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

by J. M. Robertson

It should be remembered that the Inquisition’s purpose was to destroy books no less than men; and until printing overpowered the effort, the check thus put on the spread of rational thought bade fair to be fatal. In a single auto-da-fé (“act of faith”) at Salamanca, near the end of the fifteenth century, six thousand volumes were burned, on the pretence that they contained Judaic errors, or were concerned with magic and witchcraft. It is certain that many of them were of another character. Elsewhere the work of destruction was less ostentatiously done, but it was constant.

In the matter of torture and slaughter, however, the work of the Inquisition has become a proverb; and after all corrections have been made on the earlier estimates by Llorente and other historians, the figures remain frightful. In “a few years” the New Inquisition burned alive, in Castile alone, nearly two thousand persons, and variously penalized some twenty thousand more. At this rate, many thousands must have been burned in a generation; and the statement that nearly two hundred thousand passed through the Spanish Inquisition’s hands in thirty-six years is sadly credible. Its methods were the negation of every principle of justice. Any evidence, including that of criminals, children, and even idiots, was valid against an accused person, while only that of the most unimpeachable kind was heard in his favour; all proceedings were strictly private; false informers were almost never punished; and the general principle was that anyone who was tried must be somehow guilty, the Inquisition being like the pope infallible. Thus, if a man could not be convicted of real heresy, he could be punished for an error in the repetition of a prayer or a creed. But the torture-chamber can seldom have failed to yield whatever proof was sought for. No such reign of terror and horror has occurred in any other period of European history; and only in the practices of witch-finders among savages can its systematic atrocity be anywhere paralleled.

§ 3. Classic Survivals and Saracen Contacts

Ancient literature, as we have seen, was nearing its nadir when Christianity was becoming supreme in the decadent Roman Empire; and with the formal extinction of classic paganism came the virtual extinction of fine letters, science, and philosophy, in the Byzantine State no less than in the West. The last Christian writers of any philosophic importance were really products of classic culture and the ancient civilization. When that civilization had been outwardly transformed to a Christian guise, the mental life shrank to the field of theology, with a few fenced and meagre plots of scholastic drilling-ground. Of the decayed discipline of ancient culture Christian civilization preserved only the most mechanical formulas; and the mental training of the Dark Ages consisted in a few handbooks (notably those by Martianus Capella and Cassiodorus) of what was then encyclopedic knowledge—the rules of Latin grammar, dialectics or elementary logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, elementary geometry, and some traditional astronomy. The first three constituted the trivium or introductory course in the medieval schools; the others the quadrivium: together “the seven liberal arts.” The larger Encyclopedia of Isidore of Seville, the standard authority for centuries, is as mechanical, as devoid of living thought, as empty of scientific knowledge, as any of the others. In the way of literature, there was left to most Westerns little beyond a few of the later Latin writers, such as Boethius, who could pass muster as being Christians. Gregory the Great had set the note of theological anathema against the pagan poets and philosophers; and classic history survived only in bad abstracts.

Wherever in the Dark Ages we meet with any power of thought, it is to be traced either to the influence of Saracen contacts or, as in John Scotus, to the Greek scholarship that had been preserved in Ireland while the western empire was being dissolved in barbarism. The English Alcuin, who had loyally aided Charlemagne in his efforts to spread education in the new “Holy Roman” empire, got his culture in an atmosphere where that influence had partly survived. Beyond this, the Latin world had preserved from the past, in the law schools which never wholly died out in Italy, a professional knowledge of the Justinian code, which the Lombards and Franks had allowed to subsist for those who claimed to be judged by it, and which remained the proper law of the papal territory after Charlemagne. In the sphere of such special knowledge, though it was strictly monopolized, there was doubtless an intellectual life largely independent of religion; and there some classical culture probably always flourished.

The first effectual movements of new mental life, however, come from contact with the Saracens of Spain. While the Byzantine world let the treasures of old Greek knowledge fall from its hands, the Mohammedans in the East early acquired, at first through the Nestorian Christians, some knowledge of Aristotle and of Greek mathematics, medicine, and astronomy; and this in the progressive Saracen period was passed on to the Moors of Spain. Thence came into the Latin world the beginnings of science, as anciently known, with the beginnings of chemistry, an Arab creation. After the period of John Scotus, all culture had for centuries decayed: the few who cared to read were monks, taught to hold pagan lore in horror; so that at the end of the ninth century even such schooling as the trivium and quadrivium was rare in what had been the realm of Charlemagne; and the later manuals, such as that of St. Remi, were even more puerile than the older. Only from new culture-contacts could new culture arise.

One of the most fruitful impulses to such life was the introduction, late in the tenth century, by Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II, of an intermediate form of the Arabic notation, making possible the decimal method. Gerbert had acquired in his youthful sojourn on the Spanish march—not among the Moors, as the tradition has it—some knowledge of Arab mathematics and of the logic of Aristotle; and where his predecessors in the cathedral school at Rheims had for the most part shunned the Latin classics, he used them freely in teaching rhetoric. But the impulse he gave to the science of number, so vital alike for astronomy and for chemistry, was his greatest practical service. Those who used his method of calculating were called Gerbertists; and in that still dark age even such knowledge as his gave rise to the belief that he had dealings with the devil.

The new life was slow to take root; and when in the eleventh century the English monk Adelhard translated from the Arabic, which he had learned in his travels in Spain and Egypt, the Elements of Euclid, he found little welcome for it. Not till a century later did a fresh translation of Euclid from the Arabic, by Campanus, make its way in the schools. Algebra came from the same source, through a travelling merchant of Pisa, about the beginning of the thirteenth century. Thenceforth the infant sciences of physics held their ground, and from those beginnings became possible the lore of Roger Bacon. A genuine scientific spirit indeed was slow to grow; the ideals and ethics of religion had almost atrophied among Christians the instinct for simple truth; but the passion for astrology promoted astronomy, and the passion for gold promoted chemistry, all its practitioners hoping for the philosopher’s stone, which should transmute lead into gold. Always it is from the Arabs that the impulse comes. Under the emperor Frederick II, who in his Sicilian seat gave free course to Saracen culture and thought, was first translated from the Arabic the Greek Ptolemy’s great work on astronomy; and for Alphonso X of Castile, by Moorish means, were compiled new astronomical tables. From the Arabs, too, came trigonometry, which even for the Greeks had not been a separate science; and only in the fifteenth century did Müller of Königsberg (“Regiomontanus”), who perfected the decimal notation, first give it new developments.

New philosophic thought came by the same paths. Between the philosophy of the Arab Averroës, with its Aristotelian basis and its lead to pantheism and materialism on the one hand, and the moral reaction set up by the Crusades on the other, the bases of Christian orthodoxy were shaken. The legend that Frederick II wrote a treatise entitled The Three Impostors, dealing with Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, is a fable; there was probably no such book in the Middle Ages, for it would have meant death at the hands of the Inquisition to possess it; but the very phrase showed what men had become capable of thinking and saying.