Part 20

The first of the great Paris theologians was Peter Abelard, a Breton--handsome, self-confident, ready of tongue and brain. Having studied ‘dialectics’, that is, the system of reasoning by which the mediaeval mind constructed its philosophy, he aroused the disgust of his masters by drawing away their pupils, through his eloquence and originality, as soon as he understood the subject-matter sufficiently to lecture on his own account.

In Paris so many young men of his day crowded round his desk that Abelard has been sometimes called the founder of the university. This is not true, but his popularity may be said to have decided that Paris rather than any other town should become the intellectual centre of France. Greedily his audience listened while he endeavoured to prove by human reason beliefs that the Church taught as a matter of faith; and, though he had set out with the intention of defending her, it was with the Church that he soon came into conflict.

One of his books, called _Yes and No_, contained a brief summary of the views of early Christian Fathers on various theological questions. Drawn into such close proximity some of these views were found to conflict, and the Breton lecturer became an object of suspicion in ecclesiastical quarters, especially to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who believed that human reason was given to man merely that he might accept the teaching of the Church, not to raise arguments or criticisms concerning it.

‘Peter Abelard’, he wrote to the Pope, ‘is trying to make void the merit of Christian faith when he deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God altogether ... the man is great in his own eyes ... this scrutinizer of Majesty and fabricator of heresies.’

The minds of the two men were indeed utterly opposed--types of conflicting human thought in all ages. St. Bernard, in spite of his frank denunciations of the sins of the Church, was docile to the voice of her authority, and hated and feared the pride of the human intellect as the deadliest of all sins. Abelard, by nature inquisitive and sceptical, regarded his deft brain as a surgeon’s knife, given him to cut away diseased or worn-out tissues from the thought of his day in order to leave it healthier and purer.

As antagonists they were no match, for St. Bernard was infinitely the greater man, without any of the other’s petty vanity and worldliness to confuse the issue for which they struggled: he had behind him also the sympathy of mediaeval minds not as yet awakened to any spirit of inquiry, and so the Breton was driven into the retirement of a monk’s cell and his condemned works publicly burned.

One of his pupils, Peter Lombard, adopted his master’s methods without arousing the anger of the orthodox by any daring feats of controversy, and produced a _Book of Sentences_ (_sententiae_ = opinions) that became the text-book for scholasticism, just as the _Decretum_ was the authority for students of Roman law. Without being a work of genius the _Sentences_ cleared a pathway through the jungle of mediaeval thought for more original minds, while the discovery in the latter half of the twelfth century of several hitherto unknown works of Aristotle gave added zest to the researches of the ‘Schoolmen’. Greatest of all these ‘Schoolmen’ was Thomas Aquinas, ‘the Angelic Doctor’, as he has sometimes been called.

Aquinas was a Neapolitan of noble family, who ran away from home as a boy to join the Dominicans, an Order of wandering preachers of whose foundation we shall shortly speak. Thomas was recaptured and brought home by his elder brother, a noble at the court of Frederick II; but neither threats nor imprisonment could persuade the young novice to give up the life he had chosen. After a year he broke the bars of his window, escaped from Naples, and went to Cologne and Paris, where he studied theology, emerging from this education the greatest lecturer and teacher of his day. In his _Summa Theologiae_, his best-known book, he set forth his belief in man’s highest good as the chief thought of God, using both the commentaries of the Church Fathers and the works of Aristotle as quarries to provide the material for fashioning his arguments. Like Abelard, he believed in the voice of reason, but without any of the Breton’s probing scepticism. Human reason bridled by divine grace was the guide he sought to lead his pen through the maze of theology; and so clear and judicial were his methods, so brilliant the intellect that shone through his writings, that Aquinas became for later generations an authority almost equal to St. Augustine.

[Sidenote: Mediaeval Faith]

The intense preoccupation of mediaeval minds with theology and the importance attached to ‘right belief’ are the most striking mental characteristics of the period with which we are dealing. To-day we are inclined to judge a man by his actions rather than by his beliefs, to sum up a character as good or bad because its owner is generous or selfish, kind or cruel, brave or cowardly. In the twelfth or thirteenth centuries this would have seemed a wholly false standard. The ideal of conduct, for one thing, maintained by monks like St. Bernard of Clairvaux was so exalted that, to the ordinary men and women in an age of cruelty and fierce passions, a good life seemed impossible save for Saints. The sins and failings of the rest of the world received a very easy pardon except from ascetics; and it was generally felt that God in His mercy, through the intercession of the kindly Saints, would be compassionate to human weakness so long as the sinner repented, confessed, and clung to a belief in the teaching of the Church. This teaching, or ‘Faith’, declared to have been given by Christ to His Apostles, set forth in the writings of the Christian Fathers, gathered together in the Creeds and Sacraments defined by Church Councils, preached and expounded by the clergy and theologians, defended by the Pope, was the torch that could alone guide man’s wavering footsteps to the ‘City of God’.

‘Do you know what I shall gain,’ asked a French Count of the thirteenth century, ‘in that during this mortal life I have believed as Holy Church teaches? I shall have a crown in the Heavens above the angels, for the angels cannot but believe inasmuch as they see God face to face.’

Heresy--the refusal to accept the teaching of the Church--was the one unpardonable sin, a moral leprosy worse in mediaeval eyes than any human disease because it affected the soul, not the body, and the life of the soul was everlasting. The heretic must be suppressed, converted if possible, but if not, burned and forgotten like a diseased rag, lest his wrong beliefs should infect others and so lose their souls also eternally. To-day we know that neither suppression nor burnings can ultimately extinguish that independence of thought and spirit of inquiry that are as much the motive power of some human natures as the acceptance of authority is of others. Tolerance, and how far it can be extended to actions as well as beliefs, is one of the problems that the world is still studying. The towns and provinces, where the first battles were fought, are sown with the blood and ashes of those who neither sought nor offered the way of compromise as a solution.

Another of Abelard’s pupils, besides the orthodox Peter Lombard, was an Italian, Arnold of Brescia--in many ways a man of like intellect with his master, self-centred, restless, and ambitious. When he returned home from the University he at once took a violent part in the life of the Brescian commune, declaring publicly that the Church should return to the days of ‘apostolic poverty’, and urging the citizens to cast off the yoke of their bishop. Exiled from Italy by the anger of the Pope and clergy at his views he went again to Paris, where he taught in the University until by the King’s command he was driven away. He next found a refuge in Germany under the protection of a papal legate, who had known and admired him in earlier days; but this news aroused the furious anger of St. Bernard.

‘Arnold of Brescia,’ he wrote to the legate, ‘whose speech is honey ... whose doctrine poison, the man whom Brescia has vomited forth, whom Rome abhors, whom France drives into exile, whom Germany curses, whom Italy refuses to receive, obtains thy support. To be his friend is to be the foe of the Pope and God.’

The legate contrived by mediation to reconcile the heretic temporarily with the Church; but Arnold was by nature a firebrand, and, having settled in Rome, soon became leader in one of the many plots to make that city a ‘Free Town’, owing allegiance only to the Emperor. Largely through his efforts the Pope was compelled to go into exile; but later the Romans, under the fear of an interdict that would deprive them of the visits of pilgrims out of whom they usually made their living, deserted him; and the republican leader was forced to fly. Captured amongst the Italian hills, he was taken to Rome and burned, his ashes being thrown into the Tiber lest they should be claimed as relics by those of the populace who still loved him. His judges need not have taken this precaution, for neither Arnold’s religious nor political views could claim any large measure of public approval in his own day. Elsewhere, indeed, heresy and rebellion were seething, but it was not till the beginning of the thirteenth century that the outbreak became a vital problem for the Papacy.

The widest area of heresy was in the provinces of Languedoc and Provence, to whose precocious mental development we have already referred.[23] The Counts of Toulouse no longer ruled in the thirteenth century over any of modern Spain, but north of the Pyrenees they were tenants-in-chief to the French king for one of the most fertile provinces of southern France, while as Marquesses of Provence they were vassals of the Emperor for the country beyond the Rhone.

Semi-independent of the control of either of these overlords, Count Raymond VI presided over a court famed for its luxury and gaiety of heart, its light morals, and unorthodox religious views. When he received complaints from Rome that his people were deriding the Catholic Faith and stoning his bishops and priests, he scarcely pretended regret, for his sceptical nature was quite unshocked by heresy, and both he and his nobles fully approved of popular insistence on ‘apostolic poverty’, a doctrine that enabled them to appropriate ecclesiastical lands and revenues for their own purposes.

[Sidenote: Heresy in Languedoc]

The heretical sects in Languedoc were many: perhaps the most important those of the Albigenses and Waldensians. The former practically denied Christianity, maintaining that good and evil were co-equal powers, and that Christ’s death was of no avail to save mankind. The Waldensians, or ‘Poor men of Lyons’, on the other hand, had at first tried to find acceptance for their beliefs within the Church. Peter Waldo, their founder, a rich merchant of Lyons, had translated some of the Gospels from Latin into the language of the countryside, and, having given away all his goods, he travelled from village to village, preaching, and trying with his followers to imitate the lives of the Apostles in simplicity and poverty.

In spite of condemnation from the Pope, who was suspicious of their teaching, the Waldensians increased in number. They declared that the authority of the Bible was superior to that of the Church, appointed ministers of their own, and denied many of the principal articles of Faith that the Church insisted were necessary to salvation.

The mediaeval Church taught that only through belief in these articles of Faith, that is, in the Creeds and Sacraments (_sacramentum_ = something sacred), as administered by the clergy, could man hope to be saved. The most important of the Sacraments, of which there were seven, was the miracle of the Mass, sometimes called ‘transubstantiation’. Its origin was the Last Supper, when Christ before His crucifixion gave His disciples bread and wine, saying ‘Take, eat, this is my body....’ ‘Take, drink, this is my blood which was shed for you.’ The mediaeval Church declared that every time at the service of Mass the priest offered up ‘the Host’, or consecrated bread, Christ was sacrificed anew for the sins of the world, and that the bread became in truth converted into the substance of His body.

The Waldensians, and many sects that later broke away from the tenets of the mediaeval Church, denied this miracle and also the sacred character of the priests who could perform it. According to the Church, her clergy at ordination received through the laying on of the bishop’s hands some of the mysterious power that Christ had given to St. Peter, conferring on them the power also to forgive sins. No matter if the priest became idle or vicious, he still by virtue of his ordination retained his sacred character, and to lay hands upon him was to incur the wrath of God.

Even in the twelfth century, when St. Bernard travelled in Languedoc, he had been horrified to find ‘the sacraments no longer sacred and priests without respect’. His attempts at remonstrance were met with stones and threats, while the establishment of an ‘episcopal inquisition’ to inquire into and stamp out this hostility only increased Provençal bitterness and determination.

‘I would rather be a Jew,’ was an expression of disdain in the Middle Ages; but in Toulouse the people said, ‘I had rather be a priest,’ and the clergy who walked abroad were forced to conceal their tonsures for fear of assault.

‘Heresy can only be destroyed by solid instruction’ was Innocent III’s first verdict. ‘It is by preaching the truth that we sap foundations of error.’ He therefore sent some Cistercians to hold a mission in Languedoc, and in their company travelled a young Spaniard, Dominic de Guzman, burning to win souls for the Faith or suffer martyrdom. The Cistercians rode on horses with a large train of servants and with wagons drawn by oxen to carry their clothes and their food. This display aroused the scornful mirth of the Albigenses and Waldensians. ‘See,’ they cried, ‘the wealthy missionaries of a God who was humble and despised, loaded with honours!’

Everywhere were the same ridicule and contempt, and it was in this moment of failure that Dominic the Spaniard interposed, speaking earnestly to those who were with him of the contrast between the heretic ministers in their lives of poverty and self-denial with the luxury and worldliness of the local clergy, and even with the ostentatious parade of his fellow preachers. Because he had long practised austerities himself, wearing a hair shirt, fasting often, and denying himself every pleasure, the young Spaniard received a respectful hearing, and so fired the Cistercians with his enthusiasm that they sent away their horses and baggage-wagons, and set out on foot through the country to try and win the populace by different methods. With them went Dominic, barefoot, exulting in this opportunity of bearing witness in the face of danger to the Faith he held so precious.

The attitude of the men and women of Languedoc towards the papal mission was no longer derisive but it remained hostile, for they also held their Faith sacred, while all the racial prejudice of the countryside was thrown into the balance of opposition to Rome. Thus converts were few, and angry gatherings at which stones were thrown at the strangers many; and so matters drifted on and the mission grew more and more discouraged.

In 1208 occurred a violent crisis, for the papal legate, having excommunicated Count Raymond of Toulouse for appropriating certain Church lands and refusing to restore them, was murdered, and the Count himself implicated in the crime, seeing that, as in the case of Henry II and Becket, it had been his angry curses that had prompted some knights to do the deed. Innocent III at once declared the Count deposed, and preached a crusade against him and his subjects as heretics.

Twenty years of bloodshed and cruelty followed; for under the command of the French Count Simon de Montfort, an utterly unscrupulous and brutal general, the orthodox legions of northern France gathered at the papal summons to stamp out the independence of the south that they had always hated as a rival. Languedoc, her nobles and people united, fought hard for her religious and political freedom; but the struggle was uneven, and she was finally forced into submission. Thirty thousand of her sons and daughters had perished, and with them the civilization and culture that had made the name of Provence glorious in mediaeval Europe.

[Sidenote: The Albigensian Crusade]

The name of Dominic the Spaniard does not appear in the bloodstained annals of the Albigensian Crusade. He had advocated very different measures; and in 1216, pursuing his ideal, received from the Pope leave to form an Order of ‘Preaching Brothers’, modelled on the Monastic Orders, except that the ‘Friars’ (_Fratres_ = brothers), as these monks were called, were commanded not to live permanently in communities but to spend their lives travelling about from village to village, preaching as they went. They were to beg their daily bread; and the very Order itself was forbidden to acquire wealth, their founder hoping by this stringent rule to prevent the worldliness that had corrupted the other religious communities.

Dominic, or St. Dominic, for the enthusiasm of the mediaeval Church soon canonized him, was a son of his age in his intense devotion to the Faith; but his spiritual outlook was beyond the comprehension of all save a few. In Innocent III may be found a more typical figure of the early thirteenth century; and to Innocent’s standard, and not to that of their founder, the followers of St. Dominic for the most part conformed.

Pope Innocent had advocated the driving out of error by right teaching; but his failure by this method woke in him an exasperation that made the obstinate heresy of Languedoc seem a moral and social plague to be suppressed ruthlessly. Thorough in this undertaking as in all to which he set his mind and hand, he added to the slaughter of Simon de Montfort’s Crusade the terrible and efficient machinery of the Inquisition, and this during the pontificate of Gregory IX was transferred from the jurisdiction of local bishops to that of the Papal See. The Inquisitors, empowered to discover heresy and convert the heretic by torture and fire, were mainly Dominicans, selected for this task on account of their theological training and the very devotion to the Faith on which their founder had laid such stress.

The most important political fruits of the Albigensian Crusade were gathered by Philip II of France, who had himself stood aloof from the struggle, although permitting and encouraging his nobles to take the Cross. By the deposition and fall of his powerful tenant-in-chief, the Count of Toulouse, the centre and south of France, hitherto so proudly independent, lost a formidable ally; and large tracts of Poitou and Aquitaine fell under royal influence and were incorporated amongst the crown lands.

This process continued under Philip’s son, Louis VIII, who himself joined in the Crusade and marched with an army down the valley of the Rhone, capturing Avignon, and arriving almost at the gates of Toulouse. His sudden illness and death brought the campaign to an end; but his widow, Blanche of Castile, acting as regent for her son the boy King Louis IX, concluded a treaty with the new Count of Toulouse, Raymond VII, that left that noble a chastened and submissive vassal of both king and pope. Amongst other things he was forced to acknowledge one of the French king’s younger brothers as his successor in the County of Provence.

[Sidenote: St. Francis of Assisi]

It is pleasant to turn from the Albigensian Crusade, one of the blackest pictures of the Middle Ages, to its best and brightest, the story of St. Francis of Assisi.

In 1182 there was born at Assisi, a little Umbrian village, a boy whom his mother named John, but whom his father, a rich merchant, who had lately travelled in France, nicknamed ‘Francis’, or ‘the Frenchman’. St. Dominic had developed his fiery faith in an austere and intensely religious home; but Francis shared the light-hearted sociable intercourse of an Italian town, and in boyhood was distinguished only from his fellows by his generosity, innate purity, and irrepressible joy in life.

When he grew up, Francis went to fight with the forces of Assisi against the neighbouring city of Perugia, and was taken prisoner with some others of his fellow townsmen and thrown into a dungeon. The grumbling and bitterness of the majority during that twelve months of captivity were very natural; but Francis, unlike the rest, met the general discomfort with serene good-humour, even merriment, so that not for the last time in his career he was denounced as crazy.

On his release and return home, the merchant Bernadone wished his son to cut some figure in the world; and when the young man dreamed of shining armour and military glory, he provided him with all he had asked in the way of clothes and accoutrements and sent him in the train of a wealthy noble who was going to fight in Naples.

Half-way on his journey Francis turned back to Assisi. God, he believed, had told him to do so--why he could not tell. He tried to follow the frivolous life he had led before, but now the laughter of his companions seemed to ring hollow in his ears. It was as if they found pleasure in a shadow, while he alone was conscious that somewhere close was a reality of joy that, if he could only discover it, would illumine the whole world.

Then his call came; but to the comfortable citizens of Assisi it seemed the voice of madness. The young Bernadone, it was rumoured, had been seen in the company of lepers and entertaining beggars at his table. Almost all the money and goods he possessed he had given away; nay, there came a final word that he had sold his horse and left his home to live in a cave outside the town. The people shook their heads at such folly and sympathized with the old Bernadone at this end to his fine ambitions for his son.

Pietro Bernadone in truth had developed such a furious anger that he appealed to the Bishop of Assisi, entreating him either to persuade Francis to give up his new way of life or else to compel him to surrender the few belongings he had still left. Francis was then summoned, and in the bishop’s presence handed back to his father his purse and even his very clothes. Penniless he stood before Assisi who had often ridden through the streets a rich man’s heir, and it was a beggar’s grey robe with a white cross roughly chalked upon it that he adopted as the uniform of his new career.

His fellow townsmen had been moved by this complete renunciation; but mingled at first with their admiration was a half-scornful incredulity. They could understand saints ardent in defence of the Faith against heresy, fiery in their denunciation of all worldly pleasures, for such belonged to the religious atmosphere of the Middle Ages; but this son of Assisi, who raised no banner in controversy, and found an equal joy of life in the sunshine on a hill-side, in the warmth of a fire, in the squalor of a slum, was at first beyond their spiritual vision.