That resistance had not been in the name of heresy against Catholicism, but only in defence of some measure of toleration from the State to the heretical bodies. Tolerance was not even expressly stated as the motive of those who resisted the Crusade, but only implied by their conduct. The point is worth noting. Not one of the southern lords who resisted the Crusade was himself a heretic. None of them, except Raymond Roger of Foix, was ever proved to have so much as taken any particular interest in heresy as a fad, an object of curiosity. Pedro of Aragon was the Pope’s vassal and “First Standard Bearer of the Church.” Raymond VI of Toulouse had been all his life a Catholic, and died with all the consolations of religion, having on the morning of his sudden death gone twice to the church of La Daurade in Toulouse to pray. After his death the honour of burying his remains was disputed for years between the Parish of St. Sernin and the Knights Hospitallers of Toulouse. Those who resisted the Crusaders fought so that they might not be compelled to suppress the heretics among whom they lived, and especially that they might not be deprived of power and possessions by North Frenchmen who came to seize their lands in perpetuity as a reward for bringing about suppression of heresy.
Nowhere else in Europe was there regular armed opposition. In Italy, which was (after Languedoc) the stronghold of mediæval Manicheanism, the heretics of Orvieto had caused a riot and the assassination of a zealous Catholic magistrate in 1199-1200. In Viterbo, a few years later, the citizens elected certain heretical magistrates, and it needed harsh words from Innocent before they would consent to disqualify them. But compared to the Albigensian business this was child’s play. In Languedoc the battle was fought and won.
But in order to hold a country it is necessary not only to conquer it, but also to organize it. After the conquest force is no longer needed on a large scale, it still plays its part, but only in the enforcement of decisions arrived at by some form of law. And although force plays a greater part in the conflicts of ideas than is theoretically admitted nowadays, nevertheless it is not the chief instrument of those conflicts. The chief instrument is, of course, persuasion. At the end of the Albigensian war there was no longer organized opposition in Europe to the enforcement of judicial decisions against heresy, and these judicial decisions were made by the Inquisition. Meanwhile, before the fighting had ceased, there were already in existence two powerful new bodies organized for the use of persuasion in the cause of the Church, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, who may be grouped as the Mendicant Orders.
From the beginning, Francis and Dominic agreed in this, that they uncloistered the monk. Instead of withdrawing their friars from the world, they launched them into the midst of it to strive, by precept and example, to win souls. In particular St. Dominic enlisted his “Friar Preachers” to preach against heresy, and St. Francis to preach the love of God after a fashion that did away with that grimness of early mediæval religion which had nourished the over-ascetic heresies such as the Manichean.
It is hard not to linger over St. Francis of Assisi. A true Italian and a child of his time, it is not surprising that he sometimes seems to us extravagant. When we hear of him rolling naked in a rose bush to drive away the temptations of sex, or having himself dragged through the streets and beaten, as penance for having eaten a morsel of chicken in Lent, we are as much puzzled as repelled. We may even lend an ear to doctors who tell us that there is a perversion of the lusts of the flesh called Masochism, in which the subject derives pleasure from pain. The saint himself repented at the end of having caused his body to suffer as he had done; “I have sinned against my brother the ass,” he said as he lay dying. And yet, all in all, he remains the most Christ-like of Christians. His tenderness to mankind was all-embracing, and went out beyond man to the beasts, and even to natural objects. To him all nature was a fascinating little sister, to be laughed at, petted and caressed. The sun was our brother: to him he wrote a canticle. The birds were our little brothers: to them he preached as they clustered around him. Even the wolf, whom the saint turned from his evil courses, was “Brother Wolf.” Death was but “our sister, the death of the body,” and the very devils were “God’s warders.”
This spirit was the precise opposite to that grimness in the religious feeling of a century before. To the men of the early twelfth century, for instance to Abelard, the claims of religion were inexorably stern. They could no more be reconciled with any sort of human affection, than could the unyielding round arch adjust itself to vault the irregular compartments of nave and ambulatory. In human feeling, as in architecture, the result was ugly distortion, and it was precisely this distorted feeling that produced Manicheanism. Clearly, if God was good and loving and the world utterly vile, then God had not made the world. The Devil had made it, and was by that act co-equal, if not for the time being, superior, in power to God Himself. Not so, said St. Francis, the earth is the Lord’s, and it is beautiful. Only pride, both pride of possessions and pride of intellect, stands in the way of happiness. So he joyously married his “Lady Poverty,” and once refused to let a hesitating novice possess so much as a breviary. Under the busy brushes of Giotto and the other painters of the Franciscan legend, the Holy Family, without ceasing to be a symbol of the faith, became also the emblem of innocent and happy domestic life.
St. Francis did not begin the humanizing of religion. The change had already begun before the middle of the twelfth century with the cult of the Virgin. There is a legend that once, when St. Bernard was praying to her, and had come to the words, “Show that thou art the mother,” Our Lady appeared to him and from her breast dropped on his lips three drops of the milk that had nourished the Saviour. That is already far from the atmosphere of Abelard and Heloise. Already, in St. Bernard’s time, the north-French architects were beginning to break up the unyielding Norman and Lombard round arches into the pointed form, and the same period was evidently trying to resolve the distortion of religion and human love. St. Francis enormously enlarged and deepened the new current of religious thought. The climax was reached after his death in the story of the Miracle of Bolsena. Here, in 1263, a priest without faith in the Real Presence of our Lord in the Host, saw the wafer which he himself had just consecrated covered with drops of blood. About half a century before, in neighbouring Orvieto, a zealous Catholic magistrate had been murdered by the Manichees. Now the Church insisted that God gave His very self to be the food of all men, even to the poor, the serf, and the humble.
St. Dominic was of a different temper, and attacked the problem in a different way. Dante calls him—
“... the holy athlete,
Benignant to his own and cruel to his foes,”