A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume III

by Henry Charles Lea

Pomponazio did not remain unanswered. In 1492 Agostino Nifo, professor at Padua, in his work De Intellectu et Dæmonibus, had contended for the Averrhoist theory of the unity of intelligence; a single intellect pervades the universe, and modifies all things at its will. He had already had trouble with the Dominicans, and this gave them the advantage; it would have fared ill with him had not Pietro Barozzi, the enlightened Bishop of Padua, saved him, and induced him to modify his teachings. Despite his philosophy, he was a skilful courtier, and became a favorite with Leo X., who made him count of the palace, and paid him to prove against Pomponazio that Aristotle maintained the immortality of the soul. He became the accepted interpreter of Averrhoes throughout Italy, and his mitigated Averrhoism remained the doctrine taught at Padua during the remainder of the century.[626]

It was impossible that the ministers of the Church should escape the contagion of this fashionable infidelity, however little, in their worldly self-seeking, they might trouble themselves about the theories of Averrhoism. In his sermons on Ezekiel, in the Lent of 1497, Savonarola describes the priests of the period as slaying the souls of their flocks by their wicked example; their worship, he says, is to spend the night with strumpets and the day in singing in the choir; the altar is their shop; they openly assert that the world is not ruled by the providence of God, but that everything is the result of chance, and that Christ is not in the Eucharist.[627] It was no wonder, then, that the more thoughtful of the laity, conscious of the evils of the dominant faith, and yet powerless, under the watchful eye of the Inquisition, to apply a corrective short of indifferentism or practical atheism; striving helplessly for something better than they saw around them, and yet unable to release the primal principles of Christianity from the incrustations of scholastic theology, should find their only refuge in these philosophical speculations which virtually reduced Christianity to nothingness. Had not the Reformation come, the culture of Europe would inevitably have been atheistic, or devoted to sublimated deism, scarce distinguishable from atheism. The Church would permit no dissidence within its pale, and yet was singularly tolerant of these aberrations of the fashionable Humanism. It persecuted the Fraticelli who dared to uphold the poverty of Christ, yet it allowed the paganism of the revived Hellenism to be disseminated almost without interference. Occasionally some zealous Dominican, eager to defend the inspired doctrines of the Angelic Doctor, would threaten trouble, and would burn a too daring book, but the author could readily find protectors high in the Church, some Barozzi or Bembo, who conjured the storm.

The Reformation served a double purpose in checking this tendency to dangerous speculation. It destroyed the hard-and-fast lines of the rigid scholastic theology, and gave to active intellects a wide field for discussion within the limits of the Christian faith. The assaults of Luther and Melanchthon and Calvin were not to be met with the dialectics of the schools, but with a freer and wider scope of reasoning. The worn-out debates over Aristotle and Alexander and Averrhoes, over Nominalism and Realism, were replaced with new systems of Scriptural exegesis and an earnest inquiry into man’s place in the universe and his relations to his fellows and to his God. Then the counter-Reformation aroused a zeal which could no longer tolerate the philosophical quodlibets leading to speculations adverse to the received faith. Servetus and Giordano Bruno belong to a period beyond our present limits, but their fate shows how little either Protestant or Catholic, in the fierce strife which enkindled such uncompromising ardor, were disposed to listen to philosophical discussions upon religious beliefs.

Before leaving this branch of our subject we must recur to the curious episode of the career of Raymond Lully, the Doctor Illuminatus, of whom Padre Feyjoo truly says, “Raymond Lully, looked upon from every side, is a very problematical object. Some make him a saint, others a heretic; some a most learned man, others an ignoramus; some regard him as illuminated, others as hallucinated; some attribute to him a knowledge of the transmutation of metals, others deny it; finally, some applaud his Ars Magna, others depreciate it.”[628]

This enigmatical being was born in Palma, the capital of Majorca, January 25, 1235. Sprung from a noble family, he was bred in the royal court, where he rose to the post of seneschal. He married and had children, but followed a gay and dissolute career until, like Peter Waldo and Jacopone da Todi, he was suddenly converted by an experience of the nothingness of life. He was madly in love with Leonor del Castello, and his reckless temper manifested itself by pursuing her on horseback into the church of Santa Eulalia during a Sunday service, to the great scandal of priest and congregation. To rid herself of such importunate pursuit, Leonor, with consent of her husband, exhibited to him her bosom, which was ravaged by a foul and mortal cancer. The shock brought to him so profound a recognition of the vanity of earthly things that he renounced the world and distributed his wealth in charity, after making provision for his family; and the same indomitable ardor which had rendered him extravagant in his pleasures sustained him to the end in his new vocation. Thenceforth he devoted his life to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, to the conversion of the Jews and Saracens, and to the framing of a system which should demonstrate rationally the truth of the Christian faith, and thus overcome the Averrhoism in which he recognized its most dangerous adversary.[629]

Ten years or more were spent in preparation for this new career. We hear of a pilgrimage to Compostella in 1266, and of his retirement to the Monte de Randa, near Palma, in 1275. He was so ignorant of letters that he was not even acquainted with Latin, the key to all the knowledge of the age. This he studied, and also Arabic, from a Saracen slave purchased for the purpose, and the earnest labors of an indefatigable mind can account for the enormous stores of learning which he subsequently displayed; so wonderful that to his followers they appeared necessarily the result of inspiration. In his retreat on Monte de Randa, where he conceived his Ars Universalis, he is said to have had repeated visions of Christ and the Virgin, which illuminated his mind; and the mastic-tree under which he habitually wrote bore testimony to the miracle, in its leaves inscribed with Latin, Greek, Chaldee, and Arabic characters. It continued to put forth such leaves. In the seventeenth century Vicente Mut vouches for the fact, and says he has some of them, while Wadding tells us that in his time they were carried to Rome, where they excited much wonder. When his work was completed an angel in the guise of a shepherd appeared, who kissed the book many times, and predicted that it would prove an invincible weapon for the faith.[630]

Emerging from his retreat, for forty years he led a wandering life of incessant activity, now stimulating popes and kings to renewed crusades, or to found colleges of the Oriental tongues to aid in missionary labors, now pouring forth volume after volume with incredible fecundity, now disputing and teaching against Averrhoism at Montpellier, Paris, and elsewhere, and now venturing himself among the infidel to spread among them the light of Christianity. In any one of these fields of action his labors would seem enough to exhaust the energies of an ordinary man. While on his way, in 1311, to the Council of Vienne, with projects for founding schools of Oriental tongues, for uniting in one all the military Orders, for a holy war against the infidel, for suppressing Averrhoism, and for teaching his art in all universities, he summed up his life: “I was married and a father, sufficiently rich, worldly, and licentious. For the honor of God, for the public weal, and for the advancement of the faith I abandoned all. I learned Arabic, and I have been repeatedly among the Saracens to preach to them, where I have been beaten and imprisoned. For forty-five years I have labored to excite the rulers of the Church and the princes of Christendom for the public good. Now I am old, I am poor, and I still have the same purpose, which, with the help of God, I will retain till I die.” At Vienne his only success was in obtaining a decree founding schools of Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldee in the papal court and in the Universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca. Thence he went, for the second time, to Algiers, where, at Bugia, he made many converts, until thrown into prison and starved; then he was released and ordered out of the country, but continued proselyting. With wonderful forbearance the Moors contented themselves with placing him on board a ship bound for Genoa, and warning him not to return. Ship-wrecked in sight of land, he saved his life by swimming, but lost his books. Determined to win the palm of martyrdom, in August, 1314, he again embarked at Palma for Bugia. Promptly recognized, he was thrown into jail, beaten, and starved; but in prison he continued to preach to his fellow-captives, until the Moors, finding him unconquerable, took him out, June 30, 1315, and stoned him. Some Genoese merchants about to sail carried his yet breathing body on board their ship and laid their course for Genoa, but to their surprise found themselves at the entrance of the port of Palma. In vain they endeavored to leave the spot till, recognizing the will of Heaven, they carried the body ashore. Immediately it shone in miracles, and the cult of the martyr began. In 1448 a splendid chapel was erected in his honor in the church of the Franciscans, of which Order he was a Tertiary, and another one was dedicated to him in the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1487 his bones were deposited in a richly carved alabaster urn, standing in a niche in the church-wall over an elaborate sepulchral monument, where they still remain.[631]

Slender were the results achieved at the moment by the self-devotion of this noble and indefatigable intellect. Averrhoism continued to gain strength, the Christian princes could not be stimulated to a new crusade, the conversion of Jew and infidel made no progress, and the only reward of labor so strenuous and so prolonged were Oriental schools established in Majorca and Sicily, and the foundation of others commanded by the Council of Vienne. Yet the prodigious literary activity of Lully left behind him a mass of writings destined to exercise no little influence on succeeding generations. He was perhaps the most voluminous author on record. Juan Llobet, who in the middle of the fifteenth century taught the Art of Lully in the University of Palma, had read five hundred of his books; some authors assert that their total number reached a thousand, others three thousand. Many have been lost, many spurious ones have been attributed to him, and the bibliography of his works is hopelessly confused; but Nicolas Antonio, after careful sifting, gives the titles of three hundred and twenty-one which may safely be ascribed to him. Of these there are sixty-one on the art of learning and general subjects, four on grammar and rhetoric, fifteen on logic, twenty-one on philosophy, five on metaphysics, thirteen on various sciences—astrology, geometry, politics, war, the quadrature of the circle, and the art of knowing God through grace—seven on medicine, four on law, sixty-two on spiritual contemplation and other religious subjects, six on homiletics, thirteen on Antichrist, the acquisition of the Holy Land, and other miscellaneous subjects, forty-six controversial works against Saracens, Jews, Greeks, and Averrhoists, and sixty-four on theology, embracing the most abstruse points, and religious poetry. The great collective edition of his works printed in Mainz from 1721 to 1742 forms ten folios. Like all other great scholars of his day, his name was a convenient one to affix to books on alchemy and magic, but all such are supposititious. His reputation as an alchemist is seen in the tradition that in England he made six million gold florins, and gave them to the king to stimulate him to a crusade, but his own opinion of alchemy is expressed in a passage of his Ars Magna: “Each element has its own peculiarities so that one species cannot be transmuted to another, wherefore the alchemists grieve and have occasion to weep,” and in other equally outspoken expressions.[632]

For our purpose we need consider but one phase of his marvellous productiveness. In the solitude of Monte de Randa he conceived the Art which passes by his name—a method in which, by diagrams and symbols, the sublimest truths of theology and philosophy can be deduced and memorized. Of this the Ars Brevis is a compend, while the Ars Magna describes it in greater detail and proceeds to build upon it a system of the universe. As the product of a man untinctured with culture till after the age of thirty it is a wonderful performance, revealing a familiar acquaintance with all the secrets of the material and spiritual worlds, the powers, attributes, motives, and purposes of God and his creatures logically deduced, which the Lullists might well hold to be inspired. This Art he himself taught at Montpellier and Paris, and in 1309 forty members of the latter University joined in a cordial recommendation of it as useful and necessary for the defence of the faith. At home it had great and enduring vogue. Favored by successive monarchs, it was taught in the Universities of Aragon and Valencia. In the middle of the fifteenth century the Estudio Lulliano was founded at Palma, subsquently enlarged into the Universidad Lulliana, where the tradition of his teaching was preserved almost to our own days. Cardinal Ximenes was its great admirer; Angelo Politiano says that to it he owed his ability to dispute on any subject; Jean Lefèvre d’Etaples prized it highly, as likewise did other men of note. On the other hand, it was condemned by Gerson and its use forbidden in the University of Paris; it was ill thought of by Cornelius Agrippa and Jerome Cardan; and Mariana tells us that in his time many considered it useless and even harmful, while others praised it as a gift from heaven to remedy ignorance, and in 1586 its use was prohibited in the University of Valencia.[633]

In this and in many of his other works Lully’s object was to prove by logical processes of thought the truths of Christianity and the positions of theology. We have already seen how the Church recognized the risk involved in this and forbade it, and Lully felt that he was treading on dangerous ground. He therefore lost no opportunity of declaring that faith is superior to reason, and that they were mistaken who held that faith proved by reason lost its merit. Devoting his life to combating Averrhoism and converting the infidel, he had felt that Christianity could only be spread by argument—that to convert men he had to convince them. Without this the work must stop, and he urged that the heathen might logically complain of God if it were impossible to convince their reason of the truth.[634] It was the same effort as that made two centuries later by Savonarola in his Crucis Triumphus, to combat the incredulity of the later Averrhoists and of the Renaissance.