Mediæval Heresy & the Inquisition

by Arthur Stanley Turberville

PART I - HERESY

CHAPTER I - ORIGINS OF MEDIÆVAL HERESY

Ages of Faith—the term has often enough been applied to the long era that separates the days of the Carolingian empire from those of the Italian Renaissance. Like most of the other generalizations that it is customary to make of the Middle Ages the statement is true only with important qualifications. It is with the qualifications that this book is concerned. But to appreciate the exceptions, it is first necessary to realize the full significance of the rule—the very pregnant reality concerning Church and State upon which the general statement is based. That reality, the understanding of which is essential to a grasp, not only of the ecclesiastical, but of any aspect of mediæval history, is the magnificent conception of the Civitas Dei. The Kingdom of God on earth was conceived, not as a vision of the future, but as a living and present reality—the Visible Church, Christendom. Church and Christendom were one, for the Church was catholic. The distinction which we of the modern world, as the Renaissance and Reformation have made it, are wont to make between Church and State, spiritual and temporal, was wholly foreign to mediæval thought. There was but one society, not two parallel societies. Society had indeed two aspects—one which looked to things mundane and transient, the other which looked to things heavenly and eternal. To safeguard its earthly interests the world had its secular rulers and administrators; to aid its spiritual life it had as guides and mediators the sacred hierarchy. But the secular rulers, on the one hand, and the priesthood, on the other, were officers in the same polity. The secular authority of the Empire was in the days of Frederick Barbarossa acknowledged to be derived from the Pope by consecration; later, as in Dante, it was conceived as collateral with that of the Pope. But always the two authorities were regarded as essentially related. It is true that the reality never corresponded with the august theory, that the Respublica Christiana never was universal, that there were always those who disputed the authority of Emperor or Pontiff or both; worse still, that Christendom was distracted by bitter strife between Emperor and Pontiff. But always such warfare was regarded as domestic, not one between two different states, but between two officers in one state.

It is important to bear in mind that the conception of the universal church and empire was not regarded simply as an idea which the philosopher and the publicist wrote and disputed about, but as manifest in facts, which every eye could see and every mind realize. There actually existed an empire, an imperial crown and coronation; there actually existed a Holy See and a ministering priesthood. And the authority of the rulers of the universal state was not simply vague and theoretical; it was discernible in crusades, in pilgrimages, in the ‘Truce of God.’ Men realized themselves no doubt in an ever increasing degree through the Middle Ages, national characteristics becoming more and more pronounced, as Englishmen, Frenchmen or Spaniards; but they also thought of themselves quite naturally as members together of the common society of Christendom.[1]

If we comprehend the oneness of human society in the Middle Ages, as actively believed in by the average thinking man and unquestioningly accepted as a patent fact by the average uneducated man, we can realize what is meant by the phrase ‘ages of faith’ and at the same time avoid some of the pitfalls that lie in the path of any one seeking to study the exceptions to the rule, namely, the heresies of these ages of faith.

What were the conditions that generated heresy? First, there were psychological conditions. In contrast to the bustling and multiform activity of the modern world the Middle Ages may at a first glance give an impression of inactivity and sameness. Such an impression, if it is encouraged by the intellectual dormancy of the ninth and tenth and, in some degree, of the eleventh centuries, is completely at variance with the facts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which the mind of Western Christendom was very much awake indeed. The impression also ignores what is one of the most marked characteristics of mediæval history as a whole—the clash and conflict and the dissonances of it. While the idea of the universal empire still held sway, secular princes, pursuing purely separatist ambitions, made war one upon another and the nations of Europe were in the throes of parturition. Typical of the incongruities of mediæval life was the glaring contrast between the glorious minster and the mean and filthy hovels round it to be seen in every city; but that there was incongruity in spending immense wealth, time and labour on building a house for God to dwell in, while housing themselves in dwellings rude and insanitary was not apparent to the occupants. There was another incongruity inside the churches themselves. Together with images that were sacred and beautiful there were hideous gargoyles, grotesque figures, whose inspiration was not Christian but pagan. Congregated together were saints and satyrs, and Pan is found in company with Christ. Art was made the handmaiden of religion: that did not mean that she was wholly consecrated. St. Bernard complained that the eyes of monks as they walked round their cloisters were too often assailed by pictures which could only awaken thoughts unsanctified. If the first of these two discords is eloquent of the faith which set the worship of God far before the common needs of men, the second is indicative of that alien spirit, untamed and powerful, which fights against the higher nature and the devoted life. From rebellious nature sprang all manner of unholy lusts and ambitions, productive of wars and enmities and other kinds of evil, which rendered the reality of human existence so divergent from the Christian ideal. But Christianity accepted these inevitable consequences of original sin, providing through repentance and penance reconciliation and the possibility of amendment. In the elemental passions, however, the Church found itself faced by a problem which presents one of the most interesting features of the ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages.

It is ever a hard task to expel nature, and often, where she has been renounced and thwarted, she has her revenge by returning, clothed in her grossest forms. The literature of the Thebaid and of mediæval hagiology is eloquent testimony to the fact that extreme asceticism and extreme profligacy are often found in close proximity. The fugitive from the insurgent passions of his own being, seeking to overcome the temptations of the flesh by severe macerations and scourgings, has only too often found his voluntary existence of self-discipline intolerable without the relief of an occasional wild debauch or has found that in his savage attempt to subdue the senses he has come to take a sensual delight in self-torture and that he is falling into the lowest depths of bestiality. The very fervour of religious zeal in the Middle Ages is a token of the fierceness of the passionate fires that tortured men’s hearts. It was always doubtful what outlet these fires would find. Would they glorify God in the martyrdom of the lower nature or would they rage untamed, flames solely of desire, destroying the soul? Was it a pure religious passion or a depraved sensual passion that, when the Albigensian Crusade was being preached in Germany, drove women who could not take the cross to run naked through the streets in ecstasy? Which was it that was really evidenced by the practices of the Flagellants, who at one time obtained considerable influence in different parts of Europe? They were simply doing in public what the monk did in seclusion and in the perfect odour of sanctity. The idea of bringing the soul nearer to God by the wounding of the sinful flesh had the Church’s fullest sanction. Yet the Flagellants were eventually declared heretics. Why? Because it became plain after a time that the motive of some of those who joined the sect was unholy—not a desire to seek salvation, but only a perverted lust. Secondly, because alike the genuine and the false devotee were moved in the excess of their strange enthusiasm to build upon it a theory of the efficacy of flagellation which made it the only means to salvation, a sacrament, indeed the essential sacrament.

In yet another way the unregenerate part of man’s nature might breed heresy. The lust not perhaps of the flesh so much as of the eye and the pride of life led men to take a delight in pleasure, in the sensuous pagan world, that was not a wholly hallowed delight. Such superabundant joy in life was apt to produce over-confidence in the individual’s powers unaided by religion, leading to presumption and disobedience. The phenomenon of such rebelliousness in the later Middle Ages is sometimes forgotten. Yet the legends of the blossoming pastoral staff and of the Holy Grail pictured also the Venusberg and the garden of Kundry’s flower-maidens. In remembering the figures of the anchorite and the knight-errant one must not lose sight of the troubadour and the courtesan. Eloquent of the movement of revolt is the famous passage in ‘Aucassin et Nicolette’ in which Aucassin, threatened with the pains of hell if he persists in his love for the mysterious southern maid, exclaims that in that case to hell he will go.