§ 6
Of later freethought under Islam there is little to record as regards literary output, but the phenomenon has never disappeared. Buckle, in his haste, declared that he could write the history of Turkish civilization on the back of his hand;[168] but even in Turkey, at a time of minimum friendly contact with other European life, there have been traces of a spirit of freethinking nearly as active as that astir in Christendom at the same period. Thus at the end of the seventeenth century we have circumstantial testimony to the vogue of a doctrine of atheistic Naturalism at Constantinople. The holders of this doctrine were called Muserin, a term said to mean “The true secret is with us.” They affirmed a creative and all-sustaining Nature, in which Man has his place like the plants and like the planets; and they were said to form a very large number, including Cadis and other learned as well as some renegade persons.[169] But Turkish culture-conditions in the eighteenth century were not such as to permit of intellectual progress on native lines; and to this day rationalism in that as in other Moslem countries is mainly a matter of reflex action set up by the impact of European scientific knowledge, or social contact. There is no modern rationalistic literature.
Motazilism, so-called, is still heard of in Arabia itself.[170] In the Ottoman Empire, indeed, it is little in evidence, standing now as it does for a species of broad-church liberalism, analogous to Christian Unitarianism;[171] but in Persia the ancient leaning to rationalism is still common. The old-world pantheism which we have seen conserved in Omar Khayyám gave rise in later centuries to similar developments among the Parsees both in Persia and in India; and from the sixteenth century onwards there are clear traces among them of a number of rationalizing heresies, varying from pantheism and simple deism to atheism and materialism.[172] In Persia to-day there are many thinkers of these casts of thought.[173] About 1830 a British traveller estimated that, assuming there were between 200,000 and 300,000 Sufis in the country, those figures probably fell greatly short of the number “secretly inclined to infidelity.”[174] Whatever be the value of the figures, the statement is substantially confirmed by later observers;[175] missionaries reporting independently that in Persia “most of the higher class, of the nobility, and of the learned professions ... are at heart infidels or sceptics.”[176] Persian freethought is of course, in large part, the freethought of ignorance, and seems to co-exist with astrological superstition;[177] but there is obviously needed only science, culture, and material development to produce, on such a basis, a renascence as remarkable as that of modern Japan.
The verdict of Vambéry is noteworthy: “In all Asia, with the exception of China, there is no land and no people wherein there is so little of religious enthusiasm as in Persia; where freethinkers are so little persecuted, and can express their opinions with so little disturbance; and where, finally, as a natural consequence, the old religious structure can be so easily shattered by the outbreak of new enthusiasts. Whoever has read Khayyám’s blasphemies against God and the prophet, his jesting verses against the holiest ceremonies and commandments of Islam; and whoever knows the vogue of this book and other works directed against the current religion, will not wonder that Bâb with the weapon of the Word won so many hearts in so short a time.”[178]
The view that Bâbism affiliates to rationalism is to be understood in the sense that the atmosphere of the latter made possible the growth of the former, its adherents being apparently drawn rather from the former orthodox.[179] The young founder of the sect, Mirza-Ali-Mohammed, declared himself “The Bâb,” i.e. “the Gate” (to the knowledge of God), as against the orthodox Moslem teachers who taught that “since the twelve Imâms, the Gate of Knowledge is closed.” Hence the name of the sect. Mirza-Ali, who showed a strong tendency to intolerance, quickly created an aggressive movement, which was for a time put down by the killing of himself and many of his followers.
Since his execution the sect has greatly multiplied and its doctrines have much widened. For a time the founder’s intolerant teachings were upheld by Ezél, the founder of one of the two divisions into which the party speedily fell; while his rival Béha, who gave himself out as the true Prophet, of whom the Bâb was merely the precursor, developed a notably cosmopolitan and equalitarian doctrine, including a vague belief in immortality, without heaven, hell, or purgatory. Ezél eventually abandoned his claims, and his followers now number less than two thousand; while the Béhaïtes number nearly three millions out of the seven millions of the Persian population, and some two millions in the adjacent countries. The son of Béha, Abbas Effendi, who bears the title of “The Great Branch,” now rules the cult, which promises to be the future religion of Persia.[180] One of the most notable phenomena of the earlier movement was the entrance of a young woman, daughter of a leading ulema, who for the first time in Moslem history threw off the regulation veil and preached the equality of the sexes.[181] She was one of those first executed. Persecution, however, has long ceased, and as a result of her lead the position of woman in the cult is exceptionally good. Thus the last century has witnessed within the sphere of Islam, so commonly supposed to be impervious to change, one of the most rapid and radical religious changes recorded in history. There is therefore no ground for holding that in other Moslem countries progress is at an end.
Everything depends, broadly speaking, on the possibilities of culture-contact. The changes in Persia are traceable to the element of heretical habit which has persisted from pre-Moslem times; future and more scientific development will depend upon the assimilation of European knowledge. In Egypt, before the period of European intervention, freethinking was at a minimum; and though toleration was well developed as regarded Christians and Jews, freethinking Moslems dared not avow themselves.[182] Latterly rationalism tends to spread in Egypt as in other Moslem countries; even under Mohammed Ali the ruling Turks had begun to exhibit a “remarkable indifference to religion,” and had “begun to undermine the foundations of El-Islam”; and so shrewd and dispassionate an observer as Lane expected that the common people would “soon assist in the work,” and that “the overthrow of the whole fabric may reasonably be expected to ensue at a period not very remote.”[183] To evolve such a change there will be required a diffusion of culture which is not at all likely to be rapid under any Government; but in any case the ground that is being lost by Islam in Egypt is not being retaken by Christianity.
In the other British dominions, Mohammedans, though less ready than educated Hindus to accept new ideas, cannot escape the rationalizing influence of European culture. Nor was it left to the British to introduce the rationalistic spirit in Moslem India. At the end of the sixteenth century the eclectic Emperor Akbar,[184] himself a devout worshipper of the Sun,[185] is found tolerantly comparing all religions,[186] depreciating Islam,[187] and arriving at such general views on the equivalence of all creeds, and on the improbability of eternal punishment,[188] as pass for liberal among Christians in our own day. If such views could be generated by a comparison of the creeds of pre-British India they must needs be encouraged now. The Mohammedan mass is of course still deeply fanatical, and habitually superstitious; but not any more immovably so than the early Saracens. In the eighteenth century arose the fanatical Wahabi sect, which aims at a puritanic restoration of primeval Islam, freed from the accretions of later belief, such as saint-worship; but the movement, though variously estimated, has had small success, and seems destined to extinction.[189] Of the traditional seventy-three sects in Islam only four to-day count as orthodox.[190]
It may be worth while, in conclusion, to note that the comparative prosperity or progressiveness of Islam as a proselytizing and civilizing force in Africa—a phenomenon regarded even by some Christians with satisfaction, and by some with alarm[191]—is not strictly or purely a religious phenomenon. Moslem civilization suits with negro life in Africa in virtue not of the teaching of the Koran, but of the comparative nearness of the Arab to the barbaric life. He interbreeds with the natives, fraternizes with them (when not engaged in kidnapping them), and so stimulates their civilization; where the European colonist, looking down on them as an inferior species, isolates, depresses, and degrades them. It is thus conceivable that there is a future for Islam at the level of a low culture-stage; but the Arab and Turkish races out of Africa are rather the more likely to concur in the rationalistic movement of the higher civilization.
Even in Africa, however, a systematic observer notes, and predicts the extension of, “a strong tendency on the part of the Mohammedans towards an easy-going rationalism, such as is fast making way in Algeria, where the townspeople and the cultivators in the more settled districts, constantly coming in contact with Europeans, are becoming indifferent to the more inconvenient among their Mohammedan observances, and are content to live with little more religion than an observance of the laws, and a desire to get on well with their neighbours.”[192] Thus at every culture-level we see the persistence of that force of intellectual variation which is the subject of our inquiry.
[1] The strict meaning of this term, given by Mohammed (“the true religion with God is Islam”; Sura, iii, 17), is “submission”—such being the attitude demanded by the Prophet. “Moslem” or “Muslim” means one who accepts Islam. Koran means strictly, not “book,” but “reading” or recitation. [↑]
[2] Rodwell’s tr. of the Koran, ed. 1861, pref. p. xv. [↑]
[3] Sale, Preliminary Discourse to tr. of the Koran, ed. 1833, i, 42; Muir’s Life of Mohammad, ed. Weir, 1912, p. 78. Cp. Freeman, History and Conquests of the Saracens, 1856, p. 35. The late Prof. Palmer, in introd. to his tr. of the Koran (Sacred Books of the East series), i, p. xv, says that “By far the greater number had ceased to believe in anything at all”; but this is an extravagance, confuted by himself in other passages—e.g. p. xi. [↑]
[4] These generalizations are always matched, and cancelled, by others from the same sources. Thus Prof. D. B. Macdonald writes of “the always flighty and skeptical Arabs,” and, a few pages later, of the God-fearing fatalism “of all Muslim thought, the faith to which the Semite ever returns in the end.” Development of Muslim Theology, etc. (in “Semitic Series”), New York, 1903, pp. 122, 126. [↑]
[5] The word means either convert or pervert; in Heb. and Syr. “heretic”; in Arabic, “orthodox.” It must not be confounded with Hanyfite, the name of an orthodox sect, founded by one Hanyfa. [↑]
[6] See Rodwell’s tr. of the Koran, ed. 1861, pref. pp. xvi, xvii; and Sura, xvi (lxxiii in Rodwell’s chron. arrangement), v. 121, p. 252, note 2. [↑]
[7] Sprenger, Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohammad, 1861–65, i, 83 sq. Cp. p. 60 sq. [↑]
[8] Rodwell, p. 497, note to Sura iii (xcvii) 19; and pref. p. xvi; Caussin de Perceval, Essai sur l’histoire des Arabes avant l’Islamisme, 1847, i, 321–26; Nicholson, Lit. Hist. of the Arabs, pp. 69, 149. “To the great mass of the citizens of Mecca the new doctrine was simply the Hanyfism to which they had become accustomed; and they did not at first trouble themselves at all about the matter.” Palmer, introd. to tr. of Koran, i, p. xxiv. Cp. Sprenger, as cited, i, 46–60, 65. [↑]
[9] The word Hanyf or Hanif recurs in Sura ii, 129; iii, 60, 89; iv, 124; vi, 79, 162; x, 105, xvi, 121; xxii, 32; xxx, 29. Cp. H. Derenbourg, La science des religions et l’Islamisme, 1886, pp. 42–43. Palmer’s translation, marred as it unfortunately is by slanginess, is on such points specially trustworthy. Rodwell’s does not always indicate the use of the word Hanyf; but the German version of Ullmann, the French of Kanimirski, and Sale’s, do not indicate it at all. Sprenger (p. 43) derives the Hanyfs from Essenes who had almost lost all knowledge of the Bible. Cp. p. 67. Prof. Macdonald writes that the word “is of very doubtful derivation. But we have evidence from heathen Arab poetry that these Hanifs were regarded as much the same as Christian monks, and that the term hanif was used as a synonym for rahib, monk.” Work cited, p. 125. [↑]
[10] Sprenger, as cited, p. 13. [↑]
[11] Cp. Sale’s Prelim. Discourse, as cited, i, 38; and Palmer, introd. p. xv; and Nicholson, pp. 139–40. [↑]
[12] Al Mostaraf, cited by Pococke, Specimen Histor. Arab. p. 136; Sale, Prelim. Disc. as cited, p. 45. [↑]
[13] Cp. Nicholson, pp. 155–56 and refs. [↑]
[14] Sale, as cited, pp. 39–41. [↑]
[15] Palmer, introd. to his Haroun Alraschid, 1882, p. 14. Cp. Derenbourg, La science des religions et l’Islamisme, p. 44, controverting Kuenen. [↑]
[16] Hibbert Lectures, On National and Universal Religions, ed. 1901, p. 21 and Note II. [↑]
[18] Nicholson, Lit. Hist. of the Arabs, p. 145. [↑]
[19] Rodwell, note to Sura xcvi (R. i), 10. [↑]
[20] Sprenger estimates that at his death the number really converted to his doctrine did not exceed a thousand. Cp. Nicholson, pp. 153–58. [↑]
[21] Renan ascribes the idea wholly to Omar. Études d’histoire et de critique, ed. 1862, p. 250. The faithful have preserved a sly saying that “Omar was many a time of a certain opinion, and the Koran was then revealed accordingly.” Nöldeko, Enc. Brit. art. on Koran, in Sketches from Eastern History, 1892, p. 28. On the other hand, Sedillot decides (Histoire des Arabes, 1854. p. 60) that “in Mohammed it is the political idea that dominates.” So Nicholson (p. 169): “At Medina the days of pure religious enthusiasm have passed away for ever, and the prophet is overshadowed by the statesman.” Cp. pp. 173, 175. [↑]
[22] On the measure of racial unity set up by Abyssinian attacks as well as by the pretensions of the Byzantine and Persian empires, see Sedillot, pp. 30, 38. Cp. Van Vloten, Recherches sur la domination arabe, Amsterdam, 1894. pp. 1–4. 7. [↑]
[23] Professor Stanilas Guyard, La Civilisation Musulmane, 1884, p. 22. [↑]
[24] Cp. Renan, Études, pp. 257–66; Hauri, Der Islam in seinem Einfluss auf das Leben seiner Bekenner, 1882, pp. 64–65; Nicholson, p. 235. It was at Medina that a strict Mohammedanism first arose. [↑]
[25] Nicholson, pp. 178–79, and ref. [↑]
[26] Hauri, Der Islam, p. 64. [↑]
[27] Cp. Montesquieu, Grandeur et décadence des Romains, ch. 22. [↑]
[30] Van Vloten, p. 70 and passim. [↑]
[31] Prof. Guyard, as cited, pp. 16, 51; C. E. Oelsner, Des effets de la religion de Mohammed, etc., 1810, p. 130. [↑]
[32] Guyard, p. 21; Palmer, Haroun Alraschid, introd. p. 19. [↑]
[33] The alleged destruction of the library of Alexandria by Omar is probably a myth, arising out of a story of Omar’s causing some Persian books to be thrown into the water. See Prof. Bury’s notes in his ed. of Gibbon, v, 452–54. Cp. Oelsner, as cited, pp. 142–43. [↑]
[34] Sura, vi, 25, 29; xix, 67; xxvii, 68–70; liv, 2; lxxxiii, 10–13. According to lviii, 28, however, some polytheists denied the future state. [↑]
[35] Cp. Renan, Études d’histoire et de critique, pp. 232–34. [↑]
[36] Renan, as cited, p. 232. [↑]
[37] Id. p. 235. Renan and Sprenger conflict on this point, the former having regard, apparently, to the bulk of the poetry, the latter to parts of it. [↑]
[38] Sedillot, p. 39. One of these was Zaid. Nicholson, p. 149. [↑]
[39] See the passage (Sura ii) cited with praise by the sympathetic Mr. Bosworth Smith in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, 2nd ed. p. 181; where also delighted praise is given to the “description of Infidelity” in Sura xxiv, 39–40. The “infidels” in question were simply non-Moslems. [↑]
[40] The Flight (of the Prophet to Medina from Mecca, in 622), from which begins the Mohammedan era. [↑]
[41] Sale, as cited, p. 160. [↑]
[42] Weil, Geschichte der Chalifen, ii, 261–64; Dugat, Histoire des philosophes et des théologiens Mussulmans, 1878, pp. 48–55; H. Steiner, Die Mu`taziliten, oder die Freidenker im Islam, 1865, pp. 49–50; Guyard, p. 36; Sale, p. 161 (sec. viii); Nicholson, p. 222 sq. The term Motazila broadly means “dissenter,” or “belonging to a sect.” [↑]
[44] Palmer, Introd. to Haroun Alraschid, p. 14. [↑]
[45] As to the Persian influence on Arab thought, cp. A. Müller, Der Islam, i, 469; Palmer, as last cited; Weil, Geschichte der Chalifen, ii, 114 ff.; Nicholson, p. 220; Van Vloten, Recherches sur la domination arabe, p. 43. Van Vloten’s treatise is a lucid sketch of the socio-political conditions set up in Persia by the Arab conquest. [↑]
[47] G. Dugat, Histoire des philosophes et des théologiens Mussulmans, p. 44; Sale, pp. 161, 174–78. [↑]
[48] Dugat, p. 55; Steiner, p. 4; Sale, p. 162. [↑]
[49] “Motazilism represents in Islam a Protestantism of the shade of Schleiermacher” (Renan, Averroès et l’Averroïsme, 3e ed. p. 104). Cp. Syed Ameer Ali, Crit. Exam. of Life of Mohammed, pp. 300–308; Sale, p. 161. [↑]
[50] Dugat, pp. 28, 44; Guyard, p. 36; Steiner, pp. 24–25; Renan, Averroès, p. 101. The Kadarites, as Sale notes (pp. 164–65), are really an older group than the Motazilites, so-called, their founder having rejected predestination before Wasil did. Kuenen (Hibbert Lect. p. 47) writes as if all the Motazilites were maintained of freewill, but they varied. See Prof. Macdonald, as cited, p. 135 sq. [↑]
[51] Sale, pp. 165, 172–73. [↑]
[52] For a view of the various schools of Sifatites see Sale, pp. 166–74. [↑]
[53] Guyard, pp. 37–38; G. D. Osborn, The Khalifs of Baghdad, 1878, p. 134. [↑]
[54] Steiner, p. 16. Major Osborn (work cited, p. 136) attributes their rise to the influence of Eastern Christianity, but gives no proof. [↑]
[55] Guyard, p. 40. Cp. Sale, p. 176; Van Vloten, p. 43. [↑]
[56] Dugat, p. 34. Thus the orthodox sect of Hanyfites were called by one writer followers of reason, since they relied rather on their judgment than on tradition. [↑]
[57] Steiner, p. 5; Nicholson, p. 370. [↑]
[58] Steiner, pp. 5, 9, 88–89; Sale, p. 161; Macdonald, p. 140. [↑]
[59] Sedillot, Hist. des Arabes, p. 335; Prof. A. Müller, Der Islam (in Oncken’s series), i, 470; Ueberweg, i, 402. [↑]
[60] Ueberweg, p. 403; Weil, Gesch. der Chalifen, ii, 281. [↑]
[61] For an orthodox account of the beginnings of freethinking (called zendēkism) see Weil, ii, 214. Cp. p. 261; also Tabari’s Chronicle, pt. v, ch. xcvii; and Renan, Averroès, p. 103. Already, among the Ommayade Khalifs, Yezid III held the Motazilite tenet of freewill. Weil, p. 260. [↑]
[62] Nicholson, pp. 372, 375. The name zendēk (otherwise spelt zindiq) seems to have originally meant a Manichæan. Browne, Literary History of Persia, ii (1906), 295; Nicholson, p. 375 and ref. Macdonald, p. 134, thinks it literally meant “initiate.” [↑]
[63] Steiner, p. 8. An association called “Brethren of Purity” or “Sincere Brethren” seem to have carried Motazilism far, though they aimed at reconciling philosophy with orthodoxy. They were in effect the encyclopedists of Arab science. Ueberweg, i, 411; Nicholson, p. 370 sq. See Dr. F. Dieterici, Die Naturanschauung und Naturphilosophie der Araber im 10ten Jahrhundert, aus den schriften der lautern Brüder, 1861, Vorrede, p. viii, and Flügel, as there cited. Flügel dates the writings of the Brethren about 970; but the association presumably existed earlier. Cp. Renan, Averroès, p. 104; and S. Lane-Poole’s Studies in a Mosque, 1893, ch. vi, as to their performance. Prof. Macdonald is disposed to regard them as “part of the great Fatimid propaganda which honeycombed the ground everywhere under the Sunnite Abassids,” but admits that the Fatimid movement is “the great mystery of Muslim history” (pp. 165–70). [↑]
[64] Sale, pp. 82–83, note. [↑]
[65] He made five pilgrimages to Mecca, and died on the last, thus attaining to sainthood. [↑]
[66] Weil, Gesch. der Chalifen, ii, 81; Dugat, pp. 59–61; A. Müller, Der Islam, i. 470; Macdonald, p. 134. In Mansour’s reign was born Al Allaf, “Sheikh of the Motazilites.” [↑]
[67] Dugat, p. 62. The Hâyetians, who had Unitarian Christian leanings, also held by metempsychosis. Sale, p. 163. [↑]
[68] Nicholson, p. 371 and refs. [↑]
[69] Dugat, p. 71. He persecuted Zendēks in general. Nicholson, pp. 373–74. [↑]
[70] Id. p. 72; Sale, pp. 184–85; Tabari’s Chronicle, pt. v, ch. xcvii, Zotenberg’s tr. 1874, iv, 447–53. Tabari notes (p. 448) that all the Moslem theologians agree in thinking zendēkism much worse than any of the false religions, since it rejects all and denies God as well as the Prophet. [↑]
[71] Cp. Steiner, pp. 55 sq., 66 sq.; Ueberweg, Hist. of Philos., i, 405. [↑]
[72] Dugat, p. 76. See Sale, pp. 82–83, 162–63, as to the champions of this principle. [↑]
[73] Sale, p. 83; Macdonald, p. 150. [↑]
[74] Dugat, p. 79; Osborn, The Khalifs of Baghdad, p. 195. [↑]
[75] Palmer, Haroun Alraschid, p. 82. They were really theists. [↑]
[76] Weil, Geschichte der Chalifen, ii, 215, 261, 280; A. Müller, Der Islam, pp. 514–15. “It was believed that he was at heart a zindiq.” Nicholson, p. 368. [↑]
[78] Prof. Macdonald, as cited, p. 154. [↑]
[80] See extract by Major Osborn, Khalifs, p. 250. [↑]
[81] Osborn, Khalifs, p. 249. [↑]
[82] Macdonald, pp. 154–58, 167. [↑]
[83] Nicholson, pp. 358–59. He it was who first caused to be measured a degree of the earth’s surface. The attempt was duly denounced as atheistic by a leading theologian, Takyuddin. Montucla, Hist. des Mathématiques, éd. Lalande, i, 355 sq.; Draper, Conflict of Religion and Science, p. 109. [↑]
[84] A. Müller, Der Islam, i, 509 sq.; Weil, Gesch. der Chalifen, ii, 280 ff. [↑]
[85] Dugat, pp. 105–11; Sale, p. 82. Apart from this one issue, general tolerance seems to have prevailed. Osborn, Khalifs, p. 265. [↑]
[86] Dugat, p. 112; Steiner, p. 79. According to Abulfaragius, Motawakkel had the merit of leaving men free to believe what they would as to the creation of the Koran. Sale, p. 82. [↑]
[87] A good analysis is given by Dugat, pp. 337–48. [↑]
[88] The whole of Aristotle, except, apparently, the Politics, had been translated in the time of the philosopher Avicenna (fl. 1000). [↑]
[89] Macdonald, pp. 200, 205–206. [↑]
[90] Steiner, Die Mu’taziliten, pp. 10–11, following Gazzali (Al Gazel); Weil, Gesch. der Chalifen, iii, 72. [↑]
[91] Guyard, pp. 41–42; Renan, Averroès, pp. 104–5; Macdonald, p. 186 sq. The cultivators of Kalâm were called Motecallemîn. [↑]
[92] Ueberweg, i, 405, 414; Steiner, p. 11; Whewell, Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, 3rd ed. i, 193–94. Compare the laudatory account of Al Gazzali by Prof. Macdonald (pt. iii, ch. iv), who pronounces him “certainly the most sympathetic figure in the history of Islam” (p. 215). [↑]
[93] Hence, among other things, a check on the practice of anatomy, religious feeling being opposed to it under Islam as under Christianity. Dugat, pp. 62–63. [↑]
[95] Browne, Literary History of Persia, ii (1906), 290, 293; R. A. Nicholson, Literary History of the Arabs, 1907, p. 318. [↑]
[96] Browne, as cited, p. 292. Cp. Von Kremer, Culturgeschichte des Orients, 1875–77, ii, 386–95; Macdonald, p. 199. [↑]
[97] Dugat, p. 167; Weil, iii, 72. [↑]
[99] Nicholson, pp. 314–15. [↑]
[100] The Diwan of Abu’l-Ala, by Henry Baerlein, 1908, st. 36. Cp. 1, 37, 41, 42, 53, 81, 86, 94, and the extracts given by Nicholson, pp. 316–23. [↑]
[102] Decline and Fall, ch. lvii. Bohn ed. vi, 382, and note. Cp. E. H. Whinfield, The Quatrains of Omar Khayyám, 1882, p. 4. [↑]
[103] See the preface to Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát. [↑]
[104] In one quatrain, of doubtful authenticity, is the line “Khayyám, who longtime stitched the tents of learning” (Whinfield, xxxviii), which excludes the idea of literal handicraft. [↑]
[105] J. K. M. Shirazi, Life of Omar Al-Khayyámi, ed. 1895, pp. 30–41. [↑]
[113] Id. pp. 69–76, 86–88. [↑]
[114] Cited in introd. to Dole’s variorum ed. of the Rubáiyát, 1896, i, p. xix. Cp. Macdonald, p. 199. [↑]
“Dost thou desire to taste eternal bliss?
Vex thine own heart, but never vex another.” (Whinfield, vi.)
“Seek not the Kaaba, rather seek a heart.” (Id. vii.)
This note is often repeated. E.g. xxxii, li. [↑]
[116] See in the very competent translation of Mrs. H. M. Cadell (who remarked that “Fitzgerald has rather written a poem upon Omar than translated him”), quatrains 12, 14, 15, 20, 28, 29, 42, 45, 48, 51d, 85, 88b, 133, 141, 143. etc.; in the artistically turned version of Mr. A. H. Talbot, which follows very faithfully the literal prose translation of Mr. Heron-Allen, Nos. 1, 3, 15, 18, 19, 24, 33, 41, 45, 59, 72, 91, 115, 123, 148; and in Whinfield’s version, Nos. 10, 25, 32, 41, 45, 46, 62, 68, 77, 84, 87, 104, 105, 111, 113, 118, 142, 144, 148, 151, 157, 161, 179, 195, 200, 201, 203, 216. [↑]
[117] Shirazi, pp. 102–108. Early in the thirteenth century he was denounced by a Sufi mystic as an “unhappy philosopher, atheist, and materialist.” Browne, Lit. Hist. of Persia, ii, 250. Abu’l-Ala, of course, was similarly denounced. [↑]
[118] Whinfield, cited by Browne, pp. 109–110. [↑]
[119] Cp. Mrs. Cadell, The Rub’yat of Omar Khayam, 1899. Garnett’s introd. pp. xvii, xviii–xxi, xxiv, and Shirazi, as cited, pp. 79–80. [↑]
[120] Fitzgerald’s pref. 4th ed. p. xiii; Whinfield, No. 147. Cp. quatrains cited in art. Sufiism, in Relig. Systems of the World, 2nd ed. pp. 325–26. [↑]
[121] Cp. Whinfield, p. 86, note on No. 147. [↑]
[122] Guyard, as cited, p. 42. But cp. Ueberweg, i, 411; Nicholson, pp. 233–34. [↑]
[123] It is not impossible, Max Müller notwithstanding, that the name may have come originally from the Greek sophoi, “the wise,” though it is usually connected with sufi = the woollen robe worn by the Sufite. There are other etymologies. Cp. Fraser, Histor. and Descrip. Account of Persia, 1834, p. 323, note; Dugat, p. 326; and art. Sufiism in Relig. Systems of the World, 2nd ed. p. 315. On the Sufi system in general see also Max Müller, Psychol. Relig. Lect. vi. [↑]
[124] Cp. Renan, Averroès, p. 293, as to Sufi latitudinarianism. [↑]
[125] Guyard, p. 44; Relig. Systems, p. 319. [↑]
[126] Hafiz in his own day was reckoned impious by many. Cp. Malcolm, Sketches of Persia, 1827, ii, 100. [↑]
[127] Fitzgerald’s pref. p. x. [↑]
[128] Yet he was disposed to put to death those who claimed mystic intercourse with Deity. Sale, pp. 177–78. [↑]
[129] Whose Salaman and Absal, tr. by Fitzgerald, is so little noticed in comparison with the Rubáiyát of Omar. [↑]
[130] E. C. Browne, in Religious Systems, as cited, p. 321; Dugat, p. 331. [↑]
[131] Shirazi, pp. 22–28; Fitzgerald’s pref. following Mirkhond; Fraser, Persia, p. 329. [↑]
[132] Cp. Dugat, p. 336; Syed Ameer Ali, pp. 311–15; Gobineau, Les religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie centrale, 2e édit. p. 68. [↑]
[133] Sale, p. 176. The same doctrine is fairly ancient in India. (Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts, v, 313, note.) A belief that hell-fire will not be eternal was held among the Motazilite sect of Jâhedhians. Sale, p. 164. The Thamamians, again, held that at the resurrection all infidels, idolaters, atheists, Jews, Christians, Magians, and heretics, shall be reduced to dust. Id. ib. [↑]
[134] Cp. Renan, Averroès, p. 101. Cp. p. 172. [↑]
[135] Renan’s tr. in Averroès, p. 166. The wording of the last phrase suggests a misconstruction. [↑]
[137] Renan, Averroès, pp. 104–107. [↑]
[138] Steiner, Die Mu’taziliten, p. 6. [↑]
[139] Ueberweg, i, 412; Renan, Averroès, pp. 44, 96. [↑]
[140] E. G. Browne, Lit. Hist. of Persia, ii, 107. [↑]
[141] Whom he pronounced a pagan and an infidel. Hauréau, II, i, 29. [↑]
[142] Cp. Renan, Averroès, pp. 57, 96–98; Whewell, Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, 3rd. ed. I, 193. Renan, following Degenerando (cp. Whewell, as cited), credits Gazzali with anticipating Hume’s criticism of the idea of causation; but Gazzali’s position is that of dogmatic theism, not of naturalism. See Lewes, Hist. of Philos., 4th ed. ii, 57. [↑]
[143] Hauréau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, Ptie II, i, 35. [↑]
[144] Cp. Seignobos, Hist. de la Civ. ii, 58; Stanley Lane-Poole, The Moors in Spain, pref.; Milman, Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ix. 108–18; U. R. Burke, History of Spain, i, ch. 16; Baden Powell, as cited, pp. 94–104; Gebhart, Origines de la Renaissance en Italie, 1879, pp. 185–89; and post, ch. x. [↑]
[145] Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, p. 97; Whewell, Hist. of the Induct. Sciences, 3rd ed. ii. 273–74. [↑]
[146] Dr. L. Leclerc, Hist. de la Médecine Arabe, 1876, i, 462; Dr. E. von Meyer, Hist. of Chemistry, Eng. tr. 2nd ed. p. 28. [↑]
[147] Cp. Buckle, Introd. to Hist. of Civ. in England, 1-vol. ed. p. 70. [↑]
[148] Lane-Poole, The Moors in Spain, p. 73. [↑]
[149] Properly Morabethin—men of God or of religion; otherwise known as “Marabouts.” [↑]
[151] Cp. Dozy, Hist. des Musulmans d’Espagne, iii, 248–86; Ueberweg, i, 415. [↑]
[152] Renan, Averroès, pp. 98–99. [↑]
[153] Ueberweg. i. 415; Renan, Averroès, pp. 32, 99. [↑]
[154] Renan, Averroès, p. 99. [↑]
[155] Renan, Averroès, p. 145. [↑]
[158] Renan, Averroès, pp. 160–62. [↑]
[159] Ueberweg, i, 416; Steiner, p. 6; Renan, Averroès, p. 162 sq. [↑]
[160] Ueberweg, i, 460; Renan, pp. 258, 275. [↑]
[161] Renan, Averroès, p. 169, and references. [↑]
[163] Id. p. 5. Cp. the Avertissement, p. iii. [↑]
[164] Renan, Averroès, pp. 31–36. Renan surmises that the popular hostility to the philosophers, which was very marked, was largely due to the element of the conquered Christians, who were noted for their neglect of astronomy and natural science. [↑]
[165] Cp. Ueberweg. i. 415–17. [↑]
[166] Cp. Flint, History of the Philosophy of History, ed. 1893, vol. i, p. 169. [↑]
[167] Cp. Flint, p. 129, as to their hostility to him. [↑]
[168] Huth, Life and Writings of Buckle, ii, 171. [↑]
[169] Ricaut, Present State of the Ottoman Empire, 1686, p. 245. [↑]
[170] Dugat, p. 59. The Ameer Ali Syed, Moulvi, M.A., LL.B., whose Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of Mohammed appeared in 1873, writes as a Motazilite of a moderate type. [↑]
[171] Macdonald, pp. 120, 196, 286. [↑]
[172] A. Franck, Études Orientales, 1861, pp. 241–48, citing the Dabistan. [↑]
[173] Gobineau, Les religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie centrale, 2e édit. ch. v; J. K. M. Shirazi, Life of Omar Khayyámi, ed. 1905, p. 102. The latter writer notes, however, that “the cultured classes, who ought to know better, are at no pains to dissipate the existing religious prejudice against one [Omar] of whose reputation every Persian may well feel proud.” “At the present time ... the name of Omar is no less execrated by the Shi-ite mob in Persia than it was in his own day.” Id. p. 108. [↑]
[174] Fraser, Persia, p. 330. This writer (p. 239) describes Sufiism as “the superstition of the freethinker,” and as “often assumed as a cloak to cover entire infidelity.” [↑]
[175] E.g., Dr. Wills, The Land of the Lion and the Sun, ed. 1891, p. 339. [↑]
[176] Smith and Dwight, Missionary Researches in Armenia, 1834, p. 340. Cp. Rev. H. Southgate, Tour through Armenia, etc. 1840, ii, 153; and Morier’s Hadji Baba of Ispahan (1824), ch. xlvii, near end. [↑]
[177] Fraser, Persia, p. 331; Malcolm, Sketches of Persia, ii, 108; Gobineau, as cited, ch. v. [↑]
[178] H. Vambéry, Der Islam im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 1875, pp. 32–33. Vambéry further remarks: “The half-fanatical, half-freethinking tone of Persians has often surprised me in my controversies with the most zealous Schiites.” [↑]
[179] As to the rise of this sect see Gobineau, as cited, pp. 141–358; E. G. Browne’s The Episode of the Bâb; and his lecture on Bâbism in Religious Systems of the World. Cp. Renan, Les Apôtres, pp. 378–81. [↑]
[180] H. Arakélian, Mémoire sur Le Bâbisme en Perse, in the Actes du Premier Congrès International d’Histoire des Religions, Paris, 1902, 2 Ptie. Fasc. i. [↑]
[181] Gobineau, pp. 167 sq.; 180 sq.; Arakélian, p. 94. [↑]
[182] Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 5th ed. 1871, i, 349, 356. “There are, I believe,” says Lane (writing originally in 1836), “very few professed Muslims who are really unbelievers; and these dare not openly avow their unbelief through fear of losing their heads for their apostacy. I have heard of two or three such who have been rendered so by long and intimate intercourse with Europeans; and have met with one materialist, who has often had long discussions with me.” [↑]
[183] Id. ii, 309. (Suppl. III, “Of Late Innovations in Egypt.”) [↑]
[184] See the documents reproduced by Max Müller, Introd. to the Science of Religion, ed. 1882, App. 1. [↑]
[186] Id. pp. 210, 217, 224, 225. [↑]
[189] Guyard, p. 45; Steiner, p. 5, note; Lane, The Modern Egyptians, ed. 1871, i. 137–38. Cp. Spencer, Study of Sociology, ch. xii, p. 292; Bosworth Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, 2nd ed. pp. 315–19. [↑]
[190] Derenbourg, p. 72; Steiner, p. 1; Lane, i, 79. [↑]
[191] Cp. Bosworth Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism, Lectures I and IV; Canon Isaac Taylor, address to Church Congress at Wolverhampton, 1887, and letters to Times, Oct. and Nov. 1887. On the other or anti-Mohammedan side see Canon Robinson, Hausaland, 3rd ed. 1900, p. 186 sq.—a somewhat obviously prejudiced argument. See pp. 190–91. [↑]
[192] Sir Harry H. Johnston, History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races, 1899, p. 283. [↑]
Chapter IX
CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES
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.
§ 1. Heresy in Byzantium
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-worship[4] 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 fanatical[7] 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 Pentateuch[13]—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 sympathetically[20] 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 Bogomilians[27] (= 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).
§ 2. Critical Heresy in the West
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 Cœlestius; 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 Christian[32] 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 impression[33] 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 Nominalism[40] and the first western revival of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, howbeit by way of accommodation to the doctrine of the Church.[41]
That John the Scot was an Irishman remains practically certain, even if we give up the term “Erigena,” which, as has been shown by Floss, the most careful editor of his works, is not found in the oldest MSS. The reading there is Ierugena, which later shades into Erugena and Eriugena. (Cp. Ueberweg, i, 359; Poole, pp. 55–56, note; Dr. Th. Christlieb, Leben und Lehre des Johannes Scotus Erigena, 1860, p. 14 sq.; and Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie im Mittelalter, 1861, pp. 38–40.) From this elusive cognomen no certain inference can be drawn, too many being open; though the fact that John had himself coined the term Graiugena for a late Greek writer makes it likely that he called himself Ierugena in the sense of “born in the holy (island)” = Ireland. But the name Scotus, occurring without the Ierugena, is common in old MSS.; and it is almost impossible that any save a Scot of Ireland should have possessed the scholarship of John in the ninth century. In the west, Greek scholarship and philosophy had been special to Ireland from the time of Pelagius; and it is from Greek sources that John draws his inspiration and cast of thought. M. Taillandier not unjustly calls the Ireland of that era “l’île des saints, mais aussi l’île des libres penseurs.” (Scot Érigène et la philosophie scolastique, 1843, p. 64.) To the same effect Huber, pp. 40–41. In writing that Johannes “was of Scottish nationality, but was probably born and brought up in Ireland,” Ueberweg (i, 358) obscures the fact that the people of Ireland were the Scoti of that period. All the testimony goes to show “that Ireland was called Scotia, and its ruling people Scoti, from the first appearance of these names down to the eleventh century. But that [the] present Scotland was called Scotia, or its people Scoti, before the eleventh century, not so much as one single authority can be produced” (Pinkerton, Enquiry into the History of Scotland, 1789, ii, 237). Irish Scots gave their name to Scotland, and it was adopted by the Teutonic settlers.
While the land of John the Scot’s birth is thus fairly certain, the place of his death remains a mystery. Out of a statement by Asser that King Alfred made one John, a priest, Abbot of Athelney, and that the said Abbot was murdered at the altar by hired assassins, there grew a later story that Alfred made John the Scot Abbot of Malmesbury, and that he was slain with the styli of two of his pupils. It is clear that the John of Asser was an “Old Saxon,” and not the philosopher; and it is difficult to doubt that the second story, which arises in the twelfth century, is a hearsay distortion of the first. Cp. Christlieb, who argues (p. 42 sq.) for two Johns, one of them Scotus, and both assassinated, with Huber, who sets forth (p. 108 sq.) the view here followed. There is really no adequate ground for believing that John the Scot was ever a priest. We know not where or when he died; but the presumption is that it was in France, and not long after the death of his patron Charles—877. (Huber, p. 121.)
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 Praedestinatione[43] (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 sense[51] 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 spiritual[52]—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]
Gottschalk later challenged a fourfold ordeal of “boiling water, oil, and pitch.” His primary doctrine had been the immutability of the divine will; but he brought himself to the belief that God would work a miracle in his favour. His conception of “foreordination” was thus framed solely with regard to the conception of a future state. The ordeal was not granted, the orthodox party fearing to try conclusions, and he died without the sacraments, rather than recant. Then began the second reaction of feeling against his chief persecutor, Hincmar. Neander, vi, 190.
A recent writer, who handles very intelligently and temperately the problem of persecution, urges that in that connection “one ought not to lay great stress on the old argument of the Hallam and Macaulay school as to the strength of vested interests, though it has a certain historical importance, because the priest must subsist somehow” (Religious Persecution: a Study in Psychology, by E. S. P. Haynes, 1904, p. 4). If the “certain importance” be in the ratio of the certainty of the last adduced fact, the legitimate “stress” on the argument in question would seem sufficient for most purposes. The writer adds the note: “It is not unfair, however, to quote the case of Dr. Middleton, who, writing to Lord Radnor in 1750 in respect of his famous work on Miracles, admits frankly enough that he would never have given the clergy any trouble, had he received some good appointment in the church.” If the essayist has met with no other historic fact illustrative of the play of vested interests in ecclesiastical history, it is extremely candid of him to mention that one. Later on, however, he commits himself to the proposition that “the history of medieval persecution leads one to infer that the clergy as a whole were roused to much greater activity by menaces to their material comforts in this world than by an altruistic anxiety for the fate of lay souls in the next” (id. p. 60. Cp. p. 63). This amount of “stress” on vested interests will probably satisfy most members of the Hallam and Macaulay school; and is ample for the purposes of the present contention.
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 reflection[65] 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.
Berengar’s forced prevarications, which are unsympathetically set forth by Mosheim (11 Cent., pt. ii, ch. iii, §§ 13–18), are made much more intelligible in the sympathetic survey of Neander (vi, 225–60). See also the careful inquiry of Reuter, Gesch. der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, i, 91 sq. As to Berengar’s writings, see further Murdock’s note to Mosheim, last cit., § 18. The formal compromise forced on him by Pope Hildebrand, who was personally friendly to him, consisted in adding to his denial of the change of the bread and wine into “body and blood” the doctrine that the body and blood were “superadded to the bread and wine in and by their consecration.” This formula, of course, did not represent the spirit of Berengar’s polemic. As to the disputes on the subject, which ran to the most unseemly length of physiological detail, see Voltaire, Essai sur les Mœurs, ch. xlv. It is noteworthy that Augustine had very expressly set forth a metaphorical interpretation of the Eucharist—De doctrina christiana, l. iii, c. 16. But just as the Church later set aside the verdict of Thomas Aquinas that the Virgin Mary was “born in sin,” so did it reverse Augustine’s judgment on the Eucharist. Always the more irrational view carried the day, as being more propitious to sacerdotal claims.
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.
§ 3. Popular Anti-Clerical Heresy
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 œcumenical 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 Valdis[113]—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.
§ 4. Heresy in Southern France
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 Crusades[135] 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 teaching[137]—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 faith[139] 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 Inquisition[144] 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’ service[148]—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 Christendom[156] than any conceivable combination of other causes could ever have done in any age.
According to a long current fiction, it was the Pope who first faltered when “the whole of Christendom demanded the renewal of those scenes of massacre” (Sismondi, Crusades, p. 95); but this is disproved by the discovery of two letters in which, shortly before his death, he excitedly takes on himself the responsibility for all the bloodshed (Michelet, Hist. de France, vii, introd. note to § iv). Michelet had previously accepted the legend which he here rejects. The bishops assembled in council at Lavaur, in 1213, demanded the extermination of the entire population of Toulouse. Finally, the papal policy is expressly decreed in the third canon of the Fourth General Council of Lateran, 1215. On that canon see The Statutes of the Fourth General Council of Lateran, by the Rev. John Evans, 1843. On the crusade in general, cp. Lea, History of the Inquisition, bk. i, ch. iv; Gieseler, Per. III, Div. iii, § 89.
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 hundreds[157] (all being done “with the utmost joy”)[158]; though the “White Company” organized by the Bishop of Toulouse[159] 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 Languedoc[161] 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 Languedoc[162]; 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 ideal[163]; after Simon de Montfort had died in the odour of sanctity[164] 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 Europe[165]; and about 1231 we find Gregory IX burning a multitude of them at the gates of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome[166] 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.
It is still common to speak of the personnel of the Inquisition as disinterested, and to class its crimes as “conscientious.” Buckle set up such a thesis, without due circumspection, as a support to one of his generalizations. (See the present writer’s ed. of his Introduction to the History of Civilization in England, pp. 105–108, notes, and the passages in McCrie and Llorente there cited.) Dr. Lea, whose History of the Inquisition is the greatest storehouse of learning on the subject, takes up a similar position, arguing (i, 239): “That the men who conducted the Inquisition, and who toiled sedulously in its arduous, repulsive, and often dangerous labour, were thoroughly convinced that they were furthering the kingdom of God, is shown by the habitual practice of encouraging them with the remission of sins, similar to that offered for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land”—a somewhat surprising theorem. Parallel reasoning would prove that soldiers never plunder and are always Godly; that the crusaders were all conscientious men; and that policemen never take bribes or commit perjury. The interpretation of history calls for a less simple-minded psychology. That there were devoted fanatics in the Inquisition as in the Church is not to be disputed; that both organizations had economic bases is certain; and that the majority of office-bearers in both, in the ages of faith, had regard to gain, is demonstrated by all ecclesiastical history.
Dr. Lea’s own History shows clearly enough (i, 471–533) that the Inquisition, from the first generation of its existence, lived upon its fines and confiscations. “Persecution, as a steady and continuous policy, rested, after all, upon confiscation.... When it was lacking, the business of defending the faith lagged lamentably” (i, 529). “But for the gains to be made out of fines and confiscations its [the Inquisition’s] work would have been much less thorough, and it would have sunk into comparative insignificance as soon as the first frantic zeal of bigotry had exhausted itself” (pp. 532–33). Why, in the face of these avowals, “it would be unjust to say that greed and thirst for plunder were the impelling motives of the Inquisition” (p. 532) is not very clear. See below, ch. x, § 3, as to the causation in Spain. Cp. Mocatta, The Jews and the Inquisition, pp. 37, 44, 52. On the Inquisition in Portugal, in turn, Professor W. E. Collins sums up that “it was founded for reasons ostensibly religious but actually fiscal” (in the “Cambridge Modern History,” vol. ii, The Reformation, ch. xii, p. 415). Every charge of economic motive that Catholicism can bring against Protestantism is thus balanced by the equivalent charge against its own Inquisition.
§ 5. Freethought in the Schools
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 Aristotle[171]—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]
It is doubtless true of the Paulicians that “there was no principle of development in their creed: it reflected no genuine freedom of thought” (Poole, Illustrations, p. 95); but the same thing, as we have seen, is clearly true of scholasticism itself. It may indeed be urged that “the contest between Ratramn and Paschase on the doctrine of the Eucharist; of Lanfranc with Berengar on the same subject; of Anselm with Roscelin on the nature of Universals; the complaints of Bernard against the dialectical theology of Abelard; are all illustrations of the collision between Reason and Authority ... varied forms of rationalism—the pure exertions of the mind within itself ... against the constringent force of the Spiritual government” (Hampden, Bampton Lectures on The Scholastic Philosophy, 3rd ed. p. 37; cp. Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, p. 203); but none of the scholastics ever professed to set Authority aside. None dared. John Scotus indeed affirmed the identity of true religion with true philosophy, without professing to subordinate the latter; but the most eminent of the later scholastics affirmed such a subordination. “The vassalage of philosophy consisted in the fact that an impassable limit was fixed for the freedom of philosophizing in the dogmas of the Church” (Ueberweg, i, 357); and some of the chief dogmas were not allowed to be philosophically discussed; though, “with its territory thus limited, philosophy was indeed allowed by theology a freedom which was rarely and only by exception infringed upon” (ib. Cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ix, 151). “The suspicion of originality was fatal to the reputation of the scholastic divine” (Hampden, pp. 46–47). The popular heresy, indeed, lacked the intellectual stimulus that came to the schools from the philosophy of Averroës; but it was the hardier movement of the two.
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 urged[183] 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 Aristotle[201] 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 time[203]; 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 disrespect[205]; 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.
As to William’s doctrines and writings see Poole, pp. 124–30, 346–59. His authorship of one treatise is only latterly cleared up. In the work which under the title of Elementa Philosophiae is falsely ascribed to Bede, and under the title De Philosophia Mundi to Honorius of Autun (see Poole, pp. 340–42, 347 sq.), but which is really the production of William of Conches, there occurs the passage: “What is more pitiable than to say that a thing is, because God is able to do it, and not to show any reason why it is so; just as if God did everything that he is able to do! You talk like one who says that God is able to make a calf out of a log. But did he ever do it? Either, then, show a reason why a thing is so, or a purpose wherefore it is so, or else cease to declare it so.” Migne, Patrolog. Latin. xc, 1139. It is thus an exaggeration to say of Abailard, as does Cousin, that “il mit de côté la vieille école d’Anselme de Laon, qui exposait sans expliquer, et fonda ce qu’on appelle aujourd’hui le rationalisme” (Ouvr. inédits d’Abélard, 1836, intr. p. ii).
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]
Dr. Rashdall pronounces Abailard “incomparably the greatest intellect of the Middle Ages; one of the great minds which mark a period in the world’s intellectual history”; and adds that “Abailard (a Christian thinker to the very heart’s core, however irredeemable (sic) the selfishness and overweening vanity of his youth) was at the same time the representative of the principle of free though reverent inquiry in matters of religion and individual loyalty to truth.” (The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 1895, i, 56–57.) If the praise given be intended to exalt Abailard above John Scotus, it seems excessive.
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 skeptic[213]; and his denunciation of doubt as to the goodness and power of God[214] 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 developed[215]; 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.
§ 6. Saracen and Jewish Influences
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 reason[219]; 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 synagogue[225]; 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 Spirit[233] 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 apologist[241] 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]
§ 7. Freethought in Italy
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-Moslem[260] 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.
The Pope’s letter, dated July 1, 1239, is given by Matthew Paris (extracts in Gieseler, vol. iii, § 55), and in Labbe’s Concilia, t. xiii, col. 1157. Cp. the other references given by Renan, Averroès, 3e édit. pp. 296–97. As Voltaire remarks (Essai sur les Mœurs, ch. lii), the Pope’s statement is the basis for the old belief that Frederick had written a treatise dealing with Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as The Three Impostors. The story is certainly a myth; and probably no such book existed in his century. Cp. Maclaine’s note to Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. i, end; Renan, Averroès, pp. 280–81, 295. The authorship of such a book has nevertheless been ascribed by Catholic writers successively to Averroës, Simon of Tournay, Frederick, his Minister, Pierre des Vignes, Arnaldo de Villanueva, Boccaccio, Poggio, Pietro Aretino, Machiavelli, Symphorien, Champier, Pomponazzi, Cardan, Erasmus, Rabelais, Ochinus, Servetus, Postel, Campanella, Muret, Geoffroi Vallée, Giordano Bruno, Dolet, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Vanini (cp. Sentimens sur le traité des trois imposteurs in the French ed. of 1793; and Lea, Hist. of the Inquis. iii, 560); and the seventeenth-century apologist Mersenne professed to have seen it in Arabic (Lea, iii, 297). These references may be dismissed as worthless. In 1654 the French physician and mathematician Morin wrote an Epistola de tribus impostoribus under the name of Panurge, but this attacked the three contemporary writers Gassendi, Neure, and Bernier; and in 1680 Kortholt of Kiel published under the title De tribus impostoribus magnis an attack on Herbert, Hobbes, and Spinoza. The Three Impostors current later, dealing with Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, may have been written about the same time, but, as we shall see later, is identical with L’Esprit de Spinoza, first published in 1719. A Latin treatise purporting to be written de tribus famosissimis deceptoribus, and addressed to an Otho illustrissimus (conceivably Otho Duke of Bavaria, 13th c.), came to light in MS. in 1706, and was described in 1716, but was not printed. The treatise current later in French cannot have been the same. On the whole subject see the note of R. C. Christie (reprinted from Notes and Queries) in his Selected Essays and Papers, 1902, pp. 309, 315; and the full discussion in Reuter’s Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung, ii, 251–96. The book De tribus impostoribus, bearing the date 1598, of which several copies exist, seems to have been really published, with its false date, at Vienna in 1753.
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 works[278] 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.
“Le 16e siècle n’a eu aucune mauvaise pensée que le 13e n’ait eue avant lui” (Renan, Averroès, p. 231). Renan, however, seems astray in stating that “Le Poème de la Descente de Saint Paul aux enfers parle avec terreur d’une société secrète qui avait juré la destruction de Christianisme” (id. p. 284). The poem simply describes the various tortures of sinners in hell, and mentions in their turn those who “en terre, à sainte Iglise firent guerre,” and in death “Verbe Deu refusouent”; also those “Ki ne croient que Deu fust nez (né), ne que Sainte Marie l’eust portez, ne que por le peuple vousist (voulait) mourir, ne que peine deignast soffrir.” See the text as given by Ozanam, Dante, ed. 6ième, Ptie. iv—the version cited by Renan.
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 Decameron[287] 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 that[288] 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 died[299] 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 things[308] 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 Padua[313] 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]
§ 8. Sects and Orders
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 scholar[320] 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 without[351] 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.
§ 9. Thought in Spain
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 Judaism[366] 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 occultist[369] (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.
The error as to the original or anciently ingrained fanaticism of the Spanish people, first made current by Ticknor (Hist. Spanish Lit., 6th ed. i, 505), has been to some extent diffused by Buckle, who at this point of his inquiry reasoned à priori instead of inductively as his own principles prescribed. See the notes to the present writer’s edition of his Introduction (Routledge, 1904), pp. 107, 534–50. The special atrocity of the Inquisition in Spain was not even due directly to the papacy (cp. Burke, ii, 78): it was the result first of the rapacity of Ferdinand, utilizing a papal institution; and later of the political fanaticisms of Charles V and Philip II, both of Teutonic as well as Spanish descent. Philip alleged that the Inquisition in the Netherlands was more severe than in Spain (ed. of Buckle cited, p. 107, note). In the words of Bishop Stubbs: “To a German race of sovereigns Spain finally owed the subversion of her national system and ancient freedom” (id. p. 550, note).
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 subjects[382] 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]
§ 10. Thought in England
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 libri[389] 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 months[391] 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.
Prof. Lounsbury, who has gone closely and critically into the whole question of Chaucer’s religious opinions, asks concerning the lines in the Knight’s Tale on the passing of Arcite: “Can modern agnosticism point to a denial more emphatic than that made in the fourteenth century of the belief that there exists for us any assurance of the life that is lived beyond the grave?” (Studies in Chaucer, 1892, ii, 514–15). Prof. Skeat, again, affirms (Notes to the Tales, Clar. Press Compl. Chaucer, v, 92) that “the real reason why Chaucer could not here describe the passage of Arcite’s soul to heaven is because he had already copied Boccaccio’s description, and had used it with respect to the death of Troilus” (see Troil. v, 1807–27; stanzas 7, 8, 9 from the end). This evades the question as to the poet’s faith. In point of fact, the passage in Troilus and Criseyde is purely pagan, and tells of no Christian belief, though that poem, written before the Tales, seems to parade a Christian contempt for pagan lore. (Cp. Lounsbury, as cited, p. 512.)
The ascription of unbelief seems a straining of the evidence; but it would be difficult to gainsay the critic’s summing-up: “The general view of all his [Chaucer’s] production leaves upon the mind the impression that his personal religious history was marked by the dwindling devoutness which makes up the experience of so many lives—the fallings from us, the vanishings, we know not how or when, of beliefs in which we have been bred. One characteristic which not unusually accompanies the decline of faith in the individual is in him very conspicuous. This is the prominence given to the falsity and fraud of those who have professedly devoted themselves to the advancement of the cause of Christianity.... Much of Chaucer’s late work, so far as we know it to be late, is distinctly hostile to the Church.... It is, moreover, hostile in a way that implies an utter disbelief in certain of its tenets, and even a disposition to regard them as full of menace to the future of civilization” (Lounsbury, vol. cited, pp. 519–20).
Against this general view is to be set that which proceeds on an unquestioning acceptance of the “Retractation” or confession at the close of the Canterbury Tales, as to the vexed question of the genuineness of which see the same critic, work cited, i, 412–15; iii, 40. The fact that the document is appended to the concluding “Parson’s Tale” (also challenged as to authenticity), which is not a tale at all, and to which the confession refers as “this little treatise or rede,” suggests strongly a clerical influence brought to bear upon the aging poet.
To infer real devotion on his part from his sympathetic account of the good parson, or from the dubious Retractation appended to the Tales, is as unwarrantable as is the notion, dating from the Reformation period, that he was a Wicliffite.[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.
§ 11. Thought in France
As regards France, the record of intellectual history between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries is hardly less scanty than as regards England. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the intellectual life of the French philosophic schools, as we saw, was more vigorous and expansive than that of any other country; so that, looking further to the Provençal literature and to the French beginnings of Gothic architecture, France might even be said to prepare the Renaissance.[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 denies[432] 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.
To say therefore that Jean de Meung’s part of the Roman de la Rose is a “popular satire on the beliefs of Romanism” (Owen, Skeptics of Ital. Renais. p. 44) is to misstate the case. His doctrine is rather an intellectual expression of the literary reaction against asceticism (cp. Bartoli, Storia della letteratura italiana, i, 319, quoting Lenient) which had been spontaneously begun by the Goliards and Troubadours. At the same time the poem does stand for the new secular spirit alike in “its ingrained religion and its nascent freethought” (Saintsbury, p. 87); and with the Reynard epic it may be taken as representing the beginning of “a whole revolution, the resurgence and affirmation of the laity, the new force which is to transform the world, against the Church” (Bartoli, Storia, i, 308; cp. Demogeot, Hist. de la litt. fr. 5e éd. pp. 130–31, 157; Lanson, pp. 132–36). The frequent flings at the clergy (cp. the partly Chaucerian English version, Skeat’s ed. of Chaucer’s Works, i, 234; Bell’s ed. iv, 230) were sufficient to draw upon this as upon other medieval poems of much secular vogue the anger of “the Church” (Sismondi, Lit. of South. Europe, i, 216); but they were none the less relished by believing readers. “The Church” was in fact not an entity of one mind; and some of its sections enjoyed satire directed against the others.
When, then, we speak of the anti-clerical character of much medieval poetry, we must guard against exaggerated implications. It is somewhat of a straining of the facts, for instance, to say of the humorous tale of Reynard the Fox, so widely popular in the thirteenth century, that it is essentially anti-clerical to the extent that “Reynard is laic: Isengrim [the wolf] is clerical” (Bartoli, Storia della letteratura italiana, i, 307; cp. Owen, Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, p. 44). The Reynard epic, in origin a simple humorous animal-story, had various later forms. Some of these, as the Latin poem, and especially the version attributed to Peter of St. Cloud, were markedly anti-clerical, the latter exhibiting a spirit of all-round profanity hardly compatible with belief (cp. Gervinus, Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, 5te Ausg. i, 227–28; Gebhart, Les Origines de la Renais. en Italie, 1874, p. 39); but the version current in the Netherlands, which was later rendered into English prose by Caxton, is of a very different character (Gervinus, p. 229 sq.). In Caxton’s version it is impossible to regard Reynard as laic and Isengrim as clerical; though in the Latin and other versions the wolf figures as monk or abbot. (See also the various shorter satires published by Grimm in his Reinhart Fuchs, 1834.) Often the authorship is itself clerical, one party or order satirizing another; sometimes the spirit is religious, sometimes markedly irreverent. (Gervinus, pp. 214–21). “La plupart de ces satires sont l’œuvre des moines et des abbés” (Lenient, La Satire en France au moyen âge, 1859, préf. p. 4); and to say that these men were often irreligious is not to say that they were rationalists. It is to be remembered that nascent Protestantism in England under Henry VIII resorted to the weapons of obscene parody (Blunt, Ref. of Ch. of England, ed. 1892, i, 273, note).
“In fine,” we may say with a judicious French historian, “one cannot get out of his time, and the time was not come to be non-Christian. Jean de Meung did not perceive that his thought put him outside the Church, and upset her foundations. He is believing and pious, like Rutebeuf.... The Gospel is his rule: he holds it; he defends it; he disputes with those who seem to him to depart from it; he makes himself the champion of the old faith against the novelties of the Eternal Gospel.... His situation is that of the first reformers of the sixteenth century, who believed themselves to serve Jesus Christ in using their reason, and who very sincerely, very piously, hoped for the reform of the Church through the progress of philosophy.”[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.
During the period in question, there had been established the following universities: Paris, 1200; Toulouse, 1220; Montpellier, 1289; Avignon, 1303; Orléans, 1312; Cahors, 1332; Angers, 1337; Orange, 1367; Dôle, 1422; Poitiers, 1431; Caen, 1436; Valence, 1454; Nantes, 1460; Bourges, 1463; Bordeaux, 1472 (Desmaze, L’Université de Paris, 1876, p. 2. Other dates for some of these are given on p. 31). But the militarist conditions prevented any sufficient development of such opportunities. In the fourteenth century, says Littré (Études sur les barbares, p. 419), “the university of Paris ... was more powerful than at any other epoch.... Never did she exercise such a power over men’s minds.” But he also decides that in that epoch the first florescence of French literature withered away (p. 387). The long location of the anti-papacy at Avignon (1305–1376) doubtless counted for something in French culture (V. Le Clerc, Hist. Litt. de la France au XIVe siècle, i, 37; Gebhart, pp. 221–26); but the devastation wrought by the English invasion was sufficient to countervail that and more. See the account of it by Petrarch (letter of the year 1360) cited by Littré, Études, pp. 416–17; and by Hallam, Middle Ages, i, 59, note. Cp. Michelet, Hist. de France, vi, ch. iii; Dunton, England in the Fifteenth Century, 1888, pp. 79–84. As to the consequences of the English invasion of the fifteenth century see Martin, Hist. de France, 4e édit. vi, 132–33; Sismondi, Hist. des Français, 1831, xii, 582; Hallam, Middle Ages, i, 83–87.
In northern France of the fourteenth century, as in Provence and Italy and England, there was a manifold stir of innovation and heresy: there as elsewhere the insubordinate Franciscans, with their Eternal Gospel, the Paterini, the Beghards, fought their way against the Dominican Inquisition. But the Inquisitors burned books as well as men; and much anti-ecclesiastical poetry, some dating even from the Carlovingian era, shared the fate of many copies of the Talmud, translations of the Bible, and, à fortiori, every species of heretical writing. In effect, the Inquisition for the time “extinguished freethought”[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.
The long-continued dispute as to the guilt of the Knights Templars is still chronically re-opened. Hallam, after long hesitation, came finally to believe them guilty, partly on the strength of the admissions made by Michelet in defending them (Europe in the Middle Ages, 11th ed. i, 138–42—note of 1848). He attaches, however, a surprising weight to the obviously weak “architectural evidence” cited by Hammer-Purgstall. Heeren (Essai sur l’influence des croisades, 1808, pp. 221–22) takes a more judicial view. The excellent summing-up of Lea (Hist. of the Inquis. bk. iii, ch. v, pp. 263–76) perhaps gives too little weight to the mass of curious confirmatory evidence cited by writers on the other side (e.g., F. Nicolai, Versuch über die Beschuldigungen welche dem Tempelherrenorden gemacht worden, 1782); but his conclusion as to the falsity of the charges against the order as a whole seems irresistible.
The solution that offensive practices occurred irregularly (Lea, pp. 276–77) is pointed to even by the earlier hostile writers (Nicolai, p. 17). It seems to be certain that the initiatory rites included the act of spitting on the crucifix—presumptively a symbolic display of absolute obedience to the orders of those in command (Jolly, Philippe le Bel, pp. 264–68). That there was no Catharism in the order seems certain (Lea, p. 249). The suggestion that the offensive and burlesque practices were due to the lower grade of “serving brethren,” who were contemned by the higher, seems, however, without firm foundation. The courage for such freaks, and the disposition to commit them, were rather more likely to arise among the crusaders of the upper class, who could come in contact with Moslem-Christian unbelief through those of Sicily.
For the further theory that the “Freemasons” (at that period really cosmopolitan guilds of masons) were already given to freethinking, there is again no evidence. That they at times deliberately introduced obscene symbols into church architecture is no proof that they were collectively unbelievers in the Church’s doctrines; though it is likely enough that some of them were. Obscenity is the expression not of an intellectual but of a physical and unreasoning bias, and can perfectly well concur with religious feeling. The fact that the medieval masons did not confine obscene symbols to the churches they built for the Templars (Hallam, as cited, pp. 140–41) should serve to discredit alike the theory that the Templars were systematically anti-Christian, and the theory that the Freemasons were so. That for centuries the builders of the Christian churches throughout Europe formed an anti-Christian organization is a grotesque hypothesis. At most they indulged in freaks of artistic satire on the lines of contemporary satirical literature, expressing an anti-clerical bias, with perhaps occasional elements of blasphemy. (See Menzel, Gesch. der Deutschen, Cap. 252, note.) It could well be that there survived among the Freemasons various Gnostic ideas; since the architectural art itself came in a direct line from antiquity. Such heresy, too, might conceivably be winked at by the Church, which depended so much on the heretics’ services. But their obscenities were the mere expression of the animal imagination and normal salacity of all ages. Only in modern times, and that only in Catholic countries, has the derivative organization of Freemasonry been identified with freethought propaganda. In England in the seventeenth century the Freemasonic clubs—no longer connected with any trade—were thoroughly royalist and orthodox (Nicolai, pp. 196–98), as they have always remained.
Some remarkable intellectual phenomena, however, do connect with the French university life of the first half of the fourteenth century. William of Occam (d. 1347), the English Franciscan, who taught at Paris, is on the whole the most rationalistic of medieval philosophers. Though a pupil of the Realist Duns Scotus, he became the renewer of Nominalism, which is the specifically rationalistic as opposed to the religious mode of metaphysic; and his anti-clerical bias was such that he had to fly from France to Bavaria for protection from the priesthood. His Disputatio super potestate ecclesiastica, and his Defensorium directed against Pope John XXII (or XXI), were so uncompromising that in 1323 the Pope gave directions for his prosecution. What came of the step is not known; but in 1328 we find him actually imprisoned with two Italian comrades in the papal palace at Avignon. Thence they made their escape to Bavaria.[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 criticism[454] 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.
§ 12. Thought in the Teutonic Countries
The life of the rest of Europe in the later medieval period has little special significance in the history of freethought. France and Italy, by German admission, were the lands of the medieval Aufklärung.[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]
Dr. Lasson pronounces (Ueberweg, i, 483) that the type of Eckhart’s character and teaching “was derived from the innermost essence of the German national character.” At the same time he admits that all the offshoots of the school departed more or less widely from Eckhart’s type—that is, from the innermost essence of their own national character. It would be as plausible to say that the later mysticism of Fénelon derived from the innermost essence of the French character. The Imitatio Christi has been similarly described as expressing the German character, on the assumption that it was written by Thomas à Kempis. Many have held that the author was the Frenchman Gerson (Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872, i, 139–40). It was in all probability, as was held by Suarez, the work of several hands, one a monk of the twelfth century, another a monk of the thirteenth, and the third a theologian of the fifteenth; neither Gerson nor Thomas à Kempis being concerned (Le Clerc, Hist. Litt. du XIVe Siècle, 2e édit. pp. 384–85; cp. Neale’s Hist. of the so-called Jansenist Church of Holland, 1858, pp. 97–98).
The Imitatio Christi (1471), the most popular Christian work of devotion ever published,[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 Mœurs, 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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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 (ἀγάλματα) 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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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.” [↑]
[49] S. Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pp. 25–26. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[105] Kurtz, i, 435; Lea, i, 119. [↑]
[106] Hardwick, p. 308, note; Murdock’s note to Mosheim, p. 426; Monastier, pp. 106–107. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[173] Cp. Mosheim’s note, Reid’s ed. p. 388. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[198] “Humanas ac philosophicas rationes requirebant; et plus quæ intelligi quam quæ dici possent efflagitabant” (Historia calamitatum mearum, ed. Gréard, p. 36). [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[257] Villari, Two First Centuries of Florentine History, Eng. tr. 1901, pp. 110–12. [↑]
[258] Reuter, Gesch. der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, i, 167. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[299] Probably 25,000 in England alone, including monks. Id. p. 204. [↑]
[300] Id. pp. 205–208, 213, 216. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[311] Renan, Averroès, pp. 301–15. [↑]
[312] Id. pp. 333–37; Cantù, Gli Eretici d’ltalia, i, 176 and refs. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[358] Hauréau, Hist. de la philos. scolastique, ii, 54–55. [↑]
[361] Personally he discouraged heresy-hunting. Burke, ii, 66. [↑]
[362] Burke, i, 268–73; Dunham, Hist. of Spain and Portugal, 1832, iv, 260. [↑]
[369] Id. pp. 52–53; McCrie, Reformation in Spain, p. 20. [↑]
[370] Bonet-Maury, Les Précurseurs de la Réforme, 1904, pp. 114–19. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
[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. [↑]
Chapter X
FREETHOUGHT IN THE RENAISSANCE
§ 1. The Italian Evolution
What is called the Renaissance was, broadly speaking, an evolution of the culture forces seen at work in the later “Middle Ages,” newly fertilized by the recovery of classic literature; and we shall have to revert at several points of our survey to what we have been considering as “medieval” in order to perceive the “new birth.” The term is inconveniently vague, and is made to cover different periods, sometimes extending from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, sometimes signifying only the fifteenth. It seems reasonable to apply it, as regards Italy, to the period in which southern culture began to outgo that of France, and kept its lead—that is, from the end of the fourteenth century[1] to the time of the Counter-Reformation. That is a comparatively distinct sociological era.
Renascent Italy is, after ancient Greece, the great historical illustration of the sociological law that the higher civilizations arise through the passing-on of seeds of culture from older to newer societies, under conditions that specially foster them and give them freer growth. The straitened and archaic pictorial art of Byzantium, unprogressive in the hidebound life of the Eastern Empire, developed in the free and striving Italian communities till it paralleled the sculpture of ancient Greece; and it is to be said for the Church that, however she might stifle rational thought, she economically elicited the arts of painting and architecture (statuary being tabooed as too much associated with pagan worships), even as Greek religion had promoted architecture and sculpture. By force, however, of the tendency of the arts to keep religion anthropomorphic where deeper culture is lacking, popular belief in Renaissance Italy was substantially on a par with that of polytheistic Greece.
Before the general recovery of ancient literature, the main motives to rationalism, apart from the tendency of the Aristotelian philosophy to set up doubts about creation and Providence and a future state, were (1) the spectacle of the competing creed of Islam,[2] made known to the Italians first by intercourse with the Moors, later by the Crusades; and further and more fully by the Saracenized culture of Sicily and commercial intercourse with the east; (2) the spectacle of the strife of creeds within Christendom;[3] and (3) the spectacle of the worldliness and moral insincerity of the bulk of the clergy. It is in that atmosphere that the Renaissance begins; and it may be said that freethought stood veiled beside its cradle.
In such an atmosphere, even on the ecclesiastical side, demand for “reforms” naturally made headway; and the Council of Constance (1414–1418) was convened to enact many besides the ending of the schism.[4] But the Council itself was followed by seven hundred prostitutes;[5] and its relation to the intellectual life was defined by its bringing about, on a charge of heresy, the burning of John Huss, who had come under a letter of safe-conduct from the emperor. The baseness of the act was an enduring blot on the Church; and a hundred years later, in a Germany with small goodwill to Bohemia, Luther made it one of his foremost indictments of the hierarchy. But in the interim the spirit of reform had come to nothing. Cut off from much of the force that was needed to effect any great moral revolution in the Church, the reforming movement soon fell away,[6] and the Church was left to ripen for later and more drastic treatment.
How far, nevertheless, anti-clericalism could go among the scholarly class even in Italy is seen in the career of one of the leading humanists of the Renaissance, Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457). In the work of his youth, De Voluptate et Vero Bono, a hardy vindication of aggressive Epicureanism—at a time when the title of Epicurean stood for freethinker[7]—he plainly sets up a rationalist standard, affirming that science is founded on reason and Nature, and that Nature is God. Not content with a theoretic defiance of the faith, he violently attacked the Church. It was probably to the protection of Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, who though pious was not pro-clerical,[8] that Valla was able to do what he did, above all to write his famous treatise, De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione, wherein he definitely proved once for all that the “donation” in question was a fiction.[9] Such an opinion had been earlier maintained at the Council of Basle by Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II, and before him by the remarkable Nicolaus of Cusa;[10] but when the existence of Valla’s work was known he had to fly from Rome afresh (1443) to Naples, where he had previously been protected for seven years. Applying the same critical spirit to more sacrosanct literature, he impugned the authenticity of the Apostles’ Creed, and of the letter of Abgarus to Jesus Christ, given by Eusebius; proceeding further to challenge many of the mistranslations in the Vulgate.[11] For his untiring propaganda he was summoned before the Inquisition at Naples, but as usual was protected by the king, whom he satisfied by professing faith in the dogmas of the Church, as distinguished from ecclesiastical history and philology.
It was characteristic of the life of Italy, hopelessly committed on economic grounds to the Church, that Valla finally sought and found reconciliation with the papacy. He knew that his safety at Naples depended on the continued anti-papalism of the throne; he yearned for the society of Rome; and his heart was all the while with the cause of Latin scholarship rather than with that of a visionary reformation. In his as in so many cases, accordingly, intellectual rectitude gave way to lower interests; and he made unblushing offers of retractation to cardinals and pope. In view of the extreme violence of his former attacks,[12] it is not surprising that the reigning Pope, Eugenius IV, refused to be appeased; but on the election of Nicholas V (1447) he was sent for; and he died secretary to the Curia and Canon of St. John Lateran.[13]
Where so much of anti-clericalism could find harbourage within the Church, there was naturally no lack of it without; and from the period of Boccaccio till the Catholic reaction after the Reformation a large measure of anti-clerical feeling is a constant feature in Italian life. It was so ingrained that the Church had on the whole to leave it alone. From pope to monk the mass of the clergy had forfeited respect; and gibes at their expense were household words,[14] and the basis of popular songs. Tommaso Guardati of Salerno, better known as Masuccio, attacks all orders of clergy in his collection of tales with such fury that only the protection of the court of Naples could well have saved him; and yet he was a good Catholic.[15] The popular poetic literature, with certain precautions, carried the anti-clerical spirit as far as to parade a humorous non-literary skepticism, putting in the mouths of the questionable characters in its romances all manner of anti-religious opinions which it would be unsafe to print as one’s own, but which in this way reached appreciative readers who were more or less in sympathy with the author’s sentiments and stratagems. The Morgante Maggiore of Pulci (1488) is the great type of such early Voltairean humour:[16] it revives the spirit of the Goliards, and passes unscathed in the new Renaissance world, where the earlier Provençal impiety had gone the way of the Inquisition bonfire, books and men alike. Beneath its mockery there is a constant play of rational thought, and every phase of contemporary culture is glanced at in the spirit of always unembittered humour which makes Pulci “the most lovable among the great poets of the Renaissance.”[17] It is noteworthy that Pulci is found affirming the doctrine of an Antipodes with absolute openness, and with impunity, over a hundred years before Galileo. This survival of ancient pagan science seems to have been obscurely preserved all through the Middle Ages. In the eighth century, as we have seen, the priest Feargal or Vergilius, of Bavaria, was deposed from his office by the Pope, on the urging of St. Boniface, for maintaining it; but he was reinstated, died a bishop, and became a saint; and not only that doctrine, but that of the two-fold motion of the earth, was affirmed with impunity before Pulci by Nicolaus of Cusa[18] (d. 1464); though in the fourteenth century Nicolaus of Autricuria had to recant his teaching of the atomistic theory.[19] As Pulci had specially satirized the clergy and ecclesiastical miracles, his body was refused burial in consecrated ground; but the general temper was such as to save him from clerical enmity up to that point.
The Inquisition too was now greatly enfeebled throughout central and northern as well as southern Italy. In 1440 the materialist, mathematician, and astrologer Amadeo de’ Landi, of Milan, was accused of heresy by the orthodox Franciscans. Not only was he acquitted, but his chief accuser was condemned in turn to make public retractation, which he however declined to do.[20] Fifty years later the Inquisition was still nearly powerless. In 1497 we find a freethinking physician at Bologna, Gabriele de Salò, protected by his patrons against its wrath, although he “was in the habit of maintaining that Christ was not God, but the son of Joseph and Mary ...; that by his cunning he had deceived the world; that he may have died on the cross on account of crimes which he had committed,”[21] and so forth. Nineteen years before, Galeotto Marcio had come near being burned for writing that any man who lived uprightly according to his own conscience would go to heaven, whatever his faith; and it needed the Pope, Sixtus IV, his former pupil, to save him from the Inquisition.[22] Others, who went further, ran similar risks; and in 1500 Giorgio da Novara was burned at Bologna, presumptively for denying the divinity of Jesus.[23] A bishop of Aranda, however, is said to have done the same with impunity, in the same year,[24] besides rejecting hell and purgatory, and denouncing indulgences as a device of the popes to fill their pockets.
During this period too the philosophy of Averroës, as set forth in his “Great Commentary” on Aristotle, was taught in North Italy with an outspokenness not before known. Gaetano of Siena began to lecture on the Commentary at Padua in 1436; it was in part printed there in 1472; and from 1471 to 1499 Nicoletto Vernias seems to have taught, in the Paduan chair of philosophy, the Averroïst doctrine of the world-soul, thus virtually denying the Christian doctrine of immortality. Violent opposition was raised when his pupil Niphus (Nifo) printed similar doctrine in a treatise De Intellectu et Dæmonibus (1492); but the professors when necessary disclaimed the more dangerous tenets of Averroïsm.[25] Nifo it was who put into print the maxim of his tribe: Loquendum est ut plures, sententiendum ut pauci—“think with the few; speak with the majority.”[26]
As in ancient Greece, humorous blasphemy seems to have fared better than serious unbelief.[27] As is remarked by Hallam, the number of vindications of Christianity produced in Italy in the fifteenth century proves the existence of much unbelief;[28] and it is clear that, apart from academic doubt, there was abundant freethinking among men of the world.[29] Erasmus was astonished at the unbelief he found in high quarters in Rome. One ecclesiastic undertook to prove to him from Pliny that there is no future state; others openly derided Christ and the apostles; and many avowed to him that they had heard eminent papal functionaries blaspheming the Mass.[30] The biographer of Pope Paul II has recorded how that pontiff found in his own court, among certain young men, the opinion that faith rested rather on trickeries of the saints (sanctorum astutiis) than on evidence; which opinion the Pope eradicated.[31] But in the career of Perugino (1446–1524), who from being a sincerely religious painter became a skeptic in his wrath against the Church which slew Savonarola,[32] we have evidence of a movement of things which no papal fiat could arrest.
As to the beliefs of the great artists in general we have little information. Employed as they so often were in painting religious subjects for the churches, they must as a rule have conformed outwardly; and the artistic temper is more commonly credent than skeptical. But in the case of one of the greatest, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), we have evidence of a continual play of critical scrutiny on the world, and a continual revolt against mere authority, which seem incompatible with any acceptance of Christian dogma. In his many notes, unpublished till modern times, his universal genius plays so freely upon so many problems that he cannot be supposed to have ignored those of religion. His stern appraisement of the mass of men[33] carries with it no evangelical qualifications; his passion for knowledge is not Christian;[34] and his reiterated rejection of the principle of authority in science[35] and in literature[36] tells of a spirit which, howsoever it might practise reticence, cannot have been inwardly docile to either priesthood or tradition. In all his reflections upon philosophic and scientific themes he is, in the scientific sense, materialistic—that is, inductive, studious of experiment, insistent upon tangible data.[37] “Wisdom is daughter of experience”;[38] “truth is the daughter of time”;[39] “there is no effect in Nature without a reason”;[40] “all our knowledge originates in sensations”[41]—such are the dicta he accumulates in an age of superstition heightened by the mutability of life, of ecclesiastical tyranny tempered only by indifferentism, of faith in astrology and amulets, of benumbing tradition in science and philosophy. On the problem of the phenomena of fossil shells he pronounces with a searching sagacity of inference[42] that seems to reveal at once the extent to which the advance of science has been blocked by pious obscurantism.[43] In all directions we see the great artist, a century before Bacon, anticipating Bacon’s protests and questionings, and this with no such primary bias to religion as Bacon had acquired at his mother’s knee. When he turns to the problems of body and spirit he is as dispassionate, as keenly speculative, as over those of external nature.[44] Of magic he is entirely contemptuous, not in the least on religious grounds, though he glances at these, but simply for the folly of it.[45] All that tells of religious feeling in him is summed up in a few utterances expressive of a vague theism;[46] while he has straight thrusts at religious fraud and absurdity.[47] It is indeed improbable that a mind so necessitated to discourse of its thought, however gifted for prudent silence, can have subsisted without private sympathy from kindred souls. Skepticism was admittedly abundant; and Leonardo of all men can least have failed to reckon with its motives.
Perhaps the most fashionable form of quasi-freethinking in the Italy of the fifteenth century was that which prevailed in the Platonic Academy of Florence in the period, though the chief founder of the Academy, Marsilio Ficino, wrote a defence of Christianity, and his most famous adherent, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, planned another. Renaissance Platonism began with the Greek Georgios Gemistos, surnamed Plethon because of his devotion to Plato, which was such as to scandalize common Christians and exasperate Aristotelians. The former had the real grievance that his system ostensibly embodied polytheism and logically involved pantheism;[48] and one of his antagonists, Gennadios Georgios Scolarios, who became patriarch of Constantinople, caused his book On Laws to be burned;[49] but the allegation of his Aristotelian enemy and countryman, Georgios Trapezuntios, that he prayed to the sun as creator of the world,[50] is only one of the polemical amenities of the period. Ostensibly he was a believing Christian, stretching Christian love to accommodate the beliefs of Plato; but it was not zeal for orthodoxy that moved Cosimo dei Medici, at Florence, to embrace the new Platonism, and train up Marsilio Ficino to be its prophet. The furor allegoricus which inspired the whole school[51] was much more akin to ancient Gnosticism than to orthodox Christianity, and constantly points to pantheism[52] as the one philosophic solution of its ostensible polytheism. When, too, Ficino undertakes to vindicate Christianity against the unbelievers in his Della Religione Cristiana, “the most solid arguments that he can find in its favour are the answers of the Sibyls, and the prophecies of the coming of Jesus Christ to be found in Virgil, Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry.”[53]
How far such a spirit of expatiation and speculation, however visionary and confused, tended to foster heresy is seen in the brief career of the once famous young Pico della Mirandola, Ficino’s wealthy pupil. Parading a portentous knowledge of tongues[54] and topics at the age of twenty-four, he undertook (1486) to maintain a list of nine hundred Conclusiones or propositions at Rome against all comers, and to pay their expenses. Though he had obtained the permission of the Pope, Innocent VIII, the challenge speedily elicited angry charges of heresy against certain of the theses, and the Pope had to stop the proceedings and issue an ecclesiastical commission of inquiry. Some of the propositions were certainly ill adjusted to Catholic ideas, in particular the sayings that “neither the cross of Christ nor any image is to be adored adoratione latriæ”—with worship; that no one believes what he believes merely because he wishes to; and that Jesus did not physically descend into hell.[55] Pico, retiring to Florence, defended himself in an Apologia, which provoked fresh outcry; whereupon he was summoned to proceed to Rome; and though the powerful friendship of Lorenzo dei Medici procured a countermand of the order, it was not till 1496 that he received, from Alexander VI, a full papal remission.
Among the unachieved projects of his later life, which ended at the age of thirty-one, was that of a treatise Adversus Hostes Ecclesiæ, to be divided into seven sections, the first dealing with “The avowed and open enemies of Christianity,” and the second with “Atheists and those who reject every religious system upon their own reasoning”; and the others with Jews, Moslems, idolaters, heretics, and unrighteous believers.[56] The vogue of unbelief thus signified was probably increased by the whole speculative habit of Pico’s own school,[57] which tended only less than Averroïsm to a pantheism subversive of the Christian creed. It is noteworthy that, while Ficino believed devoutly in astrology,[58] Pico rejected it, and left among his confused papers a treatise against it which his nephew contrived to transcribe and publish;[59] but it does not appear that this served either the cause of religion or that of science. The educated Italian world, while political independence lasted, remained in various degrees freethinking, pantheistic, and given to astrology, no school or teacher combining rationalism in philosophy with sound scientific methods.
One of the great literary figures of the later Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), is the standing proof of the divorce of the higher intelligence of Italy from the faith as well as the cause of the Church before the Reformation. With this divorce he expressly charges the Church itself, giving as the first proof of its malfeasance that the peoples nearest Rome were the least religious.[60] To him the Church was the supreme evil in Italian politics,[61] the “stone in the wound.” In a famous passage he gives his opinion that “our religion, having shown us the truth and the true way, makes us esteem less political honour (l’onore del mondo)”; and that whereas the pagan religion canonized only men crowned with public honour, as generals and statesmen, “our religion has glorified rather the humble and contemplative men than the active,” placing the highest good in humility and abjection, teaching rather to suffer than to do, and so making the world debile and ready to be a prey to scoundrels.[62] The passage which follows, putting the blame on men for thus misreading their religion, is a fair sample of the grave mockery with which the men of that age veiled their unfaith.[63] Machiavelli was reputed in his own world an atheist;[64] and he certainly was no religionist. He indeed never avows atheism, but neither did any other writer of the epoch;[65] and the whole tenour of his writings is that of a man who had at least put aside the belief in a prayer-answering deity;[66] though, with the intellectual arbitrariness which still affected all the thought of his age, he avows a belief that all great political changes are heralded by prodigies, celestial signs, prophecies, or revelations[67]—here conforming to the ordinary superstition of his troublous time.
It belongs, further, to the manifold self-contradiction of the Renaissance that, holding none of the orthodox religious beliefs, he argues insistently and at length for the value and importance of religion, however untrue, as a means to political strength. Through five successive chapters of his Discourses on Livy he presses and illustrates his thesis, praising Numa as a sagacious framer of useful fictions, and as setting up new and false beliefs which made for the unification and control of the Roman people. The argument evolved with such strange candour is, of course, of the nature of so much Renaissance science, an à priori error: there was no lack of religious faith and fear in primitive Rome before the age of Numa; and the legend concerning him is a product of the very primordial mythopoiesis which Machiavelli supposes him to have set on foot. It is in the spirit of that fallacious theory of a special superinduced religiosity in Romans[68] that the great Florentine proceeds to charge the Church with having made the Italians religionless and vicious (senza religione e cattivi). Had he lived a century or two later he might have seen in the case of zealously believing Spain a completer political and social prostration than had fallen in his day on Italy, and this alongside of regeneration in an unbelieving France. But indeed it was the bitterness of spirit of a suffering patriot looking back yearningly to an idealized Rome, rather than the insight of the author of The Prince,[69] that inspired his reasoning on the political uses of religion; for at the height of his exposition he notes, with his keen eye for fact, how the most strenuous use of religious motive had failed to support the Samnites against the cool courage of Romans led by a rationalizing general;[70] and he notes, too, with a sardonic touch of hopefulness, how Savonarola had contrived to persuade the people of contemporary Florence that he had intercourse with deity.[71] Italy then had faith enough and to spare.
Such argument, in any case, even if untouched by the irony which tinges Machiavelli’s, could never avail to restore faith; men cannot become believers on the motive of mere belief in the value of belief; and the total effect of Machiavelli’s manifold reasoning on human affairs, with its startling lucidity, its constant insistence on causation, its tacit negation of every notion of Providence, must have been, in Italy as elsewhere, rather to prepare the way for inductive science than to rehabilitate supernaturalism, even among those who assented to his theory of Roman development. In his hands the method of science begins to emerge, turned to the most difficult of its tasks, before Copernicus had applied it to the simpler problem of the motion of the solar system. After centuries in which the name of Aristotle had been constantly invoked to small scientific purpose, this man of the world, who knew little or nothing of Aristotle’s Politics,[72] exhibits the spirit of the true Aristotle for the first time in the history of Christendom; and it is in his land after two centuries of his influence that modern sociology begins its next great stride in the work of Vico.
He is to be understood, of course, as the product of the moral and intellectual experience of the Renaissance, which prepared his audience for him. Guicciardini, his contemporary, who in comparison was unblamed for irreligion, though an even warmer hater of the papacy, has left in writing the most explicit avowals of incredulity as to the current conceptions of the supernatural, and declares concerning miracles that as they occur in every religion they prove none.[73] At the same time he professes firm faith in Christianity;[74] and others who would not have joined him there were often as inconsistent in the ready belief they gave to magic and astrology. The time was, after all, one of artistic splendour and scientific and critical ignorance;[75] and its freethought had the inevitable defects that ignorance entails. Thus the belief in the reality of witchcraft, sometimes discarded by churchmen,[76] is sometimes maintained by heretics. Rejected by John of Salisbury in the twelfth century, and by the freethinking Pietro of Abano in 1303, it was affirmed and established by Thomas Aquinas, asserted by Gregory IX, and made a motive for uncounted slaughters by the Inquisition. In 1460 a theologian had been forced to retract, and still punished, for expressing doubt on the subject; and in 1471 Pope Sixtus VI reserved to the papacy the privilege of making and selling the waxen models of limbs used as preservatives against enchantments. In the sixteenth century a whole series of books directed against the belief were put on the Index, and a Jesuit handbook codified the creed. Yet a Minorite friar, Alfonso Spina, pronounced it a heretical delusion, and taught that those burned suffered not for witchcraft but for heresy,[77] and on the other hand some men of a freethinking turn held it. Thus the progress of rational thought was utterly precarious.
Of the literary freethinking of the later Renaissance the most famous representative is Pomponazzi, or Pomponatius (1462–1525), for whom it has been claimed that he “really initiated the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance.”[78] The Italian Renaissance, however, was in reality near its turning-point when Pomponazzi’s treatise on the Immortality of the Soul appeared (1516); and that topic was the commonest in the schools and controversies of that day.[79] He has been at times spoken of as an Averroïst, on the ground that he denied immortality; but he did so in reality as a disciple of Alexander of Aphrodisias, a rival commentator to Averroës. What is remarkable in his case is not the denial of immortality, which we have seen to be frequent in Dante’s time, and more or less implicit in Averroïsm, but his contention that ethics could do very well without the belief[80]—a thing that it still took some courage to affirm, though the spectacle of the life of the faithful might have been supposed sufficient to win it a ready hearing. Presumably his rationalism, which made him challenge the then canonical authority of the scholasticized Aristotle, went further than his avowed doubts as to a future state; since his profession of obedience to the Church’s teaching, and his reiteration of the old academic doctrine of two-fold truth—one truth for science and philosophy, and another for theology[81]—are as dubious as any in philosophic history.[82] Of him, or of Lorenzo Valla, more justly than of Petrarch, might it be said that he is the father of modern criticism, since Valla sets on foot at once historical and textual analysis, while Pomponazzi anticipates the treatment given to Biblical miracles by the rationalizing German theologians of the end of the eighteenth century.[83] He too was a fixed enemy of the clergy; and it was not for lack of will that they failed to destroy him. He happened to be a personal favourite of Leo X, who saw to it that the storm of opposition to Pomponazzi—a storm as much of anger on behalf of Aristotle, who had been shown by him to doubt the immortality of the soul, as on behalf of Christianity—should end in an official farce of reconciliation.[84] He was however not free to publish his treatises, De Incantationibus and De Fato, Libero Arbitrio, et Prædestinatione. These, completed in 1520, were not printed till after his death, in 1556 and 1557;[85] and by reason of their greater simplicity, as well as of their less dangerous form of heresy, were much more widely read than the earlier treatise, thus contributing much to the spread of sane thought on the subjects of witchcraft, miracles, and special providences.
Whether his metaphysic on the subject of the immortality of the soul had much effect on popular thought may be doubted. What the Renaissance most needed in both its philosophic and its practical thought was a scientific foundation; and science, from first to last, was more hindered than helped by the environment. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, charges of necromancy against physicians and experimenters were frequently joined with imputations of heresy, and on such charges not a few were burned.[86] The economic conditions too were all unfavourable to solid research.
When Galileo in 1589 was made Professor of Mathematics at Pisa, his salary was only 60 scudi (= dollars), while the Professor of Medicine got 2,000. (Karl von Gebler, Galileo Galilei, Eng. tr. 1879, p. 9.) At Padua, later, Galileo had 520 florins, with a prospect of rising to as many scudi. (Letter given in The Private Life of Galileo, Boston, 1870, p. 61.) The Grand Duke finally gave him a pension of 1,000 scudi at Florence. (Id. p. 64.) This squares with Bacon’s complaint (Advancement of Learning, bk. ii; De Augmentis, bk. ii, ch. i—Works, Routledge ed. pp. 76, 422–23) that, especially in England, the salaries of lecturers in arts and professions were injuriously small, and that, further, “among so many noble foundations of colleges in Europe ... they are all dedicated to professions, and none left free to the study of arts and sciences at large.” In Italy, however, philosophy was fairly well endowed. Pomponazzi received a salary of 900 Bolognese lire when he obtained the chair of Philosophy at Bologna in 1509. (Christie, essay cited, p. 138.)
Medicine was nearly as dogmatic as theology. Even philosophy was in large part shouldered aside by the financial motives which led men to study law in preference;[87] and when the revival of ancient literature gained ground it absorbed energy to the detriment of scientific study,[88] the wealthy amateurs being ready to pay high prices for manuscripts of classics, and for classical teaching; but not for patient investigation of natural fact. The humanists, so-called, were often forces of enlightenment and reform; witness such a type as the high-minded Pomponio Leto (Pomponius Laetus), pupil and successor of Lorenzo Valla, and one of the many “pagan” scholars of the later Renaissance;[89] but the discipline of mere classical culture was insufficient to make them, as a body, qualified leaders either of thought or action,[90] in such a society as that of decaying Italy. Only after the fall of Italian liberties, the decay of the Church’s wealth and power, the loss of commerce, and the consequent decline of the arts, did men turn to truly scientific pursuits. From Italy, indeed, long after the Reformation, came a new stimulus to freethought which affected all the higher civilization of northern Europe. But the failure to solve the political problem, a failure which led to the Spanish tyranny, meant the establishment of bad conditions for the intellectual as for the social life; and an arrest of freethought in Italy was a necessary accompaniment of the arrest of the higher literature. What remained was the afterglow of a great and energetic period rather than a spirit of inquiry; and we find the old Averroïst scholasticism, in its most pedantic form, lasting at the university of Padua till far into the seventeenth century. “A philosophy,” remarks in this connection an esteemed historian, “a mode of thought, a habit of mind, may live on in the lecture-rooms of Professors for a century after it has been abandoned by the thinkers, the men of letters, and the men of the world.”[91] The avowal has its bearings nearer home than Padua.
While it lasted, the light of Italy had shone upon all the thought of Europe. Not only the other nations but the scholars of the Jewish race reflected it; for to the first half of the sixteenth century belongs the Jew Menahem Asariah de Rossi, whose work, Meor Enayim, “Light of the Eyes,” is “the first attempt by a Jew to submit the statements of the Talmud to a critical examination, and to question the value of tradition in its historical records.” And he did not stand alone among the Jews of Italy; for, while Elijah Delmedigo, at the end of the fifteenth century, was in a didactic Maimonist fashion doubtful of literary tradition, his grandson, Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, flourishing early in the seventeenth century, “wrote various pamphlets of a deeply skeptical character.”[92] That this movement of Jewish rationalism should be mainly limited to the south was inevitable, since there only were Jewish scholars in an intellectual environment. There could be no better testimony to the higher influence of the Italian Renaissance.
§ 2. The French Evolution
In the other countries influenced by Italian culture in the sixteenth century the rationalist spirit had various fortune. France, as we saw, had substantially retrograded at the time of the Italian new-birth, her revived militarism no less than her depression by the English conquests having deeply impaired her intellectual life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Thus the true renascence of letters in France began late, and went on during the Reformation period; and all along it showed a tincture of freethought. From the midst of the group who laid the foundations of French Protestantism by translations of the Bible there comes forth the most articulate freethinker of that age, Bonaventure Desperiers, author of the Cymbalum Mundi (1537). Early associated with Calvin and Olivetan in revising the translation of the Bible by Lefèvre d’Etaples (rev. 1535), Desperiers turned away from the Protestant movement, as did Rabelais and Étienne Dolet, caring as little for the new presbyter as for the old priest; and all three were duly accused by the Protestants of atheism and libertinage.[93] In the same year Desperiers aided Dolet, scholar and printer, to produce his much-praised Commentarii linguæ latinæ; and within two years he had printed his own satire, Cymbalum Mundi,[94] wherein, by way of pagan dialogues, are allegorically ridiculed the Christian scheme, its miracles, Bible contradictions, and the spirit of persecution, then in full fire in France against the Protestants. In the first dialogue Mercury is sent to Athens by Zeus the Father to have the “Book of the Destinies” rebound—an adaptation of an ancient sarcasm against the Christians by Celsus.[95] He, robbing others, is robbed of the book, and another (= the New Testament) is put in its place. In the second dialogue figure Rhetulus (= Lutherus) and Cubercus (= Bucerus?), who suppose they have found the main pieces of the philosopher’s stone, which Mercury had broken and scattered in the sand of the theatre arena. Protestants and Catholics are thus alike ridiculed. The allegory is not always clear to modern eyes; but there was no question then about its general bearing; and Desperiers, though groom of the chamber (after Clement Marot) to Marguerite of France (later of Navarre), had to fly for his life, as Marot did before him. The first edition of his book, secretly printed at Paris, was seized and destroyed; and the second (1538), printed for him at Lyons, whither he had taken his flight, seems to have had a similar fate. From that time he disappears, probably dying, whether or not by suicide is doubtful,[96] before 1544, when his miscellaneous works were published. They include his Œuvres Diverses—many of them graceful poems addressed to his royal mistress, Marguerite—which, with his verse translation of the Andria of Terence and his Discours non plus Melancoliques que Divers, make up his small body of work. In the Discours may be seen applied to matters of history and scholarship the same critical spirit that utters itself in the Cymbalum, and the same literary gift; but for orthodoxy his name became a hissing and a byword, and it is only in modern times that French scholarship has recognized in Desperiers the true literary comrade and potential equal of Rabelais and Marot.[97] The age of Francis was too inclement for such literature as his Cymbalum; and it was much that it spared Gringoire (d. 1544), who, without touching doctrine, satirized in his verse both priests and Protestants.
It is something of a marvel, further, that it spared Rabelais (? 1493–1553), whose enormous raillery so nearly fills up the literary vista of the age for modern retrospect. It has been said by a careful student that “the free and universal inquiry, the philosophic doubt, which were later to work the glory of Descartes, proceed from Rabelais”;[98] and it is indeed an impression of boundless intellectual curiosity and wholly unfettered thinking that is set up by his entire career. Sent first to the convent school of La Baumette, near Angers, he had there as a schoolfellow Geoffroy d’Estissac, afterwards his patron as Bishop of Maillezais. Sent later to the convent school of Fontenay-le-Comte, he had the luck to have for schoolfellows there the four famous brothers Du Bellay, so well able to protect him in later life; and, forced to spend fifteen years of his young life (1509–24) at Fontenay as a Franciscan monk, he turned the time to account by acquiring an immense erudition, including a knowledge of Greek, then rare.[99] Naturally the book-lover was not popular among his fellow-monks; and his Greek books were actually confiscated by the chapter, who found in his cell certain writings of Erasmus,[100] to whom as a scholar he afterwards expressed the deepest intellectual obligations. Thereafter, by the help of his friend d’Estissac, now bishop of the diocese, Rabelais received papal permission to join the order of the Benedictines and to enter the Abbey of Maillezais as a canon regular (1524); but soon after, though he was thus a fully-ordained priest, we find him broken loose, and living for some six years a life of wandering freedom as a secular priest, sometimes with his friend the bishop, winning friends in high places by his learning and his gaiety, everywhere studying and observing. At the bishop’s priory of Ligugé he seems to have studied hard and widely. In 1530 he is found at Montpellier, extending his studies in medicine, in which he speedily won distinction, becoming B.M. on December 1, and a lecturer in the following year. He was later esteemed one of the chief anatomists of his day, being one of the first to dissect the human body and to insist on the need of such training for physicians;[101] and in 1532[102] we find him characterized as the “true great universal spirit of this time.”[103] In the same year he published at Lyons, where he was appointed physician to the chief hospital, an edition of the Latin letters of the Ferrarese physician Manardi; and his own commentaries on Galen and Hippocrates, which had a very poor sale.[104] At Lyons he made the acquaintance of Dolet, Marot, and Desperiers; and his letter (of the same year) to Erasmus (printed as addressed to Bernard de Salignac[105]) showed afresh how his intellectual sympathies went.
About 1532 he produced his Gargantua and Pantagruel, the first two books of his great humoristic romance; and in 1533 began his series of almanacks, continued till 1550, presumably as printer’s hack-work. From the fragments which have been preserved, they appear to have been entirely serious in tone, one containing a grave theistic protest against all astrological prediction. Along with the almanack of 1533, however, he produced a Pantagruelian Prognostication; and this, which alone has been preserved entire,[106] passes hardy ridicule on astrology,[107] one of the most popular superstitions of the day, among high and low alike. Almost immediately the Sorbonne was on his track, condemning his Pantagruel in 1533.[108] A journey soon afterwards to Rome, in the company of his friend Bishop Jean du Bellay, the French ambassador, may have saved him some personal experience of persecution. Two years later, when the Bishop went to Rome to be made cardinal, Rabelais again accompanied him; and he appears to have been a favourite alike with Pope Clement VII and Paul III. At the end of 1535 we find him, in a letter to his patron, the bishop of Maillezais, scoffing at the astrological leanings of the new Pope, Paul III.[109] Nonetheless, upon a formal Supplicatio pro apostasia, he obtained from the Pope in 1536 an absolution for his breach of his monastic vows, with permission to practise medicine in a Benedictine monastery. Shortly before, his little son Théodule had died;[110] and it may have been grief that inspired such a desire: in any case, the papal permission to turn monk again was never used,[111] though the pardon was doubtless serviceable. Taking his degree as doctor at Montpellier in May, 1537, he there lectured for about a year on anatomy; and in the middle of 1538 he recommenced a wandering life,[112] practising in turn at Narbonne, Castres, and Lyons. Then, after becoming a Benedictine canon of St. Maur in 1540, we find him in Piedmont from 1540 to 1543, under the protection of the viceroy, Guillaume de Bellay.[113]
During this period the frequent reprints of the first two books of his main work, though never bearing his name, brought upon him the denunciations alike of priests and Protestants. Ramus, perhaps in revenge for being caricatured as Raminagrobis, pronounced him an atheist.[114] Calvin, who had once been his friend, had in his book De Scandalis angrily accused him of libertinage, profanity, and atheism; and henceforth, like Desperiers, he was about as little in sympathy with Protestantism as with the zealots of Rome.
Thus assailed, Rabelais had seen cause, in an edition of 1542, to modify a number of the hardier utterances in the original issues of the first two books of his Pantagruel, notably his many epithets aimed at the Sorbonne.[115] In the reprints there are substituted for Biblical names some drawn from heathen mythology; expressions too strongly savouring of Calvinism are withdrawn; and disrespectful allusions to the kings of France are elided. In his concern to keep himself safe with the Sorbonne he even made a rather unworthy attack[116] (1542) on his former friend Étienne Dolet for the mere oversight of reprinting one of his books without deleting passages which Rabelais had expunged;[117] but no expurgation could make his évangile, as he called it,[118] a Christian treatise, or keep for him an orthodox reputation; and it was with much elation that he obtained in 1545 from King Francis—whose private reader was his friend Duchâtel, Bishop of Tulle—a privilege to print the third book of Pantagruel, which he issued in 1546, signed for the first time with his name, and prefaced by a cry of jovial defiance to the “petticoated devils” of the Sorbonne. They at once sought to convict him of fresh blasphemies; but even the thrice-repeated substitution of an n for an m in âme, making “ass” out of “soul,” was carried off, by help of Bishop Duchâtel, as a printer’s error; and the king, having laughed like other readers, maintained the imprimatur. But although it gave Rabelais formal leave to reprint the first and second books, he was careful for the time not to do so, leaving the increasing risk to be run by whoso would.
It was on the death of Francis in 1547 that Rabelais ran his greatest danger, having to fly to Metz, where for a time he acted as salaried physician of the city. About this time he seems to have written the fourth and fifth books of Pantagruel; and to the treatment he had suffered at Catholic hands has been ascribed the reversion to Calvinistic ideas noted in the fifth book.[119] In 1549, however, on the birth of a son to Henri II, his friend Cardinal Bellay returned to power, and Rabelais to court favour with him. The derider of astrology did not scruple to cast a prosperous horoscope for the infant prince—justifying by strictly false predictions his own estimate of the art, since the child died in the cradle. There was now effected the dramatic scandal of the appointment of Rabelais in 1550 to two parish cures, one of which, Meudon, has given him his most familiar sobriquet. He seems to have left both to be served by vicars;[120] but the wrath of the Church was so great that early in 1552 he resigned them;[121] proceeding immediately afterwards to publish the fourth book of Pantagruel, for which he had duly obtained official privilege. As usual, the Sorbonne rushed to the pursuit; and the Parlement of Paris forbade the sale of the book despite the royal permission. That permission, however, was reaffirmed; and this, the most audacious of all the writings of Rabelais, went forth freely throughout France, carrying the war into the enemies’ camp, and assailing alike Protestants and churchmen. In the following year, his work done, he died.
It is difficult to estimate the intellectual effect of his performance, which was probably much greater at the end of the century than during his life. Patericke, the English translator of Gentillet’s famous Discours against Machiavelli (1576), points to Rabelais among the French and Agrippa (an odd parallel) among the Germans as the standard-bearers of the whole train of atheists and scoffers. “Little by little, that which was taken in the beginning for jests turned to earnest, and words into deeds.”[122] Rabelais’s vast innuendoes by way of jests about the people of Ruach (the Spirit) who lived solely on wind;[123] his quips about the “reverend fathers in devil,” of the “diabological faculty”;[124] his narratives about the Papefigues and Papimanes;[125] and his gibes at the Decretals,[126] were doubtless enjoyed by many good Catholics otherwise placated by his attacks on the “demoniacal Calvins, impostors of Geneva”;[127] and so careful was he on matters of dogma that it remains impossible to say with confidence whether or not he finally believed in a future state.[128] That he was a deist or Unitarian seems the reasonable inference as to his general creed;[129] but there also he throws out no negations—even indicates a genial contempt for the philosophe ephectique et pyrrhonien[130] who opposes a halting doubt to two contrary doctrines. In any case, he was anathema to the heresy-hunters of the Sorbonne, and only powerful protection could have saved him.
Dolet (1508–1546) was certainly much less of an unbeliever[131] than Rabelais;[132] but where Rabelais could with ultimate impunity ridicule the whole machinery of the Church,[133] Dolet, after several iniquitous prosecutions, in which his jealous rivals in the printing business took part, was finally done to death in priestly revenge[134] for his youthful attack on the religion of inquisitorial Toulouse, where gross pagan superstition and gross orthodoxy went hand in hand.[135] He certainly “lived a life of sturt and strife.” Born at Orléans, he studied in his boyhood at Paris; later at Padua, under Simon Villanovanus, whom he heard converse with Sir Thomas More; then, at 21, for a year at Venice, where he was secretary to Langeac, the French Bishop of Limoges. It was at Toulouse, where he went in 1532 to study law, that he began his quarrels and his troubles. In that year, and in that town, the young Jean de Caturce, a lecturer in the school of law, was burned alive on a trivial charge of heresy; and Dolet witnessed the tragedy.[136] Previously there had been a wholesale arrest of suspected Lutherans—“advocates, procureurs, ecclesiastics of all sorts, monks, friars, and curés.”[137] Thirty-two saved themselves by flight; but among those arrested was Jean de Boysonne, the most learned and the ablest professor in the university, much admired by Rabelais,[138] and afterwards the most intimate friend of Dolet. It was his sheer love of letters that brought upon him the charge of heresy;[139] but he was forced publicly to abjure ten Lutheran heresies charged upon him. The students of the time were divided in the old fashion into “nations,” and formed societies as such; and Dolet, chosen in 1534 as “orator” of the “French” group, as distinct from the Gascons and the Tolosans, in the course of a quarrel of the societies delivered two Latin orations, in one of which he vilipended alike the cruelty and the superstitions of Toulouse. A number of the leading bigots of the place were attacked; and Dolet was after an interval of some months thrown into prison, charged with exciting a riot and with contempt of the Parlement of Toulouse. His incarceration did not last long; but never thereafter was he safe; and in the remaining thirteen years of his life he was five more times in prison, for nearly five years in all.[140]
After he had settled at Lyons, and produced his Commentaries, he had the bad fortune to kill an enemy who drew sword upon him; and the pardon he obtained from the king through the influence of Marguerite of Navarre remained technically unratified for six years, during which time he was only provisionally at liberty, being actually in prison for a short time in 1537. Apart from this episode he showed himself both quarrelsome and vainglorious, alienating friends who had done much for him; but his enemies were worse spirits than he. The power of the man drove him to perpetual production no less than to strife; and his mere activity as a printer went far to destroy him.
“No calling was more hateful to the friends of bigotry and superstition than that of a printer” (Christie, as cited, p. 387). Nearly all the leading printers of France and Germany were either avowedly in sympathy with Protestant heresy or suspected of being so (id. p. 388); and the issue of an edict by King Francis in 1535 for the suppression of printing was at the instance of the Sorbonne. We shall see that in Germany the support of the printers, and their hostility to the priests and monks, contributed greatly to the success of Lutheranism.
In 1542 he was indicted as a heretic, but really for publishing Protestant books of devotion and French translations of the Bible. Among the formal offences charged were: (1) his having in his Cato Christianus cited as the second commandment the condemnation of all images; (2) his use of the term “fate” in the sense of predestination; (3) his substitution of habeo fidem for credo; (4) the eating of flesh in Lent; and (5) the act of taking a walk during the performance of mass.[141] On this indictment the two inquisitors Orry and Faye delivered him over to the secular arm for execution. Again he secured the King’s pardon (1543), through the mediation of Pierre Duchâtel, the good Bishop of Tulle; but the ecclesiastical resistance was such that, despite Dolet’s formal recantation, it required a more plenary pardon, the express orders of the King, and three official letters to secure his release after a year’s detention.[142]
That was, however, swiftly followed by a final and successful prosecution. By a base device two parcels were made of prohibited books printed by Dolet and of Protestant books issued at Geneva; and these, bearing his name in large, were forwarded to Paris. The parcels were seized, and he was again arrested, early in January, 1544. He contrived to escape to Piedmont; but, returning secretly after six months to print documents of defence, he was discovered and sent to prison in Paris. The last pardon having covered all previous writings, the prosecutors sought in his translation of the pseudo-Platonic dialogues Axiochus and Hipparchus, printed with his last vindication; and, finding a slight over-emphasis of Sokrates’s phrase describing the death of the body (“thou shalt no longer be,” rendered by “thou shalt no longer be anything at all”), pronounced this a wilful propounding of a heresy, though in fact there had been no denial of the doctrine of immortality.[143] This time the prey was held. After Dolet had been in prison for twenty months the Parlement of Paris ratified the sentence of death; and he was burned alive on August 3, 1546. The utter wickedness of the whole process[144] at least serves to relieve by neighbourhood the darkness of the stains cast on Protestantism by the crimes of Calvin.
The whole of the clerical opposition to the new learning at this period is not unjustly to be characterized as a malignant cabal of ignorance against knowledge. In Germany as in France real learning was substantially on the side of the persecuted writers. When, in March of 1537, Dolet was entertained at a banquet to celebrate the pardon granted to him by the king for his homicide at Lyons on the last day of the previous year, there came to it, by Dolet’s own account, the chief lights of learning in France—Budé, the chief Greek scholar of his time; Berauld, his nearest compeer; Danès and Toussain, both pupils of Budé and the first royal professors of Greek at Paris; Marot, “the French Maro”; Rabelais, then regarded as a great new light in medicine; Voulté,[145] and others. The men of enlightenment at first instinctively drew together, recognizing that on all hands they were surrounded by rabid enemies, who were the enemies of knowledge. But soon the stresses of the time drove them asunder. Voulté, who in this year was praising Rabelais in Latin epigrams, was attacking him in the next as an impious disciple of Lucian;[146] and, after having warmly befriended Dolet, was impeaching him, not without cause, as an ingrate. It was an age of passion and violence; and Voulté was himself assassinated in 1542 “by a man who had been unsuccessful in a law-suit against him.”[147]
Infamous as was the cruelty with which Dolet was persecuted to the death, his execution was but a drop in the sea of blood then being shed in France by the Church. The king, sinking under his maladies, had become the creature of the priests, who in defiance of the Chancellor obtained his signature (1545) to a decree for a renewed persecution of the heretics of the Vaudois; and an army, followed by a Catholic mob and accompanied by the papal vice-legate of Avignon, burst upon the doomed territory and commenced to burn and slay. Women captured were violated and then thrown over precipices; and twice over, when a multitude of fugitives in a fortified place surrendered on the assurance that their lives and property would be spared, the commander ordered that all should be put to death. When old soldiers refused to enact such an infamy, others joyfully obeyed, the mob aiding; and among the women were committed, as usual, “all the crimes of which hell could dream.” Three towns were destroyed, 3,000 persons massacred, 256 executed, six or seven hundred more sent to the galleys, and many children sold as slaves.[148] Thus was the faith vindicated and safeguarded.
Of the freethought of such an age there could be no adequate record. Its tempestuous energy, however, implies not a little of private unbelief; and at a time when in England, two generations behind France in point of literary evolution, there was, as we shall see, a measure of rationalism among religionists, there must have been at least as much in the land of Rabelais and Desperiers. The work of Guillaume Postell, De causis seu principiis et originibus Naturæ contra Atheos, published in 1552, testifies to kinds of unbelief that outwent the doubt of Rabelais; though Postell’s general extravagance discounts all of his utterances. It is said of Guillaume Pellicier (1527–1568), Bishop of Montpellier, who first turned Protestant and afterwards, according to Gui Patin, atheist, that he would have been burned but for the fact of his consecration.[149] And the English chroniclers preserve a scandal concerning an anonymous atheist, worded as follows: “1539. This yeare, in October, died in the Universitie of Parris, in France, a great doctor, which said their was no God, and had bene of that opinion synce he was twentie yeares old, and was above fouerscore yeares olde when he died. And all that tyme had kept his error secrett, and was esteamed for one of the greatest clarkes in all the Universitie of Parris, and his sentence was taken and holden among the said studentes as firme as scripture, which shewed, when he was asked why he had not shewed his opinion till his death, he answered that for feare of death he durst not, but when he knew that he should die he said their was no lief to come after this lief, and so died miserably to his great damnation.”[150]
Among the eminent ones then surmised to lean somewhat to unbelief was the sister of King Francis, Marguerite of Navarre, whom we have noted as a protectress of the pantheistic Libertini, denounced by Calvin. She is held to have been substantially skeptical until her forty-fifth year;[151] though her final religiousness seems also beyond doubt.[152] In her youth she bravely protected the Protestants from the first persecution of 1523 onwards; and the strongly Protestant drift of her Miroir de l’âme pécheresse exasperated the Catholic theologians; but after the Protestant violences of 1546 she seems to have sided with her brother against the Reform.[153] The strange taste of the Heptaméron, of which again her part-authorship seems certain,[154] constitutes a moral paradox not to be solved save by recognizing in her a woman of genius, whose alternate mysticism and bohemianism expressed a very ancient duality in human nature.
A similar mixture will explain the intellectual life of the poet Ronsard. A persecutor of the Huguenots,[155] he was denounced as an atheist by two of their ministers;[156] and the pagan fashion in which he handled Christian things scandalized his own side, albeit he was hostile to Rabelais. But though the spirit of the French Renaissance, so eagerly expressed in the Défense et Illustration de la langue françoise of Joachim du Bellay (1549), is at its outset as emancipated as that of the Italian, we find Ronsard in his latter years edifying the pious.[157] Any ripe and consistent rationalism, indeed, was then impossible. One of the most powerful minds of the age was Bodin (1530–1596), whose République is one of the most scientific treatises on government between Aristotle and our own age, and whose Colloquium Heptaplomeres[158] is no less original an outline of a naturalist[159] philosophy. It consists of six dialogues, in which seven men take part, setting forth the different religious standpoints of Jew, Christian, pagan, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, the whole leading up to a doctrine of tolerance and universalism. Bodin was repeatedly and emphatically accused of unbelief by friends and foes;[160] and his rationalism on some heads is beyond doubt; yet he not only held by the belief in witchcraft, but wrote a furious treatise in support of it;[161] and he dismissed the system of Copernicus as too absurd for discussion.[162] He also formally vetoes all discussion on faith, declaring it to be dangerous to religion;[163] and by these conformities he probably saved himself from ecclesiastical attack.[164] Nonetheless, he essentially stood for religious toleration: the new principle that was to change the face of intellectual life. A few liberal Catholics shared it with him to some extent[165] long before St. Bartholomew’s Day; eminent among them being L’Hopital,[166] whose humanity, tolerance, and concern for practical morality and the reform of the Church brought upon him the charge of atheism. He was, however, a believing Catholic.[167] Deprived of power, his edict of tolerance repealed, he saw the long and ferocious struggle of Catholics and Huguenots renewed, and crowned by the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day (1572). Broken-hearted, and haunted by that monstrous memory, he died within six months.
Two years later there was put to death at Paris, by hanging and burning, on the charge of atheism, Geoffroi Vallée, a man of good family in Orléans. Long before, at the age of sixteen, he had written a freethinking treatise entitled La Béatitude des Chrétiens, ou le fléau de la foy—a discussion between a Huguenot, a Catholic, a libertin, an Anabaptist and an atheist. He had been the associate of Ronsard, who renounced him, and helped, it is said, to bring him to execution.[168] It is not unlikely that a similar fate would have overtaken the famous Protestant scholar and lexicographer, Henri Estienne (1532–1598), had he not died unexpectedly. His false repute of being “the prince of atheists”[169] and the “Pantagruel of Geneva” was probably due in large part to his sufficiently audacious Apologie pour Hérodote[170] (1566) and to his having translated into Latin (1562) the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus, a work which must have made for freethinking. But he was rather a Protestant than a rationalist. In the former book he had spoken, either sincerely or ironically, of the “detestable book” of Bonaventure Desperiers, calling him a mocker of God; and impeached Rabelais as a modern Lucian, believing neither in God nor immortality;[171] yet his own performance was fully as well fitted as theirs to cause scandal. It is in fact one of the richest repertories ever formed of scandalous stories against priests, monks, nuns, and popes.[172]
One literary movement towards better things had begun before the crowning infamy of the Massacre appalled men into questioning the creed of intolerance. Castalio, whom we shall see driven from Geneva by Calvin in 1544 for repugning to the doctrine of predestination, published pseudonymously, in 1554, in reply to Calvin’s vindication of the slaying of Servetus, a tract, De Haereticis quomodo cum iis agendum sit variorum Sententiæ, in which he contrived to collect some passage from the Fathers and from modern writers in favour of toleration. To these he prefaced, by way of a letter to the Duke of Wirtemberg, an argument of his own, the starting-point of much subsequent propaganda.[173] Aconzio, another Italian, followed in his steps; and later came Mino Celso of Siena, with his “long and elaborate argument against persecution,” De Haereticis capitali supplicio non afficiendis (1584).[174] Withal, Castalio died in beggary, ostracized alike by Protestants and Catholics, and befriended only by the Sozzini, whose sect was the first to earn collectively the praise of condemning persecution.[175] But in the next generation there came to reinforce the cause of humanity a more puissant pen than any of these; while at the same time the recoil from religious cruelty was setting many men secretly at utter variance with faith.
In France in particular a generation of insane civil war for religion’s sake must have gone far to build up unbelief. Even among many who did not renounce the faith, there went on an open evolution of stoicism, generated through resort to the teaching of Epictetus. The atrocities of Christian civil war and Christian savagery were such that Christian faith could give small sustenance to the more thoughtful and sensitive men who had to face them and carry on the tasks of public life the while. The needed strength was given by the masculine discipline which pagan thought had provided for an age of oppression and decadence, and which had carried so much of healing even for the Christians who saw decadence carried yet further, that in the fifth century the Enchiridion of Epictetus had been turned by St. Nilus into a monastic manual, even as Ambrose manipulated the borrowed Stoicism of Cicero.[176] With its devout theism, the book had appealed to those northern scholars who had mastered Greek in the early years of the sixteenth century, when the refugees of Constantinople had set up Platonic studies in Italy. After 1520, Italian Hellenism rapidly decayed;[177] but in the north it never passed away; and from the stronger men of the new learning in Germany the taste for Epictetus passed into France. In 1558 the semi-Protestant legist Coras—later slain in the massacre of St. Bartholomew—published at Toulouse a translation of the apocryphal dialogue of Epictetus and Hadrian; in 1566 the Protestant poet Rivaudeau translated the Enchiridion, which thenceforth became a culture force in France.[178]
The influence appears in Montaigne, in whose essays it is pervasive; but more directly and formally in the book of Justus Lipsius, De Constantia (1584), and the same scholar’s posthumous dialogues entitled Manducatio ad philosophiam stoïcam and Physiologia stoïcorum (1604), which influenced all scholarly Europe. Thus far the Stoic ethic had been handled with Christian bias and application; and Guillaume Du Vair, who embodied it in his work La Sainte Philosophie (1588), was not known as a heretic; but in his hands it receives no Christian colouring, and might pass for the work of a deist.[179] And its popularity is to be inferred from his further production of a fresh translation of the Enchiridion and a Traité de la philosophie morale des stoïques. Under Henri IV he rose to high power; and his public credit recommended his doctrine.
Such were the more visible fruits of the late spread of the Renaissance ferment in France while, torn by the frantic passions of her pious Catholics, she passed from the plane of the Renaissance to that of the new Europe, in which the intellectual centre of gravity was to be shifted from the south to the north, albeit Italy was still to lead the way, in Galileo, for the science of the modern world.
§ 3. The English Evolution
In England as in France the intellectual life undergoes visible retrogression in the fifteenth century, while in Italy, with the political problem rapidly developing towards catastrophe, it flourished almost riotously. From the age of Chaucer, considered on its intellectual side and as represented mainly by him, there is a steep fall to almost the time of Sir Thomas More, around whom we see as it were the sudden inrush of the Renaissance upon England. The conquest of France by Henry V and the Wars of the Roses, between them, brought England to the nadir of mental and moral life. But in the long and ruinous storm the Middle Ages, of which Wiclif is the last powerful representative, were left behind, and a new age begins to be prepared.
Of a very different type from Wiclif is the remarkable personality of the Welshman Reginald (or Reynold) Pecock (1395?–1460?), who seems divided from Wiclif by a whole era of intellectual development, though born within about ten years of his death. It is a singular fact that one of the most rationalistic minds among the serious writers of the fifteenth century should be an English bishop,[180] and an Ultramontane at that. Pecock was an opponent at once of popular Bibliolatry and of priestly persecution, declaring that “the clergy would be condemned at the last day if they did not draw men into consent to the true faith otherwise than by fire and sword and hanging.”[181] It was as the rational and temperate defender of the Church against the attacks of the Lollards in general that he formulated the principle of natural reason as against scripturalism. This attitude it is that makes his treatise, the Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy, the most modern of theoretic books before More and Hooker and Bacon. That he was led to this measure of rationalism rather by the exigencies of his papalism than by a spontaneous skepticism is suggested by the fact that he stands for the acceptance of miraculous images, shrines, and relics, when the Lollards are attacking them.[182] On the other hand, it is hard to be certain that his belief in the shrines was genuine, so ill does it consist with his attitude to Bibliolatry. In a series of serenely argued points he urges his thesis that the Bible is not the basis of the moral law, but merely an illustration thereof, and that the natural reason is obviously presupposed in the bulk of its teaching. He starts from the formulas of Thomas Aquinas, but reaches a higher ground. It is the position of Hooker, anticipated by a hundred years; and this in an age of such intellectual backwardness and literary decadence that the earlier man must be pronounced by far the more remarkable figure. In such a case the full influence of the Renaissance seems to be at work; though in the obscurity of the records we can do no more than conjecture that the new contacts with French culture between the invasion of France by Henry V in 1415 and the expulsion of the English in 1451 may have introduced forces of thought unknown or little known before. If indeed there were English opponents of scripture in Wiclif’s day, the idea must have ripened somewhat in Pecock’s. Whether, however, the victories of Jeanne D’Arc made some unbelievers as well as many dastards among the English is a problem that does not seem to have been investigated.
Pecock’s reply to the Lollards creates the curious situation of a churchman rebutting heretics by being more profoundly heretical than they. In his system, the Scriptures “reveal” only supernatural truths not otherwise attainable, a way of safeguarding dogma not likely to reassure believers. There is reason, indeed, to suspect that Pecock held no dogma with much zeal; and when in his well-named treatise (now lost), The Provoker, he denied the authenticity of the Apostles’ Creed, “he alienated every section of theological opinion in England.”
See Miss A. M. Cooke’s art. Reginald Pecock in Dict. of Nat. Biog. This valuable notice is the best short account of Pecock; though the nature of his case is most fully made out by Hook, as cited below. It is characteristic of the restricted fashion in which history is still treated that neither in the Student’s History of Professor Gardiner nor in the Short History of Green is Pecock mentioned. Earlier ideas concerning him were far astray. The notion of Foxe, the martyrologist, that Pecock was an early Protestant, is a gross error. He held not a single Protestant tenet, being a rationalizing papist. A German ecclesiastical historian of the eighteenth century (Werner, Kirchengeschichte des 18ten Jahrhunderts, 1756, cited by Lechler) calls Pecock the first English deist. See a general view of his opinions in Lewis’s Life of Dr. Reynold Pecock (rep. 1820), ch. v. The heresies charged on him are given on p. 160; also in the R. T. S. Writings and Examinations, 1831, pp. 200–201. While rejecting Bibliolatry, he yet argued that Popes and Councils could make no change in the current creed; and he thus offended the High Churchmen. Cp. Massingberd, The English Reformation, 4th ed. pp. 206–209.
The main causes of the hostility he met from the English hierarchy and Government appear to have been, on the one hand, his change of political party, which put him in opposition to Archbishop Bourchier, and on the other his zealous championship of the authority of the papacy as against that of the Councils of the Church. It was expressly on the score of his denunciation of the Councils that he was tried and condemned.[183] Thus the reward of his effort to reason down the menacing Lollards and rebut Wiclif[184] was his formal disgrace and virtual imprisonment. Had he not recanted, he would have been burned: as it was, his books were; and it is on record that they consisted of eleven quartos and three folios of manuscript. Either because of his papalism or as a result of official intrigue, Church and lords and commons were of one mind against him; and the mob would fain have burned him with his books.[185] In that age of brutal strife, when “neither the Church nor the opponents of the Church had any longer a sway over men’s hearts,”[186] he figures beside the mindless prelates and their lay peers somewhat as does More later beside Henry VIII, as Reason versus the Beast; and it was illustrative of his entire lack of fanaticism that he made the demanded retractations—avowing his sin in “trusting to natural reason” rather than to Scripture and the authority of the Church—and went his way in silence to solitude and death. The ruling powers disposed of Lollardism in their own way; and in the Wars of the Roses every species of heretical thought seems to disappear. The bribe held out to the nation by the invasion of France had been fatally effectual to corrupt the spirit of moral criticism which inspired the Lollard movement at its best; and the subsequent period of rapine and strife reduced thought and culture to the levels of the Middle Ages.
A hint of what was possible in the direction of freethought in the England of Henry V and Henry VI emerges in some of the records concerning Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, the youngest son of Henry IV. Gifted but ill-balanced, Humphrey was the chief patron of learning in England in his day; and he drank deeply of the spirit of Renaissance scholarship.[187] Sir Thomas More preserves the story—reproduced also in the old play, The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster—of how he exposed the fraud of a begging impostor who pretended to have recovered his sight through the virtue of a saint’s relics; and a modern pietistic historian decides that the Duke “had long ceased to believe in miracles and relics.”[188] But if this be true, it is the whole truth as to Humphrey’s freethinking. It was the highest flight of rationalism permissible in his day and sphere.
On the view that Humphrey was a freethinker, the pious Pauli, who says (as cited, p. 337) of the Renaissance of letters, “The weak and evil side of this revived form of literature is that its disciples should have elevated the morality, or rather the immorality, of classical antiquity above Christian discipline and virtue,” sees fit further to pronounce that the bad account of Gloucester’s condition of body drawn up eleven years before his death by the physician Kymer is a proof of the “wild unbridled passions by which the duke was swayed,” and throws a lurid light upon “the tendencies and disposition of his mind.” Humphrey lived till 55, and died suddenly, under circumstances highly suggestive of poisoning by his enemies. His brothers Henry and John died much younger than he; but in their case the religious historian sees no ground for imputation. But the historian’s inference is overstrained. In reality Humphrey never indicated any lack of theological faith. The poet Lydgate, no unbeliever, described him as “Chose of God to be his owne knyghte,” and so rigorous “that heretike dar not comen in his sihte” (verses transcribed in Furnivall’s Early English Meals and Manners, 1868, pp. lxxxv–vi).
His most comprehensive biographer decides that he was “essentially orthodox,” despite his uncanonical marriage with his second wife and his general reputation for sexual laxity. “He was punctilious in the performance of his religious duties” and “a stern opponent of the Lollards”; he “countenanced the extinction of heresy by being present at the burning at Smithfield of an old priest who denied the validity of the sacraments of the Church”; and an Archbishop of Milan pronounced him to be “known everywhere as the chiefest friend and preserver of Holy Church” (K. H. Vickers, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: A Biography, 1907, pp. 223, 321–23). Of such a personage no exegesis can make a rationalist.
Of other traces of critical thinking in England in that age there is little to be said, so little literature is there to convey them. But there are signs of the influence of the “pagan” thought of the Renaissance in religious books. The old Revelation of the Monk of Evesham, ostensibly dating from 1196, was first printed about 1482,[189] with a “prologe” explaining that it “was not shewed to hym only for hym butte also for the confort and profetyng of all cristyn pepulle that none man shuld dowte or mystruste of anothir life and world”; “and as for the trowthe of this reuelacyon no man nother woman ought to dowte in any wise,” seeing it is thus miraculously provided that “alle resons and mocyons of infydelite the which risith often tymes of man’s sensualite shall utwardly be excluded and quenched.” Evidently the old problem of immortality had been agitated.
§ 4. The Remaining European Countries
Not till late in the fifteenth century is the intellectual side of the Renaissance influence to be seen bearing fruit in Germany, of which the turbulent and semi-barbaric life in the medieval period was little favourable to mental progress. Of political hostility to the Church there was indeed an abundance, long before Luther;[190] but amid the many traces of “irreligion” there is practically none of rational freethinking. What reasoned thought there was, as we have seen, turned to Christian mysticism of a pantheistic cast, as in the teaching of Tauler and Eckhart.[191]
Another and a deeper current of thought is seen in the remarkable philosophic work of Bishop Nicolaus of Kues or Cusa (1401–1464), who, professedly by an independent movement of reflection, but really as a result of study of Greek philosophy, reached a larger pantheism than had been formulated by any Churchman since the time of John the Scot.[192] There is little or no trace, however, of any influence attained by his teaching, which indeed could appeal only to a very few minds of that day. Less remarkable than the metaphysic of Nicolaus, though also noteworthy in its way, is his Dialogue “On Peace, or Concordance of Faith,” in which, somewhat in the spirit of Boccaccio’s tale of the Three Kings, he aims at a reconciliation of all religions, albeit by way of proving the Christian creed to be the true one.
In the Netherlands and other parts of western Europe the popular anti-ecclesiastical heresy of the thirteenth century spread in various degrees; but there is only exceptional trace of literate or properly rationalistic freethinking. Among the most notable developments was the movement in Holland early in the fourteenth century, which compares closely with that of the higher Paulicians and mystics of the two previous centuries, its chief traits being a general pantheism, a denial of the efficacy of the sacrament of the altar, an insistence that all men are sons of God, and a general declaration for “natural light.”[193] But this did not progressively develop. Lack of leisured culture in the Low Countries, and the terrorism of the Inquisition, would sufficiently account for the absence of avowed unbelief, though everywhere, probably, some was set up by the contact of travellers with the culture of Italy. It is fairly to be inferred that in a number of cases the murderous crusade against witchcraft which was carried on in the fifteenth century served as a means of suppressing heresy, rationalistic or other. At Arras, for instance, in 1460, the execution of a number of leading citizens on a charge of sorcery seems to have been a blow at free discussion in the “chambers of rhetoric.”[194] And that rationalism, despite such frightful catastrophes, obscurely persisted, is to be gathered from the long vogue of the work of the Spanish physician Raymund of Sebonde,[195] who, having taught philosophy at Toulouse, undertook (about 1435) to establish Christianity on a rational foundation[196] in his Theologia Naturalis, made famous later by Montaigne.
To what length the suppressed rationalism of the age could on occasion go is dramatically revealed in the case of Hermann van Ryswyck, a Dutch priest, burned for heresy at the Hague in 1512. He was not only a priest in holy orders, but one of the order of Inquisitors; and he put forth the most impassioned denial and defiance of the Christian creed of which there is any record down to modern times. Tried before the inquisitors in 1502, he declared “with his own mouth and with sane mind” that the world is eternal, and was not created as was alleged by “the fool Moses” that there is no hell, and no future life; that Christ, whose whole career was flatly contrary to human welfare and reason, was not the son of Omnipotent God, but a fool, a dreamer, and a seducer of ignorant men, of whom untold numbers had been slain on account of him and his absurd evangel; that Moses had not physically received the law from God; and that “our” faith was shown to be fabulous by its fatuous Scripture, fictitious Bible, and crazy Gospel. And to this exasperated testimony he added: “I was born a Christian, but am no longer one: they are the chief fools.” Sentenced in 1502 to perpetual imprisonment, he was again brought forward ten years later, and, being found unbroken by that long durance, was as an unrepentant heretic sentenced to be burned on December 14, 1512, the doom being carried out on the same day. The source of his conviction can be gathered from his declaration that “the most learned Aristotle and his commentator Averroës were nearest the truth”; but his wild sincerity and unyielding courage were all his own. “Nimis infelix quidam” is the estimate of an inquisitor of that day.[197] Not so, unless they are most unhappy who die in battle, fighting for the truth they prize. But it has always been the Christian way to contemn all save Christian martyrs.
There is a tolerably full account of Ryswyck’s case in a nearly contemporary document, which evidently copies the official record. Ryswyck is described as “sacrē theologiē professorem ordinis predicatorum et inquisitorum”; and his declaration runs: “Quod mundum fuit ab eterna et non incipit per creationem fabricatum a stulto Mose, ut dicit Biblia indistincta.... Nec est infernus, ut nostri estimant. Item post hanc vitam nulla erit vita particularis.... Item doctissimus Aristoteles et ejus commentator Auerrois fuerunt veritati propinquissimi. Item Christum fuit stultus et simplex fantasticus et seductor simplicium hominum.... Quot enim homines interfecti sunt propter ipsum et suum Euangelium fatuum! Item quod omnia que Christus gessit, humano generi et rationi recte sunt contraria. Item Christum filium Dei omnipotentem aperte nego. Et Mosen legem a Deo visibiliter et facialiter suscepisse recuso. Item fides nostra fabulosa est, ut probat nostra fatua Scriptura et ficta Biblia et Euangelium delirum.... Omnes istos articulos et consimilos confessus est proprio ore et sana mente coram inquisitore et notario et testibus, addens: Ego Christianus natus, sed iam non sum Christianus, quoniam illi stultissimi sunt.” Paul Frédéricq, Corpus documentorum Inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae, Gent, 1889, i, 494, 501–502.
Thus the Renaissance passed on to the age of the Reformation the seeds of a rationalism which struck far deeper than the doctrine of Luther, but at the same time left a social soil in which such seeds could ill grow. Its own defeat, social and intellectual, may be best realized in terms of its failure to reach either political or physical science. Lack of the former meant political retrogression and bondage; and lack of the latter a renewed dominion of superstition and Bibliolatry—two sets of conditions of which each facilitated the other.
Nothing is more significant of the intellectual climate of the Renaissance than the persistence at all its stages of the belief in astrology, of which we find some dregs even in Bacon. That pseudo-science indeed stands, after all, for the spirit of science, and is not to be diagnosed as mere superstition; being really an à priori fallacy fallen into in the deliberate search for some principle of coördination in human affairs. Though adhered to by many prominent Catholics, including Charles V, and by many Protestants, including Melanchthon, it is logically anti-Christian, inasmuch as it presupposes in the moral world a reign of natural law, independent of the will or caprice of any personal power. Herein it differs deeply from magic;[198] though in the Renaissance the return to the lore of antiquity often involved an indiscriminate acceptance and blending of both sorts of occult pagan lore.[199] Magic subordinates Nature to Will: astrology, as apart from angelology, subordinates Will to Cosmic Law. For many perplexed and thoughtful men, accordingly, it was a substitute, more or less satisfying, for the theory, grown to them untenable, of a moral government of the universe. It was in fact a primary form of sociology proper, as it had been the primary form of astronomy; to which latter science, even in the Renaissance, it was still for many the introduction.
It flourished, above all things, on the insecurity inseparable from the turbulent Italian life of the Renaissance, even as it had flourished on the appalling vicissitude of the drama of imperial Rome; and it is conceivable that the inclination to true science which is seen in such men as Galileo, after the period of Italian independence, was nourished by the greater stability attained for a time under absolutist rule. And though Protestantism, on the other hand, adhered in the main unreasoningly to the theory of a moral control, that dogma at least served to countervail the dominion of astrology, which was only a dogmatism with a difference, and as such inevitably hindered true science.[200] On the whole, Protestantism tended to make more effectual that veto on pagan occultism which had been ineffectually passed from time to time by the Catholic Church; albeit the motive was stress of Christian superstition, and the veto was aimed almost as readily at inductive and true science as at the deductive and false. We shall find the craze of witchcraft, in turn, dominating Protestant countries at a time when freethinkers and liberal Catholics elsewhere were setting it at naught.
There can be little doubt that, broadly speaking, the new interest in Scripture study and ecclesiastical history told against the free play of thought on scientific and scholarly problems; we shall find Bacon realizing the fact a hundred years after Luther’s start; and the influence has operated down to our own day. In this resistance Catholics played their part. The famous Cornelius Agrippa[201] (1486–1535) never ceased to profess himself a Catholic, and had small sympathy with the Reformers, though always at odds with the monks; and his long popular treatise De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium, atque excellentia verbi Dei declamatio (1531) is a mere polemic for scripturalism against alike false science and true, monkish superstition and reason. Vilified as a magician by the monks, and as an atheist and a scoffer by angry humanists,[202] he did but set error against error, being himself a believer in witchcraft, a hater of anatomy, and as confident in his contempt of astronomy as of astrology. And his was a common frame of mind for centuries.
Still, the new order contained certain elements of help for a new life, as against its own inclement principles of authority and dogma; and the political heterogeneity of Europe, seconded by economic pressures and by new geographic discovery, sufficed further to prevent any far-reaching organization of tyranny. Under these conditions, new knowledge could incubate new criticism. But it would be an error-breeding oversight to forget that in the many-coloured world before the Reformation there was not only a certain artistic and imaginative sunlight which the Reformation long darkened, but even, athwart the mortal rigours of papal rule, a certain fitful play of intellectual insight to which the peoples of the Reformation became for a time estranged.
[1] J. A. Symonds writes that in the age of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio “what we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived” (Renaissance in Italy: Age of the Despots, ed. 1897, p. 9). [↑]
[2] Cp. Renan, Averroès, 3e édit. pp. 280–82, 295; Lewes, Hist. of Philos., 4th ed. ii, 67; Reuter, Gesch. der relig. Aufklärung im Mittelalter, i, 139–41. It is noteworthy that the troubadour, Austore d’Orlac, in cursing the crusades and the clergy who promoted them, suggests that the Christians should turn Moslems, seeing that God is on the side of the unbelievers (Gieseler, Per. III. Div. III, § 58, note 1). [↑]
[3] Cp. Burckhardt, Civ. of the Renais. in Italy, Eng. tr. ed. 1892, pp. 490, 492. [↑]
[5] Hardwick, p. 354, note. [↑]
[6] Cp. Hardwick, p. 361; “Janus,” The Pope and the Council, p. 308. [↑]
[7] Burckhardt, p. 497, note. [↑]
[8] Villari, Life and Times of Machiavelli, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. vol. i, introd. p. 115. Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 35, 226. [↑]
[9] As to its history see “Janus,” The Pope and the Council, p. 131 sq. [↑]
[10] Villari, as last cited, pp. 98, 108. [↑]
[11] It is noteworthy, however, that he did not detect, or at least did not declare, the spuriousness of the text of the three witnesses (Hallam, Lit. of Europe, iii, 58, note). Here the piety of Alfonso, who knew his Bible by heart, may have restrained him. [↑]
[12] See the passages transcribed by Hallam, Lit. of Europe, i, 148. [↑]
[13] Villari, as last cited, pp. 98–101. [↑]
[14] Cp. Gebhart, Renaissance en Italie, pp. 72–73; Burckhardt, pp. 458–65; Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, i, 5–4. “The authors of the most scandalous satires were themselves mostly monks or benficed priests.” (Burckhardt, p. 465.) [↑]
[15] Burckhardt, pp. 451–61; J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots, ed. 1897, p. 359; Villari, Life of Machiavelli, i, 153. [↑]
[16] See it well analysed by Owen, pp. 147–60. Cp. Hallam, Lit. of Europe, i, 199. M. Perrens describes Pulci as “emancipated from all belief”; but holds that he “bantered the faith without the least design of attacking religion” (La Civilisation florentine, p. 151). But cp. Villari, Life of Machiavelli, i, 159–60. [↑]
[17] Owen, p. 160. So also Hunt, and the editor of the Parnaso Italiano, there cited. [↑]
[20] Lea, ii, 271–72. Cp. pp. 282–84. [↑]
[25] Cp. R. C. Christie’s essay, “Pomponatius—a Skeptic,” in his Selected Essays and Papers, 1902, pp. 131–32; Renan, Averroès, pp. 345–352. [↑]
[26] Comm. in Aristot. de Gen. et Corr., lib. i, fol. 29 G. cited by Ellis in note on Bacon, who quotes a version of the phrase in the De Augmentis, B. v, end. As to Nifo see Nourrisson, Machiavel, 1875, ch. xii. [↑]
[27] As to ribald blasphemies by the Roman clergy see Erasmus, Epist. xxvi, 34 (ed. le Clerc), cited by Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, p. 378, note. [↑]
[28] Lit. Hist. of Europe, i, 142. Following Eichhorn, Hallam notes vindications by Marsilio Ficino, Alfonso de Spina (a converted Jew), Æneas Sylvius, and Pico di Mirandola; observing that the work of the first-named “differs little from modern apologies of the same class.” [↑]
[29] Cp. Ranke, History of the Popes, Bohn tr. ed. 1908, i, 58. [↑]
[30] Epist. above cited; Burigni, Vie d’Erasme, 1757, i, 148–49. [↑]
[31] Paul Canensius, cited by Ranke. [↑]
[32] This view seems to solve the mystery as to Perugino’s creed. Vasari (ed. Milanesi, iii, 589) calls him “persona di assai poca religione.” Mezzanotte (Della vita di P. Vanucci, etc. 1836, p. 172 sq.) indignantly rejects the statement, but notes that in Ciatti’s MS. annals of Perugia, ad ann. 1524, the mind of the painter is said to have been come una tavola rasa in religious matters. Mezzanotte holds that Pietro has been there confounded with a later Perugian painter. [↑]
[33] Leonardo da Vinci, Frammenti letterari e filosofici, trascelti par Dr. Edmondo Solmi. Firenze, 1900. Pensieri sulla scienza, 19, 20. [↑]
[34] Ib. 14, 22, 23, 24, 92. [↑]
[36] Some of the humanists called him unlettered (omo senza lettere), and he calls them gente stolta, a foolish tribe. [↑]
[37] Ib. 44, 46, 47, 48, 58, 60, 63, etc. [↑]
[42] Id. Pensieri sulla natura. 80–86. [↑]
[43] Shortly after Leonardo we find Girolamo Fracastorio (1483–1553) developing the criticism further, and in particular disposing of the futile formula, resorted to by the scientific apriorists of the time, that the “plastic force of nature” created fossils like other things. [↑]
[44] Id. Pensieri sulla morale, passim. [↑]
[48] Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 524, 541, notes; Villari, Life of Machiavelli, i, 124. “It was easy to see by his words that he hoped for the restoration of the pagan religion” (Id. Life of Savonarola, Eng. tr. p. 51). [↑]
[49] Only a few fragments of it survive. Villari, Life of Savonarola, p. 51. [↑]
[50] Carriere, Philos. Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit, 1847, p. 13. [↑]
[51] Cp. Villari, Life of Machiavelli, i, 128–34. [↑]
[52] Cp. Perrens, Hist. de Florence (1434–1531), i, 258. [↑]
[53] Id. p. 257. Cp. Villari, Machiavelli, i, 132; Savonarola, p. 60. [↑]
[54] “Of the majority of the twenty-two languages he was supposed to have studied, he knew little more than the alphabet and the elements of grammar” (Villari, Machiavelli, i, 135). As to Pico’s character, which was not saintly, see Perrens, Histoire, as cited, i, 561–62. [↑]
[55] Cp. Greswell, Memoirs of Politianus, Picus, etc. 2nd ed. 1805, 235; McCrie, The Reformation in Italy, ed. 1856, p. 33, note. [↑]
[56] Greswell, pp. 330–31. [↑]
[57] Cp. K. M. Sauer, Gesch. der italien. Litteratur, 1883, p. 109; Villari, Machiavelli, i, 138. [↑]
[58] Villari, Machiavelli, i, 133. [↑]
[59] Greswell, pp. 331–32. [↑]
[60] Discorsi sopra Tito Livio, i, 12. [↑]
[61] Istorie fiorentine, liv. i; Discorsi, i, 12. [↑]
[63] For another point of view see Owen, as cited, p. 167. [↑]
[64] In the Italian translation of Bacon’s essays, made for Bacon in 1618 by an English hand, Machiavelli is branded in one passage as an impio, and in another his name is dropped. See Routledge ed. of Bacon’s Works, pp. 749, 751. The admiring Paolo Giovio called him irrisor et atheos; and Cardinal Pole said the Prince was so full of every kind of irreligion that it might have been written by the hand of Satan (Nourrisson, Machiavel, 1875, p. 4). [↑]
[65] Burckhardt, pp. 499–500. Cp. Owen, pp. 165–68. It is thus impossible to be sure of the truth of the statement of Gregorovius (Lucrezia Borgia, Eng. tr. 1904, p. 25) that “There were no women skeptics or freethinkers; they would have been impossible in the society of that day.” Where dissimulation of unbelief was necessarily habitual, there may have been some women unbelievers as well as many men. [↑]
[66] Owen’s characterization of Machiavelli’s Asino d’oro as a “satire on the freethought of his age” (p. 177) will not stand investigation. See his own note, p. 178. [↑]
[68] As we saw, Polybius in his day took a similar view, coming as he did from Greece, where military failure had followed on a certain growth of unbelief. Machiavelli was much influenced by Polybius. Villari, ii, 9. [↑]
[69] Cp. Tullo Massarani, Studii di letteratura e d’arte, 1809, p. 96. [↑]
[73] Burckhardt, p. 464; Owen, p. 180, and refs. [↑]
[74] Owen, p. 181. See the whole account of Guicciardini’s rather confused opinions. [↑]
[75] Though Italy had most of what scientific knowledge existed. Burckhardt, p. 292. [↑]
[76] “A man might at the same time be condemned as a heretic in Spain for affirming, and in Italy for denying, the reality of the witches’ nightly rides” (The Pope and the Council, p. 258). [↑]
[77] The Pope and the Council, pp. 249–61. It was another Spina who wrote on the other side. [↑]
[78] F. Fiorentino, Pietro Pomponazzi, 1868, p. 30. [↑]
[79] Owen, pp. 197–98; Renan, Averroès, pp. 353–62; Christie, as cited, p. 133. [↑]
[80] Cp. Owen, pp. 201, 218; Lange, i, 183–87 (tr. i, 220–25). He, however, granted that the mass of mankind, “brutish and materialized,” needed the belief in heaven and hell to moralize them (Christie, pp. 140–41). [↑]
[81] This principle, though deriving from Averroïsm, and condemned, as we have seen, by Pope John XXI, had been affirmed by so high an orthodox authority as Albertus Magnus. Cp. Owen, pp. 211–12, note. While thus officially recognized, it was of course denounced by the devout when they saw how it availed to save heretics from harm. Mr. Owen has well pointed out (p. 238) the inconsistency of the believers who maintain that faith is independent of reason, and yet denounce as blasphemous the profession to believe by faith what is not intelligible by philosophy. [↑]
[82] Owen, pp. 209, note. “Son école est une école de laïques. de médecins, d’esprits forts, de libres penseurs” (Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartèsienne, 1854, i, 3). [↑]
[83] Owen. p. 210; Christie, p. 151. [↑]
[84] Christie, pp. 141–47. [↑]
[87] Gebhart, pp. 59–63; Burckhardt, p. 211. [↑]
[88] Cp. Burckhardt, p. 291. [↑]
[89] Burckhardt, pp. 279–80; Villari, Life of Machiavelli, pp. 106–107. [↑]
[90] Burckhardt, pt. iii, ch. xi. [↑]
[91] Dr. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 1895, i, 265. Cp. Renan, Averroès, Avert. [↑]
[92] Schechter, Studies in Judaism, pp. 213, 420–21. [↑]
[93] Notice of Bonaventure Desperiers, by Bibliophile Jacob [i.e. Lacroix], in 1841 ed. of Cymbalum Mundi, etc. [↑]
[94] For a solution of the enigma of the title see the Clef of Eloi Johanneau in ed. cited, p. 83. Cymbalum mundi was a nickname given in antiquity to (among others) an Alexandrian grammarian called Didymus—the name of doubting Thomas in the gospel. The book is dedicated by Thomas Du Clevier à son ami Pierre Tyrocan, which is found to be, with one letter altered (perhaps by a printer’s error), an anagram for Thomas Incrédule à son ami Pierre Croyant, “Unbelieving Thomas to his friend Believing Peter.” Clef cited, pp. 80–85. [↑]
[95] Origen, Against Celsus, vi, 78. [↑]
[96] The readiness of piety in all ages to invent frightful deaths for unbelievers must be remembered in connection with this and other records. Cp. Notice cited, p. xx, and note. The authority for this is Henri Estienne, Apologie pour Hérodote, liv. i, chs. 18, end, and 26. [↑]
[97] So Charles Nodier, cited in the Notice by Bibliophile Jacob, pp. xxiii–xxiv. The English translator of 1723 professed to see no unbelief in the book. [↑]
[98] Perrens, Les Libertins en France au XVIIe siècle, 1896, p. 41. [↑]
[99] Notice historique in Bibliophile Jacob’s ed. of Rabelais, 1841; Stapfer, Rabelais, pp. 6, 10; W. F. Smith, biog. not. to his trans. of Rabelais, 1893, i, p. xxii. [↑]
[100] Rathery, notice biog. to ed. of Burgaud des Marets, i, 12. Jacob’s account of his relations with his friends Budé and Amy at this stage is erroneous. See Rathery, p. 14. [↑]
[101] Le Double, Rabelais anatomiste et physiologiste, 1889, pp. 12, 425; and pref. by Professor Duval, p. xiii; Stapfer, p. 42; A. Tilley, François Rabelais, 1907, pp. 74–76. [↑]
[102] In the same year he was induced to publish what turned out to be two spurious documents purporting to be ancient Roman remains. See Heulhard, Rabelais légiste, and Jacob, Notice, p. xviii. [↑]
[105] As to this see Tilley, p. 53. [↑]
[106] See it at the end of the ed. of Bibliophile Jacob. [↑]
[107] Cp. Stapfer, pp. 24–25; Rathery, p. 26. [↑]
[109] Cp. Jacob, Notice, p. xxxviii; Smith, ii, 524. [↑]
[110] Rathery, p. 71; Stapfer, pp. 42–43. [↑]
[113] Rathery, pp. 44–49. The notion of Lacroix, that Rabelais visited England, has no evidence to support it. Cp. Rathery, p. 49, and Smith, p. xxiii. [↑]
[114] Cp. Jacob, p. lx. Ramus himself, for his attacks on the authority of Aristotle, was called an atheist. Cp. Waddington, Ramus, sa vie, etc., 1855, p. 126. [↑]
[115] See the list in the avertissement of M. Burgaud des Marets to éd. Firmin Didot. Cp. Stapfer, pp. 63, 64. For example, the “theologian” who makes the ludicrous speech in Liv. i, ch. xix, becomes (chs. 18 and 20) a “sophist”; and the sorbonistes, sorbonicoles, and sorbonagres of chs. 20 and 21 become mere maistres, magistres, and sophistes likewise. [↑]
[116] It is doubtful whether Rabelais wrote the whole of the notice prefixed to the next edition, in which this attack was made; but it seems clear that he “had a hand in it” (Tilley, François Rabelais, p. 87). [↑]
[117] R. Christie, Étienne Dolet, pp. 369–72. Christie, in his vacillating way, severely blames Dolet, and then admits that the book may have been printed while Dolet was in prison, and that in any case there was no malice in the matter. This point, and the persistent Catholic calumnies against Dolet, are examined by the author in art. “The Truth about Étienne Dolet,” in National Reformer, June 2 and 9, 1889. [↑]
[118] Epistre, pref. to Liv. iv. Ed. Jacob, p. 318. [↑]
[119] Cp. W. F. Smith’s trans. of Rabelais, 1893, ii, p. x. In this book, however, other hands have certainly been at work. Rabelais left it unfinished. [↑]
[120] Jacob, Notice, p. lxiii; Stapfer, p. 76. [↑]
[121] So Rathery, p. 60; and Stapfer, p. 78. Jacob, p. lxii, says he resigned only one. Rathery makes the point clear by giving a copy of the act of resignation as to Meudon. [↑]
[122] A Discourse ... against Nicholas Machiavel, Eng. tr. (1577), ed. 1608, Epist. ded. p. 2. [↑]
[124] Liv. iii, ch. xxiii. [↑]
[125] Liv. iv, ch. xlv–xlviii. [↑]
[126] Liv. iv, ch. xlix sq. [↑]
[128] Prof. Stapfer, Rabelais, sa personne, son génie, son œuvre, 1889, pp. 365–68. Cp. the Notice of Bibliophile Jacob, ed. 1841 of Rabelais, pp. lvii-lviii; and Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 39. In his youth he affirmed the doctrine. Stapfer, p. 23. [↑]
[129] Cp. René Millet, Rabelais, 1892, pp. 172–80. [↑]
[130] Liv. iii, ch. xxxvi. [↑]
[131] The description of him by one French biographer, M. Boulmier (Estienne Dolet, 1857), as “le Christ de la pensée libre” is a gross extravagance. Dolet was substantially orthodox, and even anti-Protestant, though he denounced the cruel usage of Protestants. [↑]
[132] Wallace (Antitrinitarian Biography, 1850, ii. 2) asserts that Dolet “not only became a convert to the opinions of Servetus, but a zealous propagator of them.” For this there is not a shadow of evidence. [↑]
[133] Cp. Voltaire, Lettres sur Rabelais, etc. i. [↑]
[134] Cp. author’s art. above cited; R. C. Christie, Étienne Dolet, 2nd ed. 1890, p. 100; Octave Galtier, Étienne Dolet (N.D.), pp. 66, 94, etc. [↑]
[135] Christie, as cited, pp. 50–58, 105–106; Galtier, p. 26 sq. [↑]
[136] It is to this that Rabelais alludes (ii, 5) when he tells how at Toulouse they “stuck not to burn their regents alive like red herrings.” [↑]
[140] One of his enemies wrote of him that prison was his country—patria Doleti. [↑]
[141] Procès d’Estienne Dolet, Paris, 1836, p. 11; Galtier, pp. 65–70; Christie, pp. 389–90. [↑]
[142] Procès, p. viii.; Galtier, p. 78. [↑]
[143] Galtier, p. 101 sq.; Christie, p. 461. [↑]
[144] A modern French judge, the President Baudrier, was found to affirm that the laws, though “unduly severe,” were “neither unduly nor unfairly pressed” against Dolet! Christie, p. 471. [↑]
[145] Concerning whom see Christie, as cited, pp. 29 01. [↑]
[146] Tilley, as last cited, p. 69. [↑]
[148] Christie, as cited, pp. 465–67; Lutteroth, La Reformation en France pendant sa première période, 1850, pp. 39–40; Prof. H. M. Baird, Rise of the Huguenots, 1880, i, 240 sq. [↑]
[149] Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 43; Patin, Lettres, ed. Reveillé-Parise, 1846, i, 210. [↑]
[150] Wriothesley’s Chronicle (Camden Society, 1875), pp. 107–108. [↑]
[151] Nodier, quoted by Bibliophile Jacob in ed. of Cymbalum Mundi, as cited, p. xviii. [↑]
[152] Cp. Brantome, Des dames illustres, Œuvres, ed. 1838, ii, 186. [↑]
[153] Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Marguerite de Navarre (the First), notes F and G. [↑]
[154] Bayle, note N. Cp. Nodier, as cited, p. xix, as to the collaboration of Desperiers and others. [↑]
[155] Bayle, art. Ronsard, note D. [↑]
[156] Garasse, La Doctrine Curieuse des Beaux Esprits de ce Temps, 1623, pp. 126–27. Ronsard replied to the charge in his poem, Des misères du temps. [↑]
[157] Bayle, art. Ronsard, note O. Cp. Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 43. [↑]
[158] MS. 1588. First printed in 1841 by Guhrauer, again in 1857 by L. Noack. [↑]
[159] As before noted, he was one of the first to use the word. Cp. Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus, pp. 31, 455, notes. [↑]
[160] Bayle, art. Bodin, note O. Cp. Renan, Averroès, 3e édit. p. 424; and the Lettres de Gui Patin, iii, 679 (letter of 27 juillet, 1668), cited by Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 43. Leibnitz, in an early letter to Jac. Thomasius, speaks of the MS. of the Colloquium, then in circulation, as proving its writer to be “the professed enemy of the Christian religion,” adding: “Vanini’s dialogues are a trifle in comparison.” (Philosophische Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, i, 26; Martineau, Study of Spinoza, p. 77.) Carriere, however, notes (Weltanschauung, p. 317) that in later years Leibnitz learned to prize Bodin’s treatise highly. [↑]
[161] Cp. Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i, 66, 87–91. In the République too he has a chapter on astrology, to which he leans somewhat. [↑]
[162] République, Liv. iv, ch. ii. [↑]
[163] Id. Liv. iv, ch. vii. “Bodin in this sophistry was undoubtedly insincere” (Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 159). [↑]
[164] Cp. Perrens, Les Libertins. p. 43. [↑]
[165] Cp. Villemain, Vie de L’Hopital, in Études de l’hist. moderne, 1846. pp. 363–68, 428. [↑]
[166] Buckle (3-vol. ed. ii, 10; 1-vol. ed. p. 291) errs in representing L’Hopital as the only statesman of the time who dreamt of toleration. It is to be noted, on the other hand, that the Huguenots themselves protested against any toleration of atheists or Anabaptists; and even the reputed freethinker Gabriel Naudé, writing his Science des Princes, ou Considérations politiques sur les Coups d’état, in 1639, defended the massacre on political grounds (Owen, Skeptics of the French Renaissance, p. 470, note). Bodin implicitly execrated it. Cp. Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 162. [↑]
[168] Garasse, Doctrine Curieuse, pp. 125~26; Mémoires de Garasse, ed. Ch. Nisard, 1860, pp. 77–78; Perrens, p. 43. [↑]
[169] Bibliophile Jacob, Introd. to Beroalde de Verville. [↑]
[170] Estienne’s full title is: L’Introduction au traité de la conformité des merveilles, anciennes avec les modernes: ou, Traité préparatif à l’Apologie pour Hérodote. [↑]
[171] Apologie pour Hérodote, ed. 1607, pp. 97, 249 (liv. i, chs. xiv, xviii.) Cymbalum Mundi, ed. Bibliophile Jacob, pp. xx, 13. [↑]
[172] The index was specially framed to call attention to these items. The entry, “Fables des dieux des payens cousines germaines des legendes des saints,” is typical. [↑]
[173] Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Castalion; Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 81; Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, ii, 46–49. Hallam finds Castalio’s letter to the Duke of Wirtemberg “cautious”; but Lecky quotes some strong expressions from what he describes as the preface of Martin Bellius (Castalio’s pseudonym) to Cluten’s De Haereticis persequendis, ed. 1610. Castalio died in 1563. As to his translations from the Bible, see Bayle’s note. [↑]
[174] Hallam, ii, 83; McCrie, Reformation in Italy, ed. 1856, p. 231. [↑]
[175] Even Stähelin (Johannes Calvin, ii, 303) condemns Calvin’s action and tone towards Castalio, though he makes the significant remark that the latter “treated the Bible pretty much as any other book.” [↑]
[176] Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, p. 169. [↑]
[178] Prof. Fortunat Strowski, Histoire du sentiment religieux en France au 17e siècle, Ptie i, De Montaigne à Pascal, 1907, pp. 19–23. [↑]
[179] “Du Vair ne songe pas au Médiateur; s’il y a dans son traité des allusions à Notre Seigneur, le nom de Jésus-Christ ne s’y trouve, je crois bien, pas une fois. Il songe encore moins aux pieux adjuvants qui excitent l’imagination; pas un mot de l’invocation des saints, pas un mot des sacrements” (Strowski, as cited, p. 78). [↑]
[180] Cp. Prof. Thorold Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History, p. 83. [↑]
[181] In 1387 the Lollards were denounced under that name by the Bishop of Worcester as “eternally damned sons of Antichrist.” [↑]
[182] See the Repressor, Babington’s ed. in the Rolls Series, 1860, Part ii. [↑]
[183] Hook, Lives of the Archbishops (Life of Bourchier), 1867, v, 294–306. [↑]
[184] He repels, e.g., Wiclif’s argument that a priest’s misconduct sufficed to destroy his right to his endowments. Repressor, Babington’s ed. as cited, ii, 413. [↑]
[185] Hook, as cited, v, 309. [↑]
[186] Gardiner, Student’s History, p. 330. Cp. Green, ch. vi, § i, 2, pp. 267, 275; Stubbs Const. Hist., iii, 631–33. [↑]
[187] Cp. Pauli, Pictures of Old England, Eng. tr. Routledge’s rep. pp. 332–36. [↑]
[189] See Arber’s reprint. [↑]
[190] Cp. Souchay, Gesch. der deutschen Monarchie, 1861–62, iii, 230–31. [↑]
[191] On this cp. Souchay, pp. 234–39. [↑]
[192] See a good synopsis in Pünjer’s History of the Christian Philosophy of Religion, Eng. tr. pp. 68–89; and another in Moritz Carriere’s Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit, 1847, pp. 16–25, which, however, is open to Pünjer’s criticism that it is coloured by modern Hegelianism. [↑]
[193] Dr. Paul Frédéricq, Geschiedenis der Inquisitie in de Nederlanden, 1025–1520, Gent, 1892–1897, ii, 4–9. [↑]
[194] Michelet, Hist. de France, vii—éd. 1857, pp. 125, 172. [↑]
[195] This name has many forms; and it is contended that Sabieude is the correct one. See Owen, Evenings with the Skeptics, 1881, ii, 423. [↑]
[196] Cp. Hallam, Introd. to Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872, i, 142–44, and the analysis in Prof. Dowden’s Montaigne, 1905, p. 127 sq. [↑]
[197] Van Hoogstraten, in Frédéricq, as cited below. [↑]
[198] Dr. Frazer’s assumption (Golden Bough, 3rd ed. pt. i, i, 224) that magic assumes an invariable order of nature, is unsubstantiated even by his vast anthropological erudition. Magic varies arbitrarily, and the idea of a fixed “order” does not belong to the magician’s plane of thought. [↑]
[199] Maury, La Magie et l’Astrologie, 4e éd. pp. 214–16. [↑]
[200] “Judicial astrology ... which supplanted and degraded the art of medicine” (Prof. Clifford Allbutt, Harveian Oration on Science and Medieval Thought, 1901, App. p. 113). There is a startling survival of it in the physiology of Harvey. Id. p. 45. [↑]
[201] Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. [↑]
Chapter XI
THE REFORMATION, POLITICALLY CONSIDERED
§ 1. The German Conditions
In a vague and general sense the ecclesiastical revolution known as the Reformation was a phenomenon of freethought. To be so understood, indeed, it must be regarded in contrast to the dominion of the Catholic Church, not to the movement which we call the Renaissance. That movement it was that made the Reformation possible; and if we have regard to the reign of Bibliolatry which Protestantism set up, we seem to be contemplating rather a superimposing of Semitic darkness upon Hellenic light than an intellectual emancipation. Emancipation of another kind the Reformation doubtless brought about. In particular it involved, to an extent not generally realized, a secularization of life, through the sheer curtailment, in most Protestant countries, of the personnel and apparatus of clericalism, and the new disrepute into which, for a time, these fell. Alike in Germany and in England there was a breaking-up of habits of reverence and of self-prostration before creed and dogma and ritual. But this liberation was rather social than intellectual, and the product was rather licence and irreverence than ordered freethought. On the other hand, when the first unsettlement was over, the new growth of Bibliolatry tended rather to deepen the religious way of feeling and make more definite the religious attitude. Tolerance did not emerge until after a whole era of embittered strife. The Reformation, in fact, was much more akin to a revolt against a hereditary king than to the process of self-examination and logical scrutiny by which men pass from belief to disbelief in a theory of things, a dogma, or a document.
The beginning of such a process had indeed taken place in Germany before Luther, insofar as the New Learning represented by such humanists as Erasmus, such scholars as Reuchlin,[1] and such satirists as Ulrich von Hutten, set up a current of educated hostility to the ignorance and the grosser superstitions of the churchmen. For Germany, as for England, this movement was a contagion from the new scholarship and Platonism of Italy;[2] and the better minds in the four universities founded in the pre-Lutheran generation (Tübingen, 1477; Mayence, 1482; Frankfort-on-the-Oder, 1506; Wittemberg, 1502) necessarily owed much to Italian impulses, which they carried on, though the universities as a whole were bitterly hostile to the new learning.[3] The Dutch freethinker Ryswyck, as we saw, was fundamentally an Averroïst; and Italy was the stronghold of Averroïsm, of which the monistic bias probably fostered the Unitarianism of the sixteenth century. But it was not this literary and scholarly movement that effected the Reformation so-called, which was rather an economic and political than a mental revolution.
The persistence of Protestant writers in discussing the early history of the Reformation without a glance at the economic causation is one of the great hindrances to historic science. From such popular works as those of D’Aubigné and Häusser it is practically impossible to learn what socially took place in Germany; and the general Protestant reader can learn it only—and imperfectly—from the works on the Catholic side, as Audin’s Histoire de la vie de Luther (Eng. tr. 1853) and Döllinger’s Die Reformation, and the more scientific Protestant studies, such as those of Ranke and Bezold (even there not at any great length), to neither of which classes of history will he resort. In England the facts are partially realized, in the light of an ecclesiastical predilection, through High Church histories such as that of Blunt, which proceed upon a Catholic leaning. Cobbett’s intemperate exposure of the economic causation has found an audience chiefly among Catholics.
Bezold admits that “with perfect justice have recent historians commented on the former underrating of an economic force which certainly played its part in the spread and establishment of the Reformation” (Gesch. der deutschen Reformation, 1890, p. 563). The broad fact is that in not a single country could the Reformation have been accomplished without enlisting the powerful classes or corporations, or alternatively the de facto governments, by proffering the plunder of the Church. Only in a few Swiss cantons, and in Holland, does the confiscation seem to have been made to the common good (cp. the present writer’s Evolution of States, pp. 311, 343). But even in Holland needy nobles had finally turned Protestant in the hope of getting Church lands. (See Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, ed. 1863, p. 131.) Elsewhere appropriation of Church lands by princes and nobles was the general rule.
Even as to Germany, it is impossible to accept Michelet’s indulgent statement that most of the confiscated Church property “returned to its true destination, to the schools, the hospitals, the communes; to its true proprietors, the aged, the child, the toiling family” (Hist. de France, x, 333; see the same assertion in Henderson, Short History of Germany, 1902, i, 344). Plans to that effect were drawn up; but, as the princes were left to carry out the arrangement, they took the lion’s share. Ranke (Hist. of the Ref. bk. iv, ch. v; Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. 1905, pp. 466–67) admits much grabbing of Church lands as early as 1526; merely contending, with Luther, that papist nobles had begun the spoliation. (Cp. Bezold, pp. 564–65; Menzel, Gesch. der Deutschen, cap. 393.) In Saxony, when monks broke away from their monasteries, the nobles at once appropriated the lands and buildings (Ranke, p. 467). Luther made a warm appeal to the Elector against the nobles in general (Ranke, p. 467; Luther’s letter, Nov. 22, 1526, in Werke, ed. De Wette, iii, 137; letter to Spalatin, Jan. 1, 1527, id. p. 147; also p. 153). See too his indignant protests against the rapine of the princes and nobles and the starvation of the ministers in the Table Talk, chs. 22, 60. Even Philip of Hesse did not adhere to his early and disinterested plans of appropriation (Ranke, pp. 468–69, 711–12). All that Ranke can claim is that “some great institutions were really founded”—to wit, two homes for “young ladies of noble birth,” four hospitals, and the theological school of Marburg. And this was in the most hopeful region.
There is positive evidence, further, that not only ecclesiastical but purely charitable foundations were plundered by the Protestants (Witzel, cited by Döllinger, Die Reformation, ihre innere Entwickelung und ihre Wirkungen, 1846, i, 46, 47, 51, 62); and, as school foundations were confiscated equally with ecclesiastical in England, there is no reason to doubt the statement. Practically the same process took place in Scotland, where the share of Church property proposed to be allotted to the Protestant ministers was never given, and their protests were treated with contempt (Burton, History of Scotland, iv, 37–41). Knox’s comments were similar to Luther’s (Works, Laing’s ed. ii, 310–12).
Dr. Gardiner, a fairly impartial historian, sums up that, after the German settlement of 1552, “The princes claimed the right of continuing to secularize Church lands within their territories as inseparable from their general right of providing for the religion of their subjects.... About a hundred monasteries are said to have fallen victims in the Palatinate alone; and an almost equal number, the gleanings of a richer harvest which had been reaped before the Convention of Passau, were taken possession of in Northern Germany” (The Thirty Years’ War, 8th ed. p. 11).
The credit of bringing the various forces to a head, doubtless, remains with Luther, though ground was further prepared by literary predecessors such as John of Wesel and John Wessel, Erasmus, Reuchlin, and Ulrich von Hutten. But even the signal courage of Luther could not have availed to fire an effectual train of action unless a certain number of nobles had been ready to support him for economic reasons. Even the shameless sale of indulgences by Tetzel was resented most keenly on the score that it was draining Germany of money;[4] and nothing is more certain than that Luther began his battle not as a heretic but as an orthodox Catholic Reformer, desiring to propitiate and not to defy the papacy. Economic forces were the determinants. This becomes the more clear when we note that the Reformation was only the culmination or explosion of certain intellectual, social, and political forces seen at work throughout Christendom for centuries before. In point of mere doctrine, the Protestants of the sixteenth century had been preceded and even distanced by heretics of the eleventh, and by teachers of the ninth. The absurdity of relic-worship, the folly of pilgrimages and fastings, the falsehood of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the heresy of prayers to the saints, the unscripturalness of the hierarchy—these and a dozen other points of protest had been raised by Paulicians, by Paterini, by Beghards, by Apostolicals, by Lollards, long before the time of Luther. As regards his nearer predecessors, indeed, this is now a matter of accepted Protestant history.[5] What is not properly realized is that the conditions which wrought political success where before there had been political failure were special political conditions; and that to these, and not to supposed differences in national character, is due the geographical course of the Reformation.
§ 2. The Problem in Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands
We have seen that the spirit of reform was strong in Italy three hundred years before Luther; and that some of the strongest movements within the Church were strictly reformatory, and originally disinterested in a high degree. In less religious forms the same spirit abounded throughout the Renaissance; and at the end of the fifteenth century Savonarola was preaching reform religiously enough at Florence. His death, however, was substantially due to the perception that ecclesiastical reform, as conducted by him, was a socio-political process,[6] whence the reformer was a socio-political disturber. Intellectually he was no innovator; on the contrary, he was a hater of literary enlightenment, and he was as ready to burn astrologers as were his enemies to burn him.[7] His claim, in his Triumph of the Cross, to combat unbelievers by means of sheer natural reason, indicates only his inability to realize any rationalist position—a failure to be expected in his age, when rationalism was denied argumentative utterance, and when the problems of Christian evidences were only being broached. The very form of the book is declamatory rather than ratiocinative, and every question raised is begged.[8] That he failed in his crusade of Church reform, and that Luther succeeded in his, was due to no difference between Italian and German character, but to the vast difference in the political potentialities of the two cases. The fall of public liberty in Florence, which must have been preceded as it was accompanied by a relative decline in popular culture,[9] and which led to the failure of Savonarola, may be in a sense attributed to Italian character; but that character was itself the product of peculiar social and political conditions, and was not inferior to that of any northern population.[10]
The Savonarolan movement had all the main features of the Puritanism of the northern “Reform.” Savonarola sent organized bodies of boys, latterly accompanied by bodies of adults, to force their way into private houses and confiscate things thought suitable for the reformatory bonfire. Burckhardt, p. 477; Perrens, Jérome Savonarole, 2e édit. pp. 140–41. The things burned included pictures and busts of inestimable artistic value, and manuscripts of exquisite beauty. Perrens, p. 229. Compare Villari, as cited; George Eliot’s Romola, bk. iii, ch. xlix; and Merejkowski’s The Forerunner (Eng. tr.), bk. vii. Previous reformers had set up “bonfires of false hair and books against the faith” (Armstrong, as cited, p. 167); and Savonarola’s bands of urchins were developments from previous organizations, bent chiefly on blackmail. (Id.) But he carried the tyranny furthest, and actually proposed to put obstinate gamblers to the torture. Perrens, p. 132. Villari in his sentimental commemoration lecture on Savonarola (Studies Historical and Critical, Eng. tr. 1907) ignores these facts.
When, a generation later, the propaganda of the Lutheran movement reached Italy, it was more eagerly welcomed than in any of the Teutonic countries outside of the first Lutheran circle, though a vigilant system was at once set on foot for the destruction of the imported books.[11] It had made much headway at Milan and Florence in 1525;[12] and we have the testimony of Pope Clement VII himself that before 1530 the Lutheran heresy was widely spread not only among the laity but among priests and friars, both mendicant and non-mendicant, many of whom propagated it by their sermons.[13] The ruffianism and buffoonery of the German Lutheran soldiers in the army of Charles V at the sack of Rome in 1529 was hardly likely to win adherents to their sect;[14] yet the number increased all over Italy. In 1541–45 they were numerous and audacious at Bologna,[15] where in 1537 a commission of cardinals and prelates, appointed by Pope Paul III, had reported strongly on the need for reformation in the Church. In 1542 they were so strong at Venice as to contemplate holding public assemblies; in the neighbouring towns of Vicentino, Vicenza, and Trevisano they seem to have been still more numerous;[16] and Cardinal Caraffa reported to the Pope that all Italy was infected with the heresy.[17]
Now began the check. Among the Protestants themselves there had gone on the inevitable strifes over the questions of the Trinity and the Eucharist; the more rational views of Zwingli and Servetus were in notable favour;[18] and the Catholic reaction, fanned by Caraffa, was the more facile. Measures were first taken against heretical priests and monks; Ochino and Peter Martyr had to fly; and many monks in the monastery of the latter were imprisoned. At Rome was founded, in 1543, the Congregation of the Holy Office, a new Inquisition, on the deadly model of that of Spain; and thenceforth the history of Protestantism in Italy is but one of suppression. The hostile force was all-pervading, organized, and usually armed with the whole secular power; and though in Naples the old detestation of the Inquisition broke out anew so strongly that even the Spanish tyranny could not establish it,[19] the papacy elsewhere carried its point by explaining how much more lenient was the Italian than the Spanish Inquisition. Such a pressure, kept up by the strongest economic interest in Italy, no movement could resist; and it would have suppressed the Reformation in any country or any race, as a similar pressure did in Spain.
Prof. Gebhart (Orig. de la Renais. en Italie, p. 68) writes that “Italy has known no great national heresies: one sees there no uprising of minds which resembles the profound popular movements provoked by Waldo, Wiclif, John Huss, or Luther.” The decisive answer to this is soon given by the author himself (p. 74): “If the Order of Franciscans has had in the peninsula an astonishing popularity; if it has, so to speak, formed a Church within the Church, it is that it responded to the profound aspirations of an entire people.” (Cp. p. 77.) Yet again, after telling how the Franciscan heresy of the Eternal Gospel so long prevailed, M. Gebhart speaks (p. 78) of the Italians as a people whom “formal heresy has never seduced.” These inconsistencies derive from the old fallacy of attributing the course of the Reformation to national character. (See it discussed in the present writer’s Evolution of States, pp. 237–38, 302–307, 341–44.) Burckhardt, while recognizing—as against the theory of “something lacking in the Italian mind”—that the Italian movements of Church reformation “failed to achieve success only because circumstances were against them,” goes on to object that the course of “mighty events like the Reformation ... eludes the deductions of the philosophers,” and falls back on “mystery.” (Renaissance in Italy, Eng. tr. p. 457.) There is really much less “mystery” about such movements than about small ones; and the causes of the Reformation are in large part obvious and simple. Baur, even in the act of claiming special credit for the personality of Luther as the great factor in the Reformation, admits that only in the peculiar political conditions in which he found himself could he have succeeded. (Kirchengeschichte der neueren Zeit, 1863, p. 23.)
The broad explanation of the Italian failure is that in Italy reform could not for a moment be dreamt of save as within the Church, where there was no economic leverage such as effected the Reformation from the outside elsewhere. It was a relatively easy matter in Germany and England to renounce the Pope’s control and make the Churches national or autonomous. To attempt that in Italy would have meant creating a state of universal and insoluble strife. (Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, vol. i, ed. 1897, p. 369. Symonds, however, omits to note the financial dependence of Italian society on the papal system; and his verdict that Luther and the nations of the north saw clearly “what the Italians could not see” is simply the racial fallacy over again.)
Apart from that, the Italians, as we have seen, were as much bent on reformation as any other people in mass; and the earlier Franciscan movement was obviously more disinterested than either the later German or the English, in both of which plunder was the inducement to the leading adherents, as it was also in Switzerland. There the wholesale bestowal of Church livings on Italians was the strongest motive to ecclesiastical revolution; and in Zürich, the first canton which adopted the Reformation, the process was made easy by the State guaranteeing posts and pensions for life to the whole twenty-four canons of the chapter. (Vieusseux, History of Switzerland, 1840, pp. 120, 128; cp. Zschokke, Schweizerland’s Geschichte, 9te Ausg. ch. 32, and Jackson, Huldreich Zwingli, 1901, pp. 222–25, 295–96.) The Protestants had further the support of the unbelieving soldiery, made anti-religious in the Italian wars, who rejoiced in the process of priest-baiting and plunder (Vieusseux, p. 130).
The process of suppression in Italy was prolonged through sixty years. In 1543 numbers of Protestants began to fly; hundreds more were cast into prison; and, save in a few places, public profession of the heresy was suppressed. In 1546 the papacy persuaded the Venetian senate to put down the Protestant communities in their dominions, and in 1548 there began in Venice a persecution in which many were sent to the galleys. To reach secret Protestantism, the papacy dispersed spies throughout Italy, Ferrara being particularly attended to, as a known hotbed.[20] After the death of the comparatively merciful Paul III (1550), Julius III authorized new severities. A Ferrarese preacher was put to death; and the Duchess Renée, the daughter of Louis XII, who had notoriously favoured the heretics, was made virtually a prisoner in her own palace, secluded from her children. At Faenza, a nobleman died under torture at the hands of the inquisitors, and a mob in turn killed some of these;[21] but the main process went on throughout the country. An old Waldensian community in Calabria having reverted to its former opinions under the new stimulus, it was warred upon by the inquisitors, who employed for the purpose outlaws; and multitudes of victims, including sixty women, were put to the torture.[22] At Montalto, in 1560, another Waldensian community were taken captive; eighty-eight men were slaughtered, their throats being cut one by one; many more were tortured; the majority of the men were sent to the Spanish galleys; and the women and children were sold into slavery.[23] In Venice many were put to death by drowning.[24]
Of individual executions there were many. In a documented list of seventy-eight persons burned alive or hanged and burned at Rome from 1553 to 1600,[25] only a minority are known to have been Lutherans, the official records being kept on such varying principles that it is impossible to tell how many of the victims were Catholic criminals;[26] while some heretics are represented—it would seem falsely—as having died in the communion of the Church. But probably more than half were Lutherans or Calvinists. The first in the list (1553) are Giovanni Mollio,[27] a Minorite friar of Montalcino, who had been a professor at Brescia and Bologna, and Giovanni Teodori[28] of Perugia; and the former is stated in the official record to have recommended his soul to God, the Virgin Mary, St. Francis, and St. Anthony of Padua, though he had been condemned as an obstinate Lutheran. The next victims (1556) are the Milanese friar Ambrogio de Cavoli, who dies “firm in his false opinion,” and Pomponio Angerio or Algieri of Nola, a student aged twenty-four, who, “as being obstinate, was burned alive.”[29] These were the first victims of Caraffa after his elevation to the papal chair as Paul IV. Under Pius IV three were burned in 1560; under Pius V two in 1566, six in 1567, six in 1568, and so on. Francesco Cellario, an ex-Franciscan friar, living as a refugee and Protestant preacher in the Grisons, was kidnapped, taken to Rome, and burned[30] (1569). A Neapolitan nobleman, Pompeo de Monti, caught in Rome, was officially declared to have “renounced head by head all the errors he had held,” and accordingly was benignantly beheaded.[31] Quite a number, including the learned protonotary Carnesecchi (1567), are alleged to have died “in the bosom of the Church.”[32] On the other hand, some of the inquisitors themselves came under the charge of heresy, two cardinals and a bishop being actually prosecuted[33]—whether for Lutheranism or for other forms of private judgment does not appear.
Simple Lutheranism, however, seems to have been the usual limit of heresy among those burned. Aonio Paleario (originally Antonio della Paglia or de’ Pagliaricci) of Veroli[34]—poet and professor of rhetoric at Milan, hanged in 1570 (in his seventieth year) either for denouncing the Inquisition or for Lutheranism—was an extreme heretic from the Catholic point of view. His Actio in Romanos Pontificos et eorum asseclas is still denounced by the Church.[35] If, however, he was the author of the Trattato utilissimo del beneficio di Giesu Crocifisso verso I Christiani, he was simply an evangelical of the school of Luther, exalting faith and making light of works; and its “remedies against the temptation of doubt” deal solely with theological difficulties, not with critical unbelief.[36] This treatise, immensely popular in the sixteenth century, was so zealously destroyed by the Church that when Ranke wrote no copy was known to exist.[37] The Trattato was placed on the first papal Index Expurgatorius in 1549; and the nearly complete extinction of the book is an important illustration of the Church’s faculty of suppressing literature.
The Index, anticipated by Charles V in the Netherlands several years earlier, was established especially to resist the Reformation; and its third class contained a prohibition of all anonymous books published since 1519. The destruction of books in Italy in the first twenty years of the work of the Congregation of the Index was enormous, nearly every library being decimated, and many annihilated. All editions of the classics, and even of the Fathers, annotated by Protestants, or by Erasmus, were destroyed; the library of the Medicean College at Florence, despite the appeals of Duke Cosmo, was denuded of many works of past generations, now pronounced heretical; and many dead writers who had passed for good Catholics were put on the Index. Booksellers, plundered of their stocks, were fain to seek another calling; and printers, seeing that any one of them who printed a condemned work had every book printed by him put on the Index, were driven to refuse all save works officially accredited. It was considered a merciful relaxation of the procedure when, after the death of Paul IV (1555), certain books, such as Erasmus’s editions of the Fathers, were allowed to be merely mutilated.[38] The effect of the whole machinery in making Italy in the seventeenth century relatively unlearned and illiterate cannot easily be overstated.
In fine, the Reformation failed in Italy because of the economic and political conditions, as it failed in Spain; as it failed in a large part of Germany; as it would have failed in Holland had Philip II made his capital there (in which case Spain might very well have become Protestant); and as it would have failed in England had Elizabeth been a Catholic, like her sister. During the sixty years from 1520 to 1580, thousands of Italian Protestants left Italy, as thousands of Spanish Protestants fled from Spain, and thousands of English Protestants from England in the reign of Mary.[39] To make the outcome in Italy and Spain a basis for a theory of racial tendency in religion, or racial defect of “public spirit,” is to explain history in a fashion which, in physical science, has long been discredited as an argument in a circle.
McCrie, at the old standpoint, says of the Inquisition that “this iniquitous and bloody tribunal could never obtain a footing either in France or in Germany”; that “the attempt to introduce it in the Netherlands was resisted by the adherents of the old as well as the disciples of the new religion; and it kindled a civil war which ... issued in establishing civil and religious liberty”; and that “the ease with which it was introduced into Italy showed that, whatever illumination there was among the Italians ... they were destitute of that public spirit and energy of principle which were requisite to shake off the degrading yoke by which they were oppressed.” The ethical attitude of the Christian historian is noteworthy; but we are here concerned with his historiography. A little reflection will make it clear that the non-establishment of the Inquisition in France and Germany was due precisely to the fact that the papacy was not in these countries as it was in Italy, and that the native Governments resented external influence.
As to the Netherlands, the statement is misleading in the extreme. The Inquisition set up by Charles V was long and fully established in the Low Countries; and Motley recognizes that it was there more severe even than in Spain. It was Charles V who, in 1546, gave orders for the establishment of the Inquisition in Naples, when the people so effectually resisted. The view, finally, that the attempt to suppress heresy caused the Dutch revolt is merely part of the mythology of the Reformation. Charles V, at the outset of his reign, stood to Spain in the relation of a foreign king who, with his Flemish courtiers, exploited Spanish revenues. Only by making Madrid his capital and turning semi-Spanish did he at all reverse that relation between the two parts of his dominions. So late as 1550 he set up an exceptionally merciless form of the Inquisition in the Low Countries, and this without losing any of the loyalty of the middle and upper classes, Protestantism having made its converts only among the poor. In 1546 too he had set up an Index Expurgatorius with the assistance of the theological faculty at Louvain; and there was actually a Flemish Index in print before the papal one (McCrie, Ref. in Italy, p. 184; Ticknor, Hist. of Spanish Lit. 6th ed. i, 493).
What set up the breach between the Netherlands and Spain was the failure of Philip II to adjust himself to Dutch interests as his father had adjusted himself to Spanish. The sunderance was on lines of economic interest and racial jealousy; and Dutch Protestantism was not the cause but the effect. In the war, indeed, multitudes of Dutch Catholics held persistently with their Protestant fellow-countrymen against Spain, as many English Catholics fought against the Armada. As late as 1600 the majority of the people of Groningen were still Catholics, as the great majority are now in North Brabant and Limburg; and in 1900 the Catholics in the Netherlands were nearly a third of the whole. From first to last too the Dutch Protestant creed and polity were those set up by Calvin, a Frenchman.
To those accustomed to the conventional view, the case may become clearer on a survey of the course of anti-papalism in other countries than those mentioned. The political determination of the process in the sixteenth century, indeed, cannot be properly realized save in the light of kindred movements of earlier date, when the “Teutonic conscience” made, not for reform, but for fixation.
§ 3. The Hussite Failure in Bohemia
That the causal forces in the Reformation were neither racial religious bias nor special gift on the part of any religious teachers is made tolerably clear by the pre-Lutheran episode of the Hussites in Bohemia a century before the German movement. In Bohemia as elsewhere clerical avarice, worldliness, and misconduct had long kept up anti-clerical feeling; and the adoption of Wiclif’s teaching by Huss[40] at the end of the fourteenth century was the result, and not the cause, of Bohemian anti-papalism.[41] The Waldensians, whose doctrines were closely akin to those of Huss, were represented in Bohemia as early as the twelfth century; and so late as 1330 their community was a teaching centre, able to send money help to the Waldensians of Italy. So apparent was the heredity that Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II, maintained that the Hussites were a branch of the Waldenses.[42]
Before Huss too a whole series of native reformers, beginning with the Moravian Militz, Archdeacon of Prague, had set up a partly anti-clerical propaganda. Militz, who gave up his emoluments (1363) to become a wandering preacher, actually wrote a Libellus de Anti-christo, affirming that the Church was already in Anti-christ’s power, or nearly so.[43] It was written while he was imprisoned by the Inquisition at Rome at the instance of the mendicant orders, whom he censured. As, however, the later hostility he incurred, up to his death, was on the score of his influence with the people, the treatise cannot well have been current in his lifetime. A contemporary, Conrad of Waldhausen, holding similar views, joined Militz in opposing the mendicant friars as Wiclif was doing at the same period; and the King of Bohemia (the emperor Charles IV) gave zealous countenance to both. A follower of Militz, Matthias of Janow, a prebendary of Prague, holding the same views as to Anti-christ, wrote a book on The Abomination of Desolation of Priests and Monks, and yet another to similar effect.
There was thus a considerable movement in the direction of Church reform before either Huss or Wiclif was heard in Bohemia; and a Bohemian king had shown a reforming zeal, apparently not on financial motives, before any other European potentate. And whereas racial jealousy of the dominant Italians was a main factor in the movement of Luther, the much more strongly motived jealousy of the Czechs against the Germans who exploited Bohemia was a main element in the salient movement of the Hussites.[44] Called in to work the silver mines, and led further by the increasing field for commerce and industry,[45] the more civilized Germans secured control of the Czech church and monasteries, appropriating most of the best livings. As they greatly predominated also at the University of Prague, Huss, whose inspiration was largely racial patriotism, wrought with his colleague Jerome to have the university made strictly national.[46] When, accordingly, the German heads of the university still (1403 and 1408) condemned the doctrines of Wiclif as preached by Huss, the motives of the censors were as much racial and economic as theological; that is to say, the “Teutonic conscience” operated in its own interest to the exaltation of papal rule against the Czech conscience.
The first crisis in the racial struggle ended in Huss’s obtaining a royal decree (1409) giving three votes in university affairs (wherein, according to medieval custom, the voting was by nations) to the Bohemians, and only one to the Germans, though the latter were the majority. Thereupon a multitude of the German students marched back to Germany, where there was founded for them the university of Leipzig;[47] and the racial quarrel was more envenomed than ever.
At the same time the ecclesiastical authorities, closely allied with the German interest, took up the cause of the Church against heresy; and Archbishop Sbinko of Prague, having procured a papal bull, caused a number of Wiclifian and other manuscripts to be burned[48] (1410), soon after excommunicating Huss. The now nationalist university protested, and the king sequestrated the estates of the archbishop on his refusal to indemnify the owners of the manuscripts. In 1411, further, Huss denounced the proposed papal crusade against Naples, and in 1412 the sale of indulgences by permission of Pope John XXIII, exactly as Luther denounced those of Leo X a century later, calling the Pope Antichrist in the Lutheran manner, while his partizans burned the papal bulls.[49] For the rest, he preached against image-worship, auricular confession, ceremonialism, and clerical endowments.[50] At the Council of Constance (1415), accordingly, there was arrayed against him a solid mass of German churchmen, including the ex-rector of Prague University, now bishop of Misnia. Further, the Germans were scholastically, as a rule, Nominalists, and Huss a Realist; and as Gerson, the most powerful of the French prelates, was zealous for the former school, he threw his influence on the German side,[51] as did the Bishop of London on the part of England.[52] The forty-five Wiclifian heresies, therefore, were re-condemned; Huss was sentenced to imprisonment, though he had gone to the Council under a letter of safe-conduct from the emperor;[53] and on his refusal to retract he was burned alive (July 6, 1415). Jerome, taking flight, was caught, and, being imprisoned, recanted; but later revoked the recantation and was burned likewise (May 30, 1416).
The subsequent fortunes of the Hussite party were determined as usual by the political and economic forces. The King of Bohemia had joyfully accepted Huss’s doctrine that the tithes were not the property of the churchmen; and had locally protected him as his “fowl with the golden eggs,” proceeding to plunder the Church as did the German princes in the next age.[54] When, later, the revolutionary Hussites began plundering churches and monasteries, the Bohemian nobles in their turn profited,[55] and became good Hussites accordingly; while yet another aristocracy was formed in Prague by the citizens who managed the confiscations there.[56] As happened earlier in Hungary and later in Germany, again, there followed a revolt of the peasants against their extortionate masters;[57] and there resulted a period of ferocious civil war and exacerbated fanaticism. Ziska, the Hussite leader, had been a strong anti-German;[58] and when the emperor entered into the struggle the racial hatred grew more intense than ever. On the Hussite side the claim for “the cup” (that is, the administration of the eucharist with wine as well as bread, in the original manner, departed from by the Church in the eleventh century) indicated the nature of the religious feeling involved. More memorable was the communistic zeal of the advanced section of the Taborites (so called from the town of Tabor, their headquarters), who anticipated the German movement of the Anabaptists,[59] a small minority of them seeking to set up community of women. For the rest, all the other main features of later Protestantism came up at the same time—the zealous establishment of schools for the young;[60] the insistence on the Bible as the sole standard of knowledge and practice; inflexible courage in warfare and good military organization, with determined denial of sacerdotal claims.[61]
The ideal collapsed as similar ideals did before and afterwards. First the main body of the Hussites, led by Ziska, though at war with the Catholics in general and the Germans in particular, warred murderously also on the extremer communists, called the Adamites, and destroyed them (1421). Then, as the country became more and more exhausted by the civil war, the common people gradually fell away from the Taborites, who were the prime fanatics of the period. The zeal of the communist section, too, itself fell away; and at length, in 1434, the Taborites, betrayed by one of their generals, were defeated with great slaughter by the nobles in the battle of Lipan. Meanwhile, the upper aristocracy had reaped the economic fruits of the revolution at the expense of townsmen, small proprietors, and peasants;[62] and, just as the lot of the German peasants in Luther’s day was worse after their vain revolt than before, so the Bohemian peasantry at the close of the fifteenth century had sunk back to the condition of serfdom from which they had almost completely emerged at the beginning. It is doubtful, indeed, whether the material lot of the poor was bettered in any degree at any stage of the Protestant revolution, in any country. So little efficacy for social betterment has a movement guided by a light set above reason.
That there was in the period some Christian freethinking of a finer sort than the general Taborite doctrine is proved by the recovery of the unprinted work of the Czech Peter Helchitsky (Chelcicky), The Net of Faith, which impeached the current orthodoxy and the ecclesiastico-political system on the lines of the more exalted of the Paulicians and the Lollards, very much to the same effect as the modern gospel of Tolstoy. In the midst of a party of warlike fanatics Helchitsky denounced war as mere wholesale murder, taught the sinfulness of wealth, declaimed against cities as the great corrupters of life, and preached a peaceful and non-resistant anarchism, ignoring the State. But his party in turn developed into that of the Bohemian Brethren, an intensely Puritan sect, opposed to learning, and ashamed of the memory of the communism in which their order began.[63] Of permanent gain to culture there is hardly a trace in the entire evolution.
§ 4. Anti-Papalism in Hungary
As in Bohemia, so in Hungary, there was a ready popular inclination to religious independence of Rome before the Lutheran period. The limited sway of the Hungarian monarchy left the nobles abnormally powerful, and their normal jealousy of the wealth of the Church made them in the thirteenth century favourable to the Waldenses and recalcitrant to the Inquisition.[64] In the period of the Hussite wars a similar protection was long given to the thousands of refugees led by Ziska from Bohemia into Hungary in 1424.[65] The famous king Matthias Corvinus, who put severe checks on clerical revenue, had as his favourite court poet the anti-papal bishop of Wardein, John, surnamed Pannonicus, who openly derided the Papal Jubilee as a financial contrivance.[66] Under Matthias’s successor, the ill-fated Uladislaus II, began a persecution, pushed on by his priest-ruled queen (1440), which drove many Hussites into Wallachia; and at the date of Luther’s movement the superior clergy of Hungary were a powerful body of feudal nobles, living mainly as such, wielding secular power, and impoverishing the State.[67] As the crusade got up by the papacy against the Turks (1514) drew away many serfs, and ended in a peasant war against the nobility, put down with immense slaughter, and followed by oppression both of peasants and small landholders, there was a ready hearing for the Lutheran doctrines in Hungary. Nowhere, probably, did so many join the Reformation movement in so short a time.[68] As elsewhere, a number of the clergy came forward; and the resistance of the rest was proportionally severe, though Queen Mary, the wife of King Louis II, was pro-Lutheran.[69] Books were burned by cartloads; and the diet was induced to pass a general decree for the burning of all Lutherans.[70] The great Turkish invasion under Soliman (1526) could not draw the priests from their heresy-hunt; but the subsequent division of sovereignty between John Zapoyla and Ferdinand I, and above all the disdainful tolerance of the Turkish Sultan in the parts under his authority,[71] permitted of a continuous spread of the anti-papal doctrine. About 1546 four bishops joined the Lutheran side, one getting married; and in Transylvania in particular the whole Church property was ere long confiscated to “the State”; so that in 1556, when only two monasteries remained, the Bishop withdrew. Of the tithes, it is said, the Protestant clergy held three-fourths, and retained them till 1848.[72] In 1559, according to the same authority, only three families of magnates still adhered to the pope; the lesser nobility were nearly all Protestant; and the Lutherans among the common people were as thirty to one.[73]
As a matter of course, Church property had been confiscated on all hands by the nobles, Ferdinand having been unable to hinder them. Soon after the battle of Mohäcs (1526) the nobles in diet decided not to fill up the places of deceased prelates, but to make over the emoluments of the bishoprics to “such men as deserved well of their country.” Within a short time seven great territories were so accorded to as many magnates and generals, “nearly all of whom separated from the Church of Rome, and became steady supporters of the Reformation.”[74] The Hungarian “Reformation” was thus remarkably complete.
Its subsequent decadence is one of the proofs that, even as the Reformation movement had succeeded by secular force, so it was only to be maintained on the same footing by excluding Catholic propaganda. In Hungary, as elsewhere, strife speedily arose among Reformers on the two issues on which reason could play within the limits of Scripturalism—the doctrine of the eucharist and the divinity of Jesus. On the former question the majority took the semi-rationalist view of Zwingli, making the eucharist a simple commemoration; and a strong minority in Transylvania became Socinian. The Italian Unitarian Giorgio Biandrata (or Blandrata[75]), driven to Poland from Switzerland for his anti-trinitarianism, and called from Poland to be the physician of the Prince of Transylvania, organized a ten days’ debate between Trinitarians and Unitarians at Weissenberg in 1568; and at the close the latter obtained from the nobles present all the privileges enjoyed by the Lutherans, even securing control of the cathedral and schools of Clausenburg.[76] It is remarkable that this, the most advanced movement of Protestantism, has practically held its ground in Transylvania to modern times.[77]
The advance, however, meant desperate schism, and disaster to the main Protestant cause. The professors of Wittemberg appealed to the orthodox authorities to suppress the heresy, with no better result than a public repudiation of the doctrine of the Trinity at the Synod of Wardein,[78] and an organization of the Unitarian Churches. In due course these in turn divided. In 1578 Biandrata’s colleague, Ferencz Davides, contended for a cessation of prayers to Christ, whereupon Biandrata invited Fausto Sozzini from Basel to confute him; and the confutation finally took the shape of a sentence of perpetual imprisonment on Davides in 1579 by the Prince of Transylvania, to whom Biandrata and Sozzini referred the dispute. The victim died in a few days—by one account, in a state of frenzy.[79] Between the Helvetic and Augsburg confessionalists, meanwhile, the strife was equally bitter; and it needed only free scope for the new organization of the Jesuits to secure the reconquest of the greater part of Hungary for the Catholic Church.
The course of events had shown that the Protestant principle of private judgment led those who would loyally act on it further and further from the historic faith; and there was no such general spirit of freethought in existence as could support such an advance. In contrast with the ever-dividing and mutually anathematizing parties of the dissenters, the ostensible solidity of the Catholic Church had an attraction which obscured all former perception of her corruptions; and the fixity of her dogma reassured those who recoiled in horror from Zwinglianism and Socinianism, as the adherents of these systems recoiled in turn from that of Davides. Only the absolute suppression of the Jesuits, as in Elizabethan England, could have saved the situation; and the political circumstances which had facilitated the spread of Protestantism were equally favourable to the advent of the reaction. As the Huguenot nobles in France gradually withdrew from their sect in the seventeenth century, so the Protestant nobles in Hungary began to withdraw from theirs towards the end of the sixteenth. What the Jesuits could not achieve by propaganda was compassed by imperial dragonnades; and in 1601 only a few Protestant congregations remained in all Styria and Carinthia.[80] Admittedly, however, the Jesuits wrought much by sheer polemic, the pungent writings of their Cardinal Pazmány having the effect of converting a number of nobles;[81] while the Protestants, instead of answering the most effective of Pazmány’s attacks, The Guide to Truth, spent their energies in fighting each other.[82]
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there ensued enough of persecution by the Catholic rulers to have roused a new growth of Protestantism, if that could longer avail; but the balance of forces remained broadly unchanged. Orthodox Protestantism and orthodox Unitarianism, having no new principle of criticism as against those turned upon themselves by the Jesuits, and no new means of obtaining an economic leverage, have made latterly no headway against Catholicism, which is to-day professed by more than half the people of Hungary, while among the remainder the Greek Catholics and Greek Orientals respectively outnumber the Helvetic and Lutheran Churches. The future is to some more searching principle of thought.
§ 5. Protestantism in Poland
The chief triumph of the Jesuit reaction was won in Poland; and there, perhaps, is to be found the best illustration of the failure of mere Protestantism, on the one hand, to develop a self-maintaining intellectual principle, and the worse failure, on the other hand, of an organized and unresisted Catholicism to secure either political or intellectual vitality.
Opposition to the papacy on nationalist as well as on general grounds is nearly as well marked in Polish history as in Bohemian, from the pagan period onwards, the first Christian priesthood being chiefly foreign,[83] while, as in Bohemia, the people clung to vernacular worship. In 1078 we find King Boleslav the Dauntless (otherwise the Cruel) executing the Bishop of Cracow, taxing the lands of the Church, and vetoing the bestowal of posts on foreigners.[84] He in turn was driven into exile by a combination of clergy and nobles. A century later a Polish diet vetoes the confiscation of the property of deceased bishops by the sovereign princes of the various provinces; and a generation later still the veto is seen to be disregarded.[85] In the middle of the thirteenth century there are further violent quarrels between dukes and clergy over tithes, the former successfully ordering and the latter vainly resisting a money commutation; till in 1279 Duke Boleslav of Cracow is induced to grant the bishops almost unlimited immunities and powers.[86] Under Casimir the Great (1333–1370) further strifes occur on similar grounds between the equestrian order and the clergy, the king sometimes supporting the latter against the former, as in the freeing of serfs, and sometimes enforcing taxation of Church lands with violence.[87] In the next reign the immunities granted by Boleslav in 1279 are cancelled by the equestrian order, acting in concert. And while these strifes had all been on economic grounds, we meet in 1341 with a heretical movement, set up by John Pirnensis, who denounced the pope as Antichrist in the fashion of the Bohemian reformers of the next generation. The people of Breslau seem to have gone over bodily to the heresy; and when the Inquisition of Cracow attempted forcible repression the Chief Inquisitor was murdered in a riot.[88]
It was thus natural that in the fourteenth century the Hussite movement should spread greatly in Poland, and the papacy be defied in matters of nomination by the king.[89] The Poles had long frequented the university of Prague; and Huss’s colleague Jerome was called in to organize the university of Cracow in 1413. Against the Hussite doctrines the Catholic clergy had to resort largely to written polemic,[90] their power being small; though the king confirmed their synodical decree making heresy high treason. In 1450 Poland obtained its law of Habeas Corpus,[91] over two centuries before England; and under that safeguard numbers of the nobility declared themselves Hussites. In 1435 some of the chief of these formed a confederation against Church and crown; and in 1439 they proclaimed an abolition of tithes, and demanded, on the lines of the earlier English Lollards, that the enormous estates of the clergy should be appropriated to public purposes. In the diet of 1459, again, a learned noble, John Ostrorog, who had studied at Padua, delivered an address, afterwards expanded into a Latin book, denouncing the revenue exactions of the papacy, and proposing to confiscate the annates, or first fruits of ecclesiastical offices so exacted; proceeding further to bring against the Polish clergy in general all the usual charges of simony, avarice, and fraud, and indicting the mendicant orders as having demoralized the common people.[92]
The Poles having no such nationalist motive in their Hussitism as had the Bohemians, who were fighting German domination, there took place in Poland no such convulsions as followed the Bohemian movement; but, when the Lutheran impulse came in the next century, the German element which had been added to Poland by the incorporation of the order and territory of the Teutonic knights in 1466 made an easy way for the German heresy. In Dantzic the Lutheran inhabitants in 1524 took the churches from the Catholics, and, terrorizing the town council, shut up and secularized the monasteries and convents.[93] In 1526, with due bloodshed, the king effected a counter-revolution in the Catholic interest; but still the heresy spread, the law of Habeas Corpus thwarting all clerical attempts at persecution, and the king being at heart something of an indifferentist in religion.[94] In the province of Great Poland was formed (1530–40) a Lutheran church, protected by a powerful family; and in Cracow a group of scholars formed a non-sectarian organization to evangelize the country. Among them, about 1546, occurred the first expression of Polish Unitarianism, the innovator being Adam Pastoris, a Dutch or Belgian priest, who seems to have used at times the name of Spiritus.[95]
On lines of simple Protestantism the movement was rapid, many aristocrats and clergy declaring for it;[96] and in the Diets of 1550 and 1552 was shown an increasingly strong anti-Catholic feeling, which the Church was virtually powerless to punish. In 1549 a parish priest publicly married a wife, and the bishop of Cracow abandoned the attempt to displace him. The next bishop, Zebrzydowski, a favourite pupil of Erasmus, was said by a Socinian writer of the period to have openly expressed disbelief in immortality and other dogmas;[97] but when in 1552 a noble refused to pay tithes, he ecclesiastically condemned him to death, and declared his property confiscated. The sentence, however, could not be put in force; and when the other heads of the Church, seeing their revenues menaced and their clergy in large part tending to heresy,[98] attempted a general and severe prosecution of backsliding priests, the resistance of the magistracy brought the effort to nothing.[99] The Diet of 1552 practically abrogated the ecclesiastical jurisdiction; and despite much intrigue the economic interest of the landowners continued to maintain the Protestant movement, which was rapidly organized on German and Swiss models. It was by the play of its own elements of strife that its ascendancy was undermined.
On the one hand, an influential cleric, Orzechowski, who had married and turned Protestant, reconciled himself to Rome on the death of his wife, having already begun a fierce polemic against the Unitarian tendencies appearing on the Protestant side in the teaching of the Italian Stancari (1550); on the other hand, those tendencies gained head till they ruptured the party, of which the Trinitarian majority further quarrelled violently among themselves till, as in Hungary, many were driven back to the arms of Catholicism. In a Synod held in 1556, one Peter Goniondzki[100] (Gonesius)—who as a Catholic had violently opposed Stancari in 1550, but in the interim had studied in Switzerland and turned Protestant—took up a more anti-Trinitarian position than Stancari’s, affirming three Gods, of whom the Son and the Spirit were subordinate to the Father. A few years later he declared against infant baptism—here giving forth opinions he had met with in Moravia; and he rapidly drew to him a considerable following alike of ministers and of wealthy laymen.[101]
It was thus not the primary influence of Lelio Sozzini, who had visited Poland in 1551 and did not return till 1558, that set up the remarkable growth of Unitarianism in that country. It would seem rather that in the country of Copernicus the relative weakness of the Church had admitted of a more common approach to freedom of thought than was seen elsewhere;[102] and the impunity of the new movements brought many heterodox fugitives (as it did Jews) from other lands. One of the newcomers, the learned Italian, George Biandrata, whose Unitarianism had been cautiously veiled, was made one of the superintendents of the “Helvetic” Church of Little Poland, and aimed at avoidance of dogmatic strifes; but after his withdrawal to Transylvania Gregorius Pauli, a minister of Cracow, of Italian descent, went further than Gonesius had done, and declared Jesus to be a mere man.[103] He further preached community of goods, promised a speedy millennium, and condemned the bearing of arms.[104] After various attempts at suppression and compromise by the orthodox majority, a group of Unitarian ministers and nobles formally renounced the doctrine of the Trinity at the Conference of Petrikov in 1562; and, on a formal condemnation being passed by an orthodox majority at Cracow in 1563, there was formed a Unitarian Church, with forty-two subscribing ministers, Zwinglian as to the eucharist, and opposed to infant baptism.[105] Ethically, its doctrine was humane and pacificatory, its members being forbidden to go to law or to take oaths; and for a time the community made great progress, the national Diet being, by one account, “filled with Arians” for a time.[106]
Meantime the Calvinist, Zwinglian, and Lutheran Protestant Churches quarrelled as fiercely in Poland as elsewhere, every compromise breaking down, till the abundant relapses of nobles and common people to Catholicism began to rebuild the power of the old Church, which found in “the Great Cardinal,” Hosius, a statesman and controversialist unequalled on the Protestant side. Backed by the Jesuits, he gained by every Protestant dispute, the Jesuit order building itself up with its usual skill. And the course of politics told conclusively in the same direction. King Stephen Battory favoured the Jesuits; and King Sigismund III, who had been educated as a Catholic by his mother, systematically gave effect to his personal leanings by the use of his peculiar feudal powers. Under the ancient constitution the king had the bestowal of a number of life-tenures of great estates, called starosties; and the granting of these Sigismund made conditional on the acceptance of Catholicism.[107] Thus the Protestantism of the nobles, which had been in large part originally determined by economic interests, was dissolved by a reversal of the same force, very much in the fashion in which it was disintegrated in France by the policy of Richelieu at the same period. At the close of Sigismund’s reign Protestantism was definitively broken up; and the Jesuit ascendancy permitted even of frequent persecutions of heresy. From these Unitarians could not escape; and at length, in 1658, they were expelled from the country, now completely subject to Jesuitism. In the country in which Protestantism and Unitarianism in turn had spread most rapidly under favouring political and social conditions, the rise of contrary conditions had most rapidly and decisively overthrown them.
The record of the heresy of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, in fine, is very much a reduplication of that of early Christianity. Men presented with an obscure and self-contradictory “revelation” set themselves zealously to extract from it a body of certain truth, and in that hopeless undertaking did but multiply strife, till the majority, wearied with the fruitless quest, resigned themselves like their ancient prototypes to a rule of dogma under which the reasoning faculty became inert. Sane rationalism had to find another path, in a more enlightened day.
§ 6. The Struggle in France
The political and economic conditioning of the Reformation may perhaps best be understood by following the fortunes of Protestantism in France. When Luther began his schism, France might reasonably have been held a much more likely field for its extension than England. While King Henry was still to earn from the papacy the title of “Defender of the Faith” as against Luther, King Francis had exacted from the Pope (1516) a Concordat by which the appointment of all abbots and bishops in France was vested in the crown, the papacy receiving only the annates, or first year’s revenue. For centuries too the French throne and the papacy had been chronically at strife; for seventy years a French pope, subservient to the king, had sat at Avignon; and before the Concordat the “Pragmatic Sanction,” first enacted in 1268 by the devout St. Louis, had since the reign of Charles VII, who reinforced it (1438), kept the Gallican Church on a semi-independent footing towards Rome. By the account of the chancellor Du Prat in 1517, the “Pragmatic,” then superseded by the Concordat, had isolated France among the Catholic peoples, causing her to be regarded as inclined to heresy.[108] In 1512 the Council of Pisa, convoked by Louis XII, had denounced Pope Julius II as a dangerous schismatic, and he had retaliated by placing France under interdict. In the previous year the French king had given his protection to a famous farce by Pierre Gringoire, in which, on Shrove Tuesday, the Pope was openly ridiculed.[109] Nowhere, in short, was the papacy as such less respected.
The whole strife, however, between the French kings and the popes had been for revenue, not on any question of doctrine. In the three years (1461–64) during which Louis XI had for his own purposes suspended the Pragmatic Sanction, it was found that 2,500,000 crowns had gone from France to Rome for “expetatives” and “dispensations,” besides 340,000 crowns for bulls for archbishoprics, bishoprics, abbeys, priories, and deaneries.[110] This drain was naturally resisted by Church and Crown alike. Louis XI restored the Pragmatic Sanction. Louis XII re-enacted it in 1499 with new severity; and the effect of the Concordat of Francis I was merely to win over the Pope by dividing between the king and him the power of plunder by the sale of ecclesiastical offices.[111] It was accordingly much resented by the Parlement, the University, the clergy, and the people of Paris; but the king overbore all opposition. Though, therefore, he had at times some disposition to make a “reform” on the Lutheran lines, he had no such motive thereto as had the kings and nobles of the other northern countries; and he had further no such personal motive as had Henry VIII of England. Under the existing arrangement he was as well provided for as might be, since “the patronage of some six hundred bishoprics and abbeys furnished him with a convenient and inexpensive method of providing for his diplomatic service, and of rewarding literary merit.”[112] The troubles in Germany, besides, were a warning against letting loose a movement of popular fanaticism.[113]
When, therefore, Protestantism and Lutheranism began to show head in France, they had no friends at once powerful and zealous. Before Luther, in 1512, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples laid down in the commentary on his Latin translation of the Pauline Epistles the Lutheran doctrine of grace, and in effect denied the received doctrine of transubstantiation.[114] In 1520 his former pupil, Guillaume Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, invited him and some younger reformers, among them Guillaume Farel, to join him in teaching in his diocese; and in 1523 appeared Lefèvre’s translation of and commentary on the gospels, which effectually began the Protestant movement in France.[115]
Persecution soon began. The king’s adoring sister, Margaret, Duchess of Alençon (afterwards Queen of Navarre), was the friend of Briçonnet, but was powerless to help at home even her own intimates.[116] At first the king and his mother encouraged the movement at Meaux while sending out a dozen preachers through France to combat the Lutheran teaching;[117] but in 1524, setting out on his Italian campaign, the king saw fit to conciliate his clergy, and his clerical chancellor Du Prat began measures of repression, the queen-mother assenting, and Briçonnet’s own brother assisting. Already, in 1521, the Sorbonne had condemned Luther’s writings, and the Parlement of Paris had ordered the surrender of all copies. In 1523 the works of Louis de Berquin, the anti-clerical friend of Erasmus, were condemned, and himself imprisoned; and Briçonnet consented to issue synodal decrees against Luther’s books and against certain Lutheran doctrines preached in his own diocese. Only by the king’s intervention was Berquin at this time released.
The first man slain was Jean Chastellain, a shoemaker of Tournay, burned at Vic in Lorraine on January 12, 1525. The next was a wool-carder of Meaux,[118] who was first whipped and branded for a fanatical outrage, then burned to death, with slow tortures, for a further outrage against an image of the Virgin at Metz (July, 1525). Later, an ecclesiastic of the Meaux group, Jacques Banvan of Picardy, was prosecuted at Paris for anti-Lutheran heresy, and publicly recanted; but repented, retracted his abjuration, and was burned on the Place de Grève, in August, 1526; a nameless “hermit of Livry” suffering the same death about the same time beside the cathedral of Notre Dame.[119] Meantime Lefèvre had taken refuge in Strasburg, and, despite a letter of veto from the king, now in captivity at Madrid, his works were condemned by the Sorbonne. When released, the king not only recalled him but made him tutor to his children. Ecclesiastical pressures, however, forced him finally to take refuge under the Queen of Navarre at Nérac, in Gascony, where he mourned his avoidance of martyrdom.[120]
So determined had been the persecution that in 1526 Berquin was a second time imprisoned, and with difficulty saved from death by the written command of the captive king, sent on his sister’s appeal.[121] And when the released king, to secure the deliverance of his hostage sons, felt bound to conciliate the Pope, and to secure funds had to conciliate the clergy, Marguerite, compelled to marry the king of Navarre, could do nothing more for Protestantism,[122] being herself openly and furiously denounced by the Catholic clergy.[123] Bought by a clerical subsidy, the king, on the occasion of a new outrage on a statue of the Virgin (1528),[124] associated himself with the popular indignation; and when the audacious Berquin, despite the dissuasions of Erasmus, resumed his anti-Catholic polemic, and in particular undertook to prove that Béda, the chief of the Sorbonne, was not a Christian,[125] he was re-arrested, tried, and condemned to be publicly branded and imprisoned for life. On his announcing an appeal to the absent king, and to the pope, a fresh sentence, this time of death, was hurriedly passed; and he was strangled and burned (1529) within two hours of the sentence,[126] to the intense joy of the ecclesiastical multitude.
After various vacillations, the king in 1534 had the fresh pretext of Protestant outrage—the affixing of an anti-Catholic placard in all of the principal thoroughfares of Paris, and to the door of the king’s own room[127]—for permitting a fresh persecution after he had refused the Pope’s request that he should join in a general extermination of heresy,[128] and there began at Paris a series of human sacrifices. It will have been observed that Protestant outrages had provoked previous executions; and there is some ground for the view that, but for the new and exasperating outrage of 1534, the efforts which were being officially made for a modus vivendi might have met with success.[129] This hope was now frustrated. In November, 1534, seven men were condemned to be burned alive, one of them for printing Lutheran books. In December others followed; and in January, 1535, on the occasion of a royal procession “to appease the wrath of God,” six Lutherans (by one account, three by another) were burned alive by slow fires, one of the victims being a school-mistress.[130] It was on this occasion that the king, in a public speech, declared: “Were one of my arms infected with this poison, I would cut it off. Were my own children tainted, I should immolate them.”[131]
Under such circumstances religious zeal naturally went far. In six months there were passed 102 sentences of death, of which twenty-seven were executed, the majority of the condemned having escaped by flight. Thereafter the individual burnings are past counting. On an old demand of the Sorbonne, the king actually sent to the Parlement an edict abolishing the art of printing;[132] which he duly recalled when the Parlement declined to register it. But the French Government was now committed to persecution. The Sorbonne’s declaration against Luther in 1521 had proclaimed as to the heretics that “their impious and shameless arrogance must be restrained by chains, by censures—nay, by fire and flame, rather than confuted by argument”;[133] and in that spirit the ruling clergy proceeded, the king abetting them. In 1543 he ordained that heresy should be punished as sedition;[134] and in 1545 occurred the massacres of the Vaudois, before described. The result of this and further savageries was simply the wider diffusion of heresy, and a whole era of civil war, devastation, and demoralization.
Meantime Calvin had been driven abroad, to found a Protestant polity at Geneva and give a lead to those of England and Scotland. The balance of political forces prevented a Protestant polity in France; but nowhere else in the sixteenth century did Protestantism fight so long and hard a battle. That the Reformation was a product of “Teutonic conscience” is an inveterate fallacy.[135] The country in which Protestantism was intellectually most disinterested and morally most active was France. “The main battle of erudition and doctrine against the Catholic Church,” justly contends Guizot, “was sustained by the French reformers; it was in France and Holland, and always in French, that most of the philosophic, historical, and polemic works on that side were written; neither Germany nor England, certainly, employed in the cause at that epoch more intelligence and science.”[136] Nor was there in France—apart from the provocative insults to Catholics above mentioned—any such licence on the Protestant side as arose in Germany, though the French Protestants were as violently intolerant as any. Their ultimate decline, after long and desperate wars ending in a political compromise, was due to the play of socio-economic causes under the wise and tolerant administration of Richelieu, who opened the royal services to the Protestant nobles.[137] The French character had proved as unsubduable in Protestantism as any other; and the generation which in large part gradually reverted to Catholicism did but show that it had learned the lesson of the strifes which had followed on the Reformation—that Protestantism was no solution of either the moral or the intellectual problems of religion and politics.
§ 7. The Political Process in Britain
It was thus by no predilection or faculty of “race” that the Reformation so-called came to be associated historically with the northern or “Teutonic” nations. They simply succeeded in making permanent, by reason of more propitious political circumstances, a species of ecclesiastical revolution in which other races led the way. As Hussitism failed in Bohemia, Lollardism came to nothing in England in the same age, after a period of great vogue and activity.[138] The designs of Parliament on the revenues of the Church at the beginning of the fifteenth century[139] had failed by reason of the alliance knit between Church and Crown in the times when the latter needed backing; and at the accession of Henry VIII England was more orthodox than any of the other leading States of Northern Europe.[140] Henry was himself passionately orthodox, and was much less of a reformer in his mental attitude than was Wolsey, who had far-reaching schemes for de-Romanizing the Church alike in England and France, and who actually gave the king a handle against him by his plans for turning Church endowments to educational purposes.[141] The personal need of the despotic king for a divorce which the pope dared not give him was the first adequate lead to the rejection of the papal authority. On this the plunder of the monasteries followed, as a forced measure of royal finance,[142] of precaution against papal influence, and for the creation of a body of new interests vitally hostile to a papal restoration. The king and the mass of the people were alike Catholics in doctrine; the Protestant nobles who ruled under Edward VI were for the most part mere cynical plunderers, appropriating alike Church goods, lands, and school endowments more shamelessly than even did the potentates of Germany; and on the accession of Queen Mary the nation gladly reverted to Romish usages, though the spoil-holders would not surrender a yard of Church lands.[143] Had there been a succession of Catholic sovereigns, Catholicism would certainly have been restored. Protestantism was only slowly built up by the new clerical and heretical propaganda, and by the state of hostility set up between England and the Catholic Powers. It was the episode of the Spanish Armada that, by identifying Catholicism with the cause of the great national enemy, made the people grow definitely anti-Catholic. Even in Shakespeare’s dramas the old state of things is seen not yet vitally changed.
In Scotland, though there the priesthood had fewer friends than almost anywhere else, the act of Reformation was mainly one of pure and simple plunder of Church property by the needy nobility, in conscious imitation of the policy of Henry VIII, at a time when the throne was vacant; and there too Protestant doctrine was only gradually established by the new race of preachers, trained in the school of Calvin. In Ireland, on the other hand, Protestantism became identified with the cause of the oppressor, just as for England Romanism was the cause of the enemy-in-chief. “Race” and “national character,” whatever they may be understood to mean, had nothing whatever to do with the course of events, and doctrinal enlightenment had just as little.[144] In the words of a distinguished clerical historian: “No truth is more certain than this, that the real motives of religious action do not work on men in masses; and that the enthusiasm which creates Crusaders, Inquisitors, Hussites, Puritans, is not the result of conviction, but of passion provoked by oppression or resistance, maintained by self-will, or stimulated by the mere desire of victory.”[145] To this it need only be added that the desire of gain is also a factor, and that accordingly the anti-papal movement succeeded where the balance of political forces could be turned against the clerical interest, and failed where the latter predominated.
[1] Who, however, was no rationalist, but an orientalizing mystic. Cp. Carriere, Die philos. Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit, 1846, pp. 36–38. [↑]
[2] Cp. Ranke, Hist. of the Ref. in Germany, bk. ii, ch. i (Eng. tr. Routledge’s 1-vol. ed. 1905, p. 129). The point is fairly put by Audin in the introduction to his Histoire de Luther. Compare Green: “The awakening of a rational Christianity, whether in England or in the Teutonic world at large, begins with the Florentine studies of Sir John Colet” (Short Hist. ch. vi, § iv). Colet, however, was strictly orthodox. Ulrich von Hutten spent five of the formative years of his life in Italy. [↑]
[3] Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, 1852, p. 205. [↑]
[4] As to the general resentment of the money drain cp. Strauss, Gespräche von Ulrich von Hutten, 1860, Vorrede, p. xiv, and the dialogues, pp. 159. 363. Cp. Ranke, bk. ii, ch. i (Eng. tr. as cited, pp. 123–26). [↑]
[5] See Ullmann, Reformers before the Reformation, passim. Even the Peasants’ Rising was adumbrated in the movement of Hans Böheim of Nikleshausen (fl. 1476), whose doctrine was both democratic and anti-clerical. (Work cited, ii, 380–81; cp. Bezold, Gesch. der deutschen Reform. 1890, ch. vii.) [↑]
[6] See Guicciardini’s analysis of the parties, cited by E. Armstrong in the “Cambridge Modern History,” vol. i, The Renaissance, p. 170. [↑]
[7] Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Eng. tr. pp. 476–77. [↑]
[8] See the sympathetic analysis of the book by Villari, Life of Savonarola, Eng. tr. pp. 582–94, where it is much overrated. [↑]
[9] As to the education of the Florentine common people in the fourteenth century cp. Burckhardt, pp. 203–204; Symonds, Age of the Despots, p. 202. [↑]
[10] Cp. Armstrong, as cited, pp. 150–51. [↑]
[11] McCrie, Reformation in Italy, ed. 1856, pp. 28–30, 41. [↑]
[13] Id. p. 45, citing Reynald’s Annales, ad. ann. 1530; Trechsel, Lelio Sozzini und die Anti-trinitarier seiner Zeit, 1844, pp. 19–35. [↑]
[14] McCrie reasons otherwise, from the fact that the sack of Rome was by many Catholics regarded as a divine judgment on the papacy; but he omits to mention the pestilence which followed and destroyed the bulk of the conquering army (Menzel, Gesch. der Deutschen, Cap. 390). [↑]
[18] Id. pp. 89, 98, 215. McCrie thinks it useful to suggest (p. 95) that anti-trinitarianism seems to have begun at Siena, “whose inhabitants were proverbial among their countrymen for levity and inconstancy of mind”—citing Dante, Inferno, canto xxix, 121–23. Thus does theology illumine sociology. In a note on the same page the historian cites the testimony of Melanchthon (Epist. coll. 852, 941) as to the commonness of “Platonic and skeptical theories” among his Italian correspondents in general; and quotes further the words of Calvin, who for once rises above invective to explain as to heresy (Opera, viii, 510) that “In Italis, propter rarum acumen, magis eminet.” The historian omits, further, to trace German Unitarianism to the levity of a particular community in Germany. [↑]
[19] A. von Reumont, The Carafas of Maddaloni, Eng. tr. 1854, pp. 33–37; McCrie, p. 122. It was not Protestantism that made the revolt. The contemporary historian Porzios states that the Lutherans were so few that they could easily be counted. Von Reumont, as cited, p. 33. It was not heresy that moved the Neapolitans, but the knowledge that perjurers could be found in Naples to swear to anything, and that the machine would thus be made one of pecuniary extortion. [↑]
[20] McCrie, Reformation in Italy, p. 131. [↑]
[23] Id. pp. 161–63. This seems to have been one of the latest instances of enslavement in Italy. As to the selling of many Capuan women in Rome after the capture of Capua in 1501, see Burckhardt, p. 279, note. [↑]
[25] Domenico Orano, Liberi Pensatori bruciati in Roma dal XVI al XVIII Secolo, Roma, 1904. Giordano Bruno is 77th in the list; and there are only eight more. The 85th case was in 1642; and the last—the burning of a dead body—in 1761. [↑]
[27] Signor Orano gives the name as Buzio, citing the 1835 Italian translation of McCrie, and pronouncing Cantù (ii, 338) wrong in making it Mollio. But in the 1856 ed. of McCrie’s work the name is given (pp. 57–58, 168–69) as John Mollio. Cantù then appears to have been right; but the date he gives, 1533, seems to be a blunder. [↑]
[28] McCrie gives this name as Tisserano. [↑]
[29] Orano, p. 6; McCrie, pp. 169–70. [↑]
[30] McCrie, p. 212; Orano, p. 33. [↑]
[31] Orano, pp. 15–16. McCrie, p. 165, says he was strangled; but the official record is “fu mozza la testa.” [↑]
[32] Orano, p. 22. As to Carnesecchi’s career see McCrie, pp. 173–79; and Babington’s ed. of Paleario, 1855, Introd. pp. lxv-lxvi. [↑]
[33] McCrie, p. 164. See Trechsel, Lelio Sozzini, p. 35, as to Baldo Lupetino. [↑]
[34] As to whom see McCrie, pp. 81–84, 179–82, and the copious Life and Times of Aonio Paleario, by M. Young. 2 vols. 1860. [↑]
[35] Marini, Galileo e l’Inquisizione, Roma, 1850, p. 37, note. [↑]
[36] Babington’s ed. p. 46 sq. [↑]
[37] It was afterwards unearthed, however; and Babington’s ed. (1855) is an almost facsimile reprint, with old French and English versions. [↑]
[38] Cp. McCrie, pp. 114–17. [↑]
[39] Cp. McCrie, Ref. in Italy, ch. v; Ref. in Spain, ch. viii; Green, Short Hist. pp. 358, 362. [↑]
[40] Huss, in his youth, at first turned from Wiclif’s writings with horror. Bonnechose, The Reformers before the Reformation, Eng. tr. 1844, i, 72. [↑]
[41] Cp. Krasinski, Histor. Sketch of the Reformation in Poland, 1838, i, 58. [↑]
[42] Krasinski, Sketch of Relig. Hist. of Slav. Nations, ed. 1851, pp. 26–27. [↑]
[43] Neander, ix, 242 sq.; Hardwick, pp. 426–27. Militz effected a remarkable reformation of life in Prague. Neander, p. 241. [↑]
[44] See the very intelligent survey of the situation in Kautsky’s Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation, Eng. tr. 1897, p. 35 sq. [↑]
[46] K. Raumer, Contrib. to the Hist. of the German Universities, New York, 1859, p. 19; Dr. Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, vol. ii, pt. i, 223–26; Bonnechose, i, 78; Mosheim, 15 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, § 6; Gieseler, Per. iii, Div. v, § 150; Krasinski, as cited, pp. 31–33. [↑]
[47] Krasinski, Sketch, p. 33; Kautsky, p. 43; Maclaine’s note to Mosheim, as last cited; Rashdall, pp. 225–26, 254. The exodus has been much exaggerated. Only 602 were enrolled at Leipzig. [↑]
[48] Many of these were of great beauty and value, and must have been owned by rich men. Krasinski, Sketch, p. 34. [↑]
[49] Hardwick. p. 433. Jerome caused the bull to be “fastened to an immodest woman,” and so paraded through the town before being burnt. Gieseler, iv, 114, note 15. [↑]
[50] Bonnechose, ii, 122; Gieseler, as cited. [↑]
[51] See Mosheim’s very interesting note; and Gieseler, iv, 104–105. [↑]
[53] For an account of the devices of Catholic historians to explain away the Council’s treachery see Bonnechose, note E. to vol. i, p. 270. The Council itself simply declared that faith was not to be kept with a heretic. Id. p. 271; Gieseler, p. 121. [↑]
[54] Bonnechose, ii, 118–20. Cp. Krasinski, p. 37. [↑]
[59] See their principles stated in Kautsky, p. 59. [↑]
[60] Æneas Sylvius, who detested the Taborites, declared them to have only one good quality, the love of letters. Letter to Carvajal, cited by Krasinski, p. 93, note. [↑]
[63] Kautsky, pp. 78–82. See further the account of Helchitsky’s book in Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, ch. i. [↑]
[64] Hist. of the Prot. Church in Hungary (anon.), Eng. tr. 1854, p. 17. [↑]
[67] Id. pp. 24, 32, citing the chronicler Thurnschwamm. [↑]
[69] Hist. of the Prot. Church in Hungary, p. 34. [↑]
[75] Called Blandvater in the History above cited, which is copied in this error by Hardwick. [↑]
[76] Schlegel’s note to Mosheim, Reid’s ed. p. 708. [↑]
[77] Cp. Mosheim, last cit. [↑]
[78] Hist. of the Prot. Church in Hungary, p. 86. [↑]
[79] Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biog. ii, 257–60. Schlegel, as cited. Biandrata later gave up his Unitarianism, turning either Jesuit or Protestant. He was murdered by his nephew for his money. Wallace, ii, 144. [↑]
[80] History cited, p. 109. As to the persecutions see pp. 108–15. [↑]
[83] Krasinski, Hist. of the Reformation in Poland, 1838, i, 29–30. [↑]
[85] Hist. of the Reformation in Poland, p. 38. [↑]
[92] Hist. of the Reformation in Poland, i, 91–98. [↑]
[95] Id. pp. 139, 345, following Wengierski; Wallace, Antitrin. Biog. ii, Art. 41. [↑]
[96] Krasinski, pp. 143, 344, note. [↑]
[100] I.e., Peter of Goniond, a small town in Podlachia. [↑]
[101] Krasinski, i, 346–48; Mosheim. 16 Cent. sect. III, pt. ii, ch. iv, § 7; and Schlegel’s and Reid’s notes. [↑]
[102] Cp. Mosheim, chapter last cited, § 15 sq. [↑]
[104] Wallace, Antitrin. Biog. ii, 181–82. [↑]
[105] Krasinski, pp. 357–60. [↑]
[107] Krasinski, Ref. in Poland, ii, 93–94; Rel. Hist. of Slav. Nations, p. 188. [↑]
[108] Lutteroth, La Reformation en France pendant sa première période, p. 2. [↑]
[109] A. A. Tilley, in vol. ii of Camb. Mod. Hist. The Reformation, ch. ix. p. 281. [↑]
[110] Prof. H. M. Baird, Hist. of the Rise of the Huguenots, 1880, i, 33. [↑]
[112] Tilley, as cited, p. 281. [↑]
[113] Lutteroth, pp. 14–16. [↑]
[114] Tilley, p. 282. The translation was notable as a revision of the Vulgate version, which was printed side by side with it. [↑]
[115] Lutteroth, pp. 3–4; Baird, i, 79. [↑]
[116] Michelet, Hist. de France, tom. x, La Réforme, ch. viii. [↑]
[118] Michelet. éd. 1884, x, 308; Baird, i, 80, note. [↑]
[119] See Baird, i, 91, note, as to the dates, which are usually put a year too early. [↑]
[120] Baird, i, 95–96, and note. [↑]
[122] Michelet, x, 314; Baird, i, 133–37. [↑]
[123] Lutteroth, p. 15; Michelet. x, 337. [↑]
[124] Other such outrages followed, and did much to intensify persecution. [↑]
[125] Erasmus had said that one pamphlet of Béda’s contained “eighty lies, three hundred calumnies, and forty-seven blasphemies” (Michelet, x, 320). [↑]
[126] Baird, i, 143–44; Michelet, x, 321–26. [↑]
[127] Michelet, x, 338–39. [↑]
[130] Lutteroth, p. 17; Michelet, x, 340 (giving the text of a contemporary record); Baird, i, 173–78—a very full account. [↑]
[131] See Baird, i, 176, note, as to the authenticity of the utterance, which was doubted by Voltaire. [↑]
[132] Michelet, x, 342; Baird, i, 169. [↑]
[133] Cit. by Baird, i, 24, note. [↑]
[135] It is endorsed by Professor Clifford, Lectures and Essays, 2nd ed. p. 335. [↑]
[136] Hist. de la Civ. en France, 13e édit. i, 18. [↑]
[137] See the case well made out by Buckle, ch. viii—1-vol. ed. pp. 311–13. [↑]
[139] Stubbs, Const. Hist., 3rd ed. ii, 469, 471, 510. [↑]
[140] Cp. Froude, Hist. of England, ed. 1872, i, 173; Burnet, Hist. of the Reformation, Nares’ ed. i, 17–18. Henry, says Burnet, “cherished Churchmen more than any king in England had ever done.” Compare further Shaftesbury, Miscellaneous Reflections, in the Characteristics, Misc. iii, ch. i, ed. 1733, vol. iii, p. 151; Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, as cited above, p. 316. [↑]
[141] Rev. Dr. J. H. Blunt, The Reformation of the Church of England, ed. 1892, i, 72–100. Wolsey was more patient with Protestant heresy than Henry ever was, though on his death-bed he counselled the king to put down the Lutherans. [↑]
[142] Cp. Burnet, as cited, pref. p. xl, and p. 3; Heylyn, Hist. of the Ref. pref.; Blunt, i, 293–94. In 1530 the king had actually repudiated his debts, cancelling borrowings made under the Privy Seal, and thus setting an example to the Catholic King Philip II in a later generation. [↑]
[143] Heylyn, as cited, and i, 123–27, ed. 1849; A. F. Leach, English Schools at the Reformation, 1896, pp. 5–6; J. E. G. De Montmorency, State Intervention in English Education, 1902, pp. 62–65. [↑]
[144] The subject is treated at some length in The Dynamics of Religion, by “M. W. Wiseman” (J. M. R.), 1897, pp. 3–46; and in The Saxon and the Celt, pp. 92–97. [↑]
[145] Bishop Stubbs, Const. Hist. of England, 3rd ed. iii, 638. Cp. Bishop Creighton, The Age of Elizabeth, p. 6; Hallam, Lit. of Europe, i, 366. [↑]
Chapter XII
THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT
§ 1. Germany and Switzerland
In the circumstances set forth in the last chapter, the Reformation could stand for only the minimum of freethought needed to secure political action. Some decided unbelief there was within its original sphere;[1] the best known instance being the private latitudinarianism of such humanist teachers as Mutianus (Mudt) and Crotus (Jäger), of the Erfurt University, in the closing years of the fifteenth century. Trained in Italy, Mutianus, after his withdrawal to private life at Gotha, in his private correspondence[2] avowed the opinion that the sacred books contained many designed fables; that the books of Job and Jonah were such; and that there was a secret wisdom in the Moslem opinion that Christ himself was not crucified, his place being taken by someone resembling him. To his young friend Spalatin he propounded the question: “If Christ alone be the way, the truth, and the life, how went it with the men who lived so many centuries before his birth? Had they had no part in truth and salvation?” And he hints the answer that “the religion of Christ did not begin with his incarnation, but is as old as the world, as his birth from the Father. For what is the real Christ, the only Son of God, save, as Paul says, the Wisdom of God, with which he endowed not only the Jews in their narrow Syrian land, but also the Greeks, the Romans, and the Germans, however different might be their religious usages.” Though some such doctrine could be found in Eusebius,[3] it was remarkable enough in the Germany of four hundred years ago. But Mutianus went still further. To his friend Heinrich Urban he wrote that “there is but one God and one Goddess” under the many forms and names of Jupiter, Sol, Apollo, Moses, Christ, Luna, Ceres, Proserpina, Tellus, Maria. “But,” he prudently added, “heed that you do not spread it abroad. One must hide it in silence, like Eleusinian mysteries. In religious matters we must avail ourselves of the cloak of fable and enigma. Thou, with the grace of Jupiter—that is, the best and greatest God—shouldst silently despise the little Gods. When I say Jupiter, I mean Christ and the true God. But enough of these all too high things.” Such language hints of much current rationalism that can now only be guessed at, since it was unsafe even to write to friends as Mutianus did. On concrete matters of religion he is even more pronounced, laughing at the worship of the coat and beard and foreskin of Jesus, calling Lenten food fool’s food, contemning the begging monks, rejecting confession and masses for the dead, and pronouncing the hours spent in altar-service lost time. In his house at Gotha, behind the Cathedral, his friend Crotus burlesqued the Mass, called the relics of saints bones from the gallows, and otherwise blasphemed with his host.[4]
But such esoteric doctrine and indoors unbelief can have had no part in the main movement; and though at the same period we see among the common people the satirist Heinrich Bebel, a Swabian peasant’s son, jesting for them over the doctrines of trinity in unity, the resurrection, doomsday, and the sacraments,[5] it is certain that that influence counted for little in the way of serious thinking. It was only as separate and serious heresies that such doctrines could long propagate themselves; and Luther in his letter to the people of Antwerp[6] speaks of one sect or group as rejecting baptism, another the eucharist, another the divinity of Jesus, and yet another affirming a middle state between the present life and the day of judgment. One teacher in Antwerp he describes as saying that every man has the Holy Ghost, that being simply reason and understanding, that there is no hell, and that doing as we would be done by is faith; but this heretic does not seem to have founded a sect. The most extensive wave of really innovating thought was that set up by the social and anti-sacerdotal revolt of the Anabaptists, among whom occurred also the first popular avowals of Unitarianism.
In the way of literature, Unitarian doctrine came from John Campanus, of Jülich; Ludwig Hetzer, a priest of Zürich; and (in a minor degree) Johann Denk, school-rector in Nüremberg in 1524,[7] and afterwards one of the earlier leaders of the Anabaptist movement. All three were men of academic training; and Hetzer, who wrote explicitly against the divinity of Christ, had previously made with the aid of Denk a German translation, which was used by Luther, of the Hebrew prophets (1527). He was beheaded at Constance in 1529, nominally on the charge of practising free-love.[8] Campanus, who published a book attacking the doctrine of the Trinity and the teaching of Luther, had to leave Wittemberg in consequence, and finally died after a long imprisonment in Cleve. Denk—an amiable and estimable man[9]—is said, on very scant grounds, to have recanted before he died.
Not only from such thoroughgoing heresy, but from the whole Anabaptist secession, and no less from the rising of the peasants, the main Lutheran movement kept itself utterly aloof; and, though the Catholics naturally identified the extremer parties with the Reformation, its official or “Centre” polity made little for intellectual or political as distinct from ecclesiastical innovation. Towards the Peasants’ Revolt, which at first he favoured, inasmuch as the peasants, whom he had courted, came to him for counsel, Luther’s final attitude was so brutal that it has to-day almost no apologist; and in this as in some of his other evil departures the “mild” Melanchthon went with him.[10] Their doctrine was the very negation of all democracy, and must be interpreted as an absolute capitulation to the nobles, without whose backing they knew themselves to be ecclesiastically helpless. In the massacres to which Luther gave his eager approval a hundred thousand men were destroyed.[11] “From this time onwards,” pronounces Baur, “Luther ceases to be the representative of the spirit of his time; he represents only one side of it.... Thenceforth his writings have no more the universal bearing they once had, but only a particular.... In the political connection we must date from Luther’s attitude to the Peasants’ War the Lutheran theory of unconditional obedience. Christianity, as Luther preached it, has given to princes unlimited power of despotism and tyranny; while the poor man, who, without right of protest, must submit to everything, will be compensated for his earthly sufferings in heaven.”[12] Naturally the princes henceforth grew more and more Lutheran.
As naturally the crushed peasantry turned away from the Reformation in despair. Luther had in the first instance approached them, not they him. Before the revolt the reformers had made the peasant a kind of hero in their propaganda;[13] and when in the first and moderate stage of the rising its motives were set forth in sixty-two articles, these were purely agrarian. “There is no trace of a religious element in them, no indication that their authors had ever heard of Luther or of the Gospel.”[14] Then it was that Luther commended them; and thereafter “a religious element began to obtrude.”[15] When the overthrow began, doubtless sincerely reprobating the violences of the insurgents, he hounded on the princes in their work of massacre, Melanchthon chiming in. Thereafter, as Melanchthon admitted, the people showed a detestation of the Lutheran clergy;[16] and among many there was even developed a kind of “materialistic atheism.”[17]
The political outcome, as aforesaid, was a thoroughly undemocratic organization of Protestantism in Germany; and, though the ecclesiastical tyranny which resulted from the more democratic system of Calvin was not more favourable to progress or happiness, the final German system of cujus regio, ejus religio—every district taking the religion of its ruler—must be summed up as a mere negation of the right of private judgment. Save for the attempt of a Frenchman, François Lambert of Avignon, to organize a self-governing church, German Protestantism showed almost no democratic feeling.[18] The one poor excuse for Luther was that the peasants had never recognized the need or duty of maintaining their clergy.[19] And seeing how the wealth of the Church went to the nobles and the well-to-do, and how downtrodden were the peasants all along, it would be surprising indeed if they had. They were not the workers of the ecclesiastical Reformation, and it wrought little or nothing for them.
The side on which the whole movement made for new light was its promotion of common schools, which enabled many of the people for the first time to read.[20] This tendency had been seen among the Waldenses, the Lollards, and the Hussites, and for the same reasons. Such movements depended for their existence on the reading of the sacred books by the people for themselves; and to make readers was their first concern. In this connection, of course, note must be taken of the higher educational revival before the Reformation,[21] without which the ecclesiastical revolution could not have taken place even in Germany. As we saw, a literary expansion preceded the Hussite movement in Bohemia; and the stir of concern for written knowledge, delightedly acclaimed by Ulrich von Hutten, is recognized by all thoughtful historians in Germany before the rise of Luther. Such enlightenment as that of Mutianus was far in advance of Luther’s own; and enlightenment of a lower degree cannot have been lacking. The ability to read, indeed, must have been fairly general in the middle class in Germany, for it appears that the partisan favour shown everywhere to Luther’s writings by the printers and booksellers gave him an immense propagandist advantage over his Catholic opponents, who could secure for their replies only careless or bad workmanship, and were thus made to seem actually illiterate in the eyes of the reading public.[22]
As regards Switzerland, again, it is the admitted fact that “the educational movement began before the religious revival, and was a cause of the Reformation rather than a result.”[23] So in Holland, the Brethren of the Common Lot (Fratres Vitæ Communis), a partially communistic but orthodox order of learned and unlearned laymen which lasted from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, did much for the schooling of the common people, and passed on their impulse to Germany.[24] Similarly in Scotland the schools seem to have been fairly numerous even in the later Catholic period.[25] There, and in some other countries, it was the main merit of the Reformation to carry on zealously the work so begun, setting up common schools in every parish. In Lutheran Germany this work was for a long period much more poorly done, as regarded the peasantry. These had been trodden down after their revolt into a state of virtual slavery. “The broad midlands and the entire eastern part of Germany were filled with slaves, who had neither status nor property nor education”;[26] and it was long before any large number of the people were taught to read and write,[27] the schooling given at the best being a scanty theological drill.[28]
But indeed for two-thirds of its adherents everywhere the Reformation meant no other reading than that of the Bible and catechisms and theological treatises. Coming as it did within one or two generations of the invention of printing, it stood not for new ideas, but for the spread of old. That invention had for a time positively checked the production of new books, the multiplication of the old having in a measure turned attention to the past;[29] and the diffusion of the Bible in particular determined the mental attitude of the movement in mass. The thinking of its more disinterested promoters began and ended in Bibliolatry: Luther and Calvin alike did but set up an infallible book and a local tyranny against an infallible pope and a tyranny centring at Rome. Neither dreamt of toleration; and Calvin, the more competent mind of the two, did but weld the detached irrationalities of the current theology into a system which crushed reason and stultified the morality in the name of which he ruled Geneva with a rod of iron.[30] It is remarkable that both men reverted to the narrowest orthodoxies of the earlier Church, in defiance of whatever spirit of reasonable inquiry had been on the side of their movement. “It is a quality of faith,” wrote Luther, “that it wrings the neck of reason and strangles the beast”;[31] and he repeatedly avowed that it was only by submitting his mind absolutely to the Scriptures that he could retain his faith.[32] “He despised reason as heartily as any papal dogmatist could despise it. He hated the very thought of toleration or comprehension.”[33] And when Calvin was combated by the Catholic Pighius on the question of predestination and freewill, his defence was that he followed Christ and the Apostles, while his opponents resorted to human thoughts and reasonings.[34] On the same principle he dealt with the Copernican theory. After once breaking away from Rome both leaders became typical anti-freethinkers, never even making Savonarola’s pretence to resort to rationalist methods, though of course not more anti-rationalist than he. The more reasonable Zwingli, who tried to put an intelligible aspect on one or two of the mysteries of the faith, was scouted by both, as they scouted each other.
It is noteworthy that Zwingli, the most open-minded of the Reformers, owed his relative enlightenment to his general humanist culture,[35] and in particular to the influence of Pico della Mirandola and of Erasmus. It has even been argued that his whole theological system is derived from Pico,[36] but it appears to have been from Erasmus that he drew his semi-rationalistic view of the eucharist,[37] a development of that of Berengar, representing it as a simple commemoration. Such thinking was far from the “spirit of the Reformation”; and Luther, after the Colloquy of Marburg (1529), in which he and Melanchthon debated against Zwingli and Oecolampadius, spoke of those “Sacramentarians” as “not only liars, but the very incarnation of lying, deceit, and hypocrisy.”[38] Zwingli’s language is less ferocious; but it is confessed of him that he too practised coercion against minorities in the case alike of the Anabaptists and of the monasteries and nunneries, and even in the establishment of his reformed eucharist.[39] The expulsion of the nuns of St. Katherinenthal in particular was an act of sheer tyranny; and the outcome of the methods enforced by him at Zürich was the bitter hostility of the five Forest Cantons, which remained Catholic. In war with them he lost his life; and after his death (1531) his sacramental doctrine rapidly disappeared from Swiss and Continental Protestantism,[40] even as it failed to make headway in England.[41] At his fall “the words of triumph and cursing used by Lutherans and others were shameful and almost inhuman.”[42] In the sequel, for sheer lack of a rational foundation, the other Protestant sects in turn fell to furious dissension and persecution, some apparently finding their sole bond of union in hatred of the rest.
See Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, 3te Aufl. Cap. 431, for a sample of Lutheran popery; and as to the strifes cp. C. Beard, The Reformation, as cited, pp. 182–83; Dunham, History of the Germanic Empire, 1835, iii, 115–20, 153, 169; Strype, Memorials of Cranmer, ed. 1848, iii, 155–62; A. F. Pollard, in “The Cambridge Modern History,” vol. ii, The Reformation, ch. viii, pp. 277–79. In the last-cited compilation, however, the strifes of the Protestant sects are barely indicated.
As to Luther’s attitude towards new science, see his derision of Copernicus, on scriptural grounds, in the Table Talk, ch. lxix, Of Astronomy and Astrology. (The passage is omitted from the English translation in the Bohn Library, p. 341; and the whole chapter is dropped from the German abridgment published by Reclam.) Melanchthon was equally unteachable, and actually proposed to suppress the new teachings by punitive methods. (Initia Doctrinæ Physicæ, cited by White, Warfare of Science and Theology, 1896, i, 127.) It has been loosely claimed for Luther that he was “an enemy to religious persecution” (Lieber, Manual of Political Ethics, 1839, pt. i, p. 329), when the only evidence offered is (id. p. 205) that he declared against killing for heresy, because innocent men were likely to be slain—“Quare nullo modo possum admittere, falsos doctores occidi.” As early as 1524, renouncing his previous doctrine of non-coercion, he invoked the intervention of the State to punish blasphemy, declaring that the power of the sword was given by God for such ends (Bezold, p. 563). Melanchthon too declared that “Our commands are mere Platonic laws when the civil power does not give its support” (id. p. 565).
A certain intellectual illusion is set up even by Bezold when he writes that in Luther’s resort to physical force “the hierarchical principle had triumphed over one of the noblest principles of the Reformation.” “The Reformation” had no specific principles. Among its promoters were professed all manner of principles. The Reformation was the outcome of all their activities, and to make of it an entity or even a distinct set of theories is to obscure the phenomena.
Such flaws of formulation, however, are trifling in comparison with the mis-statement of the historic fact which is still normal in academic as in popular accounts of the Reformation. It would be difficult, for instance, to give seriously a more misleading account of the Lutheran reformation than the proposition of Dr. Edward Caird that, “in thrusting aside the claim of the Church to place itself between the individual and God, Luther had proclaimed the emancipation of men not only from the leading strings of the Church, but, in effect, from all external authority whatever, and even, in a sense, from all merely external teaching or revelation of the truth” (Hegel, 1883, p. 18). Luther thrust his own Church precisely where the Catholic Church had been; bitterly denounced new heresies; and put the Bible determinedly “between the individual and God.” In Luther’s own day Sebastian Franck unanswerably accused him of setting up a paper pope in place of the human pope he had rejected. Luther’s declaration was that “the ungodly papists prefer the authority of the Church far above God’s Word, a blasphemy abominable and not to be endured, wherewith ... they spit in God’s face. Truly God’s patience is exceeding great, in that they be not destroyed” (Table Talk, ch. i).
Another misconception is set up by Pattison, who seems to have been much concerned to shield Calvin from the criticism of the civilized conscience (see below, p. 452). He pronounces that Calvin’s “great merit lies in his comparative neglect of dogma. He seized the idea of reformation as a real renovation of human character” (Essays, ii, 23). If so, the reformer can have had little satisfaction, for he never admitted having regenerated Geneva. But the claim that he “comparatively” neglected dogma is true only in the sense that he was more inquisitorially zealous about certain forms of private conduct than was Luther. Gruet, indeed, he helped to slay upon political charges, taking a savage vengeance upon a personal opponent. But even in Gruet’s case he sought later to add a religious justification to his crime. And it was in the name of dogma that he put Servetus to death, exiled Castalio, imprisoned Bolsec, broke with old friends, and imperilled the entire Genevan polity. Pattison’s praise would be much more appropriate to Zwingli.
Luther, though he would probably have been ready enough to punish Copernicus as a heretic, was saved the evil chance which befel Calvin of being put in a place of authority where he could in God’s name commit judicial murder. It is by acts so describable that the name of Calvin is most directly connected with the history of freethought. In nowise entitled to rank with its furtherers, he is to be enrolled in the evil catalogue of its persecutors. In the case of Jacques Gruet on a mixture of political and religious charges, in that of Michael Servetus on grounds of dogma pure and simple, he cast upon the record of Genevan Protestantism and upon his own memory an ineffaceable stain of blood. Gruet, an adherent of the Perrinist faction of Geneva, a party opposed to Calvin, on being arrested for issuing a placard against the clerical junto in power, was found, by the accounts of the Calvinist historians, to have among his papers some revealing his disbelief in the Christian religion.[43] This, however, proves to be a partisan account of the matter, and is hardly even in intention truthful. In the first place, it was admitted by Calvin that the placard, affixed by night to the chair of St. Peter in Geneva, was not in Gruet’s handwriting; yet he was arrested, imprisoned, and put to the torture with the avowed object of making him confess “that he had acted at the instigation of François Favre, of the wife of Perrin, and of other accomplices of the same party whom he must have had.” Perrin was the former Captain-General of Geneva, a popular personage, opposed to Calvin and detested by him. No match for the vigilant Reformer, Perrin had been through Calvin’s intrigues deprived of his post; and there was a standing feud between his friends and the Calvinistic party in power.
The main part of the charges against Gruet was political; and the most circumstantial was based upon a draft, found among his papers, of a speech which he had ostensibly proposed to make in the General Council calling for reform of abuses. The speech contained nothing seditious, but the intention to deliver it without official permission was described as lèse-majesté—a term now newly introduced into Genevan procedure. The other documentary proofs were trivial. In one fragment of a letter there was an ironical mention of “notre galant Calvin”; and in a note on a margin of Calvin’s book against the Anabaptists he had written in Latin “All trifles.” For the rest, he was accused of writing two pages in Latin “in which are comprised several errors,” and of being “inclined (plutôt enclin) to say, recite and write false opinions and errors as to the true words of Our Saviour.”[44] Concerning his errors the only documentary proof preserved is from an alleged scrap of his writing in corrupt Latin, cited by Calvin as a sample of his inability to write Latin correctly: Omnes tam humane quam divine que dicantur leges factae sunt ad placitum hominum, which may be rendered, “All so-called laws, divine as well as human, are made at the will of men.” In the act of sentence, he is declared further to have written obscene verses justifying free love; to have striven to ruin the authority of the consistory, menaced the ministers, and abused Calvin; and to have “conspired with the king of France against the safety of Calvin and the State.”
To make out these charges, for the last of which there seems to be no evidence whatever, Gruet was put to the torture many times during many days “according to the manner of the time,” says one of Calvin’s biographers.[45] In reality such unmeasured use of torture was in Geneva a Calvinistic innovation. Gruet, refusing under the worst stress of torture to incriminate anyone else, at length, in order to end it, pleaded guilty to the charges against him, praying in his last extremity for a speedy death. On July 26, 1547, his half-dead body was beheaded on the scaffold, the torso being tied and the feet nailed thereto. Such were the judicial methods and mercies of a reformed Christianity, guided by a chief reformer.
The biographer Henry “cannot repress a sigh” over the thirty days of double torture of Gruet (ii, 66), but goes on to make a most disingenuous defence of Calvin, first asserting that he was not responsible, and then arguing that it would be as unjust to try Calvin by modern standards as to blame him for not wearing a perruque à la Louis XIV, or proceeding by the Code Napoléon! The same moralist declares (p. 68) that “it is really inspiriting to hear how Calvin stormed in his sermons against the opposite party”: and is profoundly impressed by the “deep religious earnestness” with which Calvin in 1550 claimed that “The council ought again to declare aloud that this blasphemer has been justly condemned, that the wrath of God may be averted from the city.” Finally (p. 69), recording how Gruet’s “book” was burned in 1550, the biographer pronounces that “The Gospel thus gained a victory over its enemies; in the same manner as in Germany freedom triumphed when Luther burnt the pope’s bull.”
As to the alleged anti-religious writings of Gruet, they were not produced or even specified till 1550, three years after his execution, when they were said to have been found partly in the roof of what had been his house (now occupied by the secretary of the consistory), partly behind a chimney, and partly in a dustbin. Put together, they amounted to thirteen leaves, in a handwriting which was declared by Calvin to be “juridically, by good examination of trustworthy men, recognized to be that of Gruet.” The time and the singular manner of their discovery raises the question whether the papers had not been placed by the finders. The execution of Gruet, the first bloodshed under Calvin’s régime, had roused new hatred against him; the slain man figured as a martyr in the eyes of the party to which he belonged; and it had become necessary to discredit him and them if the ascendancy of Calvin was to be secure. It is solely upon Calvin’s account that we have to depend for our knowledge of Gruet’s alleged anti-Christian doctrine; for the document, after being described and condemned, was duly burned by the common hangman. If genuine, it was a remarkable performance. According to the act of condemnation, which is in the handwriting of Calvin, it derided all religions alike, blasphemed God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, Moses, the Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Apostles, the disciples, the gospels, the Old and New Testaments, the gospel miracles, and the resurrection.[46] Not a single phrase is quoted; we have mere general description, execration, and sentence.
Whether the document was a planned forgery, or part of a copy by Gruet of an anti-Christian treatise theretofore secretly circulated, will never be known. The story of Gruet soon swelled into a legend. According to one narrative, he had copied with his own hand and circulated in Geneva the mysterious treatise, De Tribus Impostoribus, the existence of which, at that period, is very doubtful.[47] On the strength of this and other cases[48] the Libertines have been sometimes supposed to be generally unbelievers; but there is no more evidence for this than for the general ascription to them of licentious conduct. It appears certain indeed that at that time the name Libertine was not recognized as a label for all of Calvin’s political opponents, but was properly reserved for the sect so-called;[49] but even a vindicator of Calvin admits that “it is undeniable that the Libertines [i.e. the political opponents of Calvin, so-called by modern writers] of 1555 were the true political representatives of the patriots of 1530.”[50] The presumption is that the political opposition included the more honest and courageous men of liberal and tolerant tendencies, as Calvin’s own following included men of “free” life.[51] The really antinomian Libertini of the period were to be found among the pantheistic-Christian sect or school so-called, otherwise known as Spirituals, who seem to have been a branch of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, or fraternity of the “Spirit of Liberty.” These Calvin denounced in his manner; but in 1544 he had also forced into exile his former friend, Sebastian Castalio (or Castalion; properly Chatillon), master of the public school at Geneva, for simply rejecting his doctrine of absolute predestination, striving to have him driven in turn from Basel; and in 1551 he had caused to be imprisoned and banished a physician and ex-Carmelite, Jerome Bolsec, for publicly denying the same dogma. Bolsec, being prevented by Calvin’s means from settling in any neighbouring Protestant community, returned to Catholicism,[52] as did many others. After Calvin’s death Bolsec took his revenge in an attack on the reformer in his public and private character,[53] which has been treated as untrustworthy by the more moderate Catholic scholars who deal with the period;[54] and which, as regards its account of his private morals, is probably on all fours with Calvin’s own unscrupulous charges against the “Libertines” and others who opposed him.
The tenets of the Libertini are somewhat mystifying, as handled by Calvin and his biographer Henry, both alike animated by the odium theologicum in the highest degree. By Calvin’s own account they were mystical Christians, speaking of Christ as “the spirit which is in the world and in us all,” and of the devil and his angels as having no proper existence, being identical with the world and sin. Further, they denied the eternity of the human soul and the freedom of the will; and Calvin charges them with subverting alike belief in God and morality (Henry, Life of Calvin, Eng. tr. ii, 45–46). The last charge could just as validly be brought against his own predestinarianism; and as regards ethics we find Calvin alternately denouncing the Libertines for treating all sin as unpardonable, and for stating that in Christ none could sin. Apparently he gives his inferences as their doctrines; and the antinomianism which, in the case of the trial of Madame Ameaux, Henry identifies with pantheism, was by his own showing of a Christian cast. Little credit, accordingly, can be given to his summing up that among the Libertines of Geneva there exhibited itself “a perfectly-formed anti-Christianity,” which he calls “a true offspring of hell” (ii, 49). The residuum of truth appears to be that in the pantheism of this sect, as Neander says concerning the Brethren of the Free Spirit among the Beghards, there were “the foretokens of a thoroughly anti-Christian tendency, hostile to everything supernatural, every sentiment of a God above the world; a tendency which contained ... the germ of absolute rationalism” (Hist. of the Chr. Church, Torrey’s tr. ix, 536). Pantheism, logically extended, obviously reduces the supernatural and the natural to unity, and is thus atheistic. But that the pantheists of Geneva in Calvin’s day reached logical consistency is incredible. The Libertine sect, in all likelihood, was only partially antinomian, and only in very small part consciously anti-Christian.
At this period (1552), on the same issue of predestination, Calvin broke utterly with one of his closest friends, Jacques de Bourgogne, Sieur de Falais.[55] It seemed as if the Protestant polity were disrupting in a continuous convulsion of dogmatic strife; and Melanchthon wrote to Bucer in despair over the madness and misery of a time in which Geneva was returning to the fatalism of the Stoics, and imprisoning whosoever would not agree with Zeno.[56] By this time it must have been clear to some that behind the strifes of raging theologians there lay a philosophic problem which they could not sound. It is therefore not surprising to learn that already Basel University, as fifty years before at Erfurt, there was a latitudinarian group of professors who aimed at a universal religion, and came near “naturalism” in the attempt;[57] while elsewhere in Switzerland, as we shall see later, there grew up the still freer way of thought which came to be known as Deism.
A great impulse to that development, as well as to simple Unitarianism, must have been given by the execution of Michael Servetus.[58] That ill-starred heretic, born of Spanish stock in France, brought to the propaganda of Unitarianism, of which he may be reckoned the inaugurator, a determination as strong as Calvin’s own. Sent by his father to study civil law at Toulouse, he began there to study the Bible, doubtless under the stimulus of the early Protestant discussions of the time. The result was a prompt advance beyond the Protestant standpoint. Leaving Toulouse after two or three years’ residence, he visited Bologna and Augsburg in the train of the confessor of Charles V. Thereafter he visited Lyons and Geneva, and had some intercourse with Oecolampadius at Basel, where he put in the hands of a bookseller the signed manuscript of his first book, De Trinitatis erroribus libri septem. The bookseller sent it on to Hagenau, in Alsace, which as an “imperial city” seems to have had special freedom in the matter of book-publishing; and thither, after visiting Bucer and Capito at Strasburg, Servetus went to have it printed in 1531.[59] In this treatise, produced in his twenty-first year, he definitely rejects Trinitarianism, while putting somewhat obscurely his own idea of the nature of Jesus Christ—whom, it should be noted, he held in high reverence. In the following year he produced at the same place another small treatise, Dialogorum de Trinitate libri duo, wherein he recasts his first work, “retracting” it and apologizing for its crudity, but standing substantially to its positions. It was not till 1553 that he printed at Vienne in Dauphiné, without his name, his Christianismi Restitutio.[60] In the interval he had been doing scientific work as an editor of Ptolemy (1535, Lyons), and as a student of and lecturer on anatomy and medicine at Paris, where (1536) he met Calvin on his last visit to France. In 1538 he is found studying at Louvain; and, after practising medicine at Avignon and Charlieu, he again studies medicine at Montpellier. The Archbishop of Vienne, who had heard him lecture at Paris, established him at Vienne as his confidential physician (1541–53), and there it was that he produced the book for which he died. About 1545–46 he had rashly written to Calvin, sending him the MS. of the much-expanded recast of his books which later appeared as the Restitutio. Calvin sent a hostile reply, and on the same day wrote to Farel: “If he come, and my influence can avail, I shall not suffer him to depart alive.” Servetus had denounced the papacy as fiercely as any Protestant could wish, yet his heresy on the question of the Trinity[61] was enough to doom him to instant death at Calvin’s hands. Servetus could not get back his MS., and wrote to a friend about 1547 that he felt sure the affair would bring him to his death.[62] When in 1552–53 he had the book privately printed at Vienne, and the bulk of the edition was sent to Lyons and Frankfort, the toils closed around him, the ecclesiastical authorities at Lyons being apprised of the facts by de Trie, a Genevan Protestant, formerly of Lyons. The whole Protestant world, in fact, was of one opinion in desiring to suppress Servetus’s anti-Trinitarian books, and the wonder is that he had so long escaped both Protestant and Catholic fury. Luther had called his first book horribly wicked; and Melanchthon, who in 1533 foresaw from the second much dangerous debate, wrote in 1539 to the Venetian Senate to warn them against letting either be sold.[63] It is significant of the random character of Protestant as of Catholic thought that Servetus, like Melanchthon, was a convinced believer in astrology,[64] while Luther on Biblical grounds rejected astrology and the Copernican astronomy alike, and held devoutly by the belief in witchcraft. The superiority of Servetus consists in his real scientific work—he having in part given out the true doctrine of the circulation of the blood[65]—and his objection to all persecution of heresy.[66] Philosophically, he was more than a mere Scripturist. Though pantheism was not charged upon him, we have Calvin’s testimony that he propounded it in the strongest form.[67]
Calvin’s guilt in the matter begins with his devices to have Servetus seized by the Catholic authorities of Lyons[68]—to set misbelievers, as he regarded them, to slay the misbeliever—and his use of Servetus’s confidential letters against him.[69] He was not repelling a heresy from his own city, but heretic-hunting far away in sheer malignity. The Catholics were the less cruel gaolers, and let their prisoner escape, condemning him to death at Vienne in absence. After some months of wandering he had the temerity to seek to pass into Italy by way of Geneva, and was there at length recognized, and arrested. After a long trial he was sentenced to be burned alive (Oct. 27, 1553). The trial at Geneva is a classic document in the records of the cruelties committed in honour of chimeras; and Calvin’s part is the sufficient proof that the Protestant could hold his own with the Catholic Inquisitor in the spirit of hate.[70] It has been urged, in his excuse, that the doctrines of Servetus were blasphemously put; but in point of fact Calvin passed some of his bitterest denunciation on the statement, cited (from Lorenz Friese) in a note in Servetus’s edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, that Judea is actually a barren and meagre country, and not “flowing with milk and honey.” Despite the citation of ample proof, and the plea that the passage was drawn from a previous edition, it was by Calvin adjudged blasphemous in that it “necessarily inculpated Moses and grievously outraged the Holy Spirit.”[71] The language of Calvin against Servetus at this point is utterly furious. Had Servetus chanced to maintain the doctrine of the earth’s motion, he would certainly have been adjudged a blasphemer on that score also; for in the Argument to his Commentary on Genesis (1563) Calvin doggedly maintains the Ptolemaic theory. His language tells of much private freethinking around him on the Mosaic doctrine, and his tone leaves no doubt as to how he would treat published heresy on that theme. The audacity of Servetus in suggesting that the 53rd chapter of Isaiah had historical reference to Cyrus is for him anathema.[72]
Even before this hideous episode, Calvin’s passion of malevolence against his theological opponents in his own sect is such as to shock some of his adoring biographers.[73] All the Protestant leaders, broadly speaking, grew more intolerant as they grew in years—a fair test as between the spirit of dogma and the spirit of freethought. Calvin had begun by pleading for tolerance and clemency; Luther, beginning as a humanitarian, soon came to be capable of hounding on the German nobility against the unhappy peasants; Melanchthon, tolerant in his earlier days, applauded the burning of Servetus;[74] Beza laboriously defended the act. Erasmus stood for tolerance; and Luther accordingly called him godless, an enemy of true religion, a slanderer of Christ, a Lucian, an Epicurean, and (by implication) the greatest knave alive.[75]
The burning of Servetus in 1553, however, marked a turning point in Protestant theological practice on the Continent. There were still to come the desperate religious wars in France, in which more than 300,000 houses were destroyed, abominable savageries were committed, and all civilization was thrown back, both materially and morally; and there was yet to come the still more appalling calamity of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany—a result of the unstable political conditions set up at the Reformation; but theological human sacrifices were rapidly discredited. Servetus was not the first victim, but he was nearly the last.
The jurist Matthieu Gripaldi (or Gribaldo) lectured on law at Toulouse, Cahors, Valence, and Padua successively, and, finding his anti-Trinitarian leanings everywhere a source of danger to him, had sought a retreat at Fargias near Geneva, then in the jurisdiction of Berne. Venturing to remonstrate with Calvin against the sentence on Servetus, he brought upon himself the angry scrutiny of the heretic-hunter, and was banished from the neighbourhood. For a time he found refuge in a new professorship at Tübingen; but there too the alarm was raised, and he was expelled. Coming back to Fargias, he gave refuge to the heretic Valentinus Gentilis on his escape from Geneva; and again Calvin attacked him, delivering him to the authorities of Berne. An abjuration saved him for the time; but he would probably have met the martyr’s fate in time had not his death by the plague, in 1564, guaranteed him, as Bayle remarks, against any further trial for heresy.[76]
The effect of theological bias on moral judgment is interestingly exemplified in the comment of Mosheim on the case of Servetus. Unable to refer to the beliefs of deists or atheists without vituperation, Mosheim finds it necessary to add to his account of Servetus as a highly-gifted and very learned man the qualification: “Yet he laboured under no small moral defects, for he was beyond all measure arrogant, and at the same time ill-tempered, contentious, unyielding, and a semi-fanatic.” Every one of these characterizations is applicable in the highest degree to Calvin, and in a large degree to Luther; yet for them the historian has not a word of blame.
Even among rationalists it has not been uncommon to make light of Calvin’s crimes on the score that his energy maintained a polity which alone sustained Protestantism against the Catholic Reaction. This is the verdict of Michelet: “The Renaissance, betrayed by the accident of the mobilities of France, turning to the wind of light volitions, would assuredly have perished, and the world would have fallen into the great net of the fishers of men, but for that supreme concentration of the Reformation on the rock of Geneva by the bitter genius of Calvin.” And again: “Against the immense and darksome net into which Europe fell by the abandonment of France nothing less than this heroic seminary could avail” (Hist. de France, vol. x, La Réforme: end of pref. and end of vol.). Though this verdict has been accepted by such critical thinkers as Pattison (Essays, ii, 30–32) and Lord Morley (Romanes Lecture on Machiavelli, 1877, p. 47), it is difficult to find for it any justification in history.
The nature of the proposition is indeed far from clear. Michelet appears to mean that Geneva saved Europe as constituting a political rallying-point, a nucleus for Protestantism. Pattison, pronouncing that “Calvinism saved Europe” (Essays, ii, 32), explains that it was by “a positive education of the individual soul”; and that “this, and this alone, enabled the Reformation to make head against the terrible repressive forces brought to bear by Spain—the Inquisition and the Jesuits” (p. 32). The thesis thus vanishes in rhetoric, for it is quite impossible to give such a formula any significance in the light of the history of Protestantism in Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, and Holland. It implies that where Protestantism finally failed—as in Italy, France, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Belgium, parts of Germany, and parts of Switzerland—it was because the individual spirit had not been educated enough, which is a mere omission to note the real economic and political causation. Neither Michelet nor Pattison had any scientific notion of the nature of the process.
If we revert to Michelet’s claim, we get no more satisfaction. The very fact that Calvin’s polity could subsist without any special military protection is the proof that it could have subsisted without the gross cruelty and systematic persecution which marked it out from the rest of the world, making Geneva “a kind of frozen hell of austerity and retribution and secret sin.” To say otherwise is to say that freedom and toleration are less attractive to men than ferocity, tyranny, and gloom. Calvin drove many men back to Catholicism, and had his full share in the mortal schism which set Calvinists and Lutherans at daggers drawn for a century, while Catholicism re-conquered Poland and Bohemia and Hungary, held France, and nearly re-conquered Lutheran Germany. There is no reason to suppose that the Reformation would have gone otherwise in Britain, Scandinavia, and Holland had Geneva gone as far in tolerance as it actually did in intolerance. To call it, as Michelet does, an “asylum,” in view of Calvin’s expulsion or execution of every man who dared to differ from him, is courageous.
At the close of his argument (p. 41) Pattison sums up that, “Greatly as the Calvinistic Churches have served the cause of political liberty, they have contributed nothing to the cause of knowledge.” The admission is in the main valid; but the claim will not stand, unless “political liberty” is to be newly defined. The Calvinistic rule at Geneva was from the first a class tyranny, which became more and more narrow in its social basis. The Calvinist clergy and populace of Holland turned their backs on republican institutions, and became violent monarchists. The Calvinists of England and Scotland were as determined persecutors as ever lived. And, indeed, how should liberty anywhere flourish when knowledge is trodden under foot?
The treatment of Bernardino Ochino, who had turned Protestant after being vicar-general of the Capuchin order, shows the slackening of ferocity after the end of Servetus. Ochino in a late writing ventured guardedly to suggest certain relaxations of the law of monogamy—a point on which some Lutherans went much further than he—and was besides mildly heretical about the Trinity.[77] He was in consequence expelled with his family from the canton of Zürich (1563), at the age of seventy-six. Finding Switzerland wholly inhospitable, and being driven by the Catholics from Poland, where he had sought to join the Socinians, he went to die in Moravia.[78] This was no worse treatment than Lutherans and Calvinists normally meted out to each other;[79] and several of the Italian Protestants settled at Geneva who leant to Unitarian views—among them Gribaldo, Biandrata, and Alciati—found it prudent to leave that fortress of orthodoxy, where they were open to official challenge.[80] Finally, when the Italian Valentinus Gentilis, or Gentile, the anti-Trinitarian, variously described as Tritheist, Deist, and Arian, uttered his heresies at Geneva, he contrived, after an imprisonment, a forced recantation, and a public degradation (1558), to escape thence with his life, but was duly beheaded at Berne in 1566, refusing this time to recant.[81]
This ends the main Swiss era of theological murder; but a century was to pass before sectarian hatreds subsided, or the spirit of persecution was brought under control of civilization. In 1632, indeed, a Protestant minister, Nicholas Anthoine, was burned at Geneva on the charge of apostasy to Judaism. As he had been admittedly insane for a time, and had repeatedly shown much mental excitement,[82] his execution tells of a spirit of cruelty worthy of the generation of Calvin. The Protestant Bibliolatry, in short, was as truly the practical negation of freethought and tolerance as was Catholicism itself; and it was only their general remoteness from each other that kept the different reformed communities from absolute war where they were not, as in Switzerland, held in check by the dangers around them.[83] As it was, they had their full share in the responsibility for the furious civil wars which so long convulsed France, and for those which ultimately reduced Germany to the verge of destruction, arresting her civilization for over a hundred years.
To sum up. In Germany Protestantism failed alike as a moral and as an intellectual reform. The lack of any general moral motive in the ecclesiastical revolution is sufficiently proved by the general dissolution of conduct which, on the express admission of Luther, followed upon it.[84] This was quite apart from the special disorders of the Anabaptist movement, which, on the other hand, contained elements of moral and religious rationalism, as against Bibliolatry, that have been little recognized.[85] Of that movement the summing-up is that, like the Lutheran, it turned to evil because of sheer lack of rationalism. Among its earlier leaders were men such as Denk, morally and temperamentally on a higher plane than any of the Lutherans. But Anabaptism too was fundamentally scriptural and revelationist, not rational; and it miscarried in its own way even more hopelessly than the theological “reform.” Lutheranism, renouncing the rational and ethical hope of social betterment, ran to insane dissension over irrational dogma; Anabaptism, ignorantly attaching the hope of social betterment to religious delusion, ran to irrational social schemes, ending in anarchy, massacre, and extinction. But the Lutheran failure was intellectually and morally no less complete. Luther was with good reason ill at ease about his cause when he died in 1546; and Melanchthon, dying in 1560, declared himself glad to be set free from the rabies theologorum.[86]
The test of the new regimen lay, if anywhere, in the University of Wittemberg; and there matters were no better than anywhere else.[87] German university life in general went from bad to worse till a new culture began slowly to germinate after the Thirty Years’ War;[88] and the germs came mainly from the neighbouring nations. German Switzerland exhibited similar symptoms, the Reformation being followed by no free intellectual life, but by a tyranny identical in spirit and method with that of Rome.[89] It rests, finally, on the express testimony of leading Reformers that the main effect of the Reformation in the intellectual life of Germany was to discredit all disinterested learning and literature. Melanchthon in particular, writing at dates as far apart as 1522 and 1557, repeatedly and emphatically testifies to the utter disregard of erudition and science in the interests of pietism, corroborating everything said to the same effect by Erasmus.[90]
On the social and political side the rule of the Protestant princes was not only as tyrannous but as indecorous as that of their Catholic days, each playing pope in his own dominions;[91] and their clergy were not in a position to correct them. Menzel notes that the normal drunkenness of the Protestant aristocracy at this period made current in Europe the expression “a German swine.” And whereas Germany before the Reformation was at various points a culture force for Europe—whence the readiness in other nations at first to follow the Lutheran lead—it progressively became more and more of an object-lesson of the evils of heresy, thus fatally weakening the cause of Protestantism in France, where its fortunes hung in the balance.
Even in the matter of theology, Protestantism did not hold its own against Catholic criticism. Both began by discriminating in the scriptural canon, rejecting some books and depreciating others, all the while professing to make the Word of God their sole or final standard. When the Catholics pressed the demand as to how they could settle what was the true Word of God, their followers and successors could make no answer, and had to fall back on an indiscriminate acceptance of the Canon. Again, Luther and Calvin alike maintained the doctrine of “Assurance,” and this was one of the points in Calvinism accepted by Arminius. The Catholics, naturally making the most of the admitted increase of sexual and other licence in Germany and elsewhere under Lutheranism, dwelt upon Luther’s predestinarianism in general, and the doctrine of Assurance in particular, as the source of the demoralization; and at the Council of Trent it was expressly condemned. Thereafter, though it was “part and parcel of the Confessions of all the Churches of the Reformation down to the Westminster Assembly,” it was in the last-named conclave (1643) declared not to be of the essence of faith; and the Scottish General Assembly subsequently deposed and condemned holders of this, the original Protestant doctrine. Similar modifications took place elsewhere. Thus the Protestant world drifted back to a Catholic position, affirmed at the Council of Trent against Protestantism;[92] and in Holland we shall see, in the rise of Arminianism, a similar surrender on the Protestant side to the general pressure of Catholicism upon the ethical weaknesses of Predestinarianism. On that point, however, the original Catholic doctrine of predestination was revived by the Spanish Jesuit Luis Molina (1535–1600; not to be confused with the later Quietist, Miguel de Molinos), who in his treatise Liberi Arbitrii concordia cum gratiæ donis (1588) set it forth as consequent upon God’s foreknowledge of man’s free use of his will. As a result of the dispute between the Thomists and Molina’s followers, known as the Molinists, the Pope in 1607 pronounced that the views of both sides were permissible—a course which had already been taken twenty years before with the controversy on predestination aroused by the doctrines of Michael Baius at the University of Louvain.[93] Thus the dissensions of Catholics in a manner kept in countenance the divided Protestants; but the old confidence of affirmation and formulation was inevitably sapped by the constant play of controversy; and from this Protestantism necessarily suffered most.
Intellectually, there was visible retrogression in the Protestant world. It is significant that throughout the sixteenth century most of the great scientific thinkers and the freethinkers with the strongest bent to new science lived in the Catholic world. Rabelais and Bruno were priests; Copernicus a lay canon; Galileo had never withdrawn from the Church which humiliated him; even Kepler returned to the Catholic environment after professing Protestantism. He was in fact excommunicated by the Tübingen Protestant authorities in 1612[94] for condemning the Lutheran doctrine that the body of Christ could be in several places at once. The immunity of such original spirits as Gilbert and Harriott from active molestation is to be explained only by the fact that they lived in the as yet un-Puritanized atmosphere of Elizabethan England, before the age of Bibliolatry. It would seem as if the spirit of Scripturalism, invading the very centres of thought, were more fatal to original intellectual life than the more external interferences of Catholic sacerdotalism.[95] In the phrase of Arnold, Protestantism turned the key on the spirit, where Catholicism was normally content with an outward submission to its ceremonies, and only in the most backward countries, as Spain, destroyed entirely the atmosphere of free mental intercourse. It was after a long reaction that Bruno and Galileo were arraigned at Rome.
The clerical resistance to new science, broadly speaking, was more bitter in the Protestant world than in the Catholic; and it was merely the relative lack of restraining power in the former that made possible the later scientific progress. The history of Lutheranism upon this side is an intellectual infamy. At Wittemberg, during Luther’s life, Reinhold did not dare to teach the Copernican astronomy; Rheticus had to leave the place in order to be free to speak; and in 1571 the subject was put in the hands of Peucer, who taught that the Copernican theory was absurd. Finally, the rector of the university, Hensel, wrote a text-book for schools, entitled The Restored Mosaic System of the World, showing with entire success that the new doctrine was unscriptural.[96] A little later the Lutheran superintendent, Pfeiffer, of Lübeck, published his Pansophia Mosaica, insisting on the literal truth of the entire Genesaic myth.[97] In the next century Calovius (1612–1686), who taught successively at Königsberg, Dantzic, and Wittemberg, maintained the same position, contending that the story of Joshua’s staying the sun and moon refuted Copernicus.[98] When Pope Gregory XIII, following an impulse abnormal in his world, took the bold step of rectifying the Calendar (1584), the Protestants in Germany and Switzerland vehemently resisted the reform, and in some cities would not tolerate it,[99] thus refusing, on theological grounds, the one species of co-operation with Catholicism that lay open to them. And the anti-scientific attitude persisted for over a century in Switzerland as in Scotland. At Geneva, J.-A. Turretin (1671–1737), writing after Kepler and Newton had done their work, laboriously repeated the demonstration of Calovius, and reaffirmed the positions of Calvin. So far as its ministers could avail, the Sacred Book was working the old effect.
§ 2. England
Freethought gained permanently as little in England as elsewhere in the process of substituting local tyranny for that of Rome. The secularizing effect of the Reformation, indeed, was even more marked there than elsewhere. What Wolsey had aimed at doing with moderation and without revolution was done after him with violence on motives of sheer plunder, and a multitude not only of monasteries but of churches were disendowed and destroyed. The monastic churches were often magnificent, and “when the monasteries were dissolved, divine service altogether ceased in ninety out of every hundred of these great churches, and the remaining ten were left ... without any provision whatever” for public worship.[100] All this must have had a secularizing effect, which was accentuated by the changes in ritual; and by the middle of the century it was common to treat both churches and clergy with utter irreverence, which indeed the latter often earned by their mode of life.[101] Riots in churches, especially in London, were common; there was in fact a habit of driving mules and horses through them;[102] and buying and selling and even gaming were often carried on. But with all this there was no intellectual enlightenment, and in high places there was no toleration. Under Henry VIII anti-Romanist heretics were put to death on the old Romanist principles. In 1532, again, was burned James Bainham, who not only rejected the specially Catholic dogmas, but affirmed the possible salvation of unbelievers.
Under the Protectorate which followed there was indeed much religious semi-rationalism, evidently of continental derivation, which is discussed in the theological literature of the time. Roger Hutchinson, writing about 1550, repeatedly speaks of contemporary “Sadducees and Libertines” who say (1) “that all spirits and angels are no substances, but inspirations, affections, and qualities”; (2) “that the devil is nothing but nolitum, or a filthy affection coming of the flesh”; (3) “that there is neither place of rest nor pain after this life; that hell is nothing else but a tormenting and desperate conscience; and that a joyful, quiet, and merry conscience is heaven.”
See The Image of God, or Layman’s Book, 1550, ch. xxiv: Parker Society’s rep. 1842, pp. 134, 138, 140. Cp. p. 79 and Sermon II, on The Lord’s Supper (id. p. 247), as to “Julianites” who “do think mortal corpo, mortal anima.” To the period 1550–60 is also assigned the undated work of John Veron, A Frutefull Treatise of Predestination and of the Divine Providence of God, with an Apology of the same against the swynishe gruntinge of the Epicures and Atheystes of oure time. There was evidently a good deal of new rationalism, which has been generally ignored in English historiography. Its foreign source is suggested by the use of the term “Libertines,” which derives from France and Geneva. See below, p. 473. The above-cited tenets are, in fact, partly identical with those of the libertins denounced at Geneva by Calvin.
Such doctrine, which we shall find in vogue fifty years later, cannot have been printed, and probably can have been uttered only by men of good status, as well as culture; and even by them only because of the weakness of the State Church in its transition stage. Yet heresy went still further among some of the sects set up by the Anabaptist movement, which in England as in Germany involved some measure of Unitarianism. A letter of Hooper to Bullinger in 1549 tells of “libertines and wretches who are daring enough in their conventicles not only to deny that Christ is the Messiah and Saviour of the world, but also to call that blessed Seed a mischievous fellow and deceiver of the world.”[103] This must have been said with locked doors, for much milder heresy was heavily punished, the worst penalties falling upon that which stood equally with orthodoxy on Biblical grounds.
In 1541, under Henry VIII, were burned three persons “because they denied transubstantiation, and had not received the sacrament at Easter.” See the letter of Hilles to Bullinger, Original Letters, as cited, i, 200. The case of Jean Bouchier or Bocher, burned in 1550, is well known. It is worth noting that the common charge against Cranmer, of persuading the young king to sign her death warrant, is false, being one of the myths of Foxe. The warrant was passed by the whole Privy Council, Cranmer not being even present. See the Parker Society’s reprint of Roger Hutchinson, 1812, introd. pp. ii-5. Hutchinson apparently approved; and it is significant of the clerical attitude of the time that he calls (Image of God, ch. xxx, p. 201) for the punishment of Anabaptists by death if necessary, but does not suggest it for “Sadducees and Libertines.”
The Elizabethan archbishops and the Puritans were equally intolerant; and the idea of free inquiry was undreamt of. That there had been much private discussion in clerical circles, however, is plain from the 13th and 18th of the Thirty-nine Articles (1562), which repudiate natural morality and hold “accursed” those who say that men can be saved under any creed.[104] This fulmination would not have occurred had the heresy not been pressing; but the “curse” would thenceforth set the key of clerical and public utterance. The Reformation, in fact, speedily over-clouded with fanaticism what new light of freethought had been glimmering before; turning into Bibliolaters those who had rationally doubted some of the Catholic mysteries, and forcing back, either into silence or, by reaction, into Catholic bigotry, those more refined spirits who, like Sir Thomas More, had before been really in advance of their age intellectually and morally, and desired a transmutation of the old system rather than its overthrow. Nothing so nearly rational as the Utopia (1515–16) appeared again in English literature for a century; it is indeed, in some respects, a lead to social science in our own day. More, with all his spontaneous turn for pietism, had evidently drunk in his youth or prime[105] at some freethinking source, for his book recognizes the existence of unbelievers in deity and immortality; and though he pronounces them unfit for political power, as did Milton, Locke, and Voltaire long after him, he stipulates that they be tolerated.[106] Broadly speaking, the book is simply deistic. “From a world,” says a popular historian, clerically trained—“from a world where fifteen hundred years of Christian teaching had produced social injustice, religious intolerance, and political tyranny, the humorist philosopher turns to a ‘Nowhere’ in which the efforts of mere natural human virtue realized those ends of security, equality, brotherhood, and freedom, for which the very institution of society seems to have been framed.”[107] In his own case, however, we see the Nemesis of the sway of feeling over judgment, for, beginning by keeping his prejudice above the reason of whose teaching he is conscious, he ends by becoming a blind religious polemist and a bitter persecutor.
Cp. Isaac Disraeli’s essay, “The Psychological Character of Sir Thomas More,” in the Amenities of Literature, and the present writer’s essay, “Culture and Reaction,” in Essays in Sociology, vol. i. Lord Acton, vindicating More as against Wolsey, pleads (Histor. Essays and Studies, 1907, p. 64) that More before his death protested that no Protestant perished by his act. This seems to be true in the bare sense that he did not exceed his ostensible legal duties, and several times restrained the execution of the law (Archdeacon Hutton, Sir Thomas More, 1895, pp. 215–22). But the fact remains that More expressly justified and advocated the burning of heretics as “lawful, necessary, and well done.” Title of ch. xiii of Dialogue, The Supper of the Lord. Cp. title of ch. xv.
It is in the wake, then, of the overthrow of Catholicism in the second generation that a far-reaching freethought begins to be heard of in England; and this clearly comes by way of new continental and literary contact, which would have occurred in at least as great a degree under Catholicism, save insofar as unbelief was facilitated by the irreverence developed by the ecclesiastical revolution, or by the state of indifference which among the upper classes was the natural sequel of the shameless policy of plunder and the oscillation between Protestant and Catholic forms. And it was finally in such negative ways only that Protestantism furthered freethought anywhere.
§ 3. The Netherlands
Hardly more fortunate was the earlier course of things intellectual after the Reformation in the Netherlands, where by the fifteenth century remarkable progress had been made alike in science and the arts, and where Erasmus acquired his culture and did his service to culture’s cause. The fact that Protestantism had to fight for its life against Philip was of course not the fault of the Protestants; and to that ruinous struggle is to be attributed the arrest of the civilization of Flanders. But it lay in the nature of the Protestant impulse that, apart from the classical culture which in Holland was virtually a successful industry, providing editions for all Europe, it should turn all intellectual life for generations into vain controversy. The struggle between reform and popery was followed by the struggle between Calvinism and Arminianism; and the second was no less bitter if less bloody than the first,[108] the religious strife passing into civil feud.
The secret of the special bitterness of Calvinist resentment towards the school of Arminius lay in the fact that the latter endorsed some of the most galling of the Catholic criticisms of Calvinism. Arminius [Latinized name of Jacob Harmensen or van Harmin, 1560–1609, professor of theology at Leyden] was personally a man of great amiability, averse to controversy, but unable to reconcile the Calvinist view of predestination with his own quasi-rational ethic, and concerned to secure that the dogma should not be fastened upon all Dutch Protestants. In his opinion, no effective answer could be made on Calvinist lines to the argument of Cardinal Bellarmin[109] that from much Calvinist doctrine there flowed the consequences: “God is the author of sin; God really sins; God is the only sinner; sin is no sin at all.”[110] This was substantially true; and Arminius, like Bellarmin, unable to see that the Calvinist position was simply a logical reduction to moral absurdity of all theistic ethic, sought safety in fresh dogmatic modifications. Of these the Calvinists, in turn, could easily demonstrate the logical incoherence; and in a ring of dilemmas from which there was no logical exit save into Naturalism there arose an exacerbated strife, as of men jostling each other in a prison where some saw their nominal friends in partial sympathy with their deadly enemies, who jeered at their divisions.
The wonder is that the chaos of dispute and dogmatic tinkering which followed did not more rapidly disintegrate faith. Calvinists sought modifications under stress of dialectic, like their predecessors; and the high “Supralapsarian” doctrine—the theory of the certain regeneration or “perseverance” of “the saints”—shaded into “the Creabilitarian opinion”[111] and yet another; while the “Sublapsarian” view claimed also to safeguard predestination. So long as men remained in the primary Protestant temper, convinced that they possessed in their Bibles an infallible revelation, such strife could but generate new passion, even as it had done on the other irrational problem of the eucharist. For men of sane and peaceful disposition, the only modes of peace were resignation and doubt; and in the case of the doubters the first intellectual movements would be either back towards Rome[112] or further on towards deism. The former course would be taken by some who had winced under the jeers of the Catholics; the latter by the hardier spirits who judged Catholicism for themselves. As most of the fighting had been primed by and transacted over texts, the surrender of the belief in an inspired scripture greatly reduced the friction; and in Holland as elsewhere deism would be thus spontaneously generated in the Protestant atmosphere. A few went even further. “I have no doubt that many persons have secretly revolted from the Reformed Church to the Papists,” wrote Uitenbogaert to Vorstius in 1613. “I firmly believe,” he added, “that Atheism is creeping by degrees into the minds of some.”[113]
Where mere Arminianism could bring Barneveldt to the block, even deism could not be avowed; and generations had to pass before it could have the semblance of a party; but the proof of the new vogue of unbelief lies in the labour spent by Grotius (Hugo or Huig van Groot, 1583–1645) on his treatise De Veritate Religionis Christianæ (1627)—a learned and strenuous defence of the faith which had so lacerated his fatherland, first through the long struggle with Spain, and again in the feud of Arminians and Calvinists. When Barneveldt was put to death, Grotius had been sentenced to imprisonment for life; and it was only after three years of the dungeon that, by the famous stratagem of his wife, he escaped in 1621. The fact that he devoted his freedom in France first to his great treatise On the Law of War and Peace (1625), seeking to humanize the civil life of the world, and next to his defence of the Christian religion, is the proof of his magnanimity; but the spectacle of his life must have done as much to set thinkers against the whole creed as his apologetic did to reconcile them to it. He, the most distinguished Dutch scholar and the chief apologist of Christianity in his day, had to seek refuge, on his escape from prison, in Catholic France, whose king granted him a pension. The circumstance which in Holland chiefly favoured freethought, the freedom of the press, was, like the great florescence of the arts in the seventeenth century, a result of the whole social and political conditions, not of any Protestant belief in free discussion. That there were freethinkers in Holland in and before Grotius’s time is implied in the pains he took to defend Christianity; but that they existed in despite and not by grace of the ruling Protestantism is proved by the fact that they did not venture to publish their opinions. In France, doubtless, he found as much unbelief as he had left behind. In the end, Grotius and Casaubon alike recoiled from the narrow Protestantism around them, which had so sadly failed to realize their hopes.[114] “In 1642 Grotius had become wholly averse to the Reformation. He thought it had done more harm than good”; and had he lived a few years longer he would probably have become a Catholic.[115]
§ 4. Conclusion
Thus concerning the Reformation generally “we are obliged to confess that, especially in Germany, it soon parted company with free learning; that it turned its back upon culture; that it lost itself in a maze of arid theological controversy; that it held out no hand of welcome to awakening science. Presently we shall see that the impulse to an enlightened study and criticism of the Scriptures came chiefly from heretical quarters; that the unbelieving Spinoza and the Arminian Le Clerc pointed the way to investigations which the great Protestant systematizers thought neither necessary nor useful. Even at a later time it has been the divines who have most loudly declared their allegiance to the theology of the Reformation who have also looked most askance at science, and claimed for their statements an entire independence of modern knowledge.”[116] In fine, “to look at the Reformation by itself, to judge it only by its theological and ecclesiastical development, is to pronounce it a failure”; and the claim that “to consider it as part of a general movement of European thought ... is at once to vindicate its past and to promise it the future”—this amounts merely to avowing the same thing. Only as an eddy in the movement of freethought is the Reformation intellectually significant. Politically it is a great illustration of the potency of economic forces.
While, however, the Reformation in itself thus did little for the spirit of freethought, substituting as it did the arbitrary standard of “revelation” for the not more arbitrary standard of papal authority, it set up outside its own sphere some new movements of rational doubt which must have counted for much in the succeeding period. It was not merely that, as we shall see, the bloody strifes of the two Churches, and the quarrels of the Protestant sects among themselves, sickened many thoughtful men of the whole subject of theology; but that the disputes between Romanists and anti-Romanists raised difficult questions as to the bases of all kinds of belief. As always happens when established beliefs are long attacked, the subtler spirits in the conservative interest after a time begin putting in doubt beliefs of every species; a method often successful with those who cannot carry an argument to its logical conclusions, and who are thus led to seek harbour in whatever credence is on the whole most convenient; but one which puts stronger spirits on the reconsideration of all their opinions. Thus we shall find, not only in the skepticism of Montaigne, which is historically a product of the wars of religion in France, but in the more systematic and more cautious argumentation of the abler Protestants of the seventeenth century, a measure of general rationalism much more favourable alike to natural science and to Biblical and ethical criticism than had been the older environment of authority and tradition, brutal sacerdotalism, and idolatrous faith. Men continued to hate each other religiously for trifles, to quarrel over gestures and vestures, and to wrangle endlessly over worn-out dogmas; but withal new and vital heresies were set on foot; new science generated new doubt; and under the shadow of the aging tree of theology there began to appear the growths of a new era. As Protestantism had come outside the “universal” Church, rearing its own tabernacles, so freethought came outside both, scanning with a deepened intentness the universe of things. And thus began a more vital innovation than that dividing the Reformation from the Renaissance, or even that dividing the Renaissance from the Middle Ages.
[1] Ranke, History of the Popes, Bohn tr. 1908, p. 60; Hardwick, Church History: Reformation, ed. 1886, p. 250. [↑]
[2] Much of this has never been published. Most of it is in a MS. Codex of the City Library at Frankfurt. Extracts in Tentzel’s Supplementum Historiæ Gothanæ, 1701, in the Narratio de Eobano Hesso of J. Camerarius, 1553, etc. See Strauss’s Ulrich von Hutten, 2te Aufl. 1871, p. 32, n. (ed. 1858, i, 44) et seq. [↑]
[3] Eccles. Hist., bk. i, ch. iv. [↑]
[4] Strauss, Ulrich von Hutten, as cited, pp. 33–35; Bezold, Gesch. der deutschen Reformation, 1890, p. 226. Bezold describes Mutianus as “der freigeistige Kanonikus zu Gotha,” and points out, concerning his universalism, that “the historic Christ thus slips through his fingers.” [↑]
[5] Bezold, as last cited. “Here is the skepticism kept in the background by Mutianus and Celtis, popularized in the rudest way.” [↑]
[6] Briefe, ed. De Wette, iii, 60. [↑]
[7] Karl Hagen, Deutschlands lit. u. relig. Verhältnisse im Reformations-zeitalter, 1868, ii, 110; letter of Capito to Zwingli, Ep. Zwinglii i, 47; F. C. Baur, Kirchengeschichte, iv, 450; Trechsel, Die protestantischen Antitrinitarier vor Faustus Socinus, 1839–44, i, 13–16, 33; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, 1850, i, art. 3, 4, 5. [↑]
[8] Schlegel’s note to Mosheim, Reid’s ed. p. 689; Baur, iv, 450; Trechsel, i, 13–16. [↑]
[9] See a good account of him by Beard, Hibbert Lectures on The Reformation, p. 204 sq. [↑]
[10] For an impartial criticism of their language see Henderson’s Short Hist. of Germany, i, 321–23. Cp. Baur, Kirchengeschichte, iv, 73–76; A. F. Pollard in Camb. Mod. Hist. ii, 192–95; Beard, Hibbert Lect. on The Reformation, p. 200; and Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation, Eng. tr. 1897, pp. 117–28. [↑]
[11] Kohlrausch, Hist. of Germany, Eng. tr. p. 397. [↑]
[12] To the same effect Menzel, Gesch. der Deutschen, Capp. 391, 492. [↑]
[13] Pollard, as cited, p. 175. [↑]
[18] Ranke, as cited, pp. 459–64. [↑]
[20] Cp. Michelet, Hist. de France, x, La Réforme, ed. 1882, pp. 104, 332. [↑]
[21] Cp. Burckhard, De Ulrichi Hutteni Vita Commentarius, 1717, i, 65. For a general view see Ranke, pp. 126–39. [↑]
[22] Jakob Marx, Die Ursachen der schnellen Verbreitung der Reformation, 1847, § 12. [↑]
[23] Prof. J. M. Vincent, in Prof. S. M. Jackson’s Huldreich Zwingli, 1901, p. 37. [↑]
[24] Cp. Ullmann, Reformers before the Reformation, i, 19; ii, passim; Mosheim, 15 Cent. Pt. ii, ch. ii, § 22; and Bonet-Maury’s thesis, De Opera Scholastica Fratrum Vitæ Communis, 1889. [↑]
[25] Burton, History of Scotland, iii, 399–401. But the end in view was probably, as Burton half admits, the recruiting of the Church. Cp. Cosmo Innes, Sketches of Early Scotch History, p. 134 sq., and Scottish Legal Antiquities, pp. 129–30. [↑]
[27] Menzel, Cap. 492 (ed. 1837, p. 762). [↑]
[28] Ranke (p. 466) becomes positively lyrical over the happy lot of the peasant who received Luther’s Catechism (1529). “It contains enduring comfort in every affliction, and, under a slight husk, the kernel of truths able to satisfy the wisest of the wise.” Such declamation holds the place that ought to have been filled by an account of economic conditions. [↑]
[29] Bishop Stubbs, Const. Hist. of England, iii. 627. The bishop, however, holds that in the time of Lollard prosperity the ability to read was widely diffused in England (p. 628); and it seems certain that in the first half of the sixteenth century printing multiplied enormously. Cp. Michelet. Hist. de France, x, ed. 1884. p. 103 sq. [↑]
[30] Cp. Willis, Servetus and Calvin, 1877, bk. ii. ch. i; Audin, Histoire de Calvin, éd. abrég. ch. xxiv–xxvii; and essay on “Machiavelli and Calvin” in the present writer’s Essays in Sociology, 1903. vol. i. [↑]
[31] Werke., ed. Walch. viii. 2043 (On Ep. to Galat.), cited by Beard. [↑]
[32] Id. viii, 1181 (On [1 Cor. xv]). Cp. other citations in Beard, pp. 161–65. [↑]
[33] Green, Short History, ch. vi, § v, p. 315. [↑]
[34] Cp. Stäbelin, Johannes Calvin, 1863. ii, 282–83. [↑]
[35] He was educated at Basel and Berne and at Vienna University, and of all the leading reformers he seems to have had most knowledge of classical literature. Hess, Life of Zwingle, Eng. tr. 1812, pp. 2–7, following Myconius and Hottinger. [↑]
[36] Chr. Sigwart, Ulrich Zwingli, der Charakter seiner Theologie, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Pico von Mirandula, 1855, pp. 14–26. Prof. Jackson, Huldreich Zwingli, p. 85, note, states that Sigwart later modified his views. [↑]
[37] So states Melanchthon, cited by Jackson, p. 85, note. Cp. pp. 201, 390–92. [↑]
[38] Cited by Jackson, p. 316. [↑]
[42] Id. According to Heylyn, the Earl of Warwick countenanced the Zwinglians in his intrigues against the Protector Somerset; and their views were further welcomed by other nobles as making for the plundering of rich altars. Hist. of the Reform. of the Ch. of Eng., ed. 1849. pref. p. vii. But Heylyn appears to identify the Zwinglians at this stage with the Calvinists. Cp. p. x. [↑]
[43] Henry, Das Leben Calvins, ii, Kap. 13, and Beilage 16 (Appendix not given in the English translation); Stähelin, Johannes Calvin, 1863, i, 399–400. [↑]
[44] Cp. Calvin’s letter to Viret, July 2, 1547 (Letters of Calvin, ed. Bonnet, Eng. tr. 1857, ii, 109), where it is alleged that in the two pages “the whole of Scripture is laughed at, Christ aspersed, the immortality of the soul called a dream and a fable, and finally the whole of religion torn in pieces. I do not think he is the author of it,” adds Calvin; “but as it is in his handwriting he will be compelled to appear in his defence.” [↑]
[45] Stähelin, i, 400. Henry avows that Gruet was “subjected to the torture morning and evening during a whole month” (Eng. tr. ii. 66). Other biographers dishonestly exclude the fact from their narratives. [↑]
[46] Cp. Calvin’s letter to the Seigneury of Geneva, in Letters, ii. 254–56. [↑]
[47] Henry, Life of Calvin, Eng. tr. ii, 47–48. Gruet’s fragment can hardly have been the De Tribus Impostoribus, inasmuch as Calvin makes no mention of any reference to Mohammed in his fragment, whereas the title of the other book proceeded on the specification of Mohammed as well as Jesus and Moses. The existing treatise of that name, in any case, is of later date. Of the famous treatise in question, which was not published till long afterwards, Henry admits that it “professes to show tranquilly, and with regret, but without abuse,” the fraudulent character of the three revealed religions. Concerning Gruet’s essay he asks: “What are all the anti-Christian writings of the French Revolution compared with the hellish laughter which seemed to peal from its pages?” For this description he has not a line to cite. [↑]
[48] For instance, one man was accused of having blasphemed against a storm which terrified the pious. [↑]
[49] Dändliker, Geschichte der Schweiz, 1884–87, ii, 559; above, p. 2. [↑]
[50] Mark Pattison, Essays, 1889, ii, 37. [↑]
[51] Dändliker, as cited, endorsing Roget. Cp. Hallam, Lit. of Europe, i, 306, and Hamilton, Discus. on Philos. and Lit., 2nd ed. p. 497, as to the “dissolution of morals” in the Lutheran world. [↑]
[52] Mosheim, 14 Cent. sec. iii, Pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 38–41; Audin, Histoire de Calvin, chs. xxix, xxx. [↑]
[53] Histoire de la vie, mœurs, actes, doctrine, constance et mort de Iean Calvin, jadis ministre de Geneue, receuilly par M. Hierosme Hermes Bolsec, docteur médecin à Lyon. Lyon, 1577. [↑]
[54] The reprint of Bolsec’s book prepared by M. L. F. Chastel (Lyon, 1875) appears to be faithful; but the Catholic animus shown deprives the annotations of critical value. [↑]
[55] Stähelin, ii, 293–301. [↑]
[56] Stähelin, ii, 293. Arminius pointed to this letter as a proof that Melanchthon had abandoned his early predestinarianism (Declaratio of 1608, xx. 2; Works of Arminius, ed. Nichols, i. 578). But of course Melanchthon had previously guarded himself in his Loci Communes (1545) and elsewhere. (Id. pp. 597–98.) [↑]
[58] Latinized name of Miguel Servedo, alias Reves, born at Tudela in Navarre in 1511, son of Hernando Villanueva, a notary of an Aragonese family, of which Villanueva had been the seat. The statement of De la Roche that Servetus was born in Aragon, though long current, is now exploded. [↑]
[59] De la Roche, Mémoires de Littérature, cited in An Impartial History of Servetus, 1724, p. 27. [↑]
[60] Christianismi Restitutio, h.e. Totius ecclesiæ apostolicæ ad sua limina vocatio in integrum, restituta cognitione Dei, fidei christianæ, justificationis nostræ, regenerationis, baptismi, Cœnæ Domini manducationis. Restituto denique nobis regno cœlesti, Babylonis impia captivitate solutâ, et antichristo cum suis penitus destructo, 1553. Of this book De la Roche (1711) knew of no printed copy, having read it solely in MS. Perfect copies, however, are preserved in Vienna and Paris; and an imperfect one in Edinburgh University Library has been completed from the original draft, which has matter not in the printed copy. It has been pointed out that the book is not absolutely anonymous, inasmuch as it has at the end the initials M. S. V.—the V. standing for the name Villanova or Villanovanus, which he bore as a student at Louvain and put on the title-pages of his scientific works; and Servetus is actually introduced as an interlocutor in one of the dialogues. [↑]
[61] It is to be remembered, however, that he pronounced all Trinitarians to be “veros Atheos.” History of Servetus, p. 131. [↑]
[62] “Mihi ob eam rem moriendum esse certo scio.” [↑]
[63] Melanchthon, Epist., lib. i, ep. 3; McCrie, Reformation in Italy, p. 96; Trechsel, Lelio Sozini, 1844, pp. 38–41. [↑]
[64] Willis, Servetus and Calvin, 1877, p. 117. [↑]
[65] See the careful account of Dr. Austin Flint, of Now York, in his pamphlet, Rabelais as a Physiologist, rep. from New York Medical Journal of June 29, 1901. [↑]
[67] Letter to Farel, Aug. 20. 1553 (Letters, Eng. tr. ii, 399). Cp. Henry, ii, 195–96. [↑]
[68] Id. ch. xix. See the letter of Trie, given in Henry’s Life of Calvin (Eng. tr. ii, 181–85), with the admission that Trie was in Calvin’s counsels. Henry vainly endeavours to make light (pp. 181–82) of Calvin’s written words to Farel concerning Servetus: “Si venerit, modo valeat mea autoritas, vivum exire nunquam patiar.” Still, it must in fairness be remembered that Trie, by his own account, persuaded Calvin, who was reluctant, to his act of complicity with the inquisitors of Lyons. Cp. Bossert, Calvin, pp. 160–64. [↑]
[69] Willis, ch. xx. Cp. pp. 457, 503. The defence of Calvin in Mackenzie’s Life (1809, p. 79) on the score that he was not likely to communicate with Catholic officials does not meet the case as to Trie. And cp. p. 83. [↑]
[70] Ten years after the death of Servetus, Calvin calls him a “dog and wicked scoundrel” (Willis, p. 530; cp. Hist. of Servetus, p. 214, citing Calvin’s Comm. on [Acts xx]); and in his Commentary on Genesis (i, 3, ed. 1838, p. 9) he says of him: “Latrat hic obscoenus canis.” And Servetus had asked his pardon at the end. [↑]
[71] White, Warfare of Science with Theology, 1896, i, 113; History of Servetus, 1724, p. 93 sq.: Willis, Servetus and Calvin, p. 325. [↑]
[72] Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, i, 430. [↑]
[73] See Stähelin, Johannes Calvin, ii, 300–308. [↑]
[74] F. A. Cox. Life of Melanchthon, 1815, pp. 523–24; Willis, pp. 47, 511. [↑]
[75] Table Talk, ch. 43. Cp. Michelet’s Life of Luther, Eng. tr. 1846, pp. 195–96; and Hallam, Lit. of Europe, i, 360–65. Michelet’s later enthusiasm for Luther (Hist. de France, x, ch. v, ed. 1884, pp. 96–97) is oblivious of many of the facts noted in his earlier studies. [↑]
[76] Bayle, Art. Gribaud; Christie, Étienne Dolet, 2nd ed. pp. 303–305. Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, ii, Art. 18. [↑]
[77] Benrath, Bernardino Ochino of Siena, Eng. tr. 1876. pp. 268–72, 287–92. [↑]
[78] McCrie, p. 230; Audin, ch. xxxv; Benrath, Bernardino Ochino, p. 297. [↑]
[79] Cp. Pusey, Histor. Enquiry into Ger. Rationalism, 1828, p. 14 sq.; Beard, p. 183. [↑]
[80] Stähelin, ii. 337. Biandrata went to Hungary, where, as we saw (p. 421), he turned persecutor, and then Protestant. [↑]
[81] Mosheim, 16 Cent. sec. iii, pt. ii, ch. iv, § 6; Audin, pp. 394–99; Aretius, Short Hist. of Valentinus Gentilis, Eng. tr. 1696; Stähelin, ii, 338–45; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, ii, Art. 20. [↑]
[82] See the Historical Account of his life and trial in the Harleian Miscellany, iv, 168 sq. [↑]
[83] See Stähelin, ii, 293, 304, etc. [↑]
[84] Cp. Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, 3te Aufl. Cap. 417; A. F. Pollard, in Cam. Mod. Hist., vol. ii, ch. vii, p. 223; The Dynamics of Religion, pp. 6–8. [↑]
[85] See Beard, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 189–90, 196. The same avowal was made in the eighteenth century by Mosheim (16 Cent. sec. iii, pt. ii, § 5). [↑]
[86] F. A. Cox, Life of Melanchthon, 1815, p. 544, citing Adam, Vitæ philosophorum (p. 934). Cp. pp. 528–29. [↑]
[87] K. von Raumer, as cited, pp. 32–37. [↑]
[88] Id. pp. 42–52; Pusey, as cited, p. 112. [↑]
[89] Dändliker, Geschichte der Schweiz, ii, 556–59, 622 sq., 728–29. [↑]
[90] See the extracts in Beard’s Hibbert Lectures, pp. 340–41. [↑]
[91] Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, Cap. 417. [↑]
[92] Cp. Hamilton, Discussions in Philosophy and Literature, 1852, pp. 493–94, note. [↑]
[93] Mosheim, Reid’s ed. pp. 625–26. Such solutions were common in papal polity. Id. p. 767. [↑]
[94] Bishop Schuster, Johann Kepler und die grossen kirchlichen Streitfragen seiner Zeit, 1888, p. 178 sq. It is noteworthy that Kepler’s mother was sentenced for witchcraft, and saved by the influence of her son. Johann Keppler’s Leben und Werken nach neuerlich aufgefundenen MSS., von G. L. C. Freiherrn von Breitschwert, 1831, p. 97 sq. [↑]
[95] “There is much reason to believe that the fetters upon scientific thought were closer under the strict interpretation of Scripture by the early Protestants than they had been under the older church” (White, Warfare of Science with Theology, i, 212). Concerning the Protestant hostility to the Copernican system and to Kepler, see Schuster, as cited, pp. 87 sq., 191 sq. [↑]
[96] White, as cited, i, 129. [↑]
[99] Menzel, Cap. 431; Dändliker, Geschichte der Schweiz, 1884, ii, 743. The cantons of Glarus, Outer Appenzell, St. Gall, and the Grisons formally rejected the Gregorian Calendar. Id. ib. Zschokke (Des Schweizerlands Geschichte, 9te Ausg. 1853, p. 179) implies that the Protestants in general ignored it. Ranke (Hist. of the Popes, Bohn tr. 1908, i, 337) mentions that “all Catholic nations took part in this reform.” [↑]
[100] Blunt, Ref. of the Church of England, ed. 1892, ii, 76. Of the twenty-six cathedrals in the reign of Henry VIII, thirteen had been monastic churches, and these were “razed to the smallest possible dimensions as to number and endowments.” Id. p. 77. [↑]
[101] Strype’s Memorials of Cranmer, ed. 1848, ii, 89. [↑]
[103] Original Letters relative to the English Reformation, Parker Society, 1816, i, 66. [↑]
[104] Bishop Burnet (Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles, Art. 18) has given currency to the pretence that the words “saved by the law” are meant to exclude the sense “saved in the law,” the latter salvation being allowed as possible. That there was no such thought on the part of the framers of the Article is shown by the Latin version, where the expression is precisely “in lege.” Burnet prints the Latin, yet utterly ignores its significance. [↑]
[105] Book II of the Utopia was written at Antwerp, during his six months’ stay there on an embassy. [↑]
[106] Bk. ii, sec. “Of the Religions” (Arber’s ed. pp. 143–47; Morley’s ed. pp. 151–53). [↑]
[107] Green, Short History, ch. vi, § 4; 1881 ed. p. 311. Compare Green’s whole estimate. Michelet’s hostile criticism (x, 356) is surprisingly inept. For the elements of naturalism in the Utopia see bk. ii, sections “Of their Journeying” and “Of the Religions.” [↑]
[108] Cp. T. C. Grattan, The Netherlands, 1830, pp. 231–43. [↑]
[109] Who, as it happened, avowed that “religion was almost extinct” in Europe at the time of the rise of the Lutheran and Calvinistic heresies. Concio xxviii. Opera, vi, 296, ed. 1617, cited by Blunt, Ref. of Church of England, ed. 1892, i, 4, note. [↑]
[110] Cp. The Works of Arminius, ed. by James Nichols, 1825, i, 580, note. [↑]
[112] Cp. Schuster, as cited, pp. 191 sq., 202 sq. [↑]
[113] Nichols’s Arminius, i, p. 233. [↑]
[114] Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 406–416; Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 2nd ed. pp. 447–48. As to Casaubon’s own intolerance, however, see p. 446. [↑]
[115] Hallam, ii, 411, 416. [↑]
[116] Beard, Hibbert Lectures, p. 298. [↑]
Chapter XIII
THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT
§ 1. The Italian Influence
The negative bearing of the Reformation on freethought is made clear by the historic fact that the new currents of thought which broadly mark the beginning of the “modern spirit” arose in its despite, and derive originally from outside its sphere. It is to Italy, where the political and social conditions thus far tended to frustrate the Inquisition, that we trace the rise alike of modern deism, modern Unitarianism, modern pantheism, modern physics, and the tendency to rational atheism. The deistic way of thinking, of course, prevailed long before it got that name; and besides the vogue of Averroïsm we have noted the virtual deism of More’s Utopia (1516). The first explicit mention of deism noted by Bayle, however, is in the epistle dedicatory to the second and expanded edition of the Instruction Chrétienne of the Swiss Protestant Viret (1563), where professed deists are spoken of as a new species bearing a new name. On the admission of Viret, who was the friend and bitter disciple of Calvin, they rejected all revealed religion, but called themselves deists by way of repudiating atheism; some keeping a belief in immortality, some rejecting it. In the theological manner he goes on to call them all execrable atheists, and to say that he has added to his treatise on their account an exposition of natural religion grounded on the “Book of Nature”; stultifying himself by going on to say that he has also dealt with the professed atheists.[1] Of the deists he admits that among them were men of the highest repute for science and learning. Thus within ten years of the burning of Servetus we find privately avowed deism and atheism in the area of French-speaking Protestantism.
Doubtless the spectacle of Protestant feuds and methods would go far to foster such unbelief; but though, as we have seen, there were aggressive Unitarians in Germany before 1530, who, being scholars, may or may not have drawn on Italian thought, thereafter there is reason to look to Italy as the source of the propaganda. Thence came the two Sozzini, the founders of Socinianism, of whom Lelio, the uncle of Fausto, travelled much in northern Europe (including England) between 1546 and 1552.[2] As the earlier doctrine of Servetus shows clear affinities to that of the Sozzini, and his earlier books were much read in Italy between 1532 and 1540, he may well have given them their impulse.[3] It is evidently to Servetus that Zanchi referred when he wrote to Bullinger in 1565 that “Spain bore the hens, Italy hatched the eggs, and we now hear the chickens piping.”[4] Before Socinianism had taken form it was led up to, as we have seen, in the later writings of the ex-monk Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), who, in the closing years of a much chequered career, combined mystical and Unitarian tendencies with a leaning to polygamy and freedom of divorce.[5] His influence was considerable among the Swiss Protestants, though they finally expelled him for his heresies. From Geneva or from France, in turn, apparently came some of the English freethought of the middle period of the sixteenth century;[6] for in 1562 Speaker Williams in the House of Commons, in a list of misbelievers, speaks of “Pelagians, Libertines, Papists, and such others, leaving God’s commandments to follow their own traditions, affections, and minds”[7]—using theologically the foreign term, which never became naturalized in English in its foreign sense. It was about the year 1563, again, that Roger Ascham wrote his Scholemaster, wherein are angrily described, as a species new in England, men who, “where they dare,” scorn both Protestant and Papist, “rejecting scripture, and counting the Christian mysteries as fables.”[8] He describes them as “ἄθεοι in doctrine”; adding, “this last word is no more unknowne now to plane Englishe men than the Person was unknown somtyme in England, untill some Englishe man took peines to fetch that develish opinion out of Italie.”[9] The whole tendency he connects in a general way with the issue of many new translations from the Italian, mentioning in particular Petrarch and Boccaccio. Among good Protestants his view was general; and so Lord Burghley in his Advice to his Son writes: “Suffer not thy sons to pass the Alps, for they shall learn nothing there but pride, blasphemy, and atheism.” As it happened, his grandson the second Earl of Exeter, and his great-grandson Lord Roos, went to Rome, and became not atheists but Roman Catholics.
Such episodes should remind us that in that age of ignorance and superstition the Church had always an immense advantage. Those who, like Gentillet in his raging Discours, commonly known as the Contre-Machiavel (1576), ascribed to “atheism” and the teaching of Machiavelli all the crimes and oppressions wrought by Catholics,[10] were ludicrously perverting the facts. Massacres in churches, which are cited by Gentillet as impossible to believing Catholics, were wrought, as we have seen, on the largest scale by the Church in the thirteenth century. So, when Scaliger calls the Italians of his day “a set of atheists,” we are to understand it rather of “the hypocrisy than of the professed skepticism of the time.”[11] But rationalism and semi-rationalism did prevail in Italy more than in any other country.[12]
Like the old Averroïsm, the new pietistic Unitarianism persisted in Italy and radiated thence afresh when it had flagged in other lands. The exploded Unitarian tradition[13] runs that the doctrine arose in the year 1546 among a group of more than forty learned men who were wont to assemble in secret at Vicenza, near Venice. Claudius of Savoy, however, emphatically gave out his anti-Trinitarian doctrine at Berne in 1534, after having been imprisoned at Strasburg and banished thence;[14] and Ochino and Lelio Sozzini left Italy in 1543. But there seems to have been a continuous evolution of Unitarian heresy in the south after the German movement had ceased. Giorgio Biandrata, whom we have seen flying to Poland from Geneva, had been seized by the Inquisition at Pavia for such opinion. Still it persisted. In 1562 Giulio Guirlando of Treviso, and in 1566 Francesco Saga of Rovigo, were burned at Venice for anti-Trinitarianism. Giacomo Aconzio too, who dedicated his Stratagems of Satan (Basel, 1565) to Queen Elizabeth, and who pleaded notably for the toleration of heresy,[15] was a decided latitudinarian.[16]
It is remarkable that the whole ferment occurs in the period of the Catholic Reaction, the Council of Trent, and the subjection of Italy, when the papacy was making its great effort to recover its ground. It would seem that in the compulsory peace which had now fallen on Italian life men’s thoughts turned more than ever to mental problems, as had happened in Greece after the rise of Alexander’s empire. The authority of the Church was outwardly supreme; the Jesuits had already begun to do great things for education;[17] the revived Inquisition was everywhere in Italy; its prisons, as we have seen, were crowded with victims of all grades during a whole generation; Pius V and the hierarchy everywhere sought to enforce decorum in life; the “pagan” academies formed on the Florentine model were dissolved; and classic culture rapidly decayed with the arts, while clerical learning flourished,[18] and a new religious music began with Palestrina. Yet on the death of Paul IV the Roman populace burned the Office of the Inquisition to the ground and cast the pope’s statue into the Tiber;[19] and in that age (1548) was born Giordano Bruno, one of the types of modern freethought.
The great service of Italy to modern freethought, however, was to come later, in respect of the impulse given to the scientific spirit by Bruno, Vanini, and Galileo. On the philosophical or critical side, the Italy of the middle of the sixteenth century left no enduring mark on European thought, though her serious writers were numerous. Aconzio had published, before his De Stratagematibus Satanæ, a treatise De Methodo, sive recta investigandarum tradendarumque scientiarum ratione (Basel, 1558), wherein he pleads strenuously for a true logical method as the one way to real knowledge of things. In this he anticipates Bacon, as did, still earlier, Mario Nizolio in his Antibarbarus sive de veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra pseudo-philosophos (Parma, 1553). Nizolio’s main effort is towards the discrediting of Aristotle, whom, like so many in the generation following, he regarded as the great bulwark of scholastic obscurantism. He insists that all knowledge must proceed from sensation, which alone has immediate certainty; and thus stands for direct scientific observation as against tradition and verbalism. But Ludovicus Vives had before him (in his De causis corruptarum artium, Antwerp, 1531) claimed that the true Aristotelian went direct to nature, as Aristotle himself had done; and Nizolio did nothing in practical science to substantiate his polemic against the logic-choppers.
He and Aconzio in effect cancel each other. Each had glimpsed a truth, one seeing the need for a right method in inference, the other protesting against the idea that abstract reasoning could lead to knowledge; but neither made good his argument by any treasure trove of fact. Another writer of the same decade, Gomez Pereira, joined in the revolt against Aristotelianism, publishing in 1554 his Margarita Antoniana, wherein, in advance of Descartes, he maintained the absence of sensation in brutes.[20] For the rest, he championed freedom in speculation, denying that authority should avail save in matters of faith. But he too failed to bring forth fruits meet for freedom. Neither by abstract exposition of right methods of reasoning, nor by abstract attacks on wrong methods, could any vital impulse yet be given to thought. What was lacking was the use of reason upon actual problems, whether of human or of natural science. All the while Europe was anchored to ancient delusion, historical and scientific. Even as the horrors of age-long religious war could alone drive men to something like toleration in the religious life, there was needed the impact of actual discovery to win them to science as against scholasticism. And rational thinking on the religion which resisted all new science was to be still later of attainment, save for the nameless men who throughout the ages of faith rejected the creeds without publishing their unbelief. Of these Italy had always a large sprinkling.
§ 2. Spain
The fact that sixteenth-century Spain could be charged, on the score of Servetus, with producing the “hen” of Socinianism, is an important reminder of the perpetuity of variation and of the fatality of environment. The Portuguese Sanchez, whom we shall find laying new potential foundations of skepticism in France alongside of Montaigne, could neither have acquired nor propounded his philosophy in his native land. But it is to be noted that an elder contemporary of Sanchez, living and dying in Spain, was able, in the generation after Servetus, to make a real contribution to the revival of freethought, albeit under shelter of a firm profession of orthodoxy.
No book of the kind, perhaps, had a wider European popularity than the Examen de Ingenios para las ciencias of Huarte de San Juan, otherwise Juan Huarte y Navarro (c. 1530–1592). Like Servetus and Sanchez and many another, Huarte had his bias to reason fostered by a medical training; and it is as a “natural philosopher” that he stands for a rational study of causation. As a pioneer of exact science, indeed, he counts for next to nothing. Taking as his special theme the divergences of human faculty, he does but found himself on the à priori system of “humours” and “temperatures” passed on by Aristotle to Galen and Hippocrates, inconsistently affirming on the one hand that the “characters” not only of whole nations but of the inhabitants of provinces are determined by their special climates and aliments, and on the other hand that individual faculty is determined by the proportions of hot and cold, moist and dry “temperatures” in the parents. Apart from his insistence on the functions of the brain, and from broadly rational deliverances as to the kinds of faculty which determine success in theology and law, arms and arts, his “science” is naught. Dealing with an obscure problem, he brought to it none of the exact inductiveness which alone had yielded true knowledge in the simpler field of astronomy. In virtue, however, either of his confidence in affirmation or of his stand for rational inquiry, or of both, Huarte’s book, published in 1575, went the round of Europe. Translated into Italian in 1582 (or earlier; new rendering 1600), it was thence rendered into English by Richard Carew in 1594.[21] A French version appeared in 1598, and two others in 1661 and 1671. A later English translation, from the original, was produced in 1698; and Lessing thought the book worth putting into German in 1785.
The rationalistic importance of Huarte lies in his insistence on the study of “second causes” and his protest against the burking of all inquiry by a reference to deity. On this head he anticipates much of the polemic of Bacon. The explanation of all processes and phenomena by the will of God, he observes, “is so ancient a manner of talk, and the natural philosophers have so often refuted it, that the seeking to take the same away were superfluous, neither is it convenient.... But I have often gone about to consider the reason and the cause whence it may grow that the vulgar sort is so great friend to impute all things to God, and to reave them from Nature, and do so abhor the natural means.”[22] His solution is the impatience of men over the complexity of Nature, their spiritual arrogance, their indolence, and their piety. For himself, he pronounces, as Middleton did in England nearly two centuries later, that “God doth no longer those unwonted things of the New Testament; and the reason is, for that on his behalf he hath performed all necessary diligence that men might not pretend ignorance. And to think that he will begin anew to do the like miracles ... is an error very great.... God speaks once (saith [Job]) and turns not to a second replial.”[23]
Only thus could the principle of natural causation be affirmed in the Spain of Philip II. Huarte is careful to affirm miracles while denying their recurrence; and throughout he writes as a good Scripturist and Catholic. But he sticks to his naturalist thesis that “Nature makes able,” and avows that “natural philosophers laugh at such as say, This is God’s doing, without assigning the order and discourse of the particular causes whence they may spring.”[24] The fact that the book was dedicated to Philip tells of royal protection, without which the author could hardly have escaped the Inquisition. Years after, we shall find Lilly in England protesting on the stage against the conception of Natura naturans; and Bacon powerfully reaffirming Huarte’s doctrine, with the same reservations. The Spaniard must have counted for something as a pleader for elementary reason, if Bacon did.
But this is practically the only important contribution from Spain to the intellectual renascence then going on in Europe. As we have seen, it was not that Spaniards had any primordial bias to dogmatism and persecution: it was simply that their whole socio-political evolution, largely determined by Spanish discovery and dominion in the New World, set up institutions and forces which became specially powerful to stamp out freethought. The work of progress was done in lands where lack of external dominion left on the one hand a greater fund of variant energy, and on the other made for a lesser power of repression on the part of Church and State.
§ 3. France
While Italy continues to be reputed throughout the sixteenth century a hotbed of freethinking, styled “atheism,” it appears to have been in France, alongside of the wars of religion, that positive unbelief, as distinct from scripturalist Unitarianism, made most new headway among laymen. It was in France that the forces of change had greatest play. The mere contact with Italy which began with the invasion of Charles VII in 1494 meant a manifold moral and mental influence, affecting French literature and life alike; and the age of strife and destruction which set in with the first Huguenot wars could not but be one of disillusionment for multitudes of serious men. We have seen as much in the work of Bonaventure des Periers and Rabelais; but the spread of radical unbelief is to be traced, as is usual in the ages of faith, by the books written against it. Already in 1552 we have seen Guillaume Postell publishing his book, Contra Atheos.[25] Unbelief increasing, there is published in 1564 an Atheomachie by one De Bourgeville; but the Massacre must have gone far to frustrate him. In 1581 appears another Atheomachie, ou réfutation des erreurs et impiétés des Athéistes, Libertins, etc., issued at Geneva, but bearing much on French life; and in the same year is issued the long-time popular work of the Huguenot Philippe de Mornay, De la vérité de la religion Chrestienne, Contre les Athées, Epicuriens, Payens, Juifs, Mahumedistes, et autres Infidèles.[26] In both the Epistle Dedicatory (to Henry of Navarre) and the Preface the author speaks of the great multiplication of unbelief, the refutation of which he declares to be more needful among Christians than it ever had been among the heathen. But, like most of the writers against atheism in that age, he declares[27] that there are no atheists save a few young fools and utterly bad men, who turn to God as soon as they fall sick. The reputed atheists of antiquity are vindicated as having denied not the principle of deity but the false Gods of their age—this after the universality of a belief in Gods in all ages had been cited as one of the primary proofs of God’s existence. In this fashion is compiled a book of nine hundred pages, ostensibly for the confutation of a few fools and knaves, described as unworthy of serious consideration. Evidently the unbelief of de Mornay’s day was a more vigorous growth than he affected to think; and his voluminous performance was followed by others. In 1586, Christophe Cheffontaines published his Epitome novæ illustrationis Christianae Fidei adversus Impios, Libertinos et Atheos; and still skepticism gained ground, having found new abettors.
First came the Portuguese Francisco Sanchez (1552–1623?), born in Portugal, but brought as a child to Bordeaux, which seems to have been a place of refuge for many fugitive heretics from both sides of the Peninsula. Sanchez has recorded that in his early youth he had no bias to incredulity of any kind; but at some stage of his adolescence he travelled in Italy and spent some time at Rome. The result was not that special disbelief in Christianity which was proverbially apt to follow, but a development on his part of philosophic skepticism properly so-called, which found expression in a Latin treatise entitled Quod Nihil Scitur—“That Nothing is Known.” Composed as early as 1576, in the author’s twenty-fourth year, the book was not published till 1581, a year after the first issue of the Essais of Montaigne. It is natural to surmise that while Sanchez was at Bordeaux he may have known something of his famous contemporary; but though Montaigne is likely to have read the Quod Nihil Scitur in due course, he nowhere speaks of it; and in 1576 Sanchez was a Professor of Medicine at Montpellier, then a town of Huguenot leanings. Soon he left it for Toulouse, the hotbed of Catholic fanaticism, where he contrived to live out his long life in peace, despite his production of a Pyrrhonist treatise and of a remarkable Latin poem (1578) on the comet of 1577. The Quod Nihil Scitur is a skeptical flank attack on current science, in no way animadverting on religion, as to which he professed orthodoxy: the poem is a frontal attack on the whole creed of astrology, then commonly held by Averroïsts and Aristotelians, as well as by orthodox Catholics. Yet he seems never to have been molested. It would seem as if a skepticism which ostensibly disallowed all claims to “natural” knowledge, while avowedly recognizing “spiritual,” was then as later thought to make rather for faith than against it. That such virtual Pyrrhonism as that of Sanchez can ever have ministered to religious zeal is not indeed to be supposed: it is rather as a weapon against the confidence of the “Naturalist” that the skeptical method has always recommended itself to the calculating priest. And inasmuch as astrology could be, and was, held by a non-religious theory, though many Christians added it to their creed, a polemic against that was the least dangerous form of rationalizing then possible. At all times there had been priests who so reasoned, though, as we have seen in dealing with the men of the Protestant Reformation, the belief in astral influences is too closely akin to the main line of religious tradition to be capable of ejection on religious grounds.
With his hostility to credulous hopes and fears in the sphere of Nature, Sanchez is naturally regarded as a forerunner and helper of freethought. But there is nothing to show that his work had any effect in undermining the most formidable of all the false beliefs of Christendom.[28] Like so many others of his age, he flouted Aristotelean scholasticism, but was perforce silent as to the verbalisms and sophistries of simple theology. It may fairly be inferred that his poem on the comet of 1577 helped to create that current of reasoned disbelief[29] which we find throwing up almost identical expressions in Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Molière,[30] concerning the folly of connecting the stars with human affairs. But a skepticism which left untouched the main matter of the creeds could not affect conduct in general; and while Sanchez passed unchecked the watchdogs of the Inquisition, the fiery Bruno and Vanini were in his day to meet their fiery death at its hands—the latter in Toulouse, perhaps under the eyes of Sanchez. Having resigned his professorship of medicine, he seems to have lived to a ripe age, dying in 1623.
Probably those very deaths availed more for the rousing of critical thought than did the dialectic of the Pyrrhonist. To the life of the reason may with perfect accuracy be applied the claim so often made for that of religion—that it feeds on feeling and is rooted in experience. Revolt from the cruelties and follies of faith plays a great part in the history of freethought. In the greatest French writer of that age, a professed Catholic, but in mature life averse alike to Catholic and to Protestant bigotry, the shock of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew can be seen disintegrating once for all the spirit of faith. Montaigne typifies the kind of skepticism produced in an unscientific age by the practical demonstration that religion can avail immeasurably more for evil than for good.[31] A few years before the Massacre he had translated for his dying father[32] the old Theologia Naturalis of Raymond of Sebonde; and we know from the later Apology in the Essays that freethinking contemporaries declared the argument of Raymond to be wholly insufficient.[33] It is clear from the same essay that Montaigne felt as much; though the gist of his polemic is a vehement attack upon all forms of confident opinion, religious and anti-religious alike. “In replying to arguments of so opposite a tenour, Montaigne leaves Christianity, as well as Raimond Sebonde, without a leg to stand upon. He demolishes the arguments of Sebonde with the rest of human presumption, and allows Christianity, neither held by faith nor provable by reason, to fall between the two stools.”[34] The truth is that Montaigne’s skepticism was the product of a mental evolution spread over at least twenty years. In his youth his vivid temperament kept him both credulous and fanatical, so much so that in 1562 he took the reckless oath prescribed by the Catholic Parlement of Paris. As he avows with his incomparable candour, he had been in many things peculiarly susceptible to outside influences, being always ready to respond to the latest pressure;[35] and the knowledge of his susceptibility made him self-distrustful. But gradually he found himself. Beginning to recoil from the ferocities and iniquities of the League, he yet remained for a time hotly anti-Protestant; and it seems to have been his dislike of Protestant criticism that led him to run amuck against reason, at the cost of overthrowing the treatise he had set out to defend. The common end of such petulant skepticism is a plunge into uneasy yet unreasoning faith; but, though Montaigne professed Catholicism to the end, the sheer wickedness of the Catholic policy made it impossible for him to hold sincerely to the creed any more than to the cause.[36] Above all things he hated cruelty.[37] It was the Massacre that finally made Montaigne renounce public life;[38] it must have affected likewise his working philosophy.
That philosophy was not, indeed, an original construction: he found it to his hand partly in the deism of his favourite Seneca; partly in the stoical ethic of Epictetus, then so much appreciated in France; and partly in the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus, of which the Latin translation is known to have been among his books; from which he took several of the mottoes inscribed on his library ceiling,[39] and from which he frequently quotes towards the end of his Apology. The body of ideas compacted on these bases cannot be called a system: it was not in Montaigne’s nature to frame a logical scheme of thought; and he was far from being the philosophic skeptic he set out to be[40] by way of confounding at once the bigots and the atheists. He was essentially ondoyant et divers, as he freely admitted. As he put it in a passage added to the later editions of the Essais,[41] he was a kind of métis, belonging neither to the camp of ignorant faith nor to that of philosophic conviction, whether believing or unbelieving. He early avows that, had he written what he thought and knew of the affairs of his times, he would have published judgments “à mon gré mesme et selon raison,” in his opinion true and reasonable, but “illégitimes et punissables.”[42] Again, “whatsoever is beyond the compass of custom, we deem likewise to be beyond the compass of reason, God knows how unreasonably, for the most part.”[43] Yet in the next breath he will exclaim at those who demand changes. Often he comments keenly on the incredible readiness of men to go to war over trifles; but in another mood he accuses the nobility of his day of unwillingness to take up arms “except upon some urgent and extreme necessity.”[44] In the same page he will tell us that he is “easily carried away by the throng,” and that he is yet “not very easy to change, forsomuch as I perceive a like weakness in contrary opinions.”[45] “I am very easily to be directed by the world’s public order,”[46] is the upshot of his easy meditations. And a conformist he remained in practice to the last, always bearing himself dutifully towards Mother Church, and generally observing the proprieties, though he confesses that he “made it a conscience to eat flesh upon a fish day.”[47]
His conformities, verbal and practical, have set certain Catholics upon proving his orthodoxy, though his Essays are actually prohibited by the Church. A Benedictine, Dom Devienne, published in 1773 a Dissertation sur la Religion de Montaigne, of which the main pleas are that the Essais often affirm the divinity of the Christian faith; that the essayist received the freedom of the city of Rome under the eyes of the pope; and that his epitaph declared his orthodoxy! A generation later, one Labouderie undertook to set forth Le Christianisme de Montaigne in a volume of 600 pages (1819). This apologist has the courage to face the protest of Pascal: “Montaigne puts everything in a doubt so universal and so general that, doubting even whether he doubts, his uncertainty turns upon itself in a perpetual and unresting circle.... It is in this doubt which doubts of itself, and in this ignorance which is ignorant of itself, that the essence of his opinion consists.... In a word, he is a pure Pyrrhonist” (Pensées, supp. to Pt. i, art. 11). The reply of the apologist is that Montaigne never extends his skepticism to “revelation,” but on the contrary declares that revelation alone gives man certainties (work cited, p. 127).
That is of course merely the device of a hundred skeptics of the Middle Ages; the old shibboleth of a “twofold truth” modified by a special disparagement of reason, with no attempt to meet the rejoinder that, if reason has no certainties, there can be no certainty that revelation is what it claims to be. When the apologist concludes that Montaigne’s aim en froissant la raison humaine is to “oblige men to recognize the need of a revelation to fix his incertitudes,” it suffices to answer that Montaigne in so many words declares at the outset of the Apologie de Raimond Sebonde that he knows nothing of theology, which is equivalent to saying that he is not a student of the Bible. As a matter of fact he never quotes it!
In the last and most characteristic essay of all, discoursing at large Of Experience, he makes the most daring attack on laws in general, as being always arbitrary and often irrational, and not seldom more criminal than the offences they punish. After a planless discourse of diseases and diets, follies of habit and follies of caprice, the wisdom of self-rule and the wisdom of irregularity, he contrives to conclude at once that we should make the best of everything and that “only authority is of force with men of common reach and understanding, and is of more weight in a strange language”—a plea for Catholic ritual. Yet in the same page he pronounces that “Supercelestial opinions and under-terrestrial manners are things that amongst us I have ever seen to be of singular accord.”
There is no final recognition here of religion as even a useful factor in life. In point of fact Montaigne’s whole habit of mind is perfectly fatal to orthodox religion; and it is clear that, despite his professions of conformity, he did not hold the Christian beliefs.[48] He was simply a deist. Again and again he points to Sokrates as the noblest and wisest of men; there is no reference to Jesus or any of the saints. Whatever he might say in the Apology, in the other essays he repeatedly reveals a radical unbelief. The essay on Custom strikes at the root of all orthodoxy, with its thrusts at “the gross imposture of religions, wherewith so many worthy and sufficient men have been besotted and drunken,” and its terse avowal that “miracles are according to the ignorance wherein we are by nature, and not according to nature’s essence.”[49] Above all, he rejected the great superstition of the age, the belief in witchcraft; and, following the lead of Wier,[50] suggested a medical view of the cases of those who professed wizardry.[51] This is the more remarkable because his rubber-ball fashion of following impulsions and rebounding from certainty made him often disparage other men’s certainties of disbelief just because they were certainties. Declaring that he prefers above all things qualified and doubtful propositions,[52] he makes as many confident assertions of his own as any man ever did. But the effect of the whole is a perpetual stimulus to questioning. His function in literature was thus to set up a certain mental atmosphere,[53] and this the extraordinary vitality of his utterance enabled him to do to an incalculable extent. He had the gift to disarm or at least to baffle hostility, to charm kings,[54] to stand free between warring factions. No book ever written conveys more fully the sensation of a living voice; and after three hundred years he has as friendly an audience as ever.
Owen notes (French Skeptics, p. 446; cp. Champion, pp. 168–69) that, though the papal curia requested Montaigne to alter certain passages in the Essays, “it cannot be shown that he erased or modified a single one of the points.” Sainte-Beuve, indeed, has noted many safeguarding clauses added to the later versions of the essay on Prayers (i, 56): but they really carry further the process of doubt. M. Champion has well shown how the profession of personal indecision and mere self-portraiture served as a passport for utterances which would have brought instant punishment on an author who showed any clear purpose. As it was, nearly a century passed before the Essais were placed upon the Roman Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1676).
To the orthodox of his own day Montaigne seems to have given entire satisfaction. Thus Florimond de Bœmond, in his Antichrist (2e éd. 1599, p. 4), begins his apologetic with a skeptical argument, which he winds up by referring the reader with eulogy to the Apologie of Montaigne. The modern resort to the skeptical method in defence of traditional faith seems to date from this time. See Prof. Fortunat Strowski, Histoire du sentiment religieux en France au xviie siècle; 1907, i, 55, note. (De Montaigne à Pascal.)
The momentum of such an influence is seen in the work of Charron (1541–1603), Montaigne’s friend and disciple. The Essais had first appeared in 1580; the expanded and revised issue in 1588; and in 1601 there appeared Charron’s De la Sagesse, which gives methodic form and as far as was permissible a direct application to Montaigne’s naturalistic principles. Charron’s is a curious case of mental evolution. First a lawyer, then a priest, he became a highly successful popular preacher and champion of the Catholic League; and as such was favoured by the notorious Marguerite (the Second[55]) of Navarre. On the assassination of the Duke of Guise by order of Henri III he delivered an indignant protest from the pulpit, of which, however, he rapidly repented.[56] Becoming the friend of Montaigne in 1586, he shows already in 1593, in his Three Truths, the influence of the essayist’s skepticism,[57] though Charron’s book was expressly framed to refute, first, the atheists; second, the pagans, Jews, Mohammedans; and, third, the Christian heretics and schismatics. The Wisdom, published only eight years later, is a work of a very different cast, proving a mental change. Even in the first work “the growing teeth of the skeptic are discernible beneath the well-worn stumps of the believer”;[58] but the second almost testifies to a new birth. Professedly orthodox, it was yet recognized at once by the devout as a “seminary of impiety,”[59] and brought on its author a persecution that lasted till his sudden death from apoplexy, which his critics pronounced to be a divine dispensation. In the second and rearranged edition, published a year after his death, there are some modifications; but they are so far from essential[60] that Buckle found the book as it stands a kind of pioneer manual of rationalism.[61] Its way of putting all religions on one level, as being alike grounded on bad evidence and held on prejudice, is only the formal statement of an old idea, found, like so many others of Charron’s, in Montaigne; but the didactic purpose and method turn the skeptic’s shrug into a resolute propaganda. So with the formal and earnest insistence that true morality cannot be built on religious hopes and fears—a principle which Charron was the first to bring directly home to the modern intelligence,[62] as he did the principle of development in religious systems.[63] Attempting as it does to construct a systematic practical philosophy of life, the book puts aside so positively the claims of the theologians,[64] and so emphatically subordinates religion to the rule of natural reason,[65] that it constitutes a virtual revolution in public doctrine for Christendom. As Montaigne is the effective beginner of modern literature, so is Charron the beginner of modern secular teaching. He is a Naturalist, professing theism; and it is not surprising to find that for a time his book was even more markedly than Montaigne’s the French “freethinker’s breviary.”
Strowski, as cited, pp. 164–65, 183 sq., founding on Garasse and Mersenne. Strowski at first pronounces Charron “in reality only a collector of commonplaces” (p. 166); but afterwards obliviously confesses (p. 191) that “his audacities are astonishing,” and explains that “he formulates, perhaps without knowing it, a whole doctrine of irreligion which outgoes the man and the time—a thought stronger than the thinker!” And again he forgetfully speaks of “cette critique hardie et méthodique, j’allais écrire scientifique” (p. 240). All this would be a new form of commonplace.
It was only powerful protection that could save such a book from proscription; but Charron and his book had the support at once of Henri IV and the President Jeannin—the former a proved indifferentist to religious forms; the latter the author of the remark that a peace with two religions was better than a war which had none. Such a temper had become predominant even among professed Catholics, as may be gathered from the immense popularity of the Satyre Menippée (1594). Ridiculing as it did the insensate fanaticism of the Catholic League, that composition was naturally described as the work of atheists; but there seems to have been no such element in the case, the authors being all Catholics of good standing, and some of them even having a record for zeal.[66] The Satyre was in fact the triumphant revolt of the humorous common sense of France against the tyranny of fanaticism, which it may be said to have overthrown at one stroke,[67] inasmuch as it made possible the entry of Henri into Paris. By a sudden appeal to secular sanity and the sense of humour it made the bulk of the Catholic mass ashamed of its past course.[68] On the other hand, it is expressly testified by the Catholic historian De Thou that all the rich and the aristocracy held the League in abomination.[69] In such an atmosphere rationalism must needs germinate, especially when the king’s acceptance of Catholicism dramatized the unreality of the grounds of strife.
After the assassination of the king in 1610, the last of the bloody deeds which had kept France on the rack of uncertainty in religion’s name for three generations, the spirit of rationalism naturally did not wane. In the Paris of the early seventeenth century, doubtless, the new emancipation came to be associated, as “libertinism,” with licence as well as with freethinking. In the nature of the case there could be no serious and free literary discussion of the new problems either of life or belief, save insofar as they had been handled by Montaigne and Charron; and, inasmuch as the accounts preserved of the freethought of the age are almost invariably those of its worst enemies, it is chiefly their side of the case that has been presented. Thus in 1623 the Jesuit Father François Garasse published a thick quarto of over a thousand pages, entitled La Doctrine Curieuse des Beaux Esprits de ce temps, ou prétendus tels, in which he assails the “libertins” of the day with an infuriated industry. The eight books into which he divides his treatise proceed upon eight alleged maxims of the freethinkers, which run as follows:—
I. There are very few good wits [bons Esprits] in the world; and the fools, that is to say, the common run of men, are not capable of our doctrine; therefore it will not do to speak freely, but in secret, and among trusting and cabalistic souls.
II. Good wits [beaux Esprits] believe in God only by way of form, and as a matter of public policy (par Maxime d’Etat).
III. A bel Esprit is free in his belief, and is not readily to be taken in by the quantity of nonsense that is propounded to the simple populace.
IV. All things are conducted and governed by Destiny, which is irrevocable, infallible, immovable, necessary, eternal, and inevitable to all men whomsoever.
V. It is true that the book called the Bible, or the Holy Scripture, is a good book (un gentil livre), and contains a lot of good things; but that a bon esprit should be obliged to believe under pain of damnation all that is therein, down to the tail of Tobit’s dog, does not follow.
VI. There is no other divinity or sovereign power in the world but Nature, which must be satisfied in all things, without refusing anything to our body or senses that they desire of us in the exercise of their natural powers and faculties.
VII. Supposing there be a God, as it is decorous to admit, so as not to be always at odds with the superstitious, it does not follow that there are creatures which are purely intellectual and separated from matter. All that is in Nature is composite, and therefore there are neither angels nor devils in the world, and it is not certain that the soul of man is immortal.
VIII. It is true that to live happily it is necessary to extinguish and drown all scruples; but all the same it does not do to appear impious and abandoned, for fear of offending the simple or losing the support of the superstitious.
This is obviously neither candid[70] nor competent writing; and as it happens there remains proof, in the case of the life of La Mothe le Vayer, that “earnest freethought in the beginning of the seventeenth century afforded a point d’appui for serious-minded men, which neither the corrupt Romanism nor the narrow Protestantism of the period could furnish.”[71] Garasse’s own doctrine was that “the true liberty of the mind consists in a simple and docile (sage) belief in all that the Church propounds, indifferently and without distinction.”[72] The later social history of Catholic France is the sufficient comment on the efficacy of such teaching to regulate life. In any case the new ideas steadily gained ground; and on the heels of the treatise of Garasse appeared that of Marin Mersenne, L’impieté des Déistes, Athées et Libertins de ce temps combattue, avec la refutation des opinions de Charron, de Cardan, de Jordan Brun, et des quatraines du Déiste (1624). In a previous treatise, Quæstiones celeberrimæ in Genesim ... in quo volumine Athei et Deisti impugnantur et expugnantur (1623), Mersenne set agoing the often-quoted assertion that, while atheists abounded throughout Europe, they were so specially abundant in France that in Paris alone there were some fifty thousand. Even taking the term “atheist” in the loosest sense in which such writers used it, the statement was never credited by any contemporary, or by its author; but neither did anyone doubt that there was an unprecedented amount of unbelief. The Quatraines du Déiste, otherwise L’Antibigot, was a poem of one hundred and six stanzas, never printed, but widely circulated in manuscript in its day. It is poor poetry enough, but its doctrine of a Lucretian God who left the world to itself sufficed to create a sensation, and inspired Mersenne to write a poem in reply.[73] Such were the signs of the times when Pascal was in his cradle.
Mersenne’s statistical assertion was made in two sheets of the Quæstiones Celeberrimæ, “qui ont été supprimé dans la plupart des exemplaires, à cause, sans doute, de leur exagération” (Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 28, where the passage is cited). The suppressed sheets included a list of the “atheists” of the time, occupying five folio columns. (Julian Hibbert, Plutarchus and Theophrastus on Superstition, etc., 1828; App. Catal. of Works written against Atheism, p. 3; Prosper Marchand, Lettre sur le Cymbalum Mundi, in éd. Bibliophile Jacob, 1841, p. 17, note; Prof. Strowski, De Montaigne à Pascal, 1907, p. 138 sq.) Mersenne himself, in the preface to his book, stultifies his suppressed assertion by declaring that the impious in Paris boast falsely of their number, which is really small, unless heretics be reckoned as atheists. Garasse, writing against them, all the while professed to know only five atheists, three of them Italians (Strowski, as cited).
END OF VOL. I.
[1] Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Viret, note D. [↑]
[2] Calvin, scenting his heresy, warned him in 1552 (Bayle, art. Marianus Socin, the first, note B); but they remained on surprisingly good terms till Lelio’s death in 1562. Cp. Stähelin, Johannes Calvin, ii. 321–28. [↑]
[3] Cp. the English History of Servetus, 1724, p. 39, and Trechsel, Lelio Sozzini und die Antitrinitarier seiner Zeit (Bd. ii. of Die protestantischen Antitrinitarier), 1844, pp. 38–41. [↑]
[4] Cited by Trechsel, p. 42, note. [↑]
[5] Cp. Bayle, art. Ochin; Miss Lowndes, Michel de Montaigne, p. 266; Owen, French Skeptics, p. 588; Benrath, Bernardino Ochino of Siena, Eng. tr. 1876, pp. 268–72. McCrie mentions (Ref. in Italy, p. 228, note) that Ochino’s dialogue on polygamy has been translated and published in England “by the friends of that practice.” (In 1657. Rep. 1732.) [↑]
[6] Above, pp. 458–59, Sermons (orthodox) by Ochino were published in English in 1548, and often reprinted. [↑]
[7] D’Ewes, Journals of Parliament in the Reign of Elizabeth, 1682, p. 65. [↑]
[9] The Scholemaster, Arber’s rep. p. 82. [↑]
[10] E.g., work cited, pt. ii, Max. 1, and Max. 6, end. Eng. tr. 1608, pp. 93, 128. [↑]
[11] Mark Pattison, Essay on Joseph Scaliger, in Essays, Routledge’s ed. i, 114. [↑]
[12] When Pattison declares that Italian curiosity had bred “not secret unbelief but callous acquiescence” he sets up a spurious antithesis; and when he generalizes that in Italy “men did not disbelieve the truths of the Christian religion,” he understates the case. He errs equally in the opposite direction when he alleges (ib. p. 141) that in the France of Montaigne “a philosophical skepticism had become the creed of all thinking men.” Such a difference between France and Italy was impossible. [↑]
[13] See McCrie, Reformation in Italy, ed. 1856, pp. 96–99. [↑]
[14] Trechsel, Die protestantischen Antitrinitarier vor Faustus Socinus, i (1839), 56; Mosheim, 16 Cent. 3rd sec. pt. ii, ch. iv, § 3. [↑]
[15] Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 82. [↑]
[16] Art. Acontius, in Dict. of National Biog. Cp. J. J. Tayler. Retrospect of the Religious Life of England, 2nd ed. pp. 205–206. As to the attack on latitudinarianism in the Thirty-nine Articles, see above, p. 460. [↑]
[17] Bacon, Adv. of Learning, bk. i; Filum Labyrinthi, § 7 (Routledge ed. pp. 50, 63, 200). [↑]
[18] Cp. Zeller, Hist. de l’Italie, pp. 400–12; Green, Short Hist. ch. viii, § 2. [↑]
[19] McCrie, p. 164. It was said by Scaliger that “in the time of Pius IV [between Paul IV and Pius V] people talked very freely in Rome.” Id. ib. note. “It was even considered characteristic of good society in Rome to call the principles of Christianity in question. ‘One passes,’ says P. Ant. Bandino, ‘no longer for a man of cultivation unless one put forth heterodox opinions concerning the Christian faith.’” Ranke, Hist. of the Popes, Bohn, tr. ed. 1908, i, 58, citing Caracciolo’s MS. Life of Paul IV. [↑]
[21] Under the alternative titles of The Examination of Men’s Wits and A Trial of Wits. Rep. 1596, 1604, 1616. [↑]
[22] Carew’s tr. ed. 1596, p. 15. [↑]
[25] According to Henri Estienne, Postell himself vended strange heresies, one being to the effect that to make a good religion there were needed three—the Christian, the Jewish, and the Turkish. Apologie pour Hérodote, liv. i, ed. 1607, pp. 98–100. [↑]
[26] Published at Antwerp. It was reprinted in 1582, 1583, and 1590; translated into Latin in 1583, and frequently reprinted in that form; translated into English (begun by Sir Philip Sidney and completed by Arthur Golding) in 1587, and in that form at least thrice reprinted in blackletter. [↑]
[27] Ed. 1582, p. 18. Eng. tr. 1601, p. 10. [↑]
[28] Or even in modifying philosophic doctrine, save perhaps as regards Descartes, later. Cp. Bartholmess, Hist. crit. des doctr. relig. de la philos. moderne, 1855, i, 21–22. [↑]
[29] See Owen, Skeptics of the French Renaissance, pp. 631–36—a fairer and more careful estimate, than that of Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 111–13. [↑]
[30] Essais, bk. ii, ch. xiii, ed. Firmin-Didot, vol. ii, 2–3; King Lear, i, 2, near end; Les Amants Magnifiques, i, 2; iii, 1. Montaigne echoes Pliny (Hist. Nat. ii, 8), as Molière does Cicero, De Divinatione, ii, 43. [↑]
[31] “Our religion,” he writes, “is made to extirpate vices; it protects, nourishes, and incites them” (Essais, liv. ii, ch. xii; éd. Firmin-Didot, ii, 464). “There is no enmity so extreme as the Christian.” (I quote in general Florio’s translation for the flavour’s sake; but it should be noted that he makes many small slips.) [↑]
[32] Owen was mistaken (Skeptics of the French Renaissance, p. 414) in supposing that Montaigne spent several years over this translation. By Montaigne’s own account at the beginning of the Apologie, it was done in a few days. Cp. Miss Lowndes’s excellent monograph, Michel de Montaigne, pp. 103, 106. [↑]
[33] Éd. Firmin-Didot, ii, 469. [↑]
[34] Miss Lowndes, p. 145. Cp. Champion, Introd. aux Essais de Montaigne, 1900. [↑]
[35] Essais, liv. ii, ch. xii; liv. iii, ch. v. Ed. cited, i, 65; ii, 309. [↑]
[36] For a view of Montaigne’s development see M. Champion’s excellent Introduction—a work indispensable to a full understanding of the Essais. [↑]
[38] Cp. the Essais, liv. iii, ch. i (ed. cited, ii, 208). Owen gives a somewhat misleading idea of the passage (French Skeptics, p. 486). [↑]
[39] Miss Lowndes, Michel de Montaigne, p. 131. Cp. Owen, p. 414. [↑]
[40] He was consistent enough to doubt the new cosmology of Copernicus (Essais, as cited, i, 615); and he even made a rather childish attack on the reform of the Calendar (liv. iii, chs. x, xi); but he was a keen and convinced critic of the prevailing abuses in law and education. Owen’s discussion of his opinions is illuminating; but that of Champion makes a still more searching analysis as regards the conflicting tendencies in Montaigne. [↑]
[45] Liv. ii, ch. xvii. Ed. cited, ii, 58. [↑]
[47] Liv. iii, ch. xiii. Ed. cited, ii, 572. [↑]
[48] Cp. the clerical protests of Sterling (Lond. and Westm. Rev. July, 1838, p. 346) and Dean Church (Oxford Essays, p. 279) with the judgment of Champion, pp. 159–73. Sterling piously declares that “All that we find in him [Montaigne] of Christianity would be suitable to apes and dogs....” [↑]
[49] Liv. i, ch. xxii. Cp. liv. iii, ch. xi. [↑]
[53] Cp. citations in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 18, note 42 (1-vol. ed. p. 296); Locky. Rationalism, i, 92–95; and Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 44. [↑]
[54] As to Henri IV see Perrens, p. 53. [↑]
[55] Not, as Owen states (French Skeptics, p. 569), the sister of Francis I, who died when Charron was eight years old, but the daughter of Henri II, and first wife of Henri of Navarre, afterwards Henri IV. [↑]
[56] Cp. Prof. Strowski, De Montaigne à Pascal, as cited, p. 170 sq., and the Discours Chrétien of Charron—an extract from a letter of 1589—published with the 1609 ed. of the Sagesse. [↑]
[57] Cp. Sainte-Beuve, as cited by Owen, p. 571, note, and Owen’s own words, p. 572. [↑]
[58] Owen, p. 571. Cp. pp. 573, 574. [↑]
[59] Bayle, art. Charron. “A brutal atheism” is the account of Charron’s doctrine given by the Jesuit Garasse. Cp. Perrens, p. 57. [↑]
[60] Owen (p. 570) comes to this conclusion after carefully collating the editions. Cp. p. 587, note. The whole of the alterations, including those proposed by President Jeannin, will be found set forth in the edition of 1607, and the reprints of that. One of the modified passages (first ed. p. 257; ed. 1609, p. 785) is the Montaignesque comment (noted by Prof. Strowski, p. 195) on the fashion in which men’s religion is determined by their place of birth. “C’est du Montaigne aggravé,” complains M. Strowski. And it is left unchanged in substance. [↑]
[61] “The first ... attempt made in a modern language to construct a system of morals without the aid of theology” (3-vol. ed. ii, 19; 1-vol. ed. p. 296). [↑]
[62] Cp. Owen, pp. 580–85. [↑]
[63] Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 21; 1-vol. ed. p. 297. [↑]
[64] E.g., the preface to the first edition, ad init. [↑]
[65] E.g., liv. ii, ch. xxviii of revised ed. (ed. 1609, p. 399). [↑]
[66] See the biog. pref. of Labitte to the Charpentier edition, p. xxv. The Satyre in its own turn freely charges atheism and incest on Leaguers; e.g., the Harangue de M. de Lyon, ed. cited, pp. 79, 86. This was by Rapin, whom Garasse particularly accuses of libertinage. See the Doctrine Curieuse, as cited, p. 124. [↑]
[67] It had to be four times reprinted in a few weeks; and the subsequent editions are innumerable. Ever since its issue it has been an anti-fanatical force in France. [↑]
[68] Cp. Ch. Read’s introd. to ed. 1886 of the Satyre, p. iii. (An exact reprint.) The Satyre anticipates (ed. Read, p. 281; ed. Labitte, p. 227) the modern saying that the worst peace is better than the best war. [↑]
[69] De Thou, T. v, liv. 98, p. 63, cited in ed. 1699 of the Satyre, p. 489. De Thou was one of the Catholics who loathed the savagery of the Church; and was accordingly branded by the pope as a heretic. Buckle, 1-vol. ed. pp. 291, 300, notes. [↑]
[70] M. Labitte, himself a Catholic, speaks of Garasse’s “forfanterie habituelle” and “ton d’insolence sincère qui déguise tant de mensonges” (Pref. cited, p. xxxi.). Prof. Strowski (p. 130) admits too that “Il ne faut pas trop s’attacher aux révélations sensationelles du père Garasse: les maximes qu’il prête aux beaux esprits, il les leur prête en effet, elles ne leur appartient pas toutes. La société secrète, la Confrérie des Bouteilles, ou il les dit engagés, est un invention de sa verve bouffonne.” But the Professor, with a “N’importe!”, forgives him, and trades on his matter. [↑]
[71] Owen, French Skeptics, p. 659. Cp. Lecky, Rationalism, i, 97, citing Maury, as to the resistance of libertins to the superstition about witchcraft. [↑]
[72] Doctrine Curieuse des Beaux Esprits, as cited, p. 208. This is one of the passages which fully explain the opinion of the orthodox of that age that Garasse “helped rather than hindered atheism” (Reimmann, Hist. Atheismi, 1725, p. 408). [↑]
[73] Mersenne ascribed the quatrains to a skilled controversialist. Quæstiones, pref. [↑]
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