The evidences of the wealth and refinement of this cultivated and unwarlike society are not confined to the written records of chroniclers and poets. Their buildings prove the same thing. For combined breadth of composition and elegance of detail the porches of such churches as St. Trophimus at Arles or the great church at St. Gilles, are equalled by nothing in the Romanesque. Often their detail is exactly that of the antique world to which they looked back over the intervening lowlands of the Dark Ages.
Further, we have seen that the society for which the troubadours sang was close to the Moslem, and was moved by currents Asiatic in their origin both Moslem and Jew. Moslem coins circulated freely there. The fact is proved beyond reams of learned stuff by such unconscious evidence as that of one troubadour’s simile:—
“... Like a child which a man makes stop crying with a ‘marabotin’ ...”
The poet does not think it necessary to stop and explain that a marabotin was a Moorish penny, and being unconscious his testimony cannot be challenged. Of the Universities, while Bologna studied law and Paris theology, Languedoc in her greatest University, that of Montpellier, studied medicine. This fact again proves her intercourse with the “Paynim,” for it is a commonplace that the Arabs of Spain were the great physicians of the Middle Ages. Saracen slaves, and negroes brought from Africa by Saracens to be slaves, continued to be held there centuries after slavery was extinct everywhere else in Christendom. As for the Jews, they were so many and so prominent that some chroniclers called Languedoc “Judea secunda.”
In such a society, it would have been strange if the different forces which worked against the Church had not been active. No word remains to us from twelfth-century Languedoc so bold as that of Henry II of England, when in his rage against Becket he threatened to turn Moslem. And Henry was half “Aquitanian,” that is South-Western French, by blood. All the forces hostile to the Church were active in the South. It is the South that has left us Aucassin’s outburst:—
“In Paradise what have I to do? I do not care to go there unless I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend that I love so much. For to Paradise goes no one but such people as I will tell you of. There go old priests, and old cripples and the maimed, who all day and all night crouch before altars, and in old crypts, and are clothed with old worn-out capes and old tattered rags, who are naked and footbare, and sore, who die of hunger and want and misery. These go to Paradise; with them I have nothing to do. But to Hell I am willing to go; for to Hell go the fine scholars, and the fair knights who die in tourneys and in glorious wars, and good men-at-arms and the well born. With them I will gladly go. And there go the fair courteous ladies which have two or three friends besides their lords also thereto. And the gold, and the silver go there, and the ermines and sables; and there go the harpers, and jongleurs, and the kings of the world. With these will I go, if only I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, with me.”[9]
It is clear that the idea of “Heaven for climate and Hell for company” is not new. Nietzsche himself has nowhere put it better. And it is perhaps significant that of all that glittering company of servants of the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, first of all come churchmen—the “fine scholars.”
Of course, all this sort of thing is not heresy. Logically it might just as well have ended in mere negation. These volatile southerners with their envy of the riches of the Church and their contempt, too often well deserved, for her ministers—so that instead of saying like most Christians “Rather than do so and so I would be a Jew,” they said, “I would rather be a priest”—might have gone on their way without troubling themselves about things not of this world. Nevertheless, they lived in an age which hardly took Nature and her secrets seriously, so absorbed were its thinkers in the nature of God and man and their relation to each other. The other world of the supernatural was as real and vivid to them as, in a different way, it was to the New England Puritans. Irrespective of their own temper, the currents of their time carried them away from secularism and mere denial.
Like practically all keen and vivid times, the twelfth century was full of religious debate. Among the learned the discussion turned largely upon philosophy. The speculative and transcendental doctrines of the Church might be called in question. In this way heresy, that is religious error among those who claimed to be Christians, might arise from intellectual speculation upon intellectual and philosophic themes. Thus the early Church, in the high Imperial time before the Dark Ages, thought of heresy first of all as erroneous speculation. But theology and morals are not and can never be really separate. The very idea of their possible separation could not have arisen except in an age so bent upon “observing” as to be contemptuous of reason. Theology and morals being merely mutually indispensable different sides of religion, it therefore follows that speculative heretics tended to become moral heretics. Now, in the Middle Ages, as we have seen, the scholars were always in minor orders. At least outside of Italy, learned heretics were rare. Therefore a good deal of speculative heresy and near-heresy could, and did, exist without doing much harm to the Church as an institution. A scholar who fell foul of authority with regard to some article of faith was punished of course, but his punishment was merely a matter of internal Church discipline about which the “general public” usually knew or cared very little.
It was very different when a dissenter, instead of confining himself to philosophy, went further and took the logical next step of “stirring up the people” by attacking not only the doctrine of the Church but also the moral conduct of her officials. To-day when a man attacks the idea of property as such, we smile. But when he attacks the excessive inequality of its distribution, that is more serious, because, however false some of his conclusions may be, a part of his major premise is undeniably true. Just so, in the twelfth century, the Church realized that her wealth laid her open to envy, and the evil conduct of many of her ministers was a scandal. Her own true leaders, those who were the most zealous for her honour, spent much of their energy in trying to bring about a wider distribution of morals within the ranks of her own clergy, just as to-day those who believe in the idea of private property would do well to work for a wider distribution of that. Accordingly heresy in the Middle Ages, although necessarily arising, like all heresy, in speculation, based its propaganda upon moral protest.