With respect to Hell, it was a literary commonplace for the lover (like Aucassin) to declare that, for the love of his lady, he cheerfully risked being roasted eternally.
As for the infliction of pain, Huysmans puts the contrast between mediæval and modern as follows:—
“Nervousness ... for no one knows exactly what this disease is from which everyone is suffering; it is certain, nowadays, people’s nerves are more easily shaken by the least shock. Remember what the papers say about the execution of those condemned to death; they reveal that the executioner works timidly, that he is on the point of fainting, that he suffers from nerves when he decapitates a man. What misery. When one compares him with the invincible torturers of old time. They used to enclose people’s legs in wrappings of wet parchment which shrank when placed before a fire and slowly crushed the flesh; or indeed they drove wedges into your thighs and so broke the bones; they crushed the thumbs in vices worked by screws, raked off strips of skin with a rake, rolled up the skin of your stomach as if it had been an apron, quartered you, put you in the strappado, roasted you, watered you with burning brandy, and all this with impassive face and tranquil nerves unshaken by any shriek, any groan. These exercises being a little fatiguing, after the operation they found themselves with a fine thirst and a great hunger. They were full-blooded, well-balanced fellows, whereas now....”[24]
Why these things are so we cannot say. We may hold that mediæval man lived under more primitive conditions, hence that his nerves were sounder; that he was comparatively near, in time, to the Dark Ages when the European mind had lain fallow and reposed for centuries. Moreover, it is possible that educated men of the time were influenced by the fact that torture had played a part, although a restricted part, in the Roman Law. But all these are only suggestions. The important thing to remember is that laymen of every class and condition were for burning the heretic, lawfully, if possible, by lynching if necessary, while some of the higher clergy were in favour of mildness, but by no means all.
With the twelfth century the scene changed ominously. Throughout considerable districts in Languedoc, Manicheanism began to gain such headway that heretics were no longer lynched but protected there. They had become so numerous in the district around Toulouse, and especially in its neighbouring town of Albi, that they began to be called Albigenses. Just when the change took place is hard to say. “Early in the century,” we are told by Lea, “the people of Albi prevented the bishop and a neighbouring abbot from imprisoning certain ‘obstinate heretics.’” And yet as late as 1126 we find the mob at St. Gilles lynching Peter of Bruys, a notorious anti-sacerdotal heretic who had taken it upon himself to show his contempt for Christian symbolism by burning a pile of crosses on Good Friday and roasting meat at the flame. However, this seems to have been the only instance of heretic-lynching in Languedoc. In 1119, Pope Calixtus II, held a council in Toulouse which declared the Albigensian Manicheans excommunicate. Henceforward we begin to get a whole series of councils. Pope Innocent II, presiding over the second General Council of the Lateran in 1139, again excommunicated the Albigenses, and went further by ordering the civil authorities to prosecute them. Only nine years later, Eugenius III, through the Council of Rheims, forbade anyone to give them aid and comfort. Under Alexander III the Council of Tours, in 1163, solemnly cursed all who might give aid and comfort to heretics; and in 1179, the third General Council of the Lateran repeated the curse once more.
The need for five Papal Councils in sixty years to repeat one another shows that their successive decrees had not amounted to much in practice. The heresy had continued to flourish. Its missionaries travelled from fair to fair throughout Gascony, the Albigeois, and the Toulousain. Their doctrine was no longer whispered, it was openly stated and seldom denied, for the clergy of the South were too busy enjoying themselves and quarrelling with the laity about property rights to go in much for preaching and theological debate.
The wealthy, refined, pleasure-loving society described earlier in this chapter was beginning to see in Albigensianism a means of escaping the clear-cut scheme of faith and morals which irked it. To most of these volatile easy-going people, with their immemorial tradition of civilization stretching back beyond the beginnings of recorded history, heresy may well have seemed like a grateful mist, a twilight serving to blur and soften the clear unmistakable lines of Catholic Christianity. And if to such a people, the life of an Albigensian believer seemed easier and more natural than that of a Catholic layman, on the other hand their self-mortifying eccentrics found in the life of an Albigensian “Perfect” a stricter and more fiercely inhuman rule of conduct than that of any Catholic order. Councils and anathema notwithstanding, the Church continued to lose ground.
Towards the middle of the twelfth century, the greatest churchman in Europe, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, gives a doleful picture of the churches of Languedoc as without people ... “the people without priests, the priests without the reverence due to them, and Christians without Christ.” Granting that St. Bernard loved violence of statement and was something of a professional pessimist, still it was true that instead of saying, like proper Christians outside of Languedoc, “I had rather be a Jew” than do such and such mean or disgraceful act, the meridional would say, “I had rather be a priest.” When St. Bernard himself, with all his prestige, came South to preach, he failed even to get a respectful hearing on one important occasion.
The atmosphere of some of these debates comes to us, with a flash of humour, in a story of St. Bernard’s preaching mission. As Lea tells it, the Saint ... “after preaching to an immense assemblage ... mounted his horse to depart, and a hardened heretic, thinking to confuse him, said, ‘my lord Abbott, our heretic, of whom you think so ill, has not a horse so fat and spirited as yours.’ ‘Friend,’ replied the Saint, ‘I deny it not. The horse eats and grows fat for itself, for it is but a brute and by nature given to its appetites, whereby it offends not God. But before the judgment seat of God I and your master will not be judged by horses’ necks, but each by his own neck. Now, then, look at my neck and see if it is fatter than your master’s and if you can justly reproach me.’ Then he threw down his cowl and displayed his neck, long and thin and wasted by maceration and austerities, to the confusion of the misbelievers.”[25] One has a vision of saints and heretics “matching necks” before the gate of Paradise, before an audience of admiring angels.
Other stories, some remarkably like accounts of modern revivalist meetings, are told of the power of the Saint’s oratory. At Albi, after preaching to a throng which packed the cathedral, he called upon all who repented to raise their right hands, and all did so. But like modern revivalists again, with their spectacular “conversions,” St. Bernard seems to have accomplished nothing definite by his trip. After his departure we find the situation in Languedoc developing precisely as if he had never come.