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

by J. M. Robertson

It is true that from the East the later crusaders learned what chivalry they evolved; that Saladin became a kind of model hero for Christian knights; and that he could hold knightly friendship with Richard of England. But Richard nevertheless could massacre two thousand hostages in cold blood for an unpaid debt; and his crusading left him as it found him, a faithless ruffian, whom to honour is to be cheated by a romance. Nor did passages of chivalry ever root out of crusaders’ hearts the creed that no faith need be kept with a misbeliever.

It is true again that the Crusades involved much social metabolism in Europe. The papal indulgence freed serfs from their masters, and debtors from their usurers, while the crusade lasted; the crusading barons freed many more serfs for a price down, and sold broad lands to middle-class buyers in order to furnish themselves for the campaign. And the mere stir of the exodus and the return, repeated for so many generations, was a vivifying shock to the torpor of medieval Europe, where war was for many the one relief to a vast tedium. But the torpor must go to the credit of the creed if the shock does, since the faith had vetoed the intercourse of peace; and to the same account must be put the throwing back upon itself of the Saracen civilization, of which Christian enmity directly or indirectly wrought the arrest and ruin, first in the East, later in Spain. Such wreckages surely block the path of the wrecker. If, finally, we seek to measure the reactions of crusading savagery on the life of those who wrought and those who applauded it—a reaction seldom reckoned in the discussion of the “results”—we shall be well prepared for the discovery that in the fourteenth century the general lot of men in Europe showed no betterment; that the tillers of the soil had still to sweat blood under feudal masters, save where the enormous loss of life through the pestilence known as the Black Death had for a time raised the price of labour; and that the institution which above all embodied for Europe the memory of the Crusades, the Order of the Knights Templars, was at length crushed in its home by as base a conspiracy and as cruel a slaughter as ever marked the struggle of Christian with Mohammedan. It was pretended by Philip the Fair of France, who began the plot, that the Order was anti-Christian, and devoted to blasphemous rites; but there is no proof of the occurrence of anything more than irregular acts of irreverence, answering to the artistic ribaldries of the mason-companies who built the cathedrals. That phenomenon is in itself noteworthy, as showing how the Crusades had tended to shake faith; but the Templars as a whole were no more unbelievers than the kings who coveted their wealth. It was for that wealth, which was indeed incongruously great, that they were conspired against by their fellow Christians, who in two hundred years of a precarious union of enmity against men of another faith had not learned goodwill towards those of their own. The drama ended as it began, in hatred and crime.

Chapter IV

THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE

§ 1. Superstition and Intolerance

In judging of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, account must always be taken of the fact that their earlier literature is mainly religious and ecclesiastical, and that such literature often gives a very faint idea of the higher mental life of the educated laity. In our own time, and still more in the last two centuries, the literature of devotion and of the Church seldom suggests the play of intelligence that actually goes on in the world: taken by itself, indeed, it would often imply intellectual decline. As we have seen and shall see, the Middle Ages had an intellectual life apart from the Church; and in the period we term the Renaissance that life was far-reaching; there is reason therefore to question whether at a time when authors were mostly clerics there was not some sane thinking of which we read little or nothing. But even if such allowance be made, the fact remains that the period of clerical supremacy in literature is a period of enormous superstition.

Under that term even religious people now include a habitual belief in diabolical agency, a constant affirmation of miracles, portents, divine and fiendish apparitions; and the Protestant adds to the definition saint-worship, belief in the supernatural virtue of relics, and the acceptance of the daily miracle of transubstantiation. But even if questions of doctrine be put aside, we may sum up that the average Christian in the Middle Ages was more credulous as to daily prodigies, saintly and fiendish, than even the average Catholic peasant of to-day in the more backward European countries. Doubters and unbelievers there must always have been; but in the medieval period it was dangerous to utter doubt, unless by way of attack on priests and monks in circles where they were not popular. Ribald doubt, besides, came off best; grave disbelief incurred suspicion; and where men cannot speak their thought they are hindered in their thinking. The most unseemly debates, such as that as to whether the eucharist when eaten passed through the normal process of digestion (“stercoranism” was the name given to the heresy that it did), and that set up by Ratramnus as to how the impregnation of the Virgin actually took place—such discussions could go on freely; but more decent controversy could not. Beyond question, the influence of clerical literature was mainly for gross credulity. The lives of the saints in general, from Gregory I onwards, tell constantly of a puerility of judgment which to a Periclean Greek would have been inconceivable, and which was incompatible not only with rational thought but with tolerable veracity. Language and the art of writing had become means of destroying common sense. In the hands of the hagiographers, the use of miracle so far outgoes the older tradition that it must have finally failed to suggest anything divine—even to a believer. To a skeptic it suggests burlesque.

On the other hand, medieval life was in the main as much ridden by fear of evil spirits as that of any savages of our own time; for every people had kept the notion of their hostile sprites, and the Christian devil was simply made the God of that kingdom. Life, too, was shorter than moderns can well realize; so high was the normal death-rate, so frequent was pestilence, so little understood was disease; and the nearness of death made men either reckless or afraid. Where ignorance and fear go hand in hand, is the realm of superstition. Average religion was summed up in a perfectly superstitious use of the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist; a devout hope in the intercession and protection of the saints; an ever-present fear of the activity of the fiend; a singularly mechanical use of formularies; an intense anxiety to possess or benefit by holy relics, the easy manufacture of which must have enriched myriads; a chronic fear of sorcery; and a conception of hell and purgatory so literal that its general failure to amend or control conduct is a revelation of the inconsequence of average morality. It is often hard to distinguish in medieval religion between devotional and criminal motives. In the life of the Italian St. Romuald (tenth century) it is told that when he insisted on leaving the retreat in Catalonia where he had won a saintly repute, the Catalans proposed to kill him in order to possess his relics. He in turn cudgelled his father nearly to death to make him adhere to his profession of the religious life. Such ethical ideas expressed themselves in the monastic caste not only in austerities but in systematic self-flagellation; and in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the principle evolved the chronic movements of the Flagellants, specially so-called, whose wild and public self-tortures neither Church nor State could put down while the mania lasted.