Aristotle’s few chapters on laws than in the whole corpus juris;396 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.397

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.398 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,399 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.400 “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.”401

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.402 This alone was sufficient practical heresy to put Bacon in danger; and yet his real orthodoxy can hardly be doubted.403 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.404 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;405 but in the England of that day his ideals of research were as unattainable as his wrath against clerical obstruction was powerless;406 and AverroÏsm in England made little for innovation.407 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,408 he tells little of the Renaissance spirit of critical unbelief, save when he notes the proverbial irreligion of the physicians,409 or smiles significantly over the problem of the potency of clerical cursing and absolution,410 or shrugs his shoulders over the question of a future state.411 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.

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.412 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.413 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?”414 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.415 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.416 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.417 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.418 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.”419 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;420 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.421 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.422 The revolt led by John Ball in 1381, which was in no way promoted by Wiclif,423 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,424 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,425 which is thus one of the very earliest works in defence of Christianity against modern criticism.426 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.427 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,428 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:429 so far was anti-clericalism from implying heterodoxy.

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.430 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;431 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 denies432 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.433 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,434 the status of a preaching friar; but he claims that he neither blames nor defames religion,435 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.

“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.”436 “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.”437

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.438 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;439 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.440 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,441 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.

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”442 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?”443 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.444 The middle period was one of indifference, following on the killing out of heresy:445 the fifteenth century is a resumption of the Middle Ages, and Comines has the medieval cast of mind,446 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.”447

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,”448 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.449 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.

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.450 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,”451 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.452 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.453 Both anticipated modern criticism454 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.455 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.456 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.457

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.”458 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.459 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.460 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.461 Even a defender of Church doctrines, Pierre d’Ailly, accepted Occam’s view of theism,462 and it appears to be broadly true that Occam had at Paris an unbroken line of successors down to the Reformation.463 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.464 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,465 illustrates at once the persistence of the spirit of reason in times of darkness, and the impossibility of its triumphing in the wrong conditions.

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.466 The poetry of the German Minnesingers, a growth from that of the Troubadours, presented the same anti-clerical features;467 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,468 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.469

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.”470 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.471

The Imitatio Christi (1471), the most popular Christian work of devotion ever published,472 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.”473 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?”474 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.”475 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.

1 This label has been applied by scholars to the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. One writer, who supposes it to cover the period from 500 to 1400, and protests, is attacking only a misconception. (M. A. Lane, The Level of Social Motion, New York, 1902., p. 232.) The Renaissance is commonly reckoned to begin about the end of the fourteenth century (cp. Symonds, Age of the Despots, ch. i). But the whole period from the fall of the Roman Empire to the fall of Constantinople, or to the Reformation, is broadly included in the “Middle Ages.”?

2 Essai sur les Moeurs, ch. xlv.?

3 According to which God predestinated good, but merely foreknew evil.?

4 For Leo’s contacts with the Saracens see Finlay, Hist. of Greece, ed. Tozer, ii, 14–20, 24, 31–32, 34–35, 37, etc., and compare p. 218. See also Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, 1833, p. 78, note 2; and Waddington, History of the Church, 1833, p. 187, note.?

5 Kurtz, Hist. of the Chr. Church, Eng. tr. i, 252.?

6 Kurtz, p. 253.?

7 As to his hostility to letters see Gibbon, ch. liii—Bohn ed. vi, 228. Of course the other side were not any more liberal. Cp. Finlay, ii, 222.?

8 Gieseler, ii, 202. Per. III, Div. I, pt. i, § 1. In the next century this was said to have gone in some churches to the point of rejection of Christ. Id. p. 207, note 28.?

9 Id. pp. 205, 207; Finlay, ii, 195.?

10 Neander, Hist. of Chr. Church, Bohn tr. v, 289; vi, 266.?

11 On their connection at this time with the culture-movement of the Khalifate of Mamoun, see Finlay, ii, 224–25; Gibbon, ch. liii—Bohn ed. vi, 228–29.?

12 Finlay, ii, 181, note. The enemies of Photius accused him of lending himself to the emperor’s buffooneries. Neander, vi, 303–304. Cp. Mosheim, 9 Cent. pt. ii, ch. iii, § 7; and Gibbon, ch. xxxiii—ed. cited, vi, 229. Finlay declares (p. 222) that no Greek of the intellectual calibre of Photius, John the Grammarian, and Leo the Mathematician, has since appeared.?

13 Neander, vi, 280.?

14 Finlay, ii, 174–75, 180.?

15 Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, 1853, p. 85. It is noteworthy that the “heathen” Magyars held the Mazdean dualistic principle, and that their evil power was named Armanyos (= Ahrimanes). MailÁth, Geschichte der Magyaren, 1828, i, 25–26.?

16 Gibbon, ch. liv; Mosheim, 9 Cent. pt. ii, ch. 5; Gieseler, Per. III, Div. I, pt. i, § 3; G. S. Faber, The Ancient Vallenses and Waldenses, 1838, pp. 32–60. Some fresh light is thrown on the Paulician doctrines by the discovery of the old Armenian book, The Key of Truth, edited and translated by F. C. Conybeare, Oxford, 1898. It belonged to the Armenian sect of Thonraki, or Thonrakians, or Thondrakians—people of the village of Thondrac (Neander, vi, 347)—founded by one Sembat, originally a Paulician, in the ninth century (Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, p. 201; Neander, last cit.). For a criticism of Mr. Conybeare’s theories see the Church Quarterly Review, Jan. 1899, Art. V.?

17 Gieseler, Per. III, §§ 45, 46, vol. ii, pp. 489, 492; Hardwick, p. 86. The sect of Euchites, also anti-priestly, seem to have joined them. Faber denies any Manichean element.?

18 Gibbon, as cited, vi, 241.?

19 Gibbon, vi, 242; Hardwick, pp. 88–90.?

20 Gibbon, vi, 245, and note; Finlay, ii, 60.?

21 Despite the express decision, the use of statues proper (????ata) gradually disappeared from the Greek Church, the disuse finally creating a strong antipathy, while pictures and ikons remained in reverence (Tozer’s note to Finlay, ii, 165; cp. Waddington, History of the Church, 1833, p. 190, note). It is probable that the sheer loss of artistic skill counted for much in the change. Cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, bk. xiv, ch. ix; 4th ed. ix, 308–12. It is noteworthy that, whereas in the struggle over images their use was for two long periods legally abolished, it was in both cases restored by empresses Irene and Theodora.?

22 Hardwick, p. 80, note; Neander, vi, 340.?

23 Cp. Kurtz, His. of the Chr. Church, Eng. tr. i, 271.?

24 Gibbon, vi, 246; Finlay, iii, 64; Mosheim, 10 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v.?

25 Finlay, iii, 66.?

26 Gibbon, as cited; R. Lane Poole, Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, 1884, pp. 91–96; Mosheim, 11 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v.?

27 Finlay, iii, 67–68; Mosheim, 12 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, § 2. Hardwick, pp. 302–305; Kurtz, i, 270–73.?

28 Gieseler, Per. III, Div. II, pt. iii, § 46.?

29 Gibbon, vi, 249, note; Poole, p. 91, note; De Potter, L’Esprit de L’Église, 1821, vi, 16, note.?

30 Boniface, Ep. lxvi, cited by Poole, p. 23; Reid’s Mosheim, p. 263, note 3; Neander, Hist. of the Christian Church, Bohn tr. v, 86–67; Hardwick, p. 23.?

31 For excellent accounts of both see Mr. Poole’s Illustrations, pp. 28–50. As to Claudius cp. Monastier, Hist. of the Vaudois Church, Eng. tr. 1848, pp. 13–42, and Faber, The Ancient Vallenses, bk. iii, ch. iv.?

32 See Mr. Poole’s Illustrations, pp. 46–48, for an account of the privileges then accorded to Jews.?

33 This is not incompatible with their having opposed both Saracens (Claudius in actual war) and Jews, as Christian bishops.?

34 Poole, Illustrations, p. 37.?

35 This when the Church found its account in adopting all such usages. Lea, Superstition and Force, pp. 242, 280, etc. It is to be noted, however, that one Council, that of Valence, 855, perhaps under the influence of Agobard’s teaching, published a canon prohibiting all duels, and praying the emperor to abolish them. Cited by Waddington, History of the Church, 1833, p. 242, note, from Fleury.?

36 De Grandine et tonitruis, c. 3; and De imaginibus, c. 13, cited by Reuter.?

37 “He had the clearest head in the whole ninth century; and as an influence (Mann der Tendenz) is above comparison” (Reuter, Gesch. der religiÖsen AufklÄrung im Mittelalter, i, 24). As to his acute handling of the thorny question of reason and authority see Reuter, i, 40–41.?

38 Poole, pp. 50–52.?

39 Noack, Philosophie-Geschichtliches Lexikon, s. v. Rabanus. As to the doubtful works in which Rabanus coincides with Scotus Erigena, cp. Poole, p. 336; Noack, as cited; Ueberweg, i, 367–68.?

40 Ueberweg, pp. 366, 371; Poole, pp. 99, 101, 336.?

41 Ueberweg, pp. 356–65. That there was, however, an Irish scholasticism as early as the eighth century is shown by Mosheim, 8 Cent. pt. ii, ch. iii, § 6, note 3. Cp. Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena, 1861, p. 428 sq.; Taillandier, Scot ErigÈne et la philosophie scolastique, 1843, p. 198.?

42 Lea, as cited, p. 280.?

43 “The learned and freethinking guest of Charles le Chauve,” Hardwick calls him, p. 176. It needed the protection of Charles to save him from the orthodox, Hincmar included. See AmpÈre, Histoire littÉraire de la France, 1840, iii, 94–95, as to the anger against him.?

44 See the whole argument summarized by Huber, p. 59 sq.?

45 Cp. Poole, Illustrations, pp. 61, 63, 65; Neander, Bohn tr. vi, 198 sq.; and the present writer’s introd. to Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, ed. 1900, p. xxxiv. And see above, p. 184.?

46 De divisione NaturÆ, l. v; De PrÆdestinatione, c. 17; Poole, pp. 71–72; Neander, vi, 198–99; Huber, as cited, p. 405.?

47 In the treatise On the Division of Nature. See the extracts given in the Cabinet CyclopÆdia survey of Europe in the Middle Ages, ii, 266–68. They prove, says the author of the survey, “that John Erigena had none of the spirit of Christianity.”?

48 Poole, pp. 64, 76.?

49 S. Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pp. 25–26.?

50 Huber, pp. 435–40.?

51 Cp. Neander, Hist. of the Chr. Church, Bohn tr. vi, 192.?

52 De Corpore et Sanguine Domini, rep. Oxford, 1838, cc. 8–16, 29, 56, 72–76, etc.?

53 C. 19: “Non sicut quidam volunt, anima sola hoc mysterio pascitur.” Neander, vi, 210.?

54 Hardwick, pp. 178, 181; Neander, vi, 217.?

55 Cp. Neander, vi, 219.?

56 Poole, p. 69.?

57 C. 6: “Ineptas quÆstiunculas et aniles pÆne fabulas Scotorumque pultes.” Neander, vi, 207.?

58 Neander, vi, 219, citing Mabillon, Analecta, i, 207.?

59 Compare the Gemma Ecclesiastica of Giraldus Cambrensis for an inside view of the avarice of the clergy in his day.?

60 Neander, Hist. of the Chr. Church, v, 187. See the whole section for a good account of the general economic and moral evolution. Neander repeatedly (pp. 186–87) insists on the “magical” element in the doctrine of the mass, as established by Gregory the Great.?

61 See Neander, as cited, v, 183. The point was well put some centuries later by the Italian story-teller Masuccio, an orthodox Catholic but a vehement anti-clericalist, in a generalization concerning the monks: “The best punishment for them would be for God to abolish Purgatory; they would then receive no more alms, and would be forced to go back to their spades.” Cited by Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Eng. tr. 1892, p. 461.?

62 Neander, vi, 182. Rabanus Maurus distinctly belied him on this score. (Id. p. 183.)?

63 Formerly, only the saved had been spoken of as prÆdestinati, the reprobate being called prÆsciti. Neander, vi, 181.?

64 Neander, vi, 187. Cp. Hampden, Bampton Lectures on The Scholastic Philosophy, 3rd ed. p. 418; and AmpÈre, Histoire littÉraire de France, 1840, iii, 92.?

65 Poole, p. 103. Cp. Neander, vi, 225.?

66 Neander, vi, 237–38.?

67 Id. pp. 255–56.?

68 Id. p. 257.?

69 Id. p. 258. As to the wide extent of the discussion see Reuter, Geschichte der religiÖsen AufklÄrung im Mittelalter, i, 112.?

70 In 945, however, Atto, Bishop of Verceil, is found complaining that some people from the Italian border had introduced heresies.?

71 Mosheim, 10 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, § 3; Poole, Illustrations, p. 91.?

72 Hardwick, p. 203.?

73 Kurtz, History of the Christian Church, Eng. tr. 1868, i, 435.?

74 HÉnault, AbrÉgÉ chronologique, ann. 1022; Neander, Hist. of the Chr. Relig. and Church, Eng. tr. Bohn ed. vi, 349 sq.; Mosheim, 10 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, § 3; De Potter, L’Esprit de l’Église, vi, 18–19; Poole, pp. 96–98; Lea, History of the Inquisition, i, 104, 108–109, 218; Gieseler, Per. III, Div. ii, § 46. The contemporary accounts say nothing as to the heretics being Manicheans. Neander, p. 350, note.?

75 Cp. Murdock’s note on Mosheim, Reid’s ed. p. 386; Monastier, Hist. of the Vaudois Church, p. 33; Waddington, p. 356; Hardwick, p. 203, note, and p. 207.?

76 De Potter, pp. 20–21; Gieseler, as cited, p. 497; Lea, i, 104, 109.?

77 Mosheim, as last cited, § 4; Gieseler, ii, 496 (§ 46); Hardwick, pp. 203, 204.?

78 Mosheim. 11 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, § 2, and Murdock’s notes; 12 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, §§ 4, 5.?

79 Hardwick, p. 306; Kurtz, i, 433. The derivation through the Italian is however disputed. Cp. Murdock’s note to Mosheim, Reid’s ed. p. 385, and Gieseler, ii, 486. The Chazari, a Turkish (Crimean) people, partly Christian and partly Moslem in the ninth century (Gieseler, as cited), may have given the name of Gazzari, as Bulgar gave Bougre; and the German Ketzer may have come directly from Chazar. The Christianity of the Chazars, influenced by neighbourhood with Islam, seems to have been a very free syncretism.?

80 Cp. Gieseler, Per. III, §§ 24, 34; AbbÉ Queant, Gerbert, ou Sylvestre II, 1868, pp. 3–5, citing ChevÉ, Histoire des papes, t. ii, and Baronius, Annales, ad ann. 900, n. 1; Mosheim, 9 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 1–4; with his and Murdock’s refs.; 10 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 1, 2; 11 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, § 1; ch. iii, §§ 1–3; 12 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, § 1; 13 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 1–7. The authorities are often eminent Churchmen, as Agobard, Ratherius, Bernard, and Gregory VIII.?

81 See Mosheim, 8 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, § 5, note z. Cp. Duruy, Hist. de France, ii, 170.?

82 Cp. Prof. Abdy, Lectures on Feudalism, 1890, p. 72.?

83 Mosheim, 12 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, § 6.?

84 Cp. Morin, Origines de la dÉmocratie, 3e Éd. pp. 164–65; Mosheim, 10 Cent. pt. ii, ch. iii, § 3.?

85 Morin, p. 168. Compare, on the whole communal movement, Duruy, Hist. de France, ch. xxi, and Michelet.?

86 Gieseler, Per. III, § 46, end; Lea, i, 109, 218.?

87 Monastier, Hist. of the Vaudois Ch., p. 32; Lea, i, 110.?

88 Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed. p. 134. See p. 135 for a list of John’s offences; and cp. p. 85 as to other papal records. For a contemporary account of Pope Honorius II (d. 1130) see Milman, Latin Christianity, iii, 448–49.?

89 Hallam, Middle Ages, 11th ed. ii, 174.?

90 Cp. MÜller, Allgemeine Geschichte, B. xiv, Cap. 17.?

91 Bryce, p. 152.?

92 “Janus,” The Pope and the Councils, Eng. tr. pp. 178–79.?

93 Cp. Heeren, Essai sur l’influence des Croisades, 1808, p. 172.?

94 Sir G. Cox, The Crusades, p. 111.?

95 Cp. Lea, i, 111.?

96 Id. p. 115.?

97 Hardwick, p. 310; Lea, i, 68; Reuter, Gesch. der religiÖsen AufklÄrung im Mittelalter, i, 148–49; Mosheim, as last cited, § 7.?

98 Cp. Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, ed. 1863, p. 36.?

99 Mosheim, 12 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, §§ 7–9, and varior. notes; Monastier, pp. 38–41, 43–47; Milman, Latin Christianity, v, 384–90.?

100 Hardwick, p. 267; Mosheim, as last cited, § 10; Monastier, p. 49.?

101 Hardwick, p. 204, note; Kurtz, i, 433. Cp. the Transactions of the New Shakespeare Society, 1875–76, pt. ii, p. 313; Mosheim, 11 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, § 13, and note; Milman, Latin Christianity, v, 401. On the sects in general see De Potter, vi, 217–310; and CantÙ, Gli Eretici d’Italia, 1865, i, 149–53.?

102 Lea, i, 115.?

103 Id. pp. 117–18.?

104 Id. p. 119.?

105 Kurtz, i, 435; Lea, i, 119.?

106 Hardwick, p. 308, note; Murdock’s note to Mosheim, p. 426; Monastier, pp. 106–107.?

107 Lea, i, 124.?

108 Id. p. 126.?

109 Id. pp. 127–28.?

110 Kitchin, History of France, 4th ed. 1889, i, 286; citing Chron. de St. Denis, p. 350. The Annales Victoriani at Philip’s death (1223) pronounce him ecclesiarum et religionarum personarum amator et fautor (HÉnault’s AbrÉgÉ Chronologique). Among the many Cathari put to death in his reign was Nicholas, the most famous painter in France—burned at Braine in 1204. Lea, i, 131.?

111 Lea, i, 113–14. Cp. Ranke, Hist. of the Popes, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. p. 13.?

112 Cp. Hardwick, p. 312; Mosheim, 12 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, § 11, and notes in Reid’s ed.; Monastier, Hist. of the Vaudois Church, Eng. tr. 1848, pp. 12–29; Faber, The Ancient Vallenses and Albigenses, pp. 28, 284, etc. As Vigilantius took refuge in the Cottian Alps, his doctrine may have survived there, as argued by Monastier (p. 10) and Faber (p. 290). The influence of Claudius of Turin, as they further contend, might also come into play. On the whole subject see Gieseler, Per. III, Div. iii, § 88.?

113 Cp. Mosheim with Faber, bk. iii, chs. iii, viii; Hardwick, as cited; and Monastier, pp. 53–82. Waddington, p. 353, holds Mosheim to be in error; and there are some grounds for dating the Waldensian heresy before Waldus, who flourished 1170–1180 (id. p. 354). Waldus had to flee from France, and finally died in Bohemia, 1197 (Kurtz, i, 439).?

114 Cp. Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, i, 73–88. Waldensian theology varied from time to time.?

115 Between 1153 and 1191 there were ten popes, three of them anti-popes. Celestine III held the chair from 1191 to 1198; and Innocent III from the latter year to 1216.?

116 De Potter, vi, 26; Lea, i, 115.?

117 Lea, i, 290.?

118 De Potter, vi, 28.?

119 See Bartoli, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, 1878, i, 262, note, also his I Precursori del Renascimento, 1877, p. 37. In this section and in the next chapter I am indebted for various clues to the Rev. John Owen’s Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance. As to the Goliards generally, see that work, pp. 38–45; Bartoli, Storia, cap. viii; Milman, Latin Christianity, bk. xiv, ch. iv; and Gebhart, Les Origines de la Renaissance en Italie, 1879, pp. 125–26. The name Goliard came from the type-name Golias, used by many satirists.?

120 Bartoli, Storia, i, 271–79. Cp. Schlegel’s note to Mosheim, Reid’s ed. p. 332, following Ratherius; and Gebhart, as cited. Milman (4th ed. ix, 189) credits the Goliards with “a profound respect for sacred things, and freedom of invective against sacred persons.” This shows an imperfect knowledge of much of their work.?

121 C. Lenient, La Satire en France au moyen Âge, 1859, pp. 38–39.?

122 Owen, as cited, pp. 43, 45; Bartoli, Storia, i, 293.?

123 Disparagement of the serf is a commonplace of medieval literature. Langlois, La Vie en France au moyen Âge, 1908, p. 169, and note; Lanson, Hist. de la litt. franÇaise, p. 96. At this point the semi-aristocratic jongleurs and the writers of bourgeois bias, such as some of the contributors to Reynard the Fox, coincided. The Renart stories are at once anti-aristocratic, anti-clerical, and anti-demotic.?

124 C. Lenient, La Satire en France, p. 115. Lenient cites from Erasmus’s letters (Sept. 1, 1528) a story of a German burned alive in his time for venting the same idea.?

125 Langlois, as cited, pp. 30–68.?

126 Cp. Langlois, pp. 107, 129, 263, etc. C. Lenient, as cited, p. 115.?

127 Rev. Joseph Berington, Literary History of the Middle Ages, ed. 1846, p. 229. Cp. Owen, p. 43.?

128 Owen, p. 43; Bartoli, Storia, i, 295, as to the French fabliaux.?

129 Labitte, La divine comÉdie avant Dante, in Charpentier ed. of Dante, pp. 133–34.?

130 Aucassin and Nicolette, tr. by Eugene Mason, p. 6.?

131 Sismondi, Literature of Southern Europe, Eng. tr. i, 74–95.?

132 Id. p. 76.?

133 Zeller, Histoire d’Italie, 1853, p. 152; Renan, AverroÈs, p. 184.?

134 “The Troubadours in truth were freethinkers” (Owen, Italian Skeptics, p. 48). Cp. Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, ii, 2; and Hardwick, p. 274, note 4, as to the common animus against the papacy.?

135 Heeren, Essai sur l’influence des Croisades, French tr. 1808, p. 174, note; Owen, Italian Skeptics, p. 44, note.?

136 AbbÉ Queant, Gerbert, ou Sylvestre II, 1868, pp. 30–31.?

137 Sismondi, as cited, p. 82; Owen, pp. 66, 68; Mosheim, 11 Cent. pt. ii, ch. i, § 4; 12 Cent. pt. ii, ch. i, § 9, and Reid’s note to § 8; Hampden, Bampton Lectures, p. 446. The familiar record that Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II, studied in Spain among the Arabs (Ueberweg, i, 369) has of late years been discredited (Olleris, Vie de Gerbert, 1867, chs. ii and xxv; Ueberweg, p. 430; Poole, Illustrations, p. 88); but its very currency depended on the commonness of some such proceeding in his age. In any case, the teaching he would receive at the Spanish monastery of Borel would owe all its value to Saracen culture. Cp. AbbÉ Queant, Gerbert, pp. 26–32. The greatness of the service he rendered to northern Europe in introducing the Arabic numerals is expressed in the legend of his magical powers. Compare the legends as to Roger Bacon.?

138 Sismondi, p. 83.?

139 Cp. G. H. Lewes, The Spanish Drama, 1846, pp. 11–14; LittrÉ, Études sur les barbares et le moyen Âge, 3e Édit. p. 356.?

140 See the passages cited by Owen, p. 58.?

141 Cp. Bartoli, Storia, pp. 200–202.?

142 Gebhart, Les Origines de la Renaissance, pp. 4, 17; Renan, AverroÈs et l’AverroÏsme, pp. 145, 183, 185; Libri, Hist. des sciences mathÉmatiques en Italie, i, 153; Michelet, Hist. de France, t. vii, Renaissance, introd. note du § vii; HaurÉau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, i, 382. Cp. Franck, Études Orientales, 1861, p. 357.?

143 As to the Pope’s character compare Sismondi, Hist. of the Crusades against the Albigenses (Eng. tr. from vols. vi and vii of his Histoire des FranÇais), p. 10; Hallam, Europe during the Middle Ages, 11th ed. ii, 198; Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 6–8.?

144 As to previous acts of inquisition and persecution by Pope Alexander III (noted above) see Llorente, Hist. Crit. de l’Inquisition en Espagne, French tr. 2e Édit. i, 27–30, and Lea, History of the Inquisition, i, 118. Cp. Gieseler, Per. III, Div. iii, § 89 (Amer. ed. ii, 564).?

145 Hardwick, p. 309; Lea, i, 145.?

146 Sismondi, Crusades against the Albigenses, p. 21.?

147 On the previous history of indulgences see Lea, History of the Inquisition, i, 41–47; De Potter, Esprit de l’Église, vii, 22–39. For the later developments cp. Lea’s Studies in Church History, 1869, p. 450; Vieusseux, History of Switzerland, 1840, pp. 121, 125.?

148 Sismondi, Crusades, pp. 28–29.?

149 Id. p. 23.?

150 Lea, i, 149.?

151 For a modern Catholic defence of the whole proceedings see the Comte de Montalembert’s Histoire de Sainte Elisabeth de Hongrie, 13e Édit. intr. pp. 35–40.?

152 Sismondi, Crusades, p. 35, and refs.; Lea, i, 154.?

153 Sismondi, pp. 36–37, and refs.?

154 Id. pp. 37–43.?

155 Id. pp. 21, 41. Cp. p. 85 as to later treachery towards Saracens; and p. 123 as to the deeds of the Bishop of Toulouse. See again pp. 140–42 as to the massacre of Marmande.?

156 As to the international character of the crusade see Sismondi, Crusades, p. 53.?

157 Sismondi, p. 62 sq.?

158 Pp. 77, 78.?

159 Pp. 74, 75.?

160 P. 87. “The worship of the reformed Albigenses had everywhere ceased” (p. 115). Cp. p. 116 as to the completeness of the final massacres. It is estimated (Monastier, p. 115, following De la Mothe-Langon) that a million Albigenses were slain in the first half of the thirteenth century. The figures are of course speculative.?

161 Cp. Lea, ii, 159; Lenient, La Satire en France an moyen Âge, 1859, p. 43.?

162 Lea, vol. ii, ch. i.?

163 Sismondi, pp. 115, 117.?

164 Id. p. 133.?

165 Id. pp. 235–39; Lea, ii, 247, 259, 319, 347, 429, etc.?

166 Sismondi, p. 236; Llorente, as cited, i, 60–64; Lea, ii, 200.?

167 Matthew Paris records that in 1249 four hundred and forty-three heretics were burned in Saxony and Pomerania. Previously multitudes had been burned by the Inquisitor Conrad, who was himself finally murdered in revenge. He was the confessor of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, and he taught her among other things, “Be merciful to your neighbour,” and “Do to others whatsoever you would that they should do to you.” See his praises recorded by Montalembert, as cited, vol. i, ch. x. Cp. Gieseler, Per. III, Div. iii, § 89 (ii, 567).?

168 Lea, ii, 204. This was the “peace-maker” described by Dr. Lea as—in that capacity—“so worthy a disciple of the Great Teacher of divine love” (i, 240).?

169 Ueberweg, i, 366; Poole, pp. 99, 100.?

170 As to the verbal confusion of Aristotle’s theory see Ueberweg.?

171 Id. i, 160.?

172 Id. i, 375.?

173 Cp. Mosheim’s note, Reid’s ed. p. 388.?

174 Ueberweg, i, 374.?

175 Poole, p. 104, note; Milman, Latin Christianity, 4th ed. i, 54.?

176 Hampden, Bampton Lectures, On the Scholastic Philosophy, 1848, p. 71.?

177 Mosheim, as cited, and refs.?

178 Hampden, p. 70.?

179 A. S. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, 1862, p. 111. Farrar adds: “‘Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, set credo ut intelligam’ are the words of the Realist Anselm (Prolog. i, 43, ed. Gerberon): ‘Dubitando ad inquisitionem venimus; inquirendo veritatem percipimus’ are those of the Nominalist Abailard (Sic et Non, p. 16, ed. Cousin).”?

180 Cp. HaurÉau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, i, ch. 19, as to orthodoxy among both Nominalists and Realists.?

181 Hampden, pp. 70, 449.?

182 Cp. Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, iii, 550.?

183 Poole, Illustr. of the Hist. of Medieval Thought, pp. 104–105.?

184 PrÆfatio in Monologium.?

185 As to the various classes of doubters known to Anselm see Reuter, Gesch. der religiÖsen AufklÄrung im Mittelalter, i, 129–31, and refs. Anselm writes: Fides enim nostra contra impios ratione defenda est. Epist. ii, 41.?

186 Ueberweg, i, 381.?

187 See it in Ueberweg, i, 384–85; cp. Ch. de RÉmusat, Saint Anselme, 1853, pp. 61–62; Dean Church, Saint Anselm, ed. 1888, pp. 86–87. As to previous instances of Anselm’s argument cp. Poole, Illustrations, p. 338 sq.?

188 Cp. Ueberweg, i, 379–80.?

189 Cited by Hampden, Bampton Lect. p. 443.?

190 Metalogicus, vii, 2; Poole, p. 223.?

191 Gemma Ecclesiastica, Distinctio i, c. 51; Works, ed. Brewer, Rolls Series, ii, 148–49; pref. p. xxxv.?

192 Cp. HaurÉau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, Ptie. II (1880), i, 61. HaurÉau points out that Simon’s writings are strictly orthodox, whatever his utterances may have been.?

193 Distinctio, ii, c. 24; pp. liv, 285.?

194 Cp. Pearson, Hist. of England during the Early and Middle Ages, ii, 504.?

195 The Saynt Graal, ed. Furnivall, 1861, pp. 7, 84; History of the Holy Grail, ed. Furnivall, 1874, pp. 5–7; Pearson, as cited, i, 606–607.?

196 HaurÉau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, i, 1870, p. 502.?

197 Poole, pp. 141–42.?

198 “Humanas ac philosophicas rationes requirebant; et plus quÆ intelligi quam quÆ dici possent efflagitabant” (Historia calamitatum mearum, ed. GrÉard, p. 36).?

199 Id. ib.?

200 Ueberweg, i, 387.?

201 Ueberweg, i, 391. Cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, ix, 111.?

202 Ueberweg, i, 394–95.?

203 Hampden, Bampton Lect. pp. 420–21.?

204 Poole, p. 175. It is not impossible that, as Sismondi suggests (Histoire des FranÇais, ed. 1823, v, 294–96), Abailard was persecuted mainly because of the dangerous anti-papal movement maintained in Italy for fifteen years (1139–1155) by his doctrinally orthodox pupil, Arnold of Brescia. But Hampden (p. 40), agreeing with Guizot (Hist. de Civ. en Europe; Hist. mod. LeÇon 6), pronounces that “there was no sympathy between the efforts of the Italian Republics to obtain social liberty, and those within the Church to recover personal freedom of thought.”?

205 Poole, pp. 117–23, 169.?

206 Ueberweg, i, 398.?

207 Poole, p. 173.?

208 Cp. Poole, p. 153. It is difficult to doubt that the series of patristic deliverances against reason in the first section of Sic et Non was compiled by Abailard in a spirit of dissent.?

209 Cp. Hardwick, p. 279; and see p. 275, note, for Bernard’s dislike of his demand for clearness: “Nihil videt per speculum et in aenigmate, sed facie ad faciem omnia intuetur.”?

210 Poole, p. 161. Cp. Dr. Hastings Rashdall on the “pious scurrility” of Bernard. The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 1895, i, 57, note. Contrast the singularly laudatory account of St. Bernard given by two contemporary Positivists, Mr. Cotter Morison in his Life and Times of St. Bernard, and Mr. F. Harrison in his essay on that work in his Choice of Books. The subject is discussed in the present writer’s paper on “The Ethics of Propaganda” in Essays in Ethics.?

211 Erdmann, History of Philosophy, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. i, 325.?

212 HaurÉau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, i (1872), 534–46.?

213 Id. citing the Polycraticus, l. vii, c. 2.?

214 Polycraticus, l. vii, c. 7.?

215 Cp. Poole, pp. 220–22; the extracts of Hampden, pp. 438–43; and the summing-up of HaurÉau. Hist. de la philos. scolastique, i (1870), 357.?

216 Historia calamitatum, as cited. Cp. p. 10 for Abailard’s own opinion of Anselm of Laon, whom he compares to a leafy but fruitless tree.?

217 Matthew Paris, sub. ann. 1201. There is a somewhat circumstantial air about this story, Simon’s reply being made to begin humorously with a Jesule. Jesule! Matthew, however, tells on this item the story of Simon’s miraculous punishment which Giraldus tells on a quite different text. Matthew is indignant with the scholastic arrogance which has led many to “suppress” the miracle.?

218 Ueberweg, i, 419, 430; Hampden, p. 443 sq. Cp. Renan, AverroÈs, p. 173 sq.?

219 Ueberweg, i, 418. The KaraÏtes may be described as Jewish Protestants or Puritans. Cp. Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 1896, pp. 252–54.?

220 Schechter (as cited, pp. 197, 417) gives two sets of dates, the second being 1135–1204.?

221 For a good survey of the medieval Hebrew thought in general see Joel, BeitrÄge zur Gesch. der Philos. 1876; and as to Maimonides see A. Franck’s Études Orientales, 1861; HaurÉau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, Ptie II, i, 41–46; and Renan, AverroÈs, pp. 177–82.?

222 Schechter, Studies in Judaism, pp. 422–23.?

223 Id. p. 208.?

224 Ueberweg, i, 428; Schechter, p. 424.?

225 Renan, AverroÈs, p. 183.?

226 Schechter, pp. 83–85.?

227 HaurÉau pronounces (II, i, 29–34) that Avicebron should be ranked among the most sincere and resolute of pantheists. His chief work was the Fons vitÆ.?

228 Renan, AverroÈs, pp. 100, 175.?

229 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, c. 8, ad init.?

230 MÉmoires de Joinville, ed. 1871, ii, 16.?

231 Renan, AverroÈs, pp. 222–24.?

232 Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena, p. 435; Christlieb, Leben und Lehre des Johannes Scotus Erigena, 1860, p. 438. Copies of John’s writings were found in the hands of the sectaries of Amalrich and David; and in 1226 the writings in question were condemned and burnt accordingly. HaurÉau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, i, 175.?

233 Ueberweg, i, 388, 431; Milman, Latin Christianity, ix, 112–14; Renan, p. 223; Hahn, Geschichte der Ketzer im Mittelalter, 1845–50, iii, 176–92.?

234 Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, § 12.?

235 Poole, p. 225; Ueberweg, i, 431.?

236 Lecky’s description (Rationalism in Europe, ed. 1887, i, 48) of AverroÏsm as a “stern and uncompromising infidelity” is hopelessly astray.?

237 Summa Theologica, Prima Secundae, QuÆst. LXXXV, Art. 6. Compare HaurÉau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, i, 189, for a trace of the idea of natura naturans in John Scotus and Heiric, in the ninth century.?

238 Renan, p. 236 sq.?

239 Cp. Reuter, Gesch. der religiÖsen AufklÄrung im Mittelalter, ii, 130.?

240 Milman, Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ix, 133.?

241 Robins. A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i, pp. 38–39. Compare Rashdall, Universities in the Middle Ages, i, 264; and Maurice, Medieval Philosophy, 2nd ed. pp. 188–90. It is noteworthy that the Summa of Thomas was a favourite study of Descartes, who read hardly any other theologian.?

242 Cp. Milman, ix, 143.?

243 See the comments of Giraldus Cambrensis in the proem to his Speculum EcclesiÆ Brewer’s ed. in Rolls Series, i. 9; and pref. pp. xii–xiii.?

244 Cp. Renan. AverroÈs, p. 267, as to the polemic of William of Auvergne.?

245 Renan, pp. 567–68.?

246 Id. pp. 269–71, and refs.?

247 Renan, pp. 273–75, and refs.; Ueberweg, i, 460, and refs.; Maywald, Die Lehre von der zweifachen Wahrheit, 1871, p. 11; Lange, i, 182 (tr. i, 218).?

248 Of John XXI, who had in 1276 condemned the doctrine of a twofold truth.?

249 Cp. Gebhart, Origines de la Renaissance, pp. 29–44. And see above, p. 308.?

250 Berington, Lit. Hist. of the Middle Ages, p. 245. See above, p. 310.?

251 See the Summa of the Inquisitor BartholomÆus Fumus, Venet. 1554, s.v. Infidelitas, fol. 261, § 5; and the Summa of Thomas, Secunda SecundÆ, QuÆst. X, Art. 2.?

252 It is sometimes described as a formidable product of doubt; and again by M. de RÉmusat as “consecrated to controversy rather than to skepticism.” Cp. Pearson, Hist. of England in the Early and Middle Ages, 1867, i. 609. The view in the text seems the just mean. Cp. Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, i. 57. In itself the book is for a modern reader a mere collection of the edifying contradictions of theologians; but such a collection must in any age have been a perplexity to faith; and it is not surprising that it remained unpublished until edited by Cousin (see the Ouvrages inÉdits, intr. pp. clxxxv–ix). That writer justly sums up that such antinomies “condamnent l’esprit À un doute salutaire.” The Rev. A. S. Farrar pronounces that “the critical independence of Nominalism, in a mind like that of Abailard, represents the destructive action of freethought, partly as early Protestantism, partly as skepticism” (Crit. Hist. of Freethought, p. 12).?

253 Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, i, 421–22, 556–58, 575; U. Burke, Hist. of Spain, Hume’s ed. 1900, ii, 351–52. For a detailed description of the methods of ecclesiastical torture, Burke refers to the treatise, De Catholicis Institutionibus, by Simancas, Bishop of Beja, Rome, 1575, tit. lxv, De Tormentis, p. 491 sq.?

254 Torture was inflicted on witnesses in England in 1311, by special inquisitors, under the mandate of Clement V, in defiance of English law; and under Edward II it was used in England as elsewhere against the Templars.?

255 Istorie fiorentine, iv, 29.?

256 See below, p. 325.?

257 Villari, Two First Centuries of Florentine History, Eng. tr. 1901, pp. 110–12.?

258 Reuter, Gesch. der religiÖsen AufklÄrung im Mittelalter, i, 167.?

259 Id. i, 164–66.?

260 The Moslems were inclined to regard him as of their creed “because educated in Sicily.” CantÙ, Gli Eretici d’Italia, 1865, i, 66.?

261 See Gieseler, as cited below; and Reid’s Mosheim, p. 437, note.?

262 Milman, Latin Christianity, vi, 150; Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, i, 221.?

263 Milman, vi, 150, 158.?

264 Renan, AverroÈs, p. 289.?

265 Renan, AverroÈs, pp. 205–10. Michael Scotus may have been, like John Scotus, an Irishman, but his refusal to accept the archbishopric of Cashel, on the ground that he did not know the native language, makes this doubtful. The identification of him with a Scottish knight, Sir Michael Scott, still persisted in by some scholars on the strength of Sir Walter Scott’s hasty note to The Lay of the Last Minstrel, is destitute of probability. See the Rev. J. Wood Brown’s Inquiry into the Life and Legend of Michael Scot, 1897, pp. 160–61, 175–76.?

266 Inferno, xx, 515–17.?

267 CantÙ, Gli Eretici d’Italia, i, 65–66; the Pope’s letter, as cited; Renan, AverroÈs, pp. 287–91, 296.?

268 See the verdict of Gieseler, Eng. tr. iii (1853), p. 103, note.?

269 Milman, vi, 158–59.?

270 Id. p. 154. Cp. the author’s Evolution of States, 1912, p. 382.?

271 G. Villani, Istorie fiorentine, vi, 46.?

272 Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. i, ch. ii, § 2, citing in particular Moneta’s Summa contra Catharos et Valdenses, lib. V, cc. 4, 11, 15; Tempier (bishop of Paris), Indiculum Errorum (1272) in the Bibliotheca Patrum Maxima, t. xxv; BulÆus, Hist. Acad. Paris, iii, 433—as to the AverroÏsts at Paris, described above, p. 319. Cp. Renan, AverroÈs, pp. 230–31, citing William of Auvergne, and pp. 283, 285; Ozanam, Dante, 6e Édit. pp. 86, 101, 111–12; Gebhart, Origines de la Renais, pp. 79–81; Lange, i, 182 (tr. i, 218); Sharon Turner, Hist. of England during the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. v, 136–38.?

273 Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, iii, 560–61.?

274 Perrens, La civilisation florentine du 13e au 16e siÈcle, 1892, p. 101. Above, p. 322.?

275 Inferno, Canto x, 14–15, 118.?

276 Ottavio Ubaldini, d. 1273, of whom the commentators tell that he said that if there were such a thing as a soul he had lost his for the cause of the Ghibellines.?

277 As to whom see Renan, AverroÈs, p. 285, note; Gebhart, Renaissance, p. 81. His son Guido, “the first friend and the companion of all the youth of Dante,” was reputed an atheist (Decameron, vi, 9). Cp. Cesare Balbo, Vita di Dante, ed. 1853, pp. 48–49. But see Owen, Skeptics of the Ital. Renais., p. 138, note.?

278 In the Convito, ii, 9, he writes that, “among all the bestialities, that is the most foolish, the most vile, the most damnable, which believes no other life to be after this life.” Another passage (iv, 5) heaps curses on the “most foolish and vile beasts ... who presume to speak against our Faith.”?

279 Cp. Ozanam, Dante, 6e Édit. pp. 111–12, as to anti-Christian movements.?

280 Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i, 83, note; Renan, AverroÈs, pp. 326–27; CantÙ, Gli Eretici d’Italia, i, 177. and note 13 on p. 196.?

281 Cp. Labitte, La Divine ComÉdie avant Dante, as cited, p. 139.?

282 Michelet argues that Italy was “anti-Dantesque” in the Renaissance (Hist. de France, vii, Intr. § 9 and App.), but he exaggerates the common disregard of the Commedia.?

283 As to an element of doubt, even in Dante, concerning Divine government, see Burckhardt, p. 497. But the attempt made by some critics to show that the “sins” to which Dante confessed had been intellectual—i.e., heresies—falls to the ground. See DÖllinger, Studies in European History, Eng. tr. 1890, pp. 87–90; and cp. CantÙ, Gli Eretici d’Italia, i, 144 sq. on the whole question.?

284 Cesare Balbo, Vita di Dante, ed. 1853, pp. 416–17, 433.?

285 CantÙ. Eretici d’ Italia, i, 153. CantÙ gives an account of the trial process.?

286 G. Villani, x, 39. It is to be noted that the horoscope of Jesus was cast by several professed believers, as Albertus Magnus and Pierre d’Ailli, Cardinal and Bishop of Cambrai, as well as by Cardan. See Bayle, art. Cardan, note Q; and cp. Renan, AverroÈs, p. 326.?

287 Cp. Owen, pp. 128, 135–42; Hallam, Lit. Hist., i, 141–42; Milman, bk. xiv, ch. v, end.?

288 Decam., Gior. i, nov. 2.?

289 Gior. i, nov. 3.?

290 Dr. Marcus Landau, Die Quellen des Dekameron, 2te Aufl. 1884, p. 182.?

291 The story is recorded to have been current among the MotecallemÎn—a party kindred to the Motazilites—in Bagdad. Renan, AverroÈs, p. 293, citing Dozy. Renan thinks it may have been of Jewish origin. Id. p. 294, note.?

292 Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 1896, pp. 207–208.?

293 It is found some time before Boccaccio in the Cento Novelle antiche (No. 72 or 73) in a simpler form; but Landau (p. 183) thinks Boccaccio’s immediate source was the version of Busone da Gubbio (b. 1280), who had improved on the version in the Cento Novelle, while Boccaccio in turn improved on him by treating the Jew more tolerantly. Bartoli (I Precursori del Boccaccio, 1876, pp. 26–28) disputes any immediate debt to Busone; as does Owen, Skeptics of the Ital. Renais., p. 29, note.?

294 Burckhardt (Renaissance in Italy, p. 493, note) points out that Boccaccio is the first to name the Christian religion, his Italian predecessors avoiding the idea; and that in one eastern version the story is used polemically against the Christians.?

295 Owen, p. 142, and refs.?

296 Id. pp. 143–45. He was even so far terrorized by the menaces of a monk (who appeared to him to have occult knowledge of some of his secrets) as to propose to give up his classical studies; and would have done so but for Petrarch’s dissuasion. Petrarch’s letter (Epist. Senil., i, 5) is translated (Lett. xii) by M. Develay, Lettres de PÉttrarque À Boccace.?

297 Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 1893, pp. 28, 32, 37, and refs.?

298 Id. pp. 11, 41.?

299 Probably 25,000 in England alone, including monks. Id. p. 204.?

300 Id. pp. 205–208, 213, 216.?

301 Below, § 11.?

302 As to his anti-clericalism, cp. Gebhart, Orig. de la Renais., p. 71, and ref.; Owen, p. 113.?

303 Cp. Rashdall, Universities in the Middle Ages, i, 264.?

304 See the exposition of Owen, pp. 109–28. and refs. on p. 113.?

305 Renan, AverroÈs, p. 328.?

306 MÉziÉres, PÉtrarque, 1868, p. 362.?

307 It is to be noted that in his opposition to the scholastics he had predecessors. Cp. Gebhart, Orig. de la Renais., p. 65.?

308 Owen, p. 113. It is to be remembered that Dante also (Convito, ii, 8, 9; iii, 14; iv, 7) exalts Reason; but he uses the word in the old sense of mere mentality—the thinking as distinguished from the sensuous element in man; and he was fierce against all resort to reason as against faith. Petrarch was of course more of a rationalist. As to his philosophic skepticism, see Owen, p. 120. He drew the line only at doubting those things “in which doubt is sacrilege.” Nevertheless he grounded his belief in immortality not on the Christian creed, but on the arguments of the pagans (Burckhardt, p. 546).?

309 Epist. sine titulo, cited by Renan, AverroÈs, p. 299. For the phrases put in AverroËs’ mouth by Christians, see pp. 294–98.?

310 Inferno, iv, 144.?

311 Renan, AverroÈs, pp. 301–15.?

312 Id. pp. 333–37; CantÙ, Gli Eretici d’ltalia, i, 176 and refs.?

313 Renan, pp. 326–27.?

314 Id. pp. 318–20.?

315 Justinger, cited in The Pope and the Council, Eng. tr. p. 298.?

316 Hardwick, p. 357, note.?

317 Cp. Bonnechose, Reformers before the the Reformation, Eng. tr. 1844, i, 40–43.?

318 “Janus” (i.e. DÖllinger), The Pope and the Council, Eng. tr. 2nd ed. 1869, pp. 292–95. This weighty work, sometimes mistakenly ascribed to Huber, who collaborated in it, was recast by commission and posthumously published as Das Papstthum, by J. Friedrich, MÜnchen, 1892.?

319 Hallam, Middle Ages, 11th ed. ii, 218; Lea, Hist. of the Inquis., i, 5–34; Gieseler, § 90 (ii, 572); Freytag, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit, 4te aufl. ii, 318–19.?

320 The Pope and the Council, p. 220. For proofs see same work, pp. 220–34.?

321 “La satire est la plus complÈte manifestation de la pensÉe libre au moyen Âge. Dans ce monde ou le dogmatisme impitoyable au sein de l’Église et de l’École frappe comme hÉrÉtique tout dissident, l’esprit critique n’a pas trouvÉ de voie plus sÛre, plus rapide et plus populaire, que la parodie” (Lenient, La Satire en France au moyen Âge, 1859, p. 14).?

322 Cp. Lenient, as cited, p. 21.?

323 See in Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy, vol. i (Age of the Despots), ed. 1897, pp. 361–69, and Appendix IV, on “Religious Revivals in Medieval Italy.” Those revivals occurred from time to time after Savonarola.?

324 Cp. Villari, Machiavelli, i, 138.?

325 Gieseler, Per. III. Div. iii, § 90; Lea, Hist. of Inquis., ii, 319–20.?

326 Kurtz, i, 435–36.?

327 Lea, i, 320–21. Cp. Ullmann, Reformers before the Reformation, Eng. tr. ii, 15–22; and Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, § 11, and notes. The doctrine of the treatise De Novem Rupibus is that of an educated thinker, and is in parts strongly antinomian, but always on pantheistic grounds.?

328 Lea, i, 323–24.?

329 Cp. Reuter, Gesch. der religiÖsen AufklÄrung, ii, 240–49.?

330 Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 40–43, and notes; ch. v, § 9. The names Beguin and Beghard seem to have been derived from the old German verb beggan, to beg. In the Netherlands, Beguine was a name for women; and Beghard for men.?

331 See the record in Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, bk. iii, chs. i-iii.?

332 Praised in the Roman de la Rose, Eng. vers. in Skeat’s Chaucer, i, 244; Bell’s ed. iv, 228. William was answered by the Dominican Thomas Aquinas.?

333 See Biog. Introd. to ed. of the Philobiblon by E. C. Thomas, 1888, pp. xliii–xlvii.?

334 C. 4, Querimonia librorum contra clericos jam promotos; C. 5, ... contra religiosos possessionatos; C. 6, ... contra religiosos mendicantes.?

335 Ed. Thomas, as cited, pp. xlvi–vii.?

336 Cp. Mosheim, 13 C. pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 18–40; Hallam, Middle Ages, ch. vii, pt. 2; Gebhart, Origines de la Renais., p. 42; Berington, Lit. Hist. of the Middle Ages, p. 244; Lea, Hist. of Inq., bk. iii, ch. i. The special work of the Dominicans was the establishment everywhere of the Inquisition. Mosheim, as last cited, ch. v, §§ 3–6, and notes; Lea, ii, 200–201; Milman, Latin Christianity, ix, 155–56; Llorente, Hist. Crit. de l’Inquis. en Espagne, as cited, i, 49–55, 68, etc.?

337 As to the development of the Beguines from an original basis of charitable co-operation see Ullmann, Reformers before the Reformation, ii, 13; Lea, ii, 351.?

338 Lea, iii, 10.?

339 See the thirteenth-century memoirs of Fra Salimbene, Eng. tr. in T. K. L. Oliphant’s The Duke and the Scholar, 1875, pp. 98, 103–104, 108–10, 116, 130.?

340 The Introduction to the book, probably written by the Franciscan Gerhard, made St. Francis the angel of Rev. xiv, 6; and the ministers of the new order were to be his friars. Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 33–36, and notes. Cp. Lea, as cited; and Hahn, Gesch. der Ketzer im Mittelalter, 1845–50, iii, 72–175—a very full account of Joachim’s teaching.?

341 Lea, iii, 20–25.?

342 Le Clerc, Hist. Litt. de la France, xx, 230; Milman, Latin Christianity, ix, 155.?

343 AverroÈs, pp. 259–60.?

344 Cp. Mosheim, 14 Cent. pt. ii, ch. iii, § 5; and Burnet’s Letters, ed. Rotterdam, 1686, p. 31.?

345 Cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, ix, 75–76.?

346 Lea, iii, 104.?

347 Hardwick, p. 316; Lea, iii, 109; Mosheim, 12 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, §§ 14–16. A sect of Apostolici had existed in Asia Minor in the fourth century. Kurtz, i, 242. Cp. Lea, i, 109, note. Those of the twelfth century were vehemently opposed by St. Bernard.?

348 Lea, iii, 109–19.?

349 Lea, p. 121; Kurtz, i, 437; Hardwick, p. 315, note; Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, § 14, and note. See Dante, Inferno, xxviii, 55–60, as to Dolcino.?

350 Lea, p. 125.?

351 As to the external movements connected with Joachim’s Gospel see Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, §§ 13–15. They were put down by sheer bloodshed. Cp. Ueberweg, i, 431; Lea, pp. 25–26, 86.?

352 Hist. de France, vol. x; La RÉforme, ed. 1884, p. 333.?

353 See the author’s notes to his ed. of Buckle (Routledge), 1904, pp. 539, 547.?

354 U. R. Burke, History of Spain, Hume’s ed. i, 109–10.?

355 McCrie, Reformation in Spain, ed. 1856, p. 41; Burke, as cited, ii, 55–56.?

356 Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, i, 81.?

357 Burke, i, 218.?

358 HaurÉau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, ii, 54–55.?

359 Id. ii, 58.?

360 Lea, iii, 560.?

361 Personally he discouraged heresy-hunting. Burke, ii, 66.?

362 Burke, i, 268–73; Dunham, Hist. of Spain and Portugal, 1832, iv, 260.?

363 Lea, iii, 24.?

364 Burke, ii, 65.?

365 Lea, ii, 183.?

366 Id. i, 221.?

367 Burke, ii, 66–67.?

368 Lea, iii, 85–86.?

369 Id. pp. 52–53; McCrie, Reformation in Spain, p. 20.?

370 Bonet-Maury, Les PrÉcurseurs de la RÉforme, 1904, pp. 114–19.?

371 Lea, iii, 86.?

372 Burke, ii, 57.?

373 Id. ii, 62–63.?

374 Lea, iii, 564.?

375 Id. ii, 187–88.?

376 Lea, ii, 287; Burke, ii, 67–69.?

377 Burke, ii, 77, citing Lafuente, ix, 233.?

378 Id. citing Bergenroth, Calendar, etc. i, 37.?

379 Even as late as 1591, in Aragon, when in a riot against the Inquisition the Inquisitors barely escaped with their lives. Burke, ii, 80, note.?

380 Id. pp. 81–82.?

381 There had previously been sharp social persecution by the CortÈs, in 1480, on “anti-Semitic” grounds, the Jews being then debarred from all the professions, and even from commerce. They were thus driven to usury by Christians, who latterly denounce the race for usuriousness. Cp. Michelet, Hist. de France, x, ed. 1884, p. 15, note.?

382 The number has been put as high as 800,000. Cp. F. D. Mocatta, The Jews and the Inquisition, 1877, p. 54; E. La RigaudiÈre, Hist. des PersÉc. Relig. en Espagne, 1860, pp. 112–14; Prescott, Hist. of Ferdinand and Isabella, Kirk’s ed. 1889, p. 323; and refs. in ed. of Buckle cited, p. 541.?

383 Llorente, Hist. Crit. de l’Inquis. en Espagne, ed. 1818, i, 280. As to Llorente’s other estimates, which are of doubtful value, cp. Prescott’s note, ed. cited, p. 746. But as to Llorente’s general credit, see the vindication of U. R. Burke, ii, 85–87.?

384 Llorente, i, 281.?

385 McCrie, Reformation in Spain, ch. viii.?

386 Cp. La RigaudiÈre, pp. 309–14; Buckle, as cited, pp. 514, 570; U. R. Burke, i, 59, 85.?

387 Cp. Émile Charles, Roger Bacon, Paris, 1861, p. 23.?

388 Cp. HaurÉau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, Ptie. ii, 1880, vol. ii, p. 79.?

389 This sum of libri has been taken by English writers to stand for English “pounds.” It may however have represented Parisian livres.?

390 Prof. Brewer, Introd. to Opera Inedita of Roger Bacon, 1859, pp. xiv–xxiii.?

391 Id. p. xlvi.?

392 Id. p. xxx, sq.?

393 Id. pp. liv-lv.?

394 Compendium PhilosophiÆ, cap. i, in Op. Ined., pp. 398–401.?

395 Id. p. 401. Cp. p. 412 as to the multitude of theologians at Paris banished for sodomy.?

396 Id. p. 422.?

397 Id. cc. ii–v, pp. 404–32.?

398 Brewer, p. xciii, note, cites this in an extract from the Chronicle of Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, a late writer of the fifteenth century, who “gives no authority for his statement.” Dr. Bridges, however, was enabled by M. Sabatier to trace the passage back to the MS. Chronica xxiv Generalium Ordinis Minorum, which belongs to the first half of the fourteenth century; and the passage, as M. Sabatier remarks, has all the appearance of being an extract from the official journal of this Order. (Bridges, The “Opus Majus” of Roger Bacon, Suppl. vol. 1900, p. 158.)?

399 “Il etait nÉ rebelle.” “Le mÉpris systÉmatique de l’autoritÉ, voilÀ vraiment ce qu’il professe.” (HaurÉau, Ptie. II, ii, 76, 85.)?

400 See the sympathetic accounts of Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, pp. 100–12; White, Warfare of Science with Theology, i, 379–91.?

401 Erdmann, History of Philosophy, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. i, 476.?

402 Humboldt, Examen Crit. de l’hist. de la GÉographie, 1836–39, i, 64–70, gives the passages in the Opus Majus and the Imago Mundi, and paraphrase of the latter in Columbus’s letter to Ferdinand and Isabella from Jamaica (given also in P. L. Ford’s Writings of Christopher Columbus, 1892, p. 199 sq.). Cp. Ellis’s note to Francis Bacon’s Temporis Partus Masculus, in Ellis and Spedding’s ed. of Bacon’s Works, iii, 534. It should be remembered in this connection that Columbus found believers, in the early stage of his undertaking, only in two friars, one a Franciscan and one a Dominican. See Ford’s ed. of the Writings, p. 107.?

403 Cp. HaurÉau, Ptie. II, ii, 95.?

404 Opus Majus, Pars ii, cap. 5.?

405 Renan, AverroÈs, p. 263. Bacon mentions AverroËs in the Opus Majus, P. i, cc. 6, 15; P. ii, c. 13; ed. Bridges, iii (1900), 14, 33, 67. In the passage last cited he calls him “homo solidae sapientiae, corrigens multa priorum et addens multa, quamvis corrigendus sit in aliquibus, et in multis complendus.”?

406 See the careful notice by Prof. Adamson in Dict. of Nat. Biog. Cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, ix, 152–60; Lewes, Hist. of Philos. ii, 77–87.?

407 Two Englishmen, the Carmelite John of Baconthorpe (d. 1346) and Walter Burleigh, were among the orthodox AverroÏsts; the latter figuring as a Realist against William of Occam.?

408 Legend of Good Women, ll. 1039–43; Parliament of Fowls, ll. 199–200.?

409 Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, 438 (440).?

410 Id. 653–61 (655–63). Cp. Tale of the Wife of Bath; 1–25.?

411 Legend of Good Women, prol. ll. 1–9; Knight’s Tale, ll. 1951–56 (2809–14 of MS. group A).?

412 The notion connects with the spurious Ploughman’s Tale and Pilgrim’s Tale, as to which see Lounsbury, as cited, i, 460–73; ii, 460–69.?

413 Vision of Piers Ploughman, ll. 5809 sq. Wright’s ed. i, 179–80.?

414 Chaucer’s Boece, B. I. Prose iv. ll. 223–26, in Skeat’s Student’s Chaucer.?

415 Mosheim, 14 Cent. Pt. ii, ch. ii, § 36, and note. Cp. Green, Short History of the English People, ch. v, § 3, ed. 1881, p. 235.?

416 Cp. Green, Short Hist. ch. v, § 5; Massingberd, The English Reformation, p. 171.?

417 Cited by Lechler, Wycliffe and his English Precursors, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. p. 440.?

418 Cp. Prof. Montagu Burrows, Wiclif’s Place in History, 1884, p. 49. Maitland (Eight Essays, 1852) suggested derivation from the movement of Abbot Joachim and others of that period.?

419 Wilkins’ Concilia, ii, 124.?

420 Cp. Vaughan, as cited by Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, p. 402.?

421 Hardwick, pp. 417, 418. The doctrine of purgatory was, however, soon renounced by the Lollards (id. p. 420).?

422 See the passages cited in Lewis’s Life of Wiclif, ed. 1820, pp. 224–25. Cp. Burrows, as cited, p. 19; Le Bas, Life of Wiclif, 1832, pp. 357–59.?

423 Lechler, Wycliffe and his Eng. Precursors, pp. 371–76; Hardwick, p. 412.?

424 Cp. Green, Short History, ch. v, § 4.?

425 Lechler, p. 236. It forms bk. vi of Wiclif’s theological Summa.?

426 Baxter, in his address “To the doubting and unbelieving readers” prefixed to his Reasons of the Christian Religion, 1667, names Savonarola, Campanella, Ficinus, Vives, Mornay, Grotius, Cameron, and Micraelius as defenders of the faith, but no writer of the fourteenth century.?

427 Cp. Le Bas, pp. 342–43; and Hardwick, Church Hist.: Middle Age, p. 415.?

428 Lechler, p. 236.?

429 Blunt, Reformation of the Church of England, 1892, i, 284, and refs.?

430 It is noteworthy that French culture affected the very vocabulary of Dante, as it did that of his teacher, Brunetto Latini. Cp. LittrÉ, Etudes sur les barbares et le moyen Âge, 3e Édit. pp. 399–400. The influence of French literature is further seen in Boccaccio, and in Italian literature in general from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. Gebhart, pp. 209–21.?

431 Saintsbury, Short Hist. of French Lit. 1882, p. 57.?

432 Passage not translated in the old Eng. version.?

433 Cp. Lenient, pp. 159–60.?

434 Lenient, p. 169.?

435 This declaration, as it happens, is put in the mouth of “False-Seeming,” but apparently with no ironical intention.?

436 Lanson, Hist. de la litt. franÇaise, p. 132.?

437 Id. p. 135.?

438 Duruy, Hist. de France, ed. 1880, i, 440–41; Gebhart, Orig. de la Renais. pp. 2, 19, 24–29, 32–35, 41–50; Le Clerc and Renan, Hist. Litt. de la France au XIVe SiÈcle, i, 4; ii, 123; LittrÉ, Études, as cited, pp. 424–29.?

439 Duruy, i, 409 sq., 449; Gebhart, pp. 35–41; Morin, Origines de la DÉmocratie: La France au moyen Âge, 3e Édit. 1865, p. 304 sq.?

440 Cp. Michelet, Hist. de France, vii, Renaissance, Introd. § ii. Between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, he insists, “le jour baisse horriblement.”?

441 Ozanam, Dante, 6e Édit. pp. 47, 78, 108–10.?

442 LittrÉ, Études, as cited, pp. 411–13.?

443 Le Clerc, as cited, p. 259; Gebhart, pp. 48–49.?

444 Sir James F. Stephen, HorÆ SabbaticÆ, 1892, i, 42.?

445 The Italians said of the French Pope Clement VI (1342–52) that he had small religion. M. Villani, Cronica, iii, 43 (ed. 1554).?

446 Cp. Dr. T. Arnold, Lect. on Mod. Hist. 4th ed. pp. 111–18; Buckle, 3 vol. ed. i, 326–27 (1-vol. ed. p. 185); Stephen, as cited, i, 121. “It is hardly too much to say that Comines’s whole mind was haunted at all times and at every point by a belief in an invisible and immensely powerful and artful man whom he called God” (last cited).?

447 Buckle, i, 329 (1-vol. ed. p. 186).?

448 Buckle, ii, 133 (1-vol. ed. p. 361); Hallam, Middle Ages, iii, 395–96. Religious ceremonies were attached to the initiation of knights in the 13th century. Seignobos, Hist. de la Civilisation, ii, 15.?

449 Duruy, i, 368, 373–74. Cp. J. Jolly, Philippe le Bel, 1869, l. iii, ch. iv, p. 249. It is to be remembered that Philippe had for years been sorely pressed for money to retrieve his military disasters. See H. Hervieu, Recherches sur les premiers États gÉnÉraux, 1879, pp. 89 sq., 99 sq. He used his ill-gotten gains to restore the currency, which he had debased. Id. pp. 101–102.?

450 HaurÉau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, Ptie II, vol. ii, 359–60.?

451 Poole, Illustrations, p. 265. Cp. Villari, Life and Times of Machiavelli, ii, 64–67; Tullo Massarani, Studii di politica e di storia, 2a ed. 1899, pp. 112–13; Neander, Ch. Hist. Eng. tr. 1855, ix, 33.?

452 Poole, pp. 266–76. Cp. Hardwick, Church History, Middle Age, 1853, pp. 346–47.?

453 Ueberweg, i, 461–62.?

454 “His (Occam’s) philosophy is that of centuries later.” (Milman, Latin Christianity, ix, 148. Cp. pp. 150–51.)?

455 Cp. Hardwick, p. 377, and Rettberg, as there cited.?

456 Milman, Latin Christianity, ix, 75–76; Mosheim, 14 C. pt. ii, ch. iii, § 5. As to his religious bigotry, see Milman, p. 142, notes.?

457 Ueberweg, i, 460–64; cp. Poole, Illustrations, pp. 275–81.?

458 James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, ed. 1869, i, 250–51.?

459 Cp. Ueberweg, p. 464. Mr. Poole’s judgment (p. 280) that Occam “starts from the point of view of a theologian” hardly does justice to his attitude towards theology. Occam had indeed to profess acceptance of theology; but he could not well have made less account of its claims.?

460 Ueberweg, pp. 465–66.?

461 Id. p. 466.?

462 Id. ib.?

463 Poole, p. 281.?

464 Ullmann, Reformers before the Reformation, i, 37, citing John of Goch, De libertate Christiana, lib. i, cc. 17, 18. Compare the AverroÏst propositions of 1269–1277, given above, pp. 319–20.?

465 Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 187–88 (Eng. tr. i, 225–26).?

466 Reuter, Gesch. der religiÖsen AufklÄrung im Mittelalter, i, 164.?

467 Gervinus, Gesch. der deutschen Dichtung, 5te Ausg. i, 489–99. Even in the period before the Minnesingers the clerical poetry had its anti-clerical side. Id. p. 194. Towards the end of the 12th century Nigellus Wireker satirized the monks in his Brunellus, seu speculum stultorum. Menzel, Gesch. der Deutschen, Cap. 252. See Menzel’s note, before cited, for a remarkable outbreak of anti-clerical if not anti-Christian satire, in the form of sculpture in an ancient carving in the Strasburg Cathedral.?

468 Reuter, Gesch. der relig. AufklÄrung, ii, 62–63; Gervinus, i, 523; ii, 69; Kurtz, Gesch. der deutschen Litteratur, 1853, i, 428, col. 2.?

469 Milman, Latin Chr., ix, 125. Albert was an Aristotelian—a circumstance which makes sad havoc of Menzel’s proposition (Geschichte, Cap. 251) that the “German spirit” did not take naturally to Aristotle. Menzel puts the fact and the theory on opposite pages.?

470 Milman, Latin Christianity, ix, 258. Cp. p. 261.?

471 For a full account of Eckhart’s teaching see Dr. A. Lasson’s monograph (§ 106) in Ueberweg’s Hist. of Philos., i, 467–84; also Ullmann, Reformers before the Ref., ii, 23–31. Cp. Lea, Hist. of Inquis., ii, 354–59, 362–69, as to the sects. As to Tauler, see Milman, ix, 255–56. He opposed the more advanced pantheism of the Beghards. Id. p. 262.?

472 In the 400 years following its publication there were published over 6,000 separate editions.?

473 Bk. i, ch. ii, 1, 2.?

474 Bk. i, ch. iii. 1, 2.?

475 Id. § 5.?