Mediæval Heresy & the Inquisition

by Arthur Stanley Turberville

Of far greater weight than that of the Franciscan leader was the authority of William of Ockham in recommending the device of a General Council. Only, unlike the former, William of Ockham discerned infallibility in neither Pope nor General Council. All human beings are liable to err, whether individually or collectively, but the ultimate power in the Church must be the Church itself, the whole body of the faithful.[125] In his enormous work, his ‘Dialogus,’ there are contradictions and qualifications which indicate that the author was perplexed by the manifold practical difficulties of the problem of how to reunite Christendom.[126] But as a Spiritual Franciscan he was clear that the Pope had no right to secular property, and as a philosopher preferred the Church Universal itself to its pontiff as the repository of truth.

Of much less influence and reputation in his own lifetime than Ockham, yet of infinitely greater originality, penetration and width of view, astonishingly farseeing and modern in his standpoint, was Marsiglio of Padua. The central argument of his ‘Defensor Pacis’ is that the cause of all the turmoil and disturbance of the world has been the bid for temporal power made by the clergy, and especially the papacy.[127] Christ had definitely stated, ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’; yet the clergy had become utterly immersed in affairs of the earth. Marsiglio equally combatted two sacerdotal contentions—the right to intervene in secular matters in despite of the spiritual office, on the one hand; on the other hand, the right of exemption from the ordinary payments and obligations of citizens in virtue of the same spiritual office. He held that the clergy had one duty only, and that a spiritual duty—to attend to the welfare of the souls of their flock. They had no legitimate claim whatever, in his opinion, to special treatment from the lay authority.[128] Their spiritual character was relative only to their performance of spiritual functions; in so far as they performed any others they were on exactly the same footing as laymen. Their tenure of land should be on precisely the same conditions as that of the laity; the civil obligations of the layman were incumbent upon them also. Similarly, they had no right to special jurisdiction, involving the infliction of the same sort of penalties—fines and imprisonments for example—as appertained to the secular courts. Such jurisdiction was abhorrent to the spirit of the Gospel.[129] To counsel and to warn was within their province; to go beyond that was not. This, according to Marsiglio, applied even to heresy. If a heresy were dangerous to society, it was for the civil authority to deal with it. Merely as wrong opinion it was not punishable at all in this world.[130] While he thus restricted and narrowly defined the functions of the priesthood, Marsiglio in no wise narrowed the conception of the Catholic Church, but rather broadened it. For his outstanding argument is that the clergy have been narrowing that conception by arrogating to themselves a position and powers which belong to the whole community. While perniciously extending the meaning of the word ‘spiritual’ to cover such essentially secular things as property and political power, they have as falsely contracted it to exclude from all control of the Church’s destinies the mass of the laity. They also, although not in orders, are religious men, members of the Church; numerically they are by far the greater part of the Church. Consequently, in a General Council, which is a representative of the entire Christian communion, and not merely a part—the fact of ordination not making the clergy any the less a fragment—in a General Council resides the ultimate authority of the Church.[131]

In these remarkable pronouncements of Marsiglio of Padua are contained the doctrines of democracy and of toleration: so also in the careful allocation of the clergy to purely spiritual functions is contained the suggestion of that precise differentiation between Church and State which perhaps more than anything else marks off modern from mediæval society. The whole conception of the ‘Defensor Pacis’ was revolutionary. No heresy of the Middle Ages had been more dangerously subversive of the whole system of the Catholic Church as it then existed. The perverse absurdities of Catharism and other such half-crazed cults were abhorrent to all sane and healthily-minded men. But the doctrines taught by Marsiglio have commended themselves to many of the most sincere, the most devout and religious of men from his own day to this.[132]

Were these opinions heretical or not? They were declared to be so by John XXII; but amid the warring religious factions of the period it was no easy matter to say what was orthodox and what was not. The controversy regarding mendicancy raged. The Minorites declared Pope John a heretic because he would not agree that mendicancy was enjoined by Scripture. The view of the Pope was shared and soberly argued by Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh. It was not only the worldly cleric necessarily that failed to find warrant for the contentions of the Spirituals in the Bible.[133] A second new tenet of the time—the dogma of the Beatific Vision—John XXII, after first inclining to believe, latterly decided to reject; and in 1331 a certain English Dominican, for daring to assert that the souls of the righteous were immediately wafted into the presence of God and beheld Him without having to wait for the Day of Resurrection, was by the Pope’s orders brought before the Inquisition, and was thrown into gaol. John’s political opponents in Germany and France, together with the Spiritual Franciscans, immediately asserted the truth of the doctrine he had denounced, the French King writing to point out that the Pope’s ruling must seriously invalidate the belief in the invocation of saints and also all pardons and indulgences. John was forced to give way, and on his death-bed affirmed his adhesion to the doctrine of the Beatific Vision. As he did not make a formal recantation, however, of his previous error, Michael of Cesena held him to have died a contumacious heretic.[134] A third new doctrine, a little later on, after considerable and powerful opposition, gained a great triumph mainly through the instrumentality of the University of Paris, which forced Pope Clement VII to acknowledge its truth. This was the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. It had been resolutely condemned by St. Bernard, Peter Lombard, and later by Thomas Aquinas. But the appeal to the popular imagination of Mariolatry was too strong, strong enough even to defeat the decision of the great Doctor. It became inconceivable to the popular imagination, which ever tended to prefer the sweetness and gentleness of the Virgin to the awfulness of the Trinity, to believe that she could have had any connection whatever with sin. In 1387, when a certain Dominican professor at Paris preached a sermon maintaining that the Virgin was conceived in sin, there was a violent uproar, leading to Clement VII’s consenting to declare all those who held this view to be heretics.[135] The confusion as to the definition of orthodoxy and heresy, inevitably produced by the introduction of such new tenets as those just enumerated, was heightened by the decadent unreality of philosophy, when it permitted of the idea of a double truth, one theological, the other philosophical, and rendered it possible for a scholar to assert that even such cardinal doctrines as those of the Trinity, immortality, the resurrection, the efficacy of prayer might be true in theology, yet quite untrue in philosophy.[136] Such a disingenuous compromise put a premium at once upon scepticism and insincerity.

There was one great schoolman living against whom, despite the prolixity and barrenness of much of his logic, no charge of unreality or insincerity can be brought— John Wycliffe. Beneath the dialectical subtleties and sophistries common to all the works of the scholastic philosophers there was in his case a profound sense of the obligation to seek, and a zealous desire to discover, the absolute truth. As with all great thinkers who have left a permanent mark on the history of religious and political opinion, there was in Wycliffe a great moral earnestness, an honest hatred of shams and impurities and all that is ignoble. The scandals of Avignon and the Schism helped to form the creed of Wycliffe, as they did that of the most religiously-minded men of the fourteenth century. His teaching was the moral repercussion of a sensitive and powerful mind flung back from impact against the clerical abuses of the Church. Indeed, as in the case of Marsiglio, so in that of Wycliffe, his attack was primarily on the polity of the Church, only secondly on doctrine. Many of his writings are perfervid denunciations, in the violent language common to mediæval controversialists, of the ill-living, laxity and ostentation of the clergy. His diatribes against successive popes and the institution of the papacy became more and more unmeasured in the choice of epithets. The writings of Wycliffe cannot be taken as a true description of the Church of his time, so great is the allowance that has to be made for the hyperbolical language of furious partizanship.

The constructive doctrine of Wycliffe is derived from his idea of Lordship. His theology is given a feudal structure, which cumbrously overweights it with technicalities and analogies of interest only to a feudal age. The whole of human society is conceived as holding from God, the suzerain of all creation. The essential characteristic which Wycliffe ascribed to it brings out of this feudal nomenclature no mere analogy but a pregnant idea. Wycliffe postulated a fundamental distinction between spiritual and earthly tenure. The feudal system on earth was one of many gradations between the supreme overlord, the king, and the humblest holder of land. But between God and His subjects there were no such gradations: each man held directly of God.[137] The consequences of this statement were radical. For one thing it was reinforced by the contention that dominion was founded in grace only (there was no other lawful claim to rule or possession) and that no man living in sin had any right to any gift of God, whether that gift be spiritual or secular in nature. For all other persons the right to such gifts was equal. Thus the only test to a man’s right to possession was a moral test.[138] These principles and their applications, elaborated in a work of immense length, ‘Of Civil Lordship,’ lead logically, on their political side, to Communism: while, on the religious side, they involve a democratic theory of the spiritual equality of all Christians, which was subversive of the claims of the priesthood, for whom the belief in the absence of any ‘mediation’ between God and man left no function.[139]

On the one hand, community of goods was regarded as essential to Christians; on the other—even more notably than in Marsiglio—the laity were accorded a novel and prominent place in the Christian fellowship. Clerical property was an abuse and the clergy ought to live on alms, tithes being recognized as such.[140] Wycliffe did not exaggerate the theory of clerical poverty; he did insist that the clergy must live simply and possess nothing superfluous to ordinary needs.[141] In accordance with the theory of ‘grace’ or merit it was laid down that such wealth as the clergy did enjoy should be taken away from the undeserving. Such money could with greater profit be given to the poor. It was for the secular power to deprive the unworthy clerk of his possessions.[142] This teaching regarding ecclesiastical property, the disposal of which he virtually assigned to the laity, was perhaps the most obnoxious element in Wycliffe’s general scheme in the eyes of the Church in his day.[143]

For the regeneration of the Church Wycliffe turned from the hierarchy to the laity. That which makes a man a member of the Church is his own personal sanctity, and the Church therefore consists of those predestined to salvation, of none others.[144] The mere fact of being a pope or a cardinal, for example, is nothing. The Church can dispense with bad popes.[145] They are antichrist. Per contra, a layman might be pope, however unlearned, even if unordained, so long as God had chosen him.[146] It is not man’s appointment, but God’s choosing—that is to say, spiritual excellence—that matters.

The extraordinarily radical character of these theories is obvious. They were subversive of the whole contemporary conception of the character of the Church. For a universal society Wycliffe substituted a small body of the elect. In all this he was emphasizing the spiritual nature of religion, as an inward force, the possession of the individual soul. Confession, he declared, was superfluous for the contrite;[147] no man could be excommunicated unless he had first been excommunicated by himself, and no prelate ought ever to excommunicate anyone unless he knew that he had already been excommunicated by God.[148]