§ 8. Sects and Orders
Despite, therefore, the premium put by the Church on devotion to its cause and doctrine, and despite its success in strangling specific forms of heresy, hostility to its own pretensions germinated everywhere,[319] especially in the countries most alien to Italy in language and civilization. An accomplished Catholic scholar[320] sums up that “from about the middle of the twelfth century the whole secular and religious literature of Europe grew more and more hostile to the papacy and the curia.” The Church’s own economic conditions, constantly turning its priesthood, despite all precautions, into a money-making and shamelessly avaricious class, ensured it a perpetuity of ill-will and denunciation. The popular literature which now began to grow throughout Christendom with the spread of political order was everywhere turned to the account of anti-clerical satire;[321] and only the defect of real knowledge secured by the Church’s own policy prevented such hostility from developing into rational unbelief. As it was, a tendency to criticize at once the socio-economic code and practice and the details of creed and worship is seen in a series of movements from the thirteenth century onwards; and some of the most popular literature of that age is deeply tinged with the new spirit. After the overthrow of the well-organized anti-clericalism of the Cathari and other heretics in Languedoc, however, no movement equally systematic and equally heretical flourished on any large scale; and as even those heresies on their popular side were essentially supernaturalist, and tended to set up one hierarchy in place of another, it would be vain to look for anything like a consistent or searching rationalism among the people in the period broadly termed medieval, including the Renaissance.
It would be a bad misconception to infer from the abundant signs of popular disrespect for the clergy that the mass of the laity even in Italy, for instance, were unbelievers.[322] They never were anything of the kind. At all times they were deeply superstitious, easily swayed by religious emotion, credulous as to relics, miracles, visions, prophecies, responsive to pulpit eloquence, readily passing from derision of worldly priests to worship of austere ones.[323] When Machiavelli said that religion was gone from Italy, he was thinking of the upper classes, among whom theism was normal,[324] and the upper clergy, who were often at once superstitious and corrupt. As for the common people, it was impossible that they should be grounded rationalists as regarded the great problems of life. They were merely the raw material on which knowledge might work if it could reach them, which it never did. And the common people everywhere else stood at or below the culture level of those of Italy.
For lack of other culture than Biblical, then, even the popular heresy tended to run into mysticisms which were only so far more rational than the dogmas and rites of the Church that they stood for some actual reflection. A partial exception, indeed, may be made in the case of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a sect set up in Germany in the early years of the thirteenth century, by one Ortlieb, on the basis of the pantheistic teachings of Amaury of Bène and David of Dinant.[325] Their doctrines were set forth in a special treatise or sacred book, called The Nine Rocks. The Fratres liberi spiritus seem to have been identical with the sect of the “Holy Spirit”;[326] but their tenets were heretical in a high degree, including as they did a denial of personal immortality, and consequently of the notions of heaven, hell, and purgatory. Even the sect’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit was heretical in another way, inasmuch as it ran, if its opponents can be believed, to the old antinomian assertion that anyone filled with the Spirit was sinless, whatever deeds he might do.[327] As always, such antinomianism strengthened the hands of the clergy against the heresy, though the Brethren seem to have been originally very ascetic; and inasmuch as their pantheism involved the idea that Satan also had in him the divine essence, they were duly accused of devil-worship.[328] On general principles they were furiously persecuted; but all through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and even in the fifteenth, they are found in various parts of central and western Europe,[329] often in close alliance with the originally orthodox communities known in France and Holland by the names of Turlupins and Beguins or Beguines, and in Germany and Belgium as Beguttæ or Beghards,[330] akin to the Lollards.
These in turn are to be understood in connection with developments which took place in the thirteenth century within the Church—notably the rise of the great orders of Mendicant Friars, of which the two chief were founded about 1216 by Francis of Assisi and the Spanish Dominic, the latter a fierce persecutor in the Albigensian crusade. Nothing availed more to preserve or restore for a time the Church’s prestige. The old criticism of priestly and monastic avarice and worldliness was disarmed by the sudden appearance and rapid spread of a priesthood and brotherhood of poverty; and the obvious devotion of thousands of the earlier adherents went to the general credit of the Church. Yet the descent of the new orders to the moral and economic levels of the old was only a question of time; and no process could more clearly illustrate the futility of all schemes of regenerating the world on non-rational principles. Apart from the vast encouragement given to sheer mendicancy among the poor, the orders themselves substantially apostatized from their own rules within a generation.
The history of the Franciscans in particular is like that of the Church in general—one of rapid lapse into furious schism, with a general reversion to gross self-seeking on the part of the majority, originally vowed to utter poverty. Elias, the first successor of Francis, appointed by the Saint himself, proved an intolerable tyrant; and in his day began the ferocious strife between the “Spirituals,” who insisted on the founder’s ideal of poverty, and the majority, who insisted on accepting the wealth which the world either bestowed or could be cajoled into bestowing on the order. The majority, of course, ultimately overbore the Spirituals, the papacy supporting them.[331] They followed the practically universal law of monastic life. The Humiliati, founded before the thirteenth century, had to be suppressed by the Pope in the sixteenth, for sheer corruption of morals; and the Franciscans and Dominicans, who speedily became bitterly hostile to each other, were in large measure little better. Even in the middle of the thirteenth century they were attacked by the Sorbonne doctor, William of St. Amour, in a book on The Perils of the Latter Times;[332] and in England in the fourteenth century we find Wiclif assailing the begging friars as the earlier satirists had assailed the abbots and monks. That all this reciprocal invective was not mere partizan calumny, but broadly true as against both sides, is the conclusion forced upon a reader of the Philobiblon ascribed to Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and Treasurer and Chancellor under Edward III. In that book, written either by the bishop or by one of his chaplains, Robert Holkot,[333] the demerits of all orders of the clergy from the points of view of letters and morals are set forth with impartial emphasis;[334] and the character of the bishop in turn is no less effectively disposed of after his death by Adam Murimuth, a distinguished lawyer and canon of St. Paul’s.[335]
The worst of the trouble for the Church was that the mendicants were detested by bishops and the beneficed priests, whose credit they undermined, and whose revenues they intercepted. That the Franciscans and Dominicans remained socially powerful till the Reformation was due to the energy developed by their corporate organization and the measure of education they soon secured on their own behalf; not to any general superiority on their part to the “secular” clergy so-called.[336] Indeed it was to the latter, within the Church, that most pre-Reformation reformers looked for sympathy. At the outset, however, the movement of the Mendicant Friars gave a great impulsion to the lay communities of the type of the Beguines and Beghards who had originated in the Netherlands, and who practised at once mendicancy and charity very much on the early Franciscan lines;[337] and the spirit of innovation led in both cases to forms of heresy. That of the Beguines and Beghards arose mainly through their association with the Brethren of the Free Spirit; and they suffered persecution as did the latter; while among the “Spiritual” Franciscans, who were despisers of learning, there arose a species of new religion. At the beginning of the century, Abbot Joachim, of Flora or Flores in Calabria (d. 1202), who “may be regarded as the founder of modern mysticism,”[338] had earned a great reputation by devout austerities, and a greater by his vaticinations,[339] which he declared to be divine. One of his writings was condemned as heretical, thirteen years after his death, by the Council of Lateran; but his apocalyptic writings, and others put out in his name, had a great vogue among the rebellious Franciscans.
At length, in 1254, there was produced in Paris a book called The Everlasting Gospel, consisting of three of his genuine works, with a long and audacious Introduction by an anonymous hand, which expressed a spirit of innovation and revolt, mystical rather than rational, that seemed to promise the utter disruption of the Church. It declared that, as the dispensation of the Son had followed on that of the Father, so Christ’s evangel in turn was to be superseded by that of the “Holy Spirit.”[340] Adopted by the “Spiritual” section of the Franciscans, it brought heresy within the organization itself, the Introduction being by many ascribed—probably in error—to the head of the order, John of Parma, a devotee of Joachim. On other grounds, he was ultimately deposed;[341] but the ferment of heresy was great. And while the Franciscans are commonly reputed to have been led by small-minded generals,[342] their order, as Renan notes,[343] not only never lost the stamp of its popular and irregular origin, but was always less orthodox in general than the Dominican. But its deviations were rather ultra-religious than rational; and some of its heresies have become orthodoxy. Thus it was the Franciscans, notably Duns Scotus, who carried the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin against the Dominicans, who held by the teaching of Thomas Aquinas that she was conceived “in sin.”[344] Mary was thus deified on a popular impulse, dating from paganism, at the expense of Christism; and, considering that both Thomas and St. Bernard had flatly rejected the Immaculate Conception, its ultimate adoption as dogma is highly significant.[345]
In the year 1260, when, according to the “Eternal Gospel,” the new dispensation of the Holy Spirit was to begin, there was an immense excitement in northern Italy, marked by the outbreak of the order of Flagellants, self-scourgers, whose hysteria spread to other lands. Gherardo Segarelli, a youth of Parma, came forward as a new Christ, had himself circumcised, swaddled, cradled, and suckled;[346] and proceeded to found a new order of “Apostolicals,” after the manner of a sect of the previous century, known by the same name, who professed to return to primitive simplicity and to chastity, and reproduced what they supposed to be the morals of the early Church, including the profession of ascetic cohabitation.[347] Some of their missionaries got as far as Germany; but Segarelli was caught, imprisoned, reduced to the status of a bishop’s jester, and at length, after saving his life for a time by abjuration, burned at Parma, in the year 1300.
Despite much persecution of the order, one of its adherents, Fra Dolcino, immediately began to exploit Segarelli’s martyrdom, and renewed the movement by an adaptation of the “Eternal Gospel,” announcing that Segarelli had begun a new era, to last till the Day of Judgment. Predicting the formation of native states, as well as the forcible purification of the papacy, he ultimately set up an armed movement, which held out in the southern Alps for two years, till the Apostolicals were reduced to cannibalism. At length (1307) they were overpowered and massacred, and Dolcino was captured, with his beautiful and devoted companion, Margherita di Trank. She was slowly burned to death before his eyes, refusing to abjure; and he in turn was gradually tortured to death, uttering no cry.[348]