A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

As we have seen in connection with the growth of idolatry, there was even in the Dark Ages an earnest minority within the Church which resisted the downward bias of the majority and of their hierarchical rulers. In no period, probably, was the spirit of reason wholly absent; and from time to time it bore distinct witness. Thus we find alongside of the effort of Claudius and Agobard against idolatry and extraneous superstitions a less vigorous but no less remarkable testimony against the central superstition of the priestly system. When the Frankish monk Paschasius Radbert (831) put flatly what had become the orthodox doctrine of Rome as to the transubstantiation of the eucharist, some of the northern scholars who had preserved the pre-barbaric tradition were found to gainsay him. As the discussion continued long, the liberal-minded Frankish emperor, Charles the Bald, invited special replies; and a learned monk, Ratramnus, wrote a treatise to the effect that the “real presence” was spiritual, not corporeal. But John the Scot (then = Irishman), otherwise known as Erigena, wrote on the same invitation to the effect that the bread and wine were merely symbols or memorials of the Last Supper—a heresy so bold that only the emperor’s protection could have saved the utterer. And his freethinking did not end there, for in the discussion on predestination begun by the monk Gottschalk, in which John was invited to intervene by the bigoted abbot Hincmar, the Irish scholar was again recalcitrant to authority; while on the question of Deity and Trinity he held a language that anticipated Spinoza, and brought upon his memory, when he was long dead, the anathema of the papacy. Another Irishman of the same period, Macarius or Macaire, taught a similar pantheism in France.

John Scotus, however, was by far the greatest thinker of the Dark Ages, and it was impossible that his ideas should become normal. Not for two hundred years was there any overt result from his and Ratramnus’s heresy on the eucharist. Then (1045) Berengar of Tours set forth a modified doctrine of the eucharist which rested on that of Ratramnus, and brought on him a series of prosecutions at Rome for heresy, from the punishment for which he was saved by Hildebrand, as papal adviser and later as pope; but also by his own formal retractations, to which however he did not adhere. The populace, he tells us, would gladly have slain him; and more than once he had narrow escapes. After all he did but affirm a “spiritual real presence”; and while some of his party went as far as John Scotus, the stand for reason was soon tacitly abandoned, the great majority even of the educated class accepting the priestly dogma. Not till the Reformation was it again firmly challenged, and even then not by all the reformers.

A similar fortune attended the attempt of the French canon Rousselin (Roscellinus), also in the twelfth century, to rationalize the doctrine of the Trinity. Proceeding logically as a “Nominalist,” denying the reality of abstractions, he argued that if the Three Persons were one thing it was only a nominal thing. His heresy, however, admittedly ended in simple tritheism; and after he, like Berengar, had on pressure recanted, his subsequent withdrawal of his recantation did not revive excitement. Not till the sixteenth century did Unitarianism begin to assert itself against Trinitarianism, and Deism against both. There was indeed a great development of general rationalism in philosophy in the twelfth century, especially in France, as represented by Abailard; and even in the eleventh the argument of Anselm to prove the existence of God shows that very radical scepticism had indirectly made itself heard; but no philosophic movement affected the teachings and practices of the Church as such. As for the kind of rationalism which denied the immortality of the soul, though it seems to have been somewhat common in Florence early in the twelfth century, it never took such propagandist form as to bring on it the assault of the papacy; and the occasional philosophic affirmation of the eternity of matter met the same immunity. It is remarkable that, despite the denunciation of all the truths of ancient science by the Church, the doctrine of the roundness of the earth was still affirmed in the eighth century by an Irish priest of Bavaria named Vergilius, who was duly denounced for his heresy by St. Boniface, and deposed by the pope, but afterwards reinstated and finally sainted. How the doctrine fared in detail does not appear, but the knowledge persisted; and though in the fourteenth century Nicolaus of Autricuria was compelled to recount his teaching of the atomistic theory, in the fifteenth his namesake of Cusa taught with impunity the rotation of the earth on its axis, being despite that made a cardinal; while the Italian poet Pulci with equal impunity affirmed the existence of an Antipodes. Nicolaus of Cusa even put forth the old pagan doctrine of the infinity of the physical universe—the beginning of modern pantheistic and atheistic philosophy.

As the “false dawn” of the Renaissance began to glimmer, a new source of heresy can be seen in the higher teaching—heretical in its own sphere—of Saracen philosophy, which under Aristotelian and Jewish influences had gone far while Christendom was sinking in a deepening darkness. The effects of Saracen contacts, acting on minds perhaps prepared by the doctrine of John Scotus, first became obvious in the pantheistic teaching of Amalrich of Bena and David Dinant at the end of the twelfth century. Amalrich was forced to abjure; and after his death his bones were dug up and burned (1209), and many of his followers burned alive; David of Dinant having to fly for his life. Then it was that a Council held at Paris vetoed all study of Aristotle at the university. Yet in 1237 the veto was withdrawn; and as Aristotle became the basis of the systematic theology of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), his philosophy was thenceforth the orthodox system in the schools. From the first it must have counted for indirect scepticism; and in the great Summa Theologiæ of Thomas himself are to be seen abundant traces of the new doubt of the age, much of it set up by reflection on the spectacle of conflicting religious dogmatisms in the Crusades, some of it by Saracen philosophy, especially that of Averroës [Ibn Roshd]. In Sicily and Southern Italy, which under Frederick II were the special seat of this doubt and of the tendency to tolerance which it generated, the spirit of reason ultimately fared ill; but thenceforth an element of skepticism pervades the higher life of Europe. Saracen science, medical, chemical, and astronomical—the virtual foundation of all the modern science of Europe—tended in the same direction. In Italy, in particular, respect for the Church and papacy almost ceased to exist among educated men; and the revival of such specific heresies as disbelief in immortality and belief in the eternity of matter prepared the way for simple deism.

But against all such heresy the Church could hold its ground in virtue of its vast vested interests, as well as of the subjection of the mass, superstitious even when irreverent. The practical danger to the Church’s power lay first in the growth of anti-clerical feeling among people with religious instincts, and secondarily in the anti-clerical economic interest of the nobility and upper classes in all the northern countries. What delayed disaster was the slowness of the two hostile elements to combine.

§ 4. Anti-clerical Heresies

The kind of heresy which first stirred the Church to murderous repression was naturally that which struck at its monopolies. After the ancient schism of the Donatists, which so organized itself as to set up a rival Church, the sect which was most bloodily persecuted in the period of established Christianity from Theodosius onwards was the Manichæan, visibly the Church’s most serious rival. So, in the Dark Ages, the heresies which roused most priestly anger were the movement against image-worship; the predestinarian doctrine of Gottschalk, which, though orthodox and Augustinian, was now felt to undermine the priest’s power over souls in purgatory; and that which impugned the priestly miracle of the eucharist, the main hold of the priesthood over society. And the first resort to general and systematic massacre as against heresy in the West was made after there had arisen in the eleventh and twelfth centuries a movement of popular schism which assailed not only a number of leading rites and dogmas, but flatly denied the priestly prerogative.

Of this movement the first stages occurred in the eastern empire, in the sect known as Paulicians, who are first heard of under that name in Armenia in the seventh century. Their founder, however, one Constantine, afterwards known as Sylvanus, worked on existing bases. The name of the sect seems to have stood for an appeal to the teaching of Paul as against paganized Christianity; and it had Marcionite elements; but though it was at first anti-Gnostic and anti-Manichæan, it acquired both Gnostic and Manichæan or at least Mazdean characteristics, even in the teaching of Sylvanus. On the face of the case, it suggests both Persian and Moslem influences. Its practical heresies were opposition to the adoration of images and relics, to the use of the Old Testament, to the worship of saints, angels, and the Virgin, and to the prerogatives of monks and priests; the sectaries claiming to read the New Testament for themselves, in defiance of the virtual veto of the Greek Church on such study by the laity. For the rest, they insisted that baptism and the eucharist were spiritual and not bodily rites, and even reaffirmed the “Docetic” doctrine that Jesus had not a true human body, and so was incapable of suffering. Their flat denial of priestly claims marked them out as a specially obnoxious body, and they were fiercely persecuted, the founder being stoned to death.

Like all the other sects, they were in turn divided, and one section had the protection of Leo the Iconoclast, who agreed with them as to images. A later leader, Sergius or Tychicus, won for his sect the favour of Nicephorus I; but the next iconoclast, Leo the Armenian, resenting their other heresies, cruelly persecuted them; and like previous heretical sects they were driven over to the national enemy, which was now Islam. Constantine “Copronymus,” seeking to remedy this state of things, transplanted many of them to Constantinople and Thrace, thus bringing their heresy into Europe; but in the ninth century, on the final restoration of image-worship, a vast multitude was massacred in Armenia. Most of the remnant there went over to the Saracens, and became the fiercest enemies of the empire.