General History of Civilisation in Europe, From the Fall of the Roman Empire Till the French Revolution. A Treatise on Death Punishments.

by François Guizot

If, therefore, we consider the church in its relations with the liberty of its members, we perceive that its principles in this respect were less legitimate and salutary than those which presided at the formation of the ecclesiastical power. We are not, however, to conclude that one evil principle radically vitiates an institution, nor even that it does all the mischief with which it is pregnant. Nothing falsifies history more than logic. When the human understanding has fixed upon an idea, it deduces therefrom all possible consequences; it makes it bring forth all that in pure possibility it could bring forth, and then represents it in history as attended by all these results. But matters do not come out after this fashion; events are not so prompt as the deductions of the human mind. There is in all things a mixture of bad and good so deep-seated and invincible, that when you dive to the most hidden elements of society or the mind, whatever portion you open out, you there find these two orders of things co-existent, developing themselves side by side, and struggling with, but not exterminating each other. Human nature never goes to the last limits either of good or bad; it passes unceasingly from one to the other, recovering itself when it seems nearest the fall, and faltering at the moment that its step seems firmest. We discover here once more that characteristic of discordance, variety, and strife, which I have already remarked as the fundamental characteristic of European civilisation.

There is, furthermore, a general fact illustrative of the government of the church of which it is necessary to take notice. At the present day, when the idea of a government, whatever may be its nature, presents itself to us, we feel that there is no longer any pretension of controlling aught else than the outward actions of men, and their civil relations amongst themselves; governments profess to go no farther. As to the human thought and conscience, morality, properly so called, or as to individual opinions and private manners, they do not interfere; those matters fall to the domain of liberty.

Now the Christian church did, or wished to do, directly the reverse. Human thought, human liberty, private manners, and individual opinions, were precisely what it endeavoured to rule over. It did not make a code like other powers, to define the actions at once morally culpable and socially dangerous, and to award them punishment in proportion only as they bore this double character; but it set out a catalogue of all actions morally culpable, and, under the name of sins, it punished and acted on the design of repressing them all; in a word, the government of the church was not applied, like modern governments, to the outward man, and to the purely civil relations of men amongst themselves; it was applied to the inward man, to the thought and the conscience—that is to say, to what is held by man as most intimately his own, to what is most free and restive to constraint. The church, then, by the very nature of its enterprise, in combination with the tendency of some of the principles upon which its government was founded, was placed in peril of becoming tyrannical, and of using an illegitimate employment of force. But at the same time the force encountered an opposition which it could not vanquish. However little movement or scope may be left to them, human thought and love of liberty react energetically against every attempt to prostrate them, and repeatedly compel the very despotism which they endure to step down and abdicate its supremacy. This is what happened in the bosom of the Christian church. We have enumerated the proscription of heresy, the anathema upon the right of examination, the contempt for individual reason, and the principle of the imperative transmission of doctrines through those in authority. Yet scarcely a society is to be found in which individual reason has been more boldly developed than in the church. What are sects and heresies but the fruit of individual opinions? And these sects and heresies, and all this species of opposition encountered by the Christian church, afford incontestible proof of the moral life and activity which reigned in it; a troubled and painful life, strewed with dangers, errors, and crimes, yet noble and potential, and giving scope to the finest developments of intellect and opinion. But setting aside the opposition, and entering into the ecclesiastical government itself, we find it constituted and acting in a manner quite different to what some of its principles seem to have prescribed. It denied the right of examination, it wished to deprive individual reason of its liberty; yet it is to reason that it for ever addressed its appeals; liberty was actually its mainspring. What were its institutions and means of action? Provincial councils, national councils, œcumenical councils, a continual correspondence and an incessant publication of letters, admonitions, and other writings. Never did any government proceed to such an extent in the way of discussion and common deliberation. We might imagine ourselves in the schools of the Greek philosophy. And yet it was not a mere discussion or investigation of truth which was at issue; it involved questions of authority, of measures to adopt, of decrees to promulgate, a government in fact. But the energy of the intellectual life in the heart of this government was such, that it became the predominant and universal standard to which all others yielded, and the main fact displayed on all sides was the exercise of reason and liberty.

I am very far from concluding, on this account, that the evil principles which I have endeavoured to unfold as existing, in my opinion, in the system of the church, remained without effect. At the epoch which now engages our attention, they had already produced bitter consequences, and afterwards they were productive of much more disastrous results; but what I mean to affirm is, that they did not perpetrate all the mischief of which they were capable, and that they did not smother the good which was growing out of the same soil.

Such was the church considered in itself, in its internal state, in its nature. I proceed to its relations with sovereigns, the masters of temporal power. It is the second point of view under which I promised to consider it.

When the Empire fell, and instead of the old Roman system, instead of that government in the midst of which it had taken root, with which it had common feelings and long-formed ties, the church found itself exposed to those barbarous kings and chiefs roaming over the country or quartered in their castles, to whom no tie founded on a community of traditions, creeds, or sentiments, united it; the danger which impended over it was great, and of corresponding magnitude was its terror.

The idea which then seized predominantly upon the church was to gain possession of the new-comers, or, in other words, to convert them. The relations between the church and the barbarians had scarcely any other object at first.

In order to captivate the barbarians, it was chiefly necessary to address their senses and imagination. Therefore we find that at this epoch the number, pomp, and variety of ceremonious rites were augmented. The chronicles prove that it was mainly by these means that the church acted upon the barbarians. She converted them by imposing spectacles.