Leaving on one side all discussion as to the damnation of the heathen, the fact remains that the Christian Church is bound to maintain her faith and practice as an essential, nay the essential, of human life. Otherwise she has no reason for being at all. She must, therefore, contend especially against the heretic, the enemy from within, who would disfigure the faith by which she lives; and she has done so, from the “false teachers” and “heretics” whom St. Paul so often urged his flock to avoid, down to the poor creatures who would reduce her Saviour to the stature of a “social uplifter” or the walking delegate of a labor union. To keep the faith is a perpetual warfare.
Make what you will of the body empowered to interpret and define Christian doctrine and of the means of defending that doctrine when defined: the necessities of some sort of definition and authority will remain as long as the Christian name endures.
Granted, then, the permanent necessity of some sort of reaction against heresy, what then would be the past precedents upon which a learned twelfth-century churchman could look back, in order to guide his action? In the Gospels themselves he would find the Pharisees denounced in violent terms. He would read St. Paul writing of “... Hymenæus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.”[18] Later, he would find Christian Emperors (beginning with Constantine, the first of them) enacting laws against the defeated party in Church councils, which laws went so far at one time as to threaten with death those in whose possession Arian writings should be found. In particular, he would find Manicheanism constantly under the ban. Diocletian, among the last of the pagan Emperors, as well as his Christian successors, including those who tolerated all other sects claiming to be Christian, so he might learn, had all persistently attacked the Manicheans. To be sure he would find almost no capital sentences, and a good deal of insistence, from various fathers and early doctors of the Church, upon the idea that faith was necessarily a matter of persuasion, and therefore could not be imposed by force. Nevertheless, he would learn that a goodly number of writers, among them the two great names of St. Augustine and Pope St. Leo, had gone so far as to approve of the death penalty when inflicted upon heretics by the State. Even in the times nearer to him, the Dark Ages, when heresy and philosophic discussion had been equally rare, our imagined twelfth-century scholar might learn by reading Alcuin, Charlemagne’s teacher, that the principal use of philosophy is that by its aid “... the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith have triumphed over all heresiarchs.”[19] Even in those sleepy days, then, the Christian scholar was ardently concerned with the refutation of heresy.
But in all probability, even the twelfth century scholar was more concerned with the Church as a factor in social life than with the intellectual pros and cons as to the lawfulness of taking action against her enemies. To the mediæval, no other centre of organized charity, of hospitality to travellers, above all of education, was even thinkable. If men travelled, they would be going on pilgrimage to the shrine of some saint; if they made war they preferred to make it against the “paynim.” The learned man, who would almost certainly be in orders himself, would think of the Church as the chief bond of human society, and the unlearned laity, whether gentle or simple, would feel this quite as strongly, and without the qualifications and distinctions which go with the intellectual life. Furthermore, had not the Church herself laid it down, in the rolling phrases of the Athanasian creed, that unless a man hold the Catholic Faith (therein defined) he cannot be saved?
Finally, we must struggle to think ourselves back inside the skin, as it were, of the Christian of those days who was unaccustomed to open denial of the faith. Such a man or woman would be leading a rough and ready sort of life, without many of the physical comforts of to-day. But that life would be sustained by the belief that God was, that He acted by the Church, and that through the Sacramental ministry of the Church, man with all his grossness and meanness was, or might make himself, secure, and would at the end have the last laugh on all the devils. To read one after the other, or still better to see, as I did once, two such plays as “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” and then Wilde’s “Birthday of the Infanta,” may hint to us all that they had and that we have lost. In the old play the Universe is known and friendly; in the modern it is infinite, uncharted, and cruel. Imagine, then, the effect upon such a man of hearing the Manichean teaching that all material things, and especially all material pleasures, were utterly devil-begotten, but that until their death-beds the common man and woman might do as they liked in all things, since God cared nothing for their observance of any commandments, except to forbid them to take oaths! Remember that to deny the value of oaths was to attack the all-important feudal oath of allegiance, the one theoretical basis of secular mediæval society. Here was an explosive mixture indeed.
But no matter how we seek to realize the mind of our forefathers in Western Europe, we cannot help shuddering at their immediate and ferocious action. In Orleans, in 1022, when the Manicheans were first discovered in the French “Royal Domaine” the king promptly called a council of bishops to decide what should be done. Meanwhile there was such an explosion of popular fury against the heretics that it was feared that they would be lynched when they should be brought out of the church in which they were being tried. To prevent this, the king had the queen stand at the church door, but when she recognized among them a priest to whom she had been used to confess she jabbed at him so savagely with a stick that she put out his eye. The heretics were taken outside the walls, a great fire was lit, for the last time they were called upon to repent and turn from their errors, and when they refused they were burned to death. One chronicler says that they went to their death cheerfully, but that when they were actually in the flames the agony was too much for some who cried out that they repented, although too late to be rescued.
The points to be noted are: First, the execution by order of the king, the highest authority in the land. Second, the fury of the queen and mob. What part, if any, the clergy had in stirring up this feeling we are not told, neither do we know exactly what action, or recommendation to action, came from the assembled bishops. Third, the constancy of the heretics and, fourth, the fearful nature of their punishment, go to make this first case a typical one. To the manner of the punishment we shall in a moment return.
We hear of the execution of heretics here and there throughout Northern France, Belgium, the Rhineland, and Lombardy from this time on. Sometimes the authorities would act, although the canon law was vague on the subject. When they would not, the people would rush the jail and burn the accused, quite in the style of our Southern lynchings. When the higher clergy protested and tried to save them, as they sometimes did, it made no difference. Once in Germany we hear of their being hanged, but in the other cases they were burned.
If anyone asks why burning was thought appropriate for the heretic, there is no answer to be given. These people were raised to the same pitch of fury by heresy, and avenged it in the same fashion, as a Southern mob of to-day in the case of negro rape upon a white woman. A difference appears in the attitude of the authorities. Throughout the twelfth century many of the higher clergy continued opposed to harsh measures. But other churchmen and invariably the civil government were usually ready to burn by full process of law, methodically, as if they were seizing property for debt. As time went on and the law on the subject became fixed, we lose the atmosphere of lynching and mob fury. Early in the fifteenth century, when the fiendish Breton noble, Gilles de Rais, was about to be burned, he repented and asked the people to pray for him; whereupon they went so far as to parade the streets, chanting and praying earnestly for the soul of the monster whom their authorities, with the entire approval of the paraders, were to burn on the morrow. To quote Belloc there was in all this “... cruelty which to us as we read of it seems something quite remote from human habit and experience.... You will perpetually hear vigorous protests against the justice of some particular sentence, but you will very rarely (but for the fear of such a negative I should say never) find men saying ‘just or unjust, the cruelty of the execution is so revolting that I protest against it.’ Men believed something with regard to the whole doctrine of expiation, of penal arrangements which they have not described to us and which we cannot understand save through the glimpses, sidelights, and guesses through what they imagine to be their plainest statements. Thus in the particular case of burning alive ... a thing we can scarcely bear to contemplate even in words ... the framers of the statutes seem to have thought not of the thing as a horror but as a particular type of execution symbolic of the total destruction of the culprit. It is quite easy to prove, from numerous instances ... Savonarola is one in point ... that the judges often appeared indifferent whether the body consumed were alive or dead. The chance pity of spectators in some cases, the sentence of the court in others, is permitted to release the sufferer long before the flames. To us it is amazing that such an attitude towards such a pain could have existed, but it did exist.”[20]
It is possible to go even further than the passage quoted above. For, if the culprit had died, it was thought worth while to dig up his corpse and at least burn that. Certainly, then, it would seem as if there was something almost sacramental about burning the heretic.