The first crusade was followed by others, in which Simon de Montfort reached the maximum of massacre, varying his procedure by tearing out eyes and cutting off noses when he was not hanging victims by dozens or burning them by scores or putting them to the sword by hundreds[157] (all being done “with the utmost joy”)[158]; though the “White Company” organized by the Bishop of Toulouse[159] maintained a close rivalry. The Church’s great difficulty was that as soon as an army had bought its plenary indulgence for all possible sin by forty days’ service, it disbanded. Nevertheless, “the greater part of the population of the countries where heresy had prevailed was exterminated.”[160] Organized Christianity had contrived to murder the civilization of Provence and Languedoc[161] while the fanatics of Islam in their comparatively bloodless manner were doing as much for that of Moorish Spain. Heresy indeed was not rooted out: throughout the whole of the thirteenth century the Inquisition met with resistance in Languedoc[162]; but the preponderance of numbers which alone could sustain freethinking had been destroyed, and in course of time it was eliminated by the sleepless engines of the Church.
It was owing to no lack of the principle of evil in the Christian system, but simply to the much greater and more uncontrollable diversity of the political elements of Christendom, that the whole culture and intelligence of Europe did not undergo the same fate. The dissensions and mutual injuries of the crusaders ultimately defeated their ideal[163]; after Simon de Montfort had died in the odour of sanctity[164] the crusade of Louis VIII of France in 1226 seems to have been essentially one of conquest, there being practically no heretics left; and the disasters of the expedition, crowned by the king’s death, took away the old prestige of the movement. Meanwhile, the heresy of the Albigenses, and kindred ideas, had been effectually driven into other parts of Europe[165]; and about 1231 we find Gregory IX burning a multitude of them at the gates of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome[166] and compassing their slaughter in France and Germany.[167] In Italy the murderous pertinacity of the Dominicans gradually destroyed organized heresy despite frequent and desperate resistance. About 1230 we hear of one eloquent zealot, chosen podestà by the people of Verona, using his power to burn in one day sixty heretics, male and female.[168] The political heterogeneity of Europe, happily, made variation inevitable; though the papacy, by making the detection and persecution of heresy a means of gain to a whole order of its servants, had set on foot a machinery for the destruction of rational thought such as had never before existed.
It is still common to speak of the personnel of the Inquisition as disinterested, and to class its crimes as “conscientious.” Buckle set up such a thesis, without due circumspection, as a support to one of his generalizations. (See the present writer’s ed. of his Introduction to the History of Civilization in England, pp. 105–108, notes, and the passages in McCrie and Llorente there cited.) Dr. Lea, whose History of the Inquisition is the greatest storehouse of learning on the subject, takes up a similar position, arguing (i, 239): “That the men who conducted the Inquisition, and who toiled sedulously in its arduous, repulsive, and often dangerous labour, were thoroughly convinced that they were furthering the kingdom of God, is shown by the habitual practice of encouraging them with the remission of sins, similar to that offered for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land”—a somewhat surprising theorem. Parallel reasoning would prove that soldiers never plunder and are always Godly; that the crusaders were all conscientious men; and that policemen never take bribes or commit perjury. The interpretation of history calls for a less simple-minded psychology. That there were devoted fanatics in the Inquisition as in the Church is not to be disputed; that both organizations had economic bases is certain; and that the majority of office-bearers in both, in the ages of faith, had regard to gain, is demonstrated by all ecclesiastical history.
Dr. Lea’s own History shows clearly enough (i, 471–533) that the Inquisition, from the first generation of its existence, lived upon its fines and confiscations. “Persecution, as a steady and continuous policy, rested, after all, upon confiscation.... When it was lacking, the business of defending the faith lagged lamentably” (i, 529). “But for the gains to be made out of fines and confiscations its [the Inquisition’s] work would have been much less thorough, and it would have sunk into comparative insignificance as soon as the first frantic zeal of bigotry had exhausted itself” (pp. 532–33). Why, in the face of these avowals, “it would be unjust to say that greed and thirst for plunder were the impelling motives of the Inquisition” (p. 532) is not very clear. See below, ch. x, § 3, as to the causation in Spain. Cp. Mocatta, The Jews and the Inquisition, pp. 37, 44, 52. On the Inquisition in Portugal, in turn, Professor W. E. Collins sums up that “it was founded for reasons ostensibly religious but actually fiscal” (in the “Cambridge Modern History,” vol. ii, The Reformation, ch. xii, p. 415). Every charge of economic motive that Catholicism can bring against Protestantism is thus balanced by the equivalent charge against its own Inquisition.
§ 5. Freethought in the Schools
The indestructibility of freethought, meanwhile, was being proved even in the philosophic schools, under all their conformities to faith. Already in the ninth century we have seen Scotus Erigena putting the faith in jeopardy by his philosophic defence of it. Another thinker, Roscelin (or Roussellin: fl. 1090), is interesting as having made a critical approach to freethought in religion by way of abstract philosophy. With him definitely begins the long academic debate between the Nominalists and Realists so called. In an undefined way, it had existed as early as the ninth century,[169] the ground being the Christian adoption of Plato’s doctrine of ideas—that individual objects are instances or images of an ideal universal, which is a real existence, and prior to the individual thing: “universalia ante rem.” To that proposition Aristotle had opposed the doctrine that the universal is immanent in the thing—“universalia in re”—the latter alone being matter of knowledge;[170] and in the Middle Ages those who called Aristotle master carried his negation of Plato to the extent of insisting that the “universal” or “abstract,” or the “form” or “species,” is a mere subjective creation, a name, having no real existence. This, the Nominalist position—mistakenly ascribed to Aristotle[171]—was ultimately expressed in the formula, “universalia post rem.”
Such reasonings obviously tend to implicate theology; and Roscelin was either led or helped by his Nominalist training to deny either explicitly or implicitly the unity of the Trinity, arguing in effect that, as only individuals are real existences, the actuality of the persons of the Trinity involves their disunity.[172] The thesis, of course, evoked a storm, the English Archbishop Anselm and others producing indignant answers. Of Roscelin’s writing only one letter is extant; and even Anselm, in criticizing his alleged doctrine, admits having gathered it only from his opponents, whose language suggests perversion.[173] But if the testimony of his pupil Abailard be truthful,[174] he was at best a confused reasoner; and in his theology he got no further than tritheism, then called ditheism.[175] Thus, though “Nominalism, by denying any objective reality to general notions, led the way directly to the testimony of the senses and the conclusions of experience,”[176] it did so on lines fatally subordinate to the theology it sought to correct. Roscelin’s thesis logically led to the denial not only of trinity-in-unity but of the Incarnation and transubstantiation; yet neither he nor his opponents seem to have thought even of the last consequence, he having in fact no consciously heretical intention. Commanded to recant by the Council of Soissons in 1092, he did so, and resumed his teaching as before; whereafter he was ordered to leave France. Coming to England, he showed himself so little of a rebel to the papacy as to contend strongly for priestly celibacy, arguing that all sons of priests and all born out of wedlock should alike be excluded from clerical office. Expelled from England in turn for these views, by a clergy still anti-celibate, he returned to Paris, to revive the old philosophic issue, until general hostility drove him to Aquitaine, where he spent his closing years in peace.[177]
Such handling of the cause of Nominalism gave an obvious advantage to Realism. That has been justly described by one clerical scholar as “Philosophy held in subordination to Church-Authority”;[178] and another has avowed that “the spirit of Realism was essentially the spirit of dogmatism, the disposition to pronounce that truth was already known,” while “Nominalism was essentially the spirit of progress, of inquiry, of criticism.”[179] But even a critical philosophy may be made to capitulate to authority, as even à priori metaphysic may be to a certain extent turned against it. Realism had been markedly heretical in the hands of John Scotus; and in a later age the Realist John Huss was condemned to death—perhaps on political grounds, but not without signs of sectarian hate—by a majority of Nominalists at the Council of Constance. Everything depended on the force of the individual thinker and the degree of restraint put upon him by the authoritarian environment.[180] The world has even seen the spectacle of a professed indifferentist justifying the massacre of St. Bartholomew; and the Platonist Marsilio Ficino vilified Savonarola, basely enough, after his execution, adjusting a pantheistic Christianity to the needs of the political situation in Medicean Florence. Valid freethinking is a matter of thoroughness and rectitude, not of mere theoretic assents.