HERESIES.
The real meaning of the word Heresy.—The Heretics of the Apostolic Days.—Simon the Magician.—Cerinthus.—The Nicolaitans.—The Gnostics.—The Schools of Philosophy of Byzantium, Antioch, and Alexandria.—Julian the Apostate.—The Pelagians and the semi-Pelagians.—Nestorius.—Eutyches.—The Iconoclasts.—Amaury.—Gilbert de la Porrée.—Abelard.—Arnold of Brescia.—The Albigenses.—The Waldenses.—The Flagellants.—Wickliff.—John Huss.—Jerome of Prague.—Luther.—Henry VIII. and the Anglican Church.—Calvin.
Probably few persons are aware that the real meaning of the word heresy, after its Greek origin (hairesis), means only opinion. Heresy consists in the pretensions to explain Holy Scripture after one’s own private judgment or personal opinion instead of receiving the interpretation given to the sacred text by the authority of the Church. Heretics have existed from the time of the apostles. St. Paul, speaking in reference to them, recommends a course which, unfortunately, has not always been followed. “If,” he says, “any man obey not our word, ... have no company with him; ... nevertheless, count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.” St. Peter, with his zealous ardour, exhorts the faithful, in language full of imagery, to be on their guard against the errors of the Gnostics (that is, the savants or the érudits): he calls them “wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest.” He then sums up the foundation of their doctrine in a few energetic sentences:—“For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error.” We know that the Gnostics believed perfection to consist in science; they held that faith and virtuous living were only meant for the common people. Infatuated by their own learning, they even rejected the authority of Christ, whom they refused to recognise as their Lord and their God; for the doctrine concerning the angels they substituted a theory of divine emanations, and they recognised the ancient doctrine of the eternal antagonism between the good and the evil principle.
The Acts of the Apostles, in speaking of the success which attended the preaching of Philip the deacon to the inhabitants of Samaria, relate that there was in that city a magician named Simon, who exercised so great an influence over the people that they all took heed of what he said and called him “the great power of God.” But the miracles worked by Philip had greater influence than the sorceries of Simon, and the people came in crowds to be baptized, Simon himself becoming a disciple of Philip.
The remainder of the story told us in the Acts of the Apostles reveals the origin of a word which appears too often in the religious history of the Middle Ages for us to let slip the opportunity of here explaining it by a fact which, moreover, helps to show how it happened that Simon fell from sincere Christianity into heresy. The apostles at that time residing in Jerusalem, having heard of the conversion of Samaria, they came to lay hands upon—that is to say confirm—the newly baptized; and the latter, when they received the Holy Ghost, were visible partakers of His marvellous gifts, which were general in the primitive Church. The Scripture says, “And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, saying, Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost. But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.... Repent, therefore, of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.... Then answered Simon, and said, Pray ye to the Lord for me, that none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me.” It is because Simon was the first who attempted to buy for money a spiritual power that his crime was called simony, and that the epithet of simonist was applied to all who purchased ecclesiastical cures.
Fig. 306.—Babylon the Great (mulier super bestiam), represented as a woman holding a cup, and riding the beast spoken of in the Apocalypse.—Miniature from a “Commentaire sur quelques Livres de l’Ecriture,” a Manuscript of the Eleventh Century, in the National Library, Paris. From Count Bastard’s great work.
The repentance of Simon the heretic did not last long, for an author of the third century, whose account is confirmed by a passage in Suetonius, tells us that this neophyte having returned to his practice of magic, and being jealous of the influence which the apostles had acquired by their miracles, boasted that he would raise himself into the air in the presence of the emperor and the people. In order to humiliate St. Peter, who was in Rome at that time, he insisted that the apostle should be present to witness this triumph of his magical art. At first his endeavours seemed as if about to succeed—he was lifted high into the air amidst the applause of the crowd; but Peter invoked the aid of his Divine Master to confound the spirit of evil, and at his prayer the magician, suddenly abandoned by the demon who had been lending him his aid, fell to the ground and broke his leg so near to the spot where Nero was sitting, that, to quote Suetonius, the blood spurted on to the emperor’s mantle.
Amongst the heresiarchs of the first century must also be mentioned Cerinthus the Jew, who had become a Christian, but who was looked upon by the apostles as the corrupter of the religion of Jesus Christ. He taught, in fact, that Jesus was not the Son of God, and that Christ, coming down from heaven in the form of a dove, was only incorporated in him after his baptism in the waters of Jordan. Ebion, a disciple of Cerinthus, also denied the divinity of Christ, and was the founder of the sect of the Ebionites. Nicholas the deacon, in his attempt to make the law of the Gospel fit in with heathen customs, gave birth to the heresy of the Nicolaitans, who were afterwards merged in the Gnostics. This latter sect, to which we have already alluded, developed enormously in the second century; and its doctrine, as well as that of Manichæus, the originator of Manichæism—that redoubtable heresy which sprung from the admixture of the ancient religions of India with Christianity—constituted the basis of nearly all the heresies of the Middle Ages.
Fig. 307.—Orthodoxy surrounded by the Snares of Heresy.—Boniface Simoneta (1470 to 1500), Abbot of San Stefano del Corno (diocese of Cremona), “calling God to his aid in order that his work may be more efficaciously wrought, ... and desiring above all things to speak reason and equity.”—Fac-simile of a Wood-Engraving in the “Livre des Persécutions des Crestiens:” Paris, Antoine Verard, gothic 4to (no date).
The schools of philosophy of Byzantium, Antioch, and Alexandria pursued their career of scepticism and sacrilegious discussion concerning the divinity of Jesus Christ during the second and third centuries. After throwing doubt upon the divine essence of the three persons of the Trinity, others still more daring, such as Sabellius and Praxeas, attempted to show that these three persons in God were but three symbolic names given to the same substance. The Council of Alexandria (261) punished these culpable errors. Soon after, an Egyptian priest named Arius took them up and propagated them very widely, maintaining that Jesus Christ was a created being, perfect no doubt and almost like unto God, but not himself God. His doctrine also contained secret heresies which were condemned by the Œcumenical Council of Nice (325). Nevertheless this doctrine, known as Arianism, made great progress; it was adopted and supported by several emperors, it spread throughout Europe, and, in spite of the authority of councils, and the efforts of popes and bishops, it seemed destined to lay the foundation of a new Christianity in which the divinity of Christ was to find no place. But the most radical attack upon Christianity was undoubtedly the conspiracy of divergent sects under the leadership of the Emperor Julian (331–362), surnamed the Apostate because he abjured the Christian faith with the view of re-establishing paganism. His plan for arriving at this result was very skilfully conceived. Perceiving that it would be necessary to combine all the forces directed against the Church, he showed favour to the heresies and the schools of philosophy which, after obtaining a certain notoriety under Plotinus and Porphyrius, had lapsed into the ridiculous fancies of evocations and of demonology. But, under the protection of the emperor, matters assumed a different aspect, as is pointed out by M. Jules Simon in his “Histoire de l’Ecole d’Alexandrie.” This school, “humiliated by the triumphs of Christianity, reduced to silence and obscurity, without any fixed purpose, devoid of credit and influence, all at once took up a fresh attitude at the accession of Julian, and attempted to employ the sovereign power, with which one of its followers was clothed, for extinguishing Christianity.” The struggle was a terrible one, and the Church seemed to have lost all human means of defence. Her children implored for help from on high, and the premature death of Julian was attributed to the divine intervention. Ecclesiastical writers relate that St. Basilius the Great, while praying God to protect his Church against the persecutor, was transported in a dream: he saw Christ in heaven and heard him say to St. Mercurius (the martyr of Cesarea, in Cappadocia), “Go and smite the enemy of those who believe in me.” The holy martyr at once sped on his mission, and, returning in a short space of time, said to his Divine Master, “Your orders are executed, Julian is no more.” St. Basilius had this vision on the night of the emperor’s death. Several writers assert that the emperor, knowing whence came the blow which was to prove fatal to him, collected in the palm of his hand the blood which issued from the wound, and scattering it towards the heavens, exclaimed, “Thou hast vanquished, Galilean.” These stories, popularised by the Byzantine art (Fig. 308), testify to the importance attached by the Christians to the struggle in which they were engaged with Julian.
The fathers of the Church endeavoured to oppose to the schools of philosophy, which had done so much harm to religion, purely ecclesiastical schools, for the teaching of the faithful and in order to protect them from the seductions of heretical learning. The school of Edessa was the most flourishing of these Eastern schools during the third and fourth centuries.
Fig. 308.—Dream of St. Basilius the Great.—The Martyr of Cesarea, St. Mercurius, sent from heaven by Christ, is in the act of stabbing the Emperor Julian the Apostate, whom he has thrown to the ground (see the text, p. 399).—After a Greek Painting of the Sixteenth Century, though the style is that of the Eleventh, in the Library of M. Firmin-Didot. The matters relating to this subject will be found collected in the “Mélanges d’Archéologie” of P. Cahier, vol. i., p. 39 et seq.
The part taken by the emperors themselves in the dogmatic disputes of the Christians, and the notoriety acquired by the rhetoricians who attacked or defended the truth, had made a number of vain nonentities rival each other in extravagance and recklessness in their endeavours to become celebrated: they tried to attract public notice by an excess of zeal against the heretics, by the austerity of their habits, by some eccentric practice, or by the rashness of their attacks against the discipline of the Church, notably against the worship paid to the Virgin. Such were Coluthus, Aetius, Bonosus, Helvidius, Jovinian, the Barefooted Friars, the Messalians, the Priscillianists, &c. Civil dissensions broke out and blood was shed, and the Court of Byzantium felt, through the great officers of the empire—and especially through the women, who took a passionate interest in these abstractions of dogma—the effect of every religious collision.
During the fourth century Arianism, which only saw in the Word a superior being created to intervene between God and man, was the prevailing heresy. The fifth century was agitated by the Pelagians, disciples of Pelagius, a native of Great Britain. This man, who was wanting neither in talent nor in ability, endeavoured to promulgate his doctrine, based upon the negation of original sin; he maintained that man could observe the commandments of God and work out his own salvation without the supernatural aid of divine grace—this was a virtual denial of Christ’s word, “Without me ye can do nothing.” Celestius, one of his followers, promulgated this heresy in Africa, where it was eloquently combated by St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippona. The council of Carthage (415) condemned it, and, upon the demand of the Fathers there present, Pope Innocent I. issued his anathema against Pelagius and his adherents. It was then that St. Augustine pronounced the celebrated sentence, “Rome has spoken, the judgment of the African bishops is confirmed by letters from the pope, the cause is at an end—pray God that the error may be also!” (Roma locuta est, causa finita est). But the leader of the sect wrote to Zosimus, Innocent’s successor, a respectful letter of justification, and, his envoy Celestius having presented to the new pope an insidious profession of faith, by which he undertook to condemn anything which should be reprobated by the Holy See, Zosimus intervened with the African bishops on behalf of Pelagius, whom he sincerely believed to be attached to the true faith. Those bishops represented to the pontiff that his credulity had been imposed upon, and that the heretic, before receiving absolution, ought to be made to abjure his errors formally and explicitly. The pope then saw the trickery which had been attempted, and again condemned Pelagius and his followers. The latter appealed to the Council, but St. Augustine proved that the heresy imputed to them had been fully inquired into by the African bishops and irrevocably condemned by the Holy See, and that all that remained to be done was to put it down. The Emperor Honorius, considering the political troubles which were engendered, in the East more especially, by religious dissensions, decreed that whoever should persist in upholding the errors of Pelagianism should be punished with exile.
The heresy did not, however, altogether disappear, but underwent a modification of form, and the semi-Pelagians, whose doctrine was formally expounded by Cassianus the monk, while admitting original sin, maintained that God had given to man the innate and natural power of walking in the way of salvation, of believing and of freeing himself from the fetters of sin without the help of divine grace. This was appropriating the religious to the philosophical notion of free-will. These abstract questions may to us seem very subtle, but in these early centuries they were the great questions which occupied the attention of society. A new heretic, Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, created a vast sensation throughout Christianity by maintaining that Jesus Christ embodied two distinct persons. Hitherto all Christians had believed as the Church taught them, that the divine and the human nature of Jesus Christ belonged to one person—the Word, the second person of the Trinity. Nestorius attacked this fundamental dogma indirectly, declaring that the Virgin should be called the Mother of Christ, but not the Mother of God. This doctrine, implying that in Christ there were two distinct persons, was so repulsive to the faithful that, when the bishop expounded it to them for the first time, they immediately left the church for fear of seeming to approve this new heresy. The Emperor Theodosius the younger, seeing what disturbance the preaching of Nestorius was giving rise to in Constantinople, assembled a council at Ephesus, which was presided over by St. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, on behalf of the pope. The heresiarch refused to appear, and his doctrine was examined, discussed, and condemned.
The people of Ephesus gave marked evidence of their satisfaction when they found that the title of Mother of God was confirmed to the Virgin. But the ambassador of Theodosius, a devoted ally of Nestorius, intercepted the despatch of the proceedings of the Council, and sent to Constantinople a garbled account. The approaches to the imperial palace were so well guarded, that there seemed to be little hope of acquainting the emperor with what had really taken place, until a deputy of the council resorted to the ruse of disguising himself as a beggar and conveying the true written report in the hollow of his staff. Theodosius then shut up Nestorius in a monastery at Antioch, and, as he continued to promulgate his dogma, exiled him to Egypt.
A zealous monk, Eutyches, superior of a monastery near Constantinople, while combating the heresy of Nestorius, fell into the opposite error, alike contrary to orthodox teaching. Instead of respecting the letter of the dogma, he in his turn became a schismatic, as he maintained that there was only one nature in Jesus Christ—the divine; that this had absorbed the human nature as the ocean absorbs a drop of water. Condemned at Constantinople, he appealed from the sentence to another council assembled at Ephesus, the decrees of which were confirmed by Theodosius II. At the accession of Justinian, the orthodox religion regained all its authority; Eutychianism no longer dared to attack it, but Arianism extended even into Gaul in the track of the victorious armies of Theodoric, Egidius, Odoacer, Totila, and the long-haired kings.
The reign of Leo the Isaurian opened up fresh opportunities for error. The sacred images, which had been held in veneration from the earliest ages, became a cause of dispute in the East, where they were disapproved of by Mahomet and forbidden by the Koran. It was alleged that the figurative representation of human beings was subjected to certain astral and diabolical influences, and that it was contrary to religion, not to say sacrilegious, thus to disturb the quiet repose of their souls. Leo the Isaurian, who had imbibed this idea, which was, moreover, taught in oriental magic, issued against all kinds of images the celebrated edict which was excommunicated by the pope, and which convulsed the whole Eastern world. Luitprand, King of the Lombards, the Venetians, Charles Martel and his Franks, were summoned to the aid of the Eternal City, menaced by the forces of the empire, which was determined to impose the condemnation of images upon the Western Church. Charles Martel, by his overthrow of the victorious Saracens on the plains of Poitiers (732), rendered a service of inestimable value to the Christian religion as well as to France, for Islamism was upon the point of subjugating all Christian Europe.
Fig. 309.—Amaury’s Disciples burnt by order of Philip Augustus (1208).—Fac-simile of a Miniature in the “Chroniques de St. Denis” (Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century).—Burgundian Library, Brussels.
Fig. 310.—Episode in the Siege of Toulouse, representing, according to tradition, the death of Simon de Montfort, who was killed on the 25th of June, 1218.—Bas-relief in stone in the Church of St. Nazaire, in Carcassonne (Thirteenth Century).
During the reign of the Empress Irene, the second Council of Nice had re-established the worship of images (787), but, until the accession of the Empress Theodora, who enforced the decisions of the Council, the Iconoclasts upon the one side, and the Manicheans upon the other, continued to disturb the East as well as the various provinces of Western and Southern Europe. In this great civil war a hundred thousand persons perished; and those who succeeded in escaping took refuge in the solitude of remote valleys and inaccessible mountains, where they entrenched themselves and incessantly made inroads upon and ravaged the territory of the empire. The separation of the Greek and the Latin Churches, prepared if not actually affected under the Emperor Bardas (854-866), served to further the spread of heresy. No new sect arose in the eleventh century, but schisms broke out in the Church, some due to individual pride and ambition, others emanating from the dialectics of Aristotle, from the strange abuse of syllogism, and the substitution of reasoning for faith. The mysteries were radically changed by the endeavours to reconcile them with ordinary ideas, to interpret and accommodate them to the vulgar understanding. Bérenger (tenth century), in endeavouring to explain the dogma of the eucharist, himself fell into heresy, and Roscelin, the chief of the Nominalists (eleventh century), in his efforts to clear up the mystery of the Trinity, was led to assert that it was but a name which did not correspond with any actual fact. The Manicheans had made their way into Europe; they affected a love of poverty and humble conduct which predisposed people in their favour and won them adherents. Many of them were burnt at the stake, but the sect was not crushed out, often reappearing in different cities of Europe under various names, now in one shape and now in another.
The civil tribunals also condemned to be burnt the disciples of a theologian named Amaury of Paris, who promulgated his dogma during the reign of Philip Augustus (Fig. 309). He taught that God is the first cause, and that the law of Jesus Christ was to terminate in the year 1200, and to make way for the law of the Holy Ghost, which would sanctify men without any external act; by his denial of the resurrection of the dead and of hell, he destroyed the essential basis of morality. This doctrine, as convenient as it was dangerous, found many warm partisans.
Abelard, the most talented dialectician of his day, gifted with wonderful learning, and armed with a rational theology which he made intelligible, assigned a different origin and a different mode of action to each of the three persons of the Trinity. The divines at once prepared to combat his views, and St. Bernard constituted himself their champion. Abelard, when condemned, repented, and, on his knees before his judges, burnt the books which contained his heretical theories; he showed himself, indeed, even a greater man by this expiatory act than he had ever done by the brilliancy of his teaching. Bishop Gilbert de la Porrée, a scholastic heresiarch like Abelard, also met a terrible antagonist in the gifted Abbot of Clairvaux, and, bowing his head, he confessed his guilt, leaving his disciples to maintain that the attributes of God ought to be considered as distinct from his essence. Arnold of Brescia attacked the temporal power, upon the ground that the Church should be stripped of her property, that the wallet of St. Peter should be given back to the pope, and the ancient Roman Republic proclaimed in the pontifical city. Valdo went still further; he advised the Christians to renounce all kinds of property, in order to render their lives more spiritual. The Albigenses (Figs. 310 and 311) and the Waldenses, who were Manicheans under another name, eventually embodied in themselves all the heresies which, towards the close of the twelfth century, had spread over Europe and chiefly throughout the south of France. In the following chapter (“The Inquisition”), the account of the crusade preached against them is related at length. From every quarter of Christendom, but chiefly from Germany, Flanders, and France, crusaders were enlisted beneath the banner of the faith.
Fig. 311.—Entry of Louis VIII., King of France, and of Cardinal St. Angelo, the Pope’s Legate, upon the 12th of September, 1226, into Avignon, which had just capitulated after a three months’ siege.—After a Miniature in the “Chroniques de Hainaut” (Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Burgundian Library, Brussels).
Fig. 312.—Heresy of the Flagellants.—The Latin inscription upon the streamer borne by the Bishop of Hippona signifies, “They sacrifice to Satan, and not to God.”—Fac-simile of a Miniature in the “Cité de Dieu,” by St. Augustine (Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in St. Geneviève Library, Paris).
This campaign was begun in 1196. The council which condemned the new Manichean heresy met at Montpellier in December of that year, and the first effect of the repressive measures which it very promptly employed was to drive back into the Cevennes, the Alps, and the Vosges, and towards the Rhône, the Moselle, and the Rhine, a host of heretics who endeavoured to teach publicly in the free towns of Germany.
An excess of devotion, which had its origin in the wish to avert the wrath of God, gave birth in Italy quite spontaneously to the sect known as the Flagellants. This strange infatuation for scourging began at Perugia, whence it passed to Rome and afterwards to Germany and Poland. The nobles, the elders, the people of all classes, the poor and even the children, traversed the streets of the towns and the country districts with bare shoulders, scourging themselves mercilessly with whips having leathern thongs (Fig. 312). These fanatics who travelled through all Europe, firmly believed that an angel had brought a missive from Jesus Christ, which declared that there was only one way for a Christian to obtain pardon for his sins, viz. to leave his native country and scourge himself for thirty-three consecutive days, in commemoration of the thirty-three years which Christ had passed upon earth. The Apostolicals, the Dulcinists, the Beghards, the Flagellants, the Spiritual Brothers, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Turlupins, &c., adopted these superstitious ideas, and constituted distinct sects which were condemned by the Church as heretical. The sectaries appealed from the sentence: the civil tribunals backed up the ecclesiastical ones; the faggots were kindled and a vast number of heretics perished; many, however, escaped, and, joining the Albigenses, they formed the sect of the Lollards. The Englishman Wickliff, whose heresy had pervaded all Britain (1368–1384), openly attacked the Court of Rome, the upper clergy, the liturgy, and the sacraments, with an audacity all the greater because he felt that he had the support of the people at large and of several sovereigns. The University of Oxford made a critical examination of Wickliff’s books, and found them to contain two hundred and seventy-eight reprehensible propositions, which it submitted for censure to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. After he had declaimed against the Church, its customs and its institutions, Wickliff attacked the very foundations of civil society, by his doctrine that, to possess any right or authority upon earth, it was necessary to be in a state of grace. Consequently kings, nobles, and the landowners were to lose their political and domanial rights, since they were in a state of mortal sin, just as the pope, the bishops, and the priests through sin were to lose their spiritual powers. He moreover denied the existence of free-will; and his allegation that everything which man did he was necessarily obliged to do, implied that all punishment was unjust, for no one is guilty who acts under compulsion. Lastly, he only recognised the existence of God to make Him responsible for evil, maintaining that God also is moved by an invincible necessity, that He looks with approval on those who sin, that He even constrains men to commit sin; “so that,” as Bossuet remarks, “the religion of this so-called Reformer was worse than atheism.” It is true that with Wickliff God counted for little, for, according to his system, “every creature is God, everything is God.” It is easy to understand the effect of such doctrines as these upon the masses; the religious dispute was transformed into a social question. The followers of Wickliff, when condemned, refused to bow to the decisions of the ecclesiastical authority. Their books were burnt, their apostles were sent to the stake, while others were imprisoned or exiled. But, in spite of this rigorous treatment, Wickliff’s doctrines made a deep impression in England, obtained shortly afterwards the protection of the House of Commons, and disposed men’s minds to bend beneath the despotic will of Henry VIII.
Fig. 313.—John Wickliff, a theologian Heresiarch, the Precursor of Luther, born at Wickliff, in England, about 1324, died in 1387.—After the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres:” 4to, Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581.
The staunchest Catholic writers admit that the clergy are themselves responsible for the triumph of the heretics. Moeller says—“The relaxation of ecclesiastical discipline amongst the clergy and that in a great many religious communities, from which the pontifical court itself was not always exempt, gave the sectaries of the sixteenth century a pretext for their rebellion against the Church, its doctrines, its hierarchy, and its institutions. To this moral decadence of a great part of the clergy must further be added the profound ignorance of the upper clergy; and even those who cultivated literature and science confined themselves almost exclusively to the study of Greek and Latin literature, which directed the whole course of scientific research from the fifteenth century downwards. Many pagan ideas had pervaded men’s minds, and had contributed to create a feeling of contempt both for Christianity and for that beautiful Christian literature which had shed a lustre on the Church from the very earliest times. This condition of the clergy had a baneful influence upon the mass of the people, who lived in utter ignorance of religion, and who had lost their attachment to the Church and all respect for its pastors.”
This religious indifference of the clergy and of the people explains the success, not only of the heresiarchs who presented themselves as reformers of manners and discipline, but even of the sects held in the lowest esteem, the sorcerers, for instance. The facts are too numerous and too well-authenticated to admit of any doubt upon this head. There existed throughout all Europe, in the Middle Ages, numerous sects of sorcerers and witches who in all seriousness professed to give themselves over to the devil in exchange for the gift of magic power. The Spanish Inquisition was not the only body which sent them to the stake, after having submitted them to trial and received the confession of their misdeeds; the French tribunals pronounced sentence of death in similar cases when the accused, after long and minute interrogatories, but without being put to the torture, made a confession of their satanic orgies known by the name of sabbat (Fig. 314). This kind of heresy eluded all the steps taken by the civil and the religious powers to put it down. The “Histoire des Procès de Sorcellerie,” by Soldam, tells us that, even at the close of the sixteenth century, from 1590 to 1594, thirty-five witches were condemned to be burnt, out of a total population of six thousand, in the small Protestant town of Nordling, in Germany. The enormities of the sect of sorcerers attest, no doubt, a profound depravation of morals, but they contained no germ of social revolution; such, however, was not the case with the theories expounded by the great heresiarchs.
Fig. 314.—The “Sabbat,” reprint of the legend contained in a sentence of the Arras Tribunal in 1460.—Engraving of the Sixteenth Century, preserved in the National Library, Paris.
Wickliff’s doctrine soon made its way into Germany. It was propagated by John Huss, one of the doctors at the University of Prague. When the University discovered this, it solemnly condemned Wickliff’s books, and prohibited them from being read. John Huss did not venture upon any overt opposition; but, as the doctors of the University were Germans, he called to his aid the vanity of the Bohemians and the personal ill-will of King Wenceslaus against the Germans, who had deposed him from the empire. The situation of the professors became untenable, and they left with their two thousand pupils for Leipsic, where they founded the University. John Huss was joined by several ecclesiastics, who were anxious to acquire liberty of action; but the leading Bohemian professors, convoked by the archbishop to examine the works of Wickliff which John Huss had distributed amongst the Bohemian nobles, decided that the possessors of these books should surrender them to be burnt. John Huss again endeavoured to temporise, promising the archbishop to correct in his preaching anything which might have escaped him contrary to Christian doctrine; for, in his view, this promise did not prevent him from propagating the doctrine of Wickliff, which he believed to be quite orthodox. He was supported by Jerome of Prague, a man of position, who, in addition to his ardour and daring, was a bachelor in theology, though a layman. The latter was so zealous in his partisanship, that he upon one occasion stopped three Carmelite monks who had been combating the theories of Wickliff, and threw one of them into the Moldau. Denounced to the pope by the clergy of Prague, John Huss and his adherents were declared heretics and excommunicated. A rebellion got up in Prague by his partisans, headed by the impetuous Jerome, cost a great number of them their lives, the senate visiting their crimes with capital punishment. John Huss appealed from the sentence of the pope to the next council; and this, which was held at Rome in 1413, condemned afresh the writings of Wickliff and excommunicated John Huss, who had not put in an appearance, although he was cited before the Council. The Chancellor Gerson, the illustrious Dean of the Faculty of Theology in the University of Paris, which had just condemned the nineteen errors of John Huss, wrote to the Archbishop of Prague, exhorting him to take the necessary steps for repressing this heresy.
That prelate, in conformity with Gerson’s advice, obtained the support of the King of Bohemia; and it was decreed that all those who still adhered to the condemned theories of Wickliff should be expelled from the kingdom. John Huss was thus compelled to leave the city, but he declaimed as vehemently as ever against the Church, and especially against the pope.
Fig. 315.—John Huss, the celebrated Heresiarch, born in Bohemia; tried, condemned, and burnt at Constance in 1415.
Fig. 316.—Jerome of Prague, a Disciple of John Huss, born at Prague about 1378; burnt alive for heresy at Constance in 1416.
After the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres:” Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581.
The Council of Constance, convoked for the 1st of November, 1414, was ordered to examine his doctrines. John Huss, far from flinching at this decisive moment, vehemently called upon his adversaries, by public placards, to come and put him to confusion before the council. “If,” he stated in these placards, “I can be convicted of any error, or of having taught anything contrary to the Christian faith, I am ready to undergo the punishment inflicted upon heretics.” He then solicited and obtained from the Emperor Sigismund a safe-conduct, in which it was stated that, “out of respect for the imperial majesty he was to be let freely and safely pass, sojourn, remain, and return, and be provided, if necessary, with other fitting passports.” John Huss left Prague on the 11th of October (Figs. 315 and 316), and on the 20th, in a letter written from Nuremberg, he expresses his satisfaction at the reception which he has everywhere met with, especially from the ecclesiastics, who seemed disposed to accept his doctrine. Upon reaching Constance, on the 3rd of November, he expounded his ideas very freely, both by word of mouth and in writing; and, in spite of the excommunication hurled against him, he said mass every day in a private room, but without making any secret of it, to the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. Upon the 28th of November he was arrested and cast into prison. After many witnesses had been examined, thirty-nine articles taken from his speeches and writings were read in public, the most important of which declared “that the elect alone are members of the Catholic Church; that St. Peter neither is nor ever has been the chief of that Church; that by the commission of mortal sin the ecclesiastical and civil authorities lose their rights and privileges; and lastly, that the condemnation of the forty-five articles of Wickliff was unreasonable and unjust.” The venerable Peter d’Ailly exhorted John Huss to submit himself to the judgment of the council; the emperor did the same, threatening him, if he refused, with the rigour of the law. Upon the following day he was given a recantation to sign, which he would not consent to do. A fortnight afterwards, on the 24th of June, his books were condemned to be burnt. On the 6th of July the council declared him to be a heretic, and degraded him from his ecclesiastical orders, by which process he was handed over to the secular arm. The emperor, who was present, had him immediately seized by the count-palatine, and the civil law, which condemned stubborn heretics to the stake, was applied in all its rigour. John Huss submitted to his fate with courage. Jerome of Prague at first signed the formula of recantation, but he soon afterwards disavowed it; and, after publicly declaring that he adopted the whole doctrine of John Huss, he also was sent to the stake.
These pitiless measures failed to intimidate the partisans of John Huss; on the contrary, they became converted into a horde of fanatics, in which all the sects hostile to the Church became indiscriminately merged. Ziska, the chamberlain of King Wenceslaus, placing himself at their head, ravaged Bohemia, pillaged the monasteries, massacred the monks, constituted himself absolute master of the country, holding in check the whole military force of the empire. After his death (1424) the Hussites, far from giving in their submission and avowing their errors, continued supreme in Germany, so that Luther had only to cast seed upon the ground which they had bedewed with blood.
By a strange anomaly, the Hussites remained firmly attached to the dogma of the eucharist; and the chief inducement of the people to join their party was, in several cases, the privilege of being able to receive the communion in both kinds. The Hussites, assembled to the number of forty thousand in their celebrated camp of Tabor, by the wayside, without any preliminary confession, received the communion under the elements of bread and wine. Their leader signed himself Ziska of the Chalice; and when the moderate section of the party separated themselves from the more advanced section, he chose the name of Calixtines to indicate his own followers. The Protestants, on the contrary, were not long in coming to deny the real and abiding presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements. The importance attached to this dogma drew general attention to the extraordinary case of a woman possessed, who travelled through the dioceses of Laon and Soissons towards the middle of the sixteenth century. This was a young woman, recently married, of the name of Nicole, belonging to a humble but very honest family. There were many public exorcisms, and the paroxysms of the patient were always allayed by the giving of the sacrament. The case was much criticised; it was submitted to a scrupulous examination, and the agitation which it gave rise to was so great that the authorities intervened. Nicole was handed over to the royal delegates (Fig. 317), “who ordered that all the experiments should be made by physicians and surgeons officially appointed, and selected from among Catholics and Protestants alike, so that there should be no suspicion attaching to their reports.” The evidence of these doctors did away with all idea of fraud, which the judicial authorities would have had no hesitation in punishing had it been practised. The Prince de Condé, Governor of Picardy, and one of the warmest upholders of the Reformed Religion, so called, detained for several days at his residence the possessed woman, together with her parents, who accompanied her wherever she went; but his interrogatories failed to shake their conviction that Nicole had been possessed, and that the eucharist had restored her. At last, a royal order enabled these poor people to return to their own home at Vervins.
Fig. 317.—Exorcism of a person possessed with a devil in the Church of Notre-Dame, at Laon, by the bishop of that city, on the 8th of February, 1566.—Reduced Fac-simile of an Engraving in the “Manuel de la Victoire du Corps de Dieu sur l’Esprit malin,” by Jean Boulaese: 16mo., Paris, 1575.
The ecclesiastical authority, seconded as it was by the orthodox sovereigns, had been nearly always sufficient to suppress the heretical movements, which were circumscribed within a few provinces or dioceses; but the violent dissensions of Rome with the Empire, the two rival camps, formed during two centuries between the popes and the anti-popes, the independent position acquired by the communes after reiterated uprisings against their bishops and nobles, rendered necessary the intervention of a judicial authority in the religious quarrels and contentions springing out of the heresies and schisms which were constantly arising. The creation of this authority, half civil and half ecclesiastical, emanating from the throne, was mainly with a view to protect the legacy of the past against the encroachments and the audacious claims of the future. This is how it came to pass that, from the fourteenth century, the courts styled Cours des Grand Jours, the presidential tribunals, the parliaments, and even the bailiwicks, together with the Châtelet of Paris, intervened in matters of worship, though their rulings were not always in accordance with canonical law. The Inquisition failed to effect a permanent lodgment in France, but the ordinary tribunals claimed for themselves the right to take cognizance of crimes of heresy without having recourse to the aid of the ecclesiastical authorities.
Fig. 318.—Allegorical Picture of the Excesses committed by the Huguenots.—The lion bound and tamed represents France reduced to a deplorable position by the heretics, as much by civil war, pillage, violence, and bloodshed, as by the impiety of which they left traces everywhere, profaning churches, breaking the sacred vessels, and treading under foot the crosses, the images, and the relics of the saints.—After a Drawing from the Manuscript “De Tristibus Franciæ,” preserved in the Library of Lyons. (Sixteenth Century.)
Fig. 319.—John Knox, Propagator of the Reformed Religion, so-called, in Scotland; born at Gifford in 1504, died in 1572.
Fig. 320.—Ulrich Zwingle, the first champion of religious reform in Switzerland; born and died at Wildhaus, in the Canton of St. Gall, 1484–1531.
From the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres:” Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581.
Fig. 321.—The Massacre of St. Bartholomew, Paris, August 24th, 1572.—The principal subject is the murder of Coligny. To the left, the admiral is leaving the Louvre, and while reading a memorandum is wounded by an arquebuse fired by Maurevert from a window (August 22nd); in the background, one of his equerries is communicating this fact to King Charles IX., whom he finds playing at tennis. To the right, Coligny, attacked by soldiers in his hotel, Rue Béthisy, is assassinated by Besme, and his body, thrown from the window, falls at the Duc de Guise’s feet. In the next house Téligny and other Protestants are being massacred.—After a German Engraving, a reprint of one of the Supplementary Plates of the Collection engraved by Jean Tortorel and Jacques Perrissin.
When Luther’s protests against Rome and Catholicism (1517) first burst upon the world, the heresy of Reform had long slumbered in a chrysalis state, so to speak, awaiting only some circumstance to favour its development. “The egg was laid,” as Erasmus remarked, “Luther had but to incubate and hatch it.” The corruption of the higher classes, of the clergy, and of the people, increased his chances of success. The suppression of celibacy amongst the clergy, and of monastic vows, was looked upon with secret favour by the depraved among the bishops, priests, and monks; the prospect of seeing all the property of the Church fall into their possession excited the cupidity of the princes and nobles; and the rejection of ecclesiastical teaching flattered the vanity of the people, who were made supreme judges of the dogmas through the right which had been given to them, themselves to interpret the Bible, now translated into the vulgar tongue. For two centuries Rationalism had been disseminating the leaven of revolt against the authority of the past, and the advent of printing lent it fresh force. The apostle of the new doctrine had only to pronounce the word negation, and an army of disciples rose up to follow him and fight under his banner—disciples who, at first obedient to his command, soon became rebellious, and impatient to obtain for themselves the liberty of inquiry and the independence of principles which Luther despotically endeavoured to reserve exclusively for himself. Carlstadt, Œcolampadius, Hutten, Zwingle (Fig. 320), Schwenckfeld, Munzer, Staupitz, Knox (Fig. 319), and many others, while following in the footsteps of the famous Wittenberg professor, had their own school: “The teachings crashed like avalanches, the doctrines rattled like the tempest; there was a dark abyss of neologies, inconsistencies, and contradictions, amidst which no ray of the eternal sun of grace was visible,” to quote the poetic simile of Wieland. The intellectual movement was none the less gigantic, especially in Germany and in the countries bordering on the Moselle. A deluge of statements, of pamphlets, and of stories, some true and others false, issuing, most of them anonymously, from an infinity of printing-presses, were rapidly disseminated, and made their way into every district; the allegorical eucharist of Zwingle, the revolutionary appeal of Munzer to the Franconian monks, the restoration of the letter by Schwenckfeld, the trope of Carlstadt against Luther, assumed a thousand different forms; while the indefatigable Luther himself, in turn a Demosthenes, a Petronius, a Danubian peasant, a beer-sodden drunkard, spun out in fifteen thousand folio pages his senseless Protestant theories—a chaos of eloquence, poesy, impassioned similes, tangible truths, audacious falsehoods, venom, hatred, jealousy, and filth. The famous Leipsic dispute, the sessions of Worms and of Augsburg, the war of extermination of the peasantry, the quarrel about images, the interview of Mauburg, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in France (Fig. 321)—in a word, the numerous revolutions of this great religious drama which Europe was watching with nervous anxiety, are brought into less marked relief in the large works since published by learned controversialists, than in these desultory pages, scattered to the winds, sung at the street-corners, accompanied by denunciations, threats and sanguinary struggles between the irreconcilable factions of Catholic and Huguenot.
Fig. 322.—Martin Luther.—Reduced Fac-simile of a Portrait by Lucas de Cranach (1520), published in the fly-leaf of a sermon preached by Luther against the authority of the Roman Church (in octavo, Wittenberg, 1522), when he threw off his garb of an Augustine monk. The Latin distich renders famous both the artist and the original in these words:—“If Luther leaves imperishable traces of his genius, Lucas (Cranach) perpetuates for ever the features which death will efface.”
Lutheranism, in consequence of a revolt in the cloister, had led to anarchy in the Church, to the exile of Carlstadt, who was compelled to beg his bread from village to village, to the persecutions against Œcolampadius and Schwenckfeld, and to the massacre of a hundred thousand rebellious peasants in Thuringia and Swabia. A multitude of sects—the Sacramentarians, the Œcolampadians, the Antinomians, the Majorists, and the Anabaptists were given birth to by the heresy of Luther; there were as many popes as there were dissenting churches. The Lutheran creed was still confined to the countries on the other side of the Rhine, when the French sectaries, Farel and Froment (Fig. 324), set out to revolutionise Geneva and the neighbouring country. An unjust hatred for the House of Savoy attracted to their standard a large body of patriots, who, aspiring after a democratic independence, hoped to rid themselves of hereditary monarchy and to break with Catholicism, its main ally.
Fig. 323.—John Calvin, called the Pope of Geneva, chief of the so-called Reformed Church; born at Noyon in 1509, died at Geneva in 1564.—Fac-simile of a Wood Engraving from the works of Theodore Beza, translated from the Latin by Simon Goulart—“Les Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres” (4to, Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581).—One of the engraved frontispieces of this collection bears the monogram of Jean Cousin.
In England, the king separated himself from the Roman Church. Henry VIII., unable to obtain from Pope Clement VIII. a bull annulling his marriage with Catherine of Arragon, and permitting him to espouse Anne Boleyn, declared himself to be the supreme and only head of the Church in his own kingdom, but he did not touch upon the dogmas which he had defended against Luther; thus it was a schism rather than a heresy. Under his successors, in conformity with a decision of the English Parliament, a synod assembled in London drew up the Confession of Faith for the Anglican Church, which differs less than any other, in regard to dogma and discipline, from the traditions of the Catholic Church.
Fig. 324.—William Farel, preacher of the so-called Reformed faith; born at Gap in 1489, died at Geneva in 1565.—From the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres:” 4to, Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581.
Calvin, upon arriving at Geneva, his mind imbued with those evangelical novelties which constituted a heresy essentially French, found the Reformation already accomplished there. Its passage was marked only too plainly by ruins and blood-stains; the stripping of the vanquished by their conquerors had turned a religious reform into a social revolution. Calvin, a jealous and inflexible sectary, laid hold upon reform as an instrument of despotism. In order to become head of the Church as well as head of the State, he proclaimed the doctrinal negation of authority, thus beginning where Luther ended. To the Saxon-like creed of the great Reformer, he adapted a mixed system concerning the Lord’s Supper borrowed from Zwingle and Œcolampadius; he was ardent and pitiless, as the sad fate of Servet and of Gruet too clearly prove; he was determined to reign by terror, for he was a slave of politics rather than of spiritual ideas. This it is which constitutes so marked and characteristic a difference between the two champions of Protestantism, between the rebellious monk of Wittenberg and the apostate priest of Noyon. Calvin entered upon an overt struggle with all the renegades of the Catholic school, with Gentilis, Ochino, Castalion, and Westphalz; his doctrine and his teaching were alike divergent from those of Zwingle in the mountains of Switzerland, of Melancthon in the University of Wittenberg, of Œcolampadius at the foot of the Hauenstein, of Martin Bucer at Strasburg, and of Brentzen at Tubingen. Amongst the Geneva sectaries, two friends, Farel and Beza, alone remained faithful to him, more through compatibility of temperament than from identity of principles. The French Huguenots had, however, accepted as their supreme chief a theocrat like Calvin, who, for four-and-twenty years, never stepped without an escort of swords, of faggots, and of executioners (Fig. 325).
Fig. 325.—Violence of the French Huguenots against the Catholics.—A. Noble lady of Montbrun (Charente) being tortured by soldiers whom she had hospitably welcomed. They are burning the soles of her feet with red-hot irons, and with the sharp edges of the irons cutting the skin from her legs in strips.—B. Master Jean Arnould, Procureur-Royal at Angoulême, after having had his limbs mutilated, is strangled in his own house.—C. The widow of the Procureur at the criminal court of that city, seventy years of age, being dragged by the hair through the streets.—Fac-simile of a Copper-plate in the “Theatrum Crudelitatum nostri Temporis” (4to, Antwerp, 1587).
Fig. 326.—Seal of an imaginary Bull of Lucifer, taken from the “Roi Modus,” a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Burgundian Library, Brussels. The inscription on the seal seems to be cabalistic; at any rate, it is unintelligible.
It is therefore to Calvin and his personal influence that must be attributed the violent and merciless character which reform took during the sixteenth century, when the horrors of religious warfare were excused by the necessity of preaching the word of God to Christians who were anxious to hear it!