It is no wonder that the authorities became alarmed. Legitimate exception was taken to the enthusiasts’ indecency—men went virtually naked, women insufficiently clad, all were under a temptation to sexual excesses.[67] Worse was the doctrinal error involved—the attack upon sacraments and priesthood contained in the preaching of the strange means of grace by these new priests of Baal.[68] In 1349 Clement VI, condemning the movement on the ground of the contempt of the Church implied in the formation of such an unlicensed fellowship, ordered the suppression of the Flagellants, who thereafter came under the purview of the Inquisition. The heretical doctrine inherent in the Flagellant mania was enunciated in its most extravagant form by a native of Thuringia, named Conrad Schmidt, who in 1414 was maintaining that all spiritual authority had passed from the Catholic Church to the Flagellants, that not only were the sacraments useless, but they had been proscribed by God and it was mortal sin to partake of them, so that, for example, the ceremony of marriage polluted the union.

The fundamentally anti-sacerdotal character of the Flagellant movement was shared by another contemporary mania in Flanders and the Rhinelands—a dancing mania, under whose impulse fanatics would leap and convulse themselves in the most violent contortions in fierce ecstasies of religious frenzy.[69]

It is a most curious and remarkable story that is made by these interconnected heresies, more especially of the thirteenth century, and by others like them. In the midst of the Ages of Faith individual emotional outpourings or intellectual speculations would lead to strange results of fanaticism or dogma. There were indeed some that were mainly sensual in origin, but others betokened an earnest desire for a new heaven and a new earth and demanded a moral progression in human affairs not visible in existing human society. Such an aspiration is implicit in all the strange theories connected with ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ and in all the ideas of the Spiritual Franciscans, their offshoots and their companion sects. How much of such aspiration, such opinions could the mediæval Church absorb within herself? It was ever doubtful. It would have been impossible to predict beforehand upon which side would eventually be found many of the remarkable men referred to in this chapter—Francis, John of Parma, Bonaventura, Marsiglio of Padua, William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Amaury, Master Eckhart. The pope who condemned the Spiritual Franciscans might easily have regarded Francis himself as a heretic. Fortunately for herself the Church, while repudiating doctrines which were obviously unchristian, those that were the mere frenzies of the ignorant and the demented, succeeded in absorbing a large measure of the enthusiasm and the thought of the age, incorporated the mendicant orders, produced the scholastic philosophy. Nevertheless there were abroad in the mediæval world moral and intellectual ferments, yearnings for regeneration and guesses at truth which found within her fold no satisfaction.

Note.—In O. Holder-Egger’s (complete) edition of Salimbene (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, vol. xxxii, Hanover and Leipzig, 1905-13) the most important references to Joachitism are on pp. 231-41, 292-4, 455-8.

CHAPTER IV - AVERRHOÏST INFLUENCES

The great intellectual achievement of the Middle Ages was the recovery of the learning of the world that had vanished before the onset of the Hun, the Vandal and the Lombard.[70] That learning was in part classical, in part patristic. But as the process of absorption was the achievement of the Church, the emphasis was on theology, and the works of the Fathers bulked very much more largely than the profane literatures of Greece and Rome. There was much in the teaching of Augustine that was Neoplatonic, that was akin to the speculations of Plato himself. But the whole point of view, method and cast of mind of the mediæval thinker were radically different from those of the pagan philosopher. The latter set out upon the search for abstract truth without any preconceptions; the former started from the postulate of a divine revelation. His primary object was not to investigate, but to justify the ways of God to man. For him all knowledge must be a theodicæa. He was not, therefore, an original thinker; for the foundations of his scholarship being revealed truth, his most marked characteristic was a sincere deference to authority. He was, moreover, ever conscious that the salvation of the soul was a matter of greater cogency than even the exposition of God’s dealings with the world. At the same time mediæval philosophy was of a peculiarly formal pattern; and to the modern world it is apt to appear pedantic indeed, ‘cabined, cribbed, confined.’ It rested upon the tripod of grammar, rhetoric, logic. It was a matter very largely of dialectic, and it may seem to us of mere verbal juggling. The Trivium was an introduction to metaphysics, but the metaphysics were strongly theological in bias and nakedly logical in form. Their clue to the processes of thought being logic, not psychology, mediæval thinkers did not clearly distinguish between problems of the human mind and problems of reality, assuming an exact correspondence between mental conceptions and the ultimate facts of the universe.

Yet whatever the defects of the scholastic philosophy, it holds a great and significant place in the history of the intellectual development of western Europe, since it was the means whereby the learning of the ancient world was recovered and preserved and an intellectual continuity rendered possible. Such is one out of many of the great contributions made by the mediæval Church to the cause of civilization. Secular knowledge was not proscribed, but on the contrary adopted and utilized, by the Church; enquiry and research not looked askance upon, but encouraged. The universities of the Middle Ages were ecclesiastical in origin; their teachers and scholars were clerks. The great University of Paris, the very centre of the intellectual life of Christendom in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was an object of very special solicitude to the Holy See. The two great mendicant orders, the Prædicants and the Minorites, taking the lead in the schools and universities only a few years after their own inception, speedily produced some of the most erudite and the most brilliant minds of the Middle Ages.

In the twelfth century the leading scholastics were Augustinians; in the middle of the thirteenth the dominant philosophy was still of a Neoplatonic character. The great Franciscans Alexander of Hales, Bonaventura, Peckham belonged to that school of thought. In many of them, notably in Bonaventura, there was a marked strain of mysticism. The mystic note in Plato, his insistence on moral and spiritual values had made his doctrine harmonize easily with Christian dogma. The appropriation of pagan thought and secular science had not so far produced any discord with the truths of the Christian faith, or any serious tendency to question them. It is indeed significant that the pupils of Anselm of Bec should have asked him for a rational justification of Christian dogma; but that had not betokened any doubt as to the possibility of reconciling faith with reason, but only an appreciation of the desirability of being able to demonstrate that, however superfluous, such justification was perfectly possible. Again, in the vast compendious treatises of such encyclopædic scholars as Vincent of Beauvais, Hugo of St. Victor and Peter Lombard, there was the explicit recognition that, while secular learning is a thing to be desired for its own sake, yet its stages of cogitatio and meditatio are only the threshold before the portal of the shrine, wherein the divine nature may be contemplated. Reason cannot unaided explain the ineffable; the visible world is but the simulacrum of the unseen.[71] Once or twice indeed there had been hints of danger. Right back in the ninth century a certain very self-confident Irishman, by name John Scotus Eriugena, had declared the supremacy of reason over authority; for while authority sometimes proceeded from reason, reason never proceeded from authority. In the eleventh century there had been the aberrations of Berengar of Tours and Roscellinus. In the next century a new and more brilliant Eriugena arose in the person of Abelard, a man even more self-opinionated and self-confident, one who treated the seeming contradictions of the Fathers as opportunity merely for mental calisthenics, whose whole method of thought appeared to enthrone reason at the expense of authority. But the potential danger was never realized. The trained dialectician trembled before the unlearned spiritual dictator of Christendom; the man who exalted himself in his own eyes dared not face Bernard, to whom God was all in all and man as nothing: and at the last Abelard, a monk of Cluny, died humbled, in the odour of sanctity. Up to the end of the twelfth century, then, the free play of enquiry and discussion in the schools had not threatened defilement of the purity of the Christian faith. Heresy had indeed been a serious danger; but not among the learned, not in the precincts of the university, had it been bred.