It would be an error, in view of the biological generalization proceeded on and the facts noted in this inquiry, to suppose that even in the Dark Ages, so called,[1] the spirit of critical reason was wholly absent from the life of Christendom. It had simply grown very rare, and was the more discountenanced where it strove to speak. But the most systematic suppression of heresies could not secure that no private heresy should remain. As Voltaire has remarked, there was “nearly always a small flock separated from the great.”[2] Apart too from such quasi-rationalism as was involved in semi-Pelagianism,[3] critical heresy chronically arose even in the Byzantine provinces, which by the curtailment of the Empire had been left the most homogeneous and therefore the most manageable of the Christian States. It is necessary to note those survivals of partial freethinking, when we would trace the rise of modern thought.
§ 1. Heresy in Byzantium
It was probably from some indirect influence of the new anti-idolatrous religion of Islam that in the eighth century the soldier-emperor, Leo the Isaurian, known as the Iconoclast, derived his aversion to the image-worship[4] which had long been as general in the Christian world as ever under polytheism. So gross had the superstition become that particular images were frequently selected as god-parents; of others the paint was partly scratched off to be mixed with the sacramental wine; and the bread was solemnly put in contact with them.[5] Leo began (726) by an edict simply causing the images to be placed so high that they could not be kissed, but on being met with resistance and rebellion he ordered their total removal (730). One view is that he saw image-worship to be the main hindrance to the spread of the faith among Jews and Moslems, and took his measures accordingly.[6] Save on this one point he was an orthodox Christian and Trinitarian, and his long effort to put down images and pictures was in itself rather fanatical[7] than rationalistic, though a measure of freethinking was developed among the religious party he created.[8] Of this spirit, as well as of the aversion to image-worship,[9] something must have survived the official restoration of idolatry; but the traces are few. The most zealous iconoclasts seem never to have risen above the flat inconsistency of treating the cross and the written gospels with exactly the same adoration that their opponents paid to images;[10] and their appeal to the scriptures—which was their first and last argument—was accordingly met by the retort that they themselves accepted the authority of tradition, as did the image-worshippers. The remarkable hostility of the army to the latter is to be explained, apparently, by the local bias of the eastern regions from which the soldiers were mainly recruited.
In the ninth century, when Saracen rivalry had stung the Byzantines into some partial revival of culture and science,[11] the all-learned Patriarch Photius (c. 820–891), who reluctantly accepted ecclesiastical office, earned a dangerous repute for freethinking by declaring from the pulpit that earthquakes were produced by earthly causes and not by divine wrath.[12] But this was an almost solitary gleam of reason in a generation wholly given up to furious strife over the worship of images, and Photius was one of the image-worshippers. The battle swung from extreme to extreme. The emperor Michael II, “the Stammerer” (820–828), held a medium position, and accordingly acquired the repute of a freethinker. A general under Leo V, “the Armenian,” he had conspired against him, and when on the verge of execution had been raised to the throne in place of Leo, who was assassinated at the altar. The new emperor aimed above all things at peace and quietness; but his methods were thoroughly Byzantine, and included the castration of the four sons of Leo. Michael himself is said to have doubted the future resurrection of men, to have maintained that Judas was saved, and to have doubted the existence of Satan because he is not named in the Pentateuch[13]—a species of freethinking not far removed from that of the Iconoclasts, whose grounds were merely Biblical. A generation later came Michael IV, “the Sot,” bred a wastrel under the guardianship of his mother, Theodora (who in 842 restored image-worship and persecuted the Paulicians), and her brother Bardas, who ultimately put her in a convent. Michael, repeatedly defeated by the Saracens, long held his own at home. Taking into favour Basil, who married his (Michael’s) mistress, he murdered Bardas, and a year later (867) was about to murder Basil in turn, when the latter anticipated him, murdered the emperor, and assumed the purple. It was under Basil, who put down the Iconoclasts, that Photius, after formally deposing and being deposed by the Pope of Rome (864–66) was really deposed and banished (868), to be restored to favour and office ten years later. In 886, on the death of Basil, he was again deposed, dying about 891. In that kaleidoscope of plot and faction, fanaticism and crime, there is small trace of sane thinking. Michael IV, in his disreputable way, was something of a freethinker, and could even with impunity burlesque the religious processions of the clergy,[14] the orthodox populace joining in the laugh; but there was no such culture at Constantinople as could develop a sober rationalism, or sustain it against the clergy if it showed its head. Intelligence in general could not rise above the plane of the wrangle over images. While the struggle lasted, it was marked by all the ferocity that belonged from the outset to Christian strifes; and in the end, as usual, the more irrational bias triumphed.
It was in a sect whose doctrine at one point coincided with iconoclasm that there were preserved such rude seeds of oriental rationalism as could survive the rule of the Byzantine emperors, and carry the stimulus of heresy to the west. The rise of the Paulicians in Armenia dates from the seventh century, and was nominally by way of setting up a creed on the lines of Paul as against the paganized system of the Church. Rising as they did on the borders of Persia, they were probably affected from the first by Mazdean influences, as the dualistic principle was always affirmed by their virtual founder, Constantine, afterwards known as Sylvanus.[15] Their original tenets seem to have been anti-Manichean, anti-Gnostic (though partly Marcionite), opposed to the worship of images and relics, to sacraments, to the adoration of the Virgin, of saints, and of angels, and to the acceptance of the Old Testament; and in an age in which the reading of the Sacred Books had already come to be regarded as a privilege of monks and priests, they insisted on reading the New Testament for themselves.[16] In this they were virtually founding on the old pagan conception of religion, under which all heads of families could offer worship and sacrifice without the intervention of a priest, as against the Judæo-Christian sacerdotalism, which vetoed anything like a private cultus. In the teaching of Sylvanus, further, there were distinct Manichean and Gnostic characteristics—notably, hostility to Judaism; the denial that Christ had a real human body, capable of suffering; and the doctrine that baptism and the communion were properly spiritual and not physical rites.[17] In the ninth century, when they had become a powerful and militant sect, often at war with the empire, they were still marked by their refusal to make any difference between priests and laymen. Anti-ecclesiasticism was thus a main feature of the whole movement; and the Byzantine Government, recognizing in its doctrine a particularly dangerous heresy, had at once bloodily attacked it, causing Sylvanus to be stoned to death.[18] Still it grew, even to the length of exhibiting the usual phenomena of schism within itself. One section obtained the protection of the first iconoclastic emperor, who agreed with them on the subject of images; and a later leader, Sergius or Tychicus, won similar favour from Nicephorus I; but Leo the Armenian (suc. 813), fearing the stigma of their other heresies, and having already trouble enough from his iconoclasm, set up against them, as against the image-worshippers, a new and cruel persecution.[19] They were thus driven over to the Saracens, whose advance-guard they became as against the Christian State; but the iconoclast Constantine Copronymus sympathetically[20] transplanted many of them to Constantinople and Thrace, thus introducing their doctrine into Europe. The Empress Theodora (841–855), who restored image-worship,[21] sought to exterminate those left in Armenia, slaying, it is said, a hundred thousand.[22] Many of the remnant were thus forced into the arms of the Saracens; and the sect did the empire desperate mischief during many generations.[23]
Meantime those planted in Thrace, in concert with the main body, carried propaganda into Bulgaria, and these again were further reinforced by refugees from Armenia in the ninth century, and in the tenth by a fresh colony transplanted from Armenia by the emperor John Zimisces, who valued them as a bulwark against the barbarous Slavs.[24] Fresh persecution under Alexius I at the end of the eleventh century failed to suppress them; and imperial extortion constantly drove to their side numbers of fresh adherents,[25] while the Bulgarians for similar reasons tended in mass to adopt their creed as against that of Constantinople. So greatly did the cult flourish that at its height it had a regular hierarchy, notably recalling that of the early Manicheans—with a pope, twelve magistri, and seventy-two bishops, each of whom had a filius major and filius minor as his assistants. Withal the democratic element remained strong, the laying on of the hands of communicants on the heads of newcomers being part of the rite of reception into full membership. Thus it came about that from Bulgaria there passed into western Europe,[26] partly through the Slavonic sect called Bogomiles or Bogomilians[27] (= Theophiloi, “lovers of God”), who were akin to the Paulicians, partly by more general influences,[28] a contagion of democratic and anti-ecclesiastical heresy; so that the very name Bulgar became the French bougre = heretic—and worse.[29] It specified the most obvious source of the new anti-Romanist heresies of the Albigenses, if not of the Vaudois (Waldenses).
§ 2. Critical Heresy in the West
In the west, meanwhile, where the variety of social elements was favourable to new life, heresy of a rationalistic kind was not wholly lacking. About the middle of the eighth century we find one Feargal or Vergilius, an Irish priest in Bavaria, accused by St. Boniface, his enemy, of affirming, “in defiance of God and his own soul,” the doctrine of the antipodes,[30] which must have reached him through the ancient Greek lore carried to Ireland in the primary period of Christianization of that province. Of that influence we have already seen a trace in Pelagius and Cœlestius; and we shall see more later in John the Scot. After being deposed by the Pope, Vergilius was reinstated; was made Bishop of Salzburg, and held the post till his death; and was even sainted afterwards; but the doctrine disappeared for centuries from the Christian world.