A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume III

A HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION Vol. III.
BY HENRY CHARLES LEA, AUTHOR OF “AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF SACERDOTAL CELIBACY,” “SUPERSTITION AND FORCE,” “STUDIES IN CHURCH HISTORY.”
IN THREE VOLUMES . VOL. III. NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE.
1901
Copyright, 1887, by Harper & Brothers. —— All rights reserved.

BOOK III.
SPECIAL FIELDS OF INQUISITORIAL ACTIVITY.
IN a former chapter we considered the Mendicants as an active agency in the suppression of heresy. One of the Orders, however, by no means restricted itself to this function, and we have now to examine the career of the Franciscans as the subjects of the spirit of persecuting uniformity which they did so much to render dominant.
It is a very curious fact that while Joachim’s metaphysical subtleties respecting the Trinity were ostentatiously condemned as a dangerous heresy, no one seems at the time to have recognized the far more perilous conclusions to be drawn from these apocalyptic reveries. So far from being burned as heretical, they were prized by popes, and Joachim was honored as a prophet until his audacious imitators and followers developed the revolutionary doctrines to which they necessarily led. To us, for the moment, their chief significance lies in the proof which they afford that the most pious minds confessed that Christianity was practically a failure. Mankind had scarce grown better under the New Law. Vices and passions were as unchecked as they had been before the coming of the Redeemer. The Church itself was worldly and carnal; in place of elevating man it had been dragged down to his level; it had proved false to its trust and was the exemplar of evil rather than the pattern of good. To such men as Joachim it was impossible that crime and misery should be the ultimate and irremediable condition of human life, and yet the Atonement had thus far done little to bring it nearer to the ideal. Christianity, therefore, could not be a finality in man’s existence upon earth; it was merely an intermediate condition, to be followed by a further development, in which, under the rule of the Holy Ghost, the law of love, fruitlessly inculcated by the gospel, should at last become the dominant principle, and men, released from carnal passions, should realize the glad promises so constantly held out before them and so miserably withheld in the performance. Joachim himself might seek to evade these deductions from his premises, yet others could not fail to make them, and nothing could be more audaciously subversive of the established spiritual and temporal order of the Church.