All I held dear I now abhor,
My pride, my knightly rank and fame,
And seek the spot which all adore,
The pilgrim's goal—Jerusalem.
sang Guillem of Poitiers, one of the gayest of the troubadours.
Only very few of the more thoughtful minds realised that divine thoughts have their source in the soul of man, and that these Crusades were obviously a senseless undertaking (not to mention the fact that God does not need human assistance). "It is a greater thing to worship God always in humility and poverty," said the abbot, Peter of Cluny, "than to journey to Jerusalem in great pomp and circumstance. If, therefore, it is a good thing to visit Jerusalem and stand on the soil which our Lord's feet have trod, it is a far better thing still to strive after heaven where our Lord can be seen face to face." Both the great scholastic, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux, were of the same opinion. "They shall aspire not to the earthly, but to the heavenly Jerusalem, and travel there not with their feet, but with the desire of their hearts." And "They seek God in external objects, neglecting to look into their hearts, in whose innermost depths dwells the divine." And yet those same men, who even then seemed to have outgrown biblical religiosity, were under the spell of the all-absorbing idea of the age. Bernard solved the contradiction in the following way: "It is not because His power has grown less that the Lord calls us feeble worms to protect His own; His word is deed, and He could send more than twelve legions of angels to do His bidding; but because it is the will of the Lord your God to save you from perdition, He gives you an opportunity to serve Him." In these words a significant change of the fundamental idea can already be traced. Peter of Cluny worked for the Crusades, and Bernard, one of the most influential and venerable personalities of the Middle Ages, a man before whose word the popes bowed down, journeyed through the whole of France, inciting all hearts to fanatical enthusiasm. Whoever heard him preach forsook his worldly possessions and took the cross, clamouring for Peter himself to lead all Christendom. "Countless numbers flocked to his banner, towns and castles stood forsaken and there was hardly one man to seven women. The wives were made widows during the lifetime of their husbands." Thus Bernard wrote to the Pope, travelling through Germany, healing the sick by his mere presence, and preaching to the people in a tongue no one could understand. But the personality of this physically delicate man, whose body was only kept alive by his spirit, touched all hearts. The prudent Emperor, Conrad, resisted for a long time, and would have nothing to do with such an aimless enterprise. But Bernard's first sermon in the cathedral at Speyer, on Christmas Day, moved him to tears. Bernard left the pulpit and pinned the cross on the shoulder of the kneeling emperor. By this symbolical act the metaphysical spirit of the time, of which the Church had obtained control for her own purposes, visibly became master of political common-sense.
The Crusades were one of the great movements matured by the newly-awakened metaphysical yearning. The same spirit in another, profounder, way, manifested itself in the efforts of religious reform which were being made here and there. "The appearance and spread of heresy has always been the gauge by which the religious life of the individual must be measured," says Büttner very pertinently in his preface to his edition of Eckhart. For the first time since the days of Christ true religious feeling was again quickening the hearts of men; the ecclesiastical dogma, which until then had represented absolute truth, no longer satisfied their need. Soon opposition, timidly at first, made itself felt. Laymen ventured to interfere in the domain of religion. All knowledge—and consequently all tradition and religion—had been for a thousand years the exclusive possession of the clergy; those laymen who had any culture at all knew a little Latin and a few scholastic propositions. All this was changing. Despite reiterated ecclesiastical prohibitions, parts of the Bible were translated into the vulgar tongue and eagerly studied by ignorant folk; everywhere men appeared to whom religion was a matter of vital importance, men who strove to find God in their own souls, instead of blindly accepting the God of foreign doctrine.
The more obvious cause of the growing dislike to ecclesiastical authority was the immorality of the priests. The contrast between the professions of humility, and the greed, vice and tyranny of the clergy was too pronounced. The ecclesiastical offices were publicly sold. Divine forgiveness was cheaper than a new garment; every priest was allowed to keep a mistress if he paid a tax to the bishop. Two poems of the troubadour, Guillem Figueiras, express the state of affairs very bluntly: "Our shepherds have become thievish wolves, plundering and despoiling the fold under the guise of messengers of peace. They gently console their sheep night and day, but once they have them in their power, these false shepherds let their flock perish and die." In the other poem he says of the priest:
He lies in a woman's arms all night,
And wakes—defiled—in the morning light