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

by Henry Charles Lea

On the other hand he was unquestionably the heresiarch of the Spirituals, both of France and Italy, regarded by them as the direct successor of Joachim and Francis. The Historia Tribulationum finds in the pseudo-Joachitic prophecies a clear account of all the events in his career. Enthusiastic Spirituals, who held the revolutionary doctrines of the Everlasting Gospel, testified before the Inquisition that the third age of the Church had its beginning in Olivi, who thus supplanted St. Francis himself. He was inspired of heaven; his doctrine had been revealed to him in Paris, some said, while he was washing his hands; others that the illumination came to him from Christ while in church, at the third hour of the day. Thus his utterances were of equal authority with those of St. Paul, and were to be obeyed by the Church without the change of a letter. It is no wonder that he was held accountable for the extravagances of those who regarded him with such veneration and recognized him as their leader and teacher.[50]

When Olivi died, his former prosecutor, Giovanni di Murro, was general of the Order, and, strong as were his own ascetic convictions, he lost no time in completing the work which he had previously failed to accomplish. Olivi’s memory was condemned as that of a heretic, and an order was issued for the surrender of all his writings, which was enforced with unsparing rigor, and continued by his successor, Gonsalvo de Balboa. Pons Botugati, a friar eminent for piety and eloquence, refused to surrender for burning some of the prohibited tracts, and was chained closely to the wall in a damp and fetid dungeon, where bread and water were sparingly flung to him, and where he soon rotted to death in filth, so that when his body was hastily thrust into an unconsecrated grave it was found that already the flesh was burrowed through by worms. A number of other recalcitrants were also imprisoned with almost equal harshness, and in the next general chapter the reading of all of Olivi’s works was formally prohibited. That much incendiary matter was in circulation, attributed directly or indirectly to him, is shown by a catalogue of Olivist tracts, treating of such dangerous questions as the power of the pope to dispense from vows, his right to claim implicit obedience in matters concerning faith and morals, and other similar muttering of rebellion.[51]

The work of Olivi which called forth the greatest discussion, and as to which the evidences are peculiarly irreconcilable, was his Postil on the Apocalypse. It was from this that the chief arguments were drawn for his condemnation. In an inquisitorial sentence of 1318 we learn that his writings were then again under examination by order of John XXII.; that they were held to be the source of all the errors which the sectaries were then expiating at the stake, and that principal among them was his work on the Apocalypse, so that, until the papal decision, no one was to hold him as a saint or a Catholic. When the condemnatory report of eight masters of theology came, in 1319, the Spirituals held that the outrage thus committed on the faith deprived of all virtue the sacrament of the altar. No formal judgment was rendered, however, until February 8, 1326, when John XXII. finally condemned the Postil on the Apocalypse after a careful scrutiny in the Consistory, and the general chapter of the Order forbade any one to read or possess it. One of the reports of the experts upon it has reached us. It is impossible to suppose that they deliberately manufactured the extracts on which their conclusions are based, and these extracts are quite sufficient to show that the work was an echo of the most dangerous doctrines of the Everlasting Gospel. The fifth age is drawing to an end, and, under the figure of the mystical Antichrist, there are prophecies about the pseudo-pope, pseudo-Christs, and pseudo-prophets in terms which clearly allude to the existing hierarchy. The pseudo-pope will be known by his heresies concerning the perfection of evangelical poverty (as we shall see was the case with John XXII.), and the pseudo-Joachim’s prophecies concerning Frederic II. are quoted to show how prelates and clergy who defend the Rule will be ejected. The carnal church is the Great Whore of Babylon; it makes drunken and corrupts the nations with its carnalities, and oppresses the few remaining righteous, as under Paganism it did with its idolatries. In forty generations from the harvest of the apostles there will be a new harvest of the Jews and of the whole world, to be garnered by the Evangelical Order, to which all power and authority will be transferred. There are to be a sixth and a seventh age, after which comes the Day of Judgment. The date of this latter cannot be computed, but at the end of the thirteenth century the sixth age is to open. The carnal church, or Babylon, will expire, and the triumph of the spiritual church will commence.[52]

It has been customary for historians to assume that this resurrection of the Everlasting Gospel was Olivi’s work, though it is evident from the closing years of his career that he could not have been guilty of uttering such inflammatory doctrines, and this is confirmed by the silence of the Council of Vienne concerning them, although it condemned his other trifling errors after a thorough debate on the subject by his enemies and friends. In fact, Bonagrazia, in the name of the Conventuals, bitterly attacked his memory and adduced a long list of his errors, including cursorily certain false and fantastic prophecies in the Postil on the Apocalypse and his stigmatizing the Church as the Great Whore. Had such passages as the above existed they would have been set forth at length and defence would have been impossible. Ubertino in reply, however, boldly characterized the assertion as most mendacious and impious; Olivi, he declared, had always spoken most reverently of the Church and Holy See; the Postil itself closed with a submission to the Roman Church as the universal mistress, and in the body of the work the Holy See was repeatedly alluded to as the seat of God and of Christ; the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant are spoken of as the seats of God which will last to the end, while the reprobate are Babylon and the Great Whore. It is impossible that Ubertino can have quoted these passages falsely, for Bonagrazia would have readily overwhelmed him with confusion, and the Council of Vienne would have rendered a far different judgment. We know from undoubted sources that the revolutionary doctrines commonly attributed to Olivi were entertained by those who considered themselves and were considered to be his disciples, and we can only assume that in their misguided zeal they interpolated his Postil, and gave to their own mystic dreams the authority of his great name.[53]

After the death of Olivi the Franciscan officials seem to have felt themselves unable to suppress the sect which was spreading and organizing throughout Languedoc. For some reason not apparent, unless it may have been jealousy of the Dominicans, the aid of the Inquisition was not called in, and the inquisitors withheld their hands from offenders of the rival Order. The regular church authorities, however, were appealed to, and in 1299 Gilles, Archbishop of Narbonne, held at Béziers a provincial synod, in which were condemned the Beguines of both sexes who under the lead of learned men of an honorable Order (the Franciscans) engaged in religious exercises not prescribed by the Church, wore vestments distinguishing them from other folk, performed novel penances and abstinences, administered vows of chastity, often not observed, held nocturnal conventicles, frequented heretics, and proclaimed that the end of the world was at hand, and that already the reign of Antichrist had begun. From them many scandals had already arisen, and there was danger of more and greater troubles. The bishops were therefore ordered, in their several dioceses, to investigate these sectaries closely and to suppress them. We see from this that there was rapidly growing up a new heresy based upon the Everlasting Gospel, with the stricter Franciscans as a nucleus, but extending among the people. For this popular propaganda the Tertiary Order afforded peculiar facilities, and we shall find hereafter that the Beguines, as they were generally called, were to a great extent Tertiaries, when not full members of the Order. There was nothing, however, to tempt the cupidity of the episcopal officials to the prosecution of those whose principal belief consisted in the renunciation of all worldly goods, and it is not likely that they showed themselves more diligent in their duties than we have seen them when greater interests were at stake. The action of the council may therefore be safely assumed as wasted, except as justifying persecution within the Order. The lay Beguines doubtless enjoyed practical immunity, while the Spiritual Friars continued to endure the miseries at the hands of their superiors for which monastic life afforded such abundant opportunities. Thus, at Villefranche, when Raymond Auriole and Jean Prime refused to admit that their vows permitted a liberal use of the things of the world, they were imprisoned in chains and starved till Raymond died, deprived of the sacraments as a heretic, and Jean barely escaped with his life.[54]

Thus passed away the unfortunate thirteenth century—that age of lofty aspirations unfulfilled, of brilliant dreams unsubstantial as visions, of hopes ever looking to fruition and ever disappointed. The human intellect had awakened, but as yet the human conscience slumbered, save in a few rare souls who mostly paid in disgrace or death the penalty of their precocious sensitiveness. That wonderful century passed away and left as its legacy to its successor vast progress, indeed, in intellectual activity, but on the spiritual side of the inheritance a dreary void. All efforts to elevate the ideals of man had miserably failed. Society was harder and coarser, more carnal and more worldly than ever, and it is not too much to say that the Inquisition had done its full share to bring this about by punishing aspirations, and by teaching that the only safety lay in mechanical conformity, regardless of abuses and unmindful of corruption. The results of that hundred years of effort and suffering are well symbolized in the two popes with whom it began and ended—Innocent III. and that pinchbeck Innocent, Boniface VIII., who, in the popular phrase of the time, came in like a fox, ruled like a lion, and died like a dog. In intellect and learning Boniface was superior to his model, in imperious pride his equal, in earnestness, in self-devotion, in loftiness of aim, in all that dignifies ambition, immeasurably his inferior. It is no wonder that the apocalyptic speculations of Joachim should acquire fresh hold on the minds of those who could not reconcile the spiritual desert in which they lived with their conception of the merciful providence of God. To such men it seemed impossible that he could permit a continuance of the cruel wickedness which pervaded the Church, and through it infected society at large. This was plainly beyond the power of a few earnest zealots to cure, or even to mitigate, so the divine interposition was requisite to create a new earth, inhabited only by the few virtuous Elect, under a reign of ascetic poverty and all-embracing love.

One of the most energetic and impetuous missionaries of these beliefs was Arnaldo de Vilanova, in some respects, perhaps, the most remarkable man of his time, whom we have only of late learned to know thoroughly, from the researches of Señor Pelayo. As a physician he stood unrivalled. Kings and popes disputed his services, and his voluminous writings on medicine and hygiene were reprinted in collective editions six times during the sixteenth century, besides numerous issues of special treatises. As a chemist he is more doubtfully said to have left his mark in several useful discoveries. As an alchemist he had the repute of producing ingots of gold in the court of Robert of Naples, a great patron of the science, and his treatises on the subject were included in collections of such works printed as lately as the eighteenth century. A student of both Arabic and Hebrew, he translated from Costa ben Luca treatises on incantations, ligatures, and other magic devices. He wrote on astronomy and on oneiromancy, for he was an expert expounder of dreams, and also on surveying and wine-making. He draughted laws for Frederic of Trinacria which that enlightened monarch promulgated and enforced, and his advice to Frederic and his brother Jayme II. of Aragon on their duties as monarchs stamps him as a conscientious statesman. When Jayme applied to him for the explanation of a mysterious dream he not only satisfied the king with his exposition, but proceeded to warn him that his chief duty lay in administering justice, first to the poor, and then to the rich. When asked how often he gave audience to the poor, Jayme answered, once a week, and also when he rode out for pleasure. Arnaldo sternly reproved him; he was earning damnation; the rich had access to him every day, morning, noon, and night, the poor but seldom; he made of God the hog of St. Anthony, which received only the refuse rejected by all. If he wished to earn salvation he must devote himself to the welfare of the poor, without which, in spite of the teachings of the Church, neither psalms, nor masses, nor fasting, nor even alms would suffice. To Jayme he was not only physician but counsellor, venerable and much beloved, and he was repeatedly employed on diplomatic missions by the kings of both Aragon and Sicily.[55]

Multifarious as were these occupations, they consumed but a portion of his restless activity. In dedicating to Robert of Naples his treatise on surveying, he describes himself—

“Yeu, Arnaut de Vilanova ...
Doctor en leys et en decrets,
Et en siensa de strolomia,
Et en l’art de medicina,
Et en la santa teulogia”—

and, although a layman, married, and a father, his favorite field of labor was theology, which he had studied with the Dominicans of Montpellier. In 1292 he commenced with a work on the Tetragrammaton, or ineffable name of Jehovah, in which he sought to explain by natural reasons the mystery of the Trinity. Embarked in such speculations he soon became a confirmed Joachite. To a man of his lofty spiritual tendencies and tender compassion for his fellows, the wickedness and cruelty of mankind were appalling, and especially the crimes of the clergy, among whom he reckoned the Mendicants as the worst. Their vices he lashed unsparingly, and he naturally fell in with the speculations of the pseudo-Joachitic writings, anticipating the speedy advent of Antichrist and the Day of Judgment. In numberless works composed in both Latin and the vernacular he commented upon and popularized the Joachitic books, even going so far as to declare that the revelation of Cyril was more precious than all Scripture. Such a man naturally sympathized with the persecuted Spirituals. He boldly undertook their defence in sundry tracts, and when, in 1309, Frederic of Trinacria applied to him to expound his dream, he seized the opportunity to invoke the monarch’s commiseration for their suffering, by explaining to him how, when they sought to appeal to the Holy See, their brethren persecuted and slew them, and how evangelical poverty was treated as the gravest of crimes. He used his influence similarly at the court of Naples, thus providing for them, as we shall see, a place of refuge in their necessity.[56]