“His mind drifted back once more to those ancient heresies of the Gnostics and the Manicheans which saw the God of the World as altogether evil. For a while his soul sank down into the uncongenial darknesses of these creeds of despair....
“Is the whole scheme of Nature evil? Is life in its essence cruel?”[13]
I hasten to add that the Manicheans, following the little-known Gnostics, made matter the evil principle in Nature, as opposed to spirit, the principle of good.
We have seen that it had come originally from the East. Manes himself, away back in the third century, had been a Mesopotamian, and in the fourth century his disciples seem to have been widely distributed from Persia to the Atlantic. They were hated. “Manicheans and Mathematicians (i.e., sorcerers) were alone excepted from the general toleration of Valentinian, in the fourth century.”[14] They reappear, under the name of Paulicians, in the East Roman Empire, during the tenth century, and thence passed into Bulgaria. Later, in Western Europe, they were often known as Bulgars, “Bougres,” or “Buggers.” From Bulgaria they spread westward into what is now Bosnia, and from Bosnia westward again into Northern Italy. By the middle of the eleventh century they were numerous and influential throughout Lombardy and especially in Milan.
Lea suggests that without the impulse these people gave to extreme asceticism, and especially their contempt for marriage, Pope Gregory VII would not have been able to get his decrees forbidding the marriage of priests obeyed in Northern Italy.
“Vernon Lee”[15] gives ... “a very curious anecdote, unearthed by the learned ecclesiastical historian Tocco, and consigned in his extremely suggestive book on mediæval heresies. A certain priest of Milan became so revered for his sanctity and learning, and for the marvellous cures he worked, that the people insisted on burying him before the high altar, and resorting to his tomb as to that of a saint. The holy man became even more undoubtedly saintly after his death; and in the face of the miracles which were wrought by his intercession, it became necessary to proceed to his beatification. The Church was about to establish his miraculous sainthood, when, in the official process of collecting the necessary information, it was discovered that the supposed saint was a Manichean heretic, a Catharus, a believer in the wicked Demiurgus, the creating Satan, the defeat of the spiritual God, and the uselessness of the coming of Christ. It was quite probable that he had spat upon the crucifix as a symbol of the devil’s triumph; it was quite possible that he had said masses to Satan as the true creator of all matter. Be this as it may, that priest’s half-canonized bones were publicly burnt and their ashes scattered to the wind. The anecdote shows that the Manichean heresies, some ascetic and tender, others brutal and foul, had made their way into the most holy places. And, indeed, when we come to think of it, no longer startled by so extraordinary a revelation, this was the second time that Christianity ran the risk of becoming a dualistic religion—a religion, like some of its Asiatic rivals, of pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base according to the individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such views, identical with those of the transcendental theologians of the fourth century, and equivalent to the philosophical pessimism of our own day, as expounded particularly by Schopenhauer, should have found favour among the best and most thoughtful men of the early Middle Ages. In those stern and ferocious yet tender-hearted and most questioning times, there must have been something logically satisfying, and satisfying also to the harrowed sympathies, in the conviction, if not in the dogma, that the soul of man had not been made by the maker of the foul and cruel world of matter; and that the suffering of all good men’s hearts corresponded with the suffering, the humiliation of a mysteriously dethroned God of the Spirit. And what a light it must have shed, completely solving all terrible questions, upon the story of Christ’s martyrdom, so constantly uppermost in the thoughts and feelings of mediæval men!”
The same author noting what seems to be the intentionally hopeless, repulsive, and horrible nature of twelfth century (or, as she puts it, pre-Franciscan) Italian sculpture, goes on to argue from this that such “Nightmare pessimism had honeycombed the twelfth century Italian mind.” How uncertain was the popular distinction between orthodox and heretical asceticism is attested by many humorous-pathetic stories like that of the priest of Milan. What the distinction actually was may well be considered later in connection with the Dominican order.
The man of European stock cannot but wonder why any Christian people, especially the volatile Provençals, could accept so savage a creed. Perhaps people ready to “... jump the life to come” might be attracted by the moral latitude allowed the Albigensian “Believers” during life, and would, meanwhile, banish the thought of death, as so many moderns do, or else hope to be “consoled” even at the last gasp. But this is guesswork. What is certain is that the sect prospered.
We have seen that the Middle Ages, although weaker than we in the observation of Nature, had a stronger faith in logic, and were, therefore, bolder in the application of formally reasoned, logical, ideas of life. Accordingly, those of them who were possessed of the dualistic idea proceeded to all sorts of perfectly logical extremes in showing their hatred and contempt for matter.
Thus their fully initiated members, or “Perfect,” were sworn never to eat meat, eggs, milk, cheese or anything which was the result of sexual procreation. Fish was permitted because they thought that fish did not reproduce themselves by the coming together of the male and female! To eat any sort of food which came from a warm-blooded animal might be murder, for they believed in the transmigration of souls, and therefore such an animal might be the dwelling-place of a human soul. This, again, was perfectly logical; to be born again, after death, in another body was, according to this theology, a proper and necessary punishment for sin. All sexual acts which might possibly produce offspring were forbidden to the “Perfect”; they must purify themselves by fasts and elaborate ceremonies if they so much as touched a woman by accident. The propagation of human beings, with their sinful, material bodies, was clearly the worst of crimes. Hence the “Perfect” would sometimes tell a pregnant woman that she had a devil within her. Marriage was a perpetual state of sin; it was worse than adultery and fornication because the married felt no shame, and were, therefore, more likely to persist in cohabitation. It was even whispered that, just as sexual intercourse out of marriage was better than intercourse between married people because the married felt no shame, so, too, any unnatural form of intercourse from which children could not be conceived was better than natural cohabitation. Finally, the horrible and perfectly logical climax to all this was that suicide was the deed above all others most pleasing to God.