It was thus the fate of Spain to illustrate once for all the power of a dogmatic religious system to extirpate the spirit of reason from an entire nation for a whole era. There and there only, save for a time in Italy, did the Inquisition become all-powerful; and it wrought for the evisceration of the intellectual and material life of Spain with a demented zeal to which there is no parallel in later history. In the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, after several random massacres and much persecution of the “New Christians” or doubtful converts from Judaism,[381] the unconverted Jews of Spain were in 1489 penned into Ghettos, and were in 1492 expelled bodily from the country, with every circumstance of cruelty, so far as Church and State could compass their plans. By this measure at least 160,000 subjects[382] of more than average value were lost to the State. Portugal and other Christian countries took the same cruel step a few years later; but Spain carried the policy much further. From the year of its establishment, the Inquisition was hotly at work destroying heresy of every kind; and the renowned Torquemada, the confessor of Isabella, is credited with having burned over ten thousand persons in his eighteen years of office as Grand Inquisitor, besides torturing many thousands. Close upon a hundred thousand more were terrified into submission; and a further six thousand burned in effigy in their absence or after death.[383] The destruction of books was proportionally thorough;[384] and when Lutheran Protestantism arose it was persistently killed out; thousands leaving the country in view of the hopelessness of the cause.[385] At this rate, every vestige of independent thought must soon have disappeared from any nation in the world. If she is to be judged by the number of her slain and exiled heretics, Spain must once have been nearly as fecund in reformative and innovating thought as any State in northern Europe; but the fatal conjunction of the royal and the clerical authority sufficed for a whole era to denude her of every variety of the freethinking species.[386]
§ 10. Thought in England
Lying on the outskirts of the world of culture, England in the later Middle Ages and the period of the Italian Renaissance lived intellectually, even where ministered to by the genius of Chaucer, for the most part in dependence on Continental impulses; yet not without notable outcrops of native energy. There is indeed no more remarkable figure in the Middle Ages than Roger Bacon (? 1214–1294), the English Franciscan friar, schooled at Paris. His career remains still in parts obscure. Born at or near Ilchester, in Somersetshire, he studied at Oxford under Edmund Rich, Richard Fitzacre, Robert Grosstête, and Adam de Marisco; and later, for a number of years, at Paris, where he is supposed to have held a chair. On his return he was lionized; but a few years afterwards, in 1257, we find him again in Paris, banished thither by his Order.[387] He was not absolutely imprisoned, but ordered to live under official surveillance in a dwelling where he was forbidden to write, to speak to novices, or observe the stars—rules which, it is pretty clear, he broke, one and all.[388] After some eight years of this durance, Cardinal Guido Falcodi (otherwise Guy Foucaud or De Foulques), who while acting as papal legate in England at the time of the rising of Simon de Montfort may have known or heard of Bacon, became interested in him through his chaplain, Raymond of Laon, who spoke (in error) of the imprisoned friar as having written much on science. The cardinal accordingly wrote asking to see the writings in question. Bacon sent by a friend an explanation to the effect that he had written little, and that he could not devote himself to composition without a written mandate and a papal dispensation. About this time the Cardinal was elevated to the papacy as Clement IV; and in that capacity, a year later (1266), he wrote to Bacon authorizing him to disobey his superior, but exhorting him to do it secretly. Bacon, by his own account, had already spent in forty years of study 2,000 libri[389] in addition to purchases of books and instruments and teacher’s fees; and it is not known whether the Pope furnished the supplies he declared he needed.[390] To work, however, he went with an astonishing industry, and in the course of less than eighteen months[391] he had produced his chief treatise, the Opus Majus; the Opus Minus, designed as a summary or sample of the former; and the later Opus Tertium, planned to serve as a preamble to the two others.[392]
Through all three documents there runs the same inspiration, the Opus Tertium and the Majus constituting a complete treatise, which gives at once the most vivid idea of the state of culture at the time, and the most intimate presentment of a student’s mind, that survive from the thirteenth century. It was nothing less than a demand, such as was made by Francis Bacon three hundred and fifty years later, and by Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century, for a reconstruction of all studies and all tuition. Neither pope nor emperor could have met it; but Clement gave Roger his freedom, and he returned to Oxford, papally protected, at the end of 1267. Four years later Clement died, and was succeeded by Gregory X, a Franciscan.
At this stage of his life Bacon revealed that, whatever were his wrongs, he was inclined to go halfway to meet them. In a new writing of similar purport with the others, the Compendium Philosophiæ, written in 1271,[393] he not only attacked in detail the ecclesiastical system,[394] but argued that the Christians were incomparably inferior to pagans in morals, and therefore in science;[395] that there was more truth in Aristotle’s few chapters on laws than in the whole corpus juris;[396] that the Christian religion, as commonly taught, was not free of errors; and that philosophy truly taught, and not as in the schools, was perhaps the surer way to attain both truth and salvation.[397]
Again he was prosecuted; and this time, after much delay, it was decided that the entire Order should deal with the case. Not till 1277 did the trial come off, under the presidency of the chief of the Order, Jerome of Ascoli. Bacon was bracketed with another insubordinate brother, Jean d’Olive; and both were condemned. In Bacon’s case his doctrine was specified as continentem aliquas novitates suspectas, propter quas fuit idem Rogerius carceri condempnatus.[398] This time Bacon seems to have undergone a real imprisonment, which lasted fourteen years. During that time four more popes held office, the last of them being the said Jerome, elevated to the papal chair as Nicholas IV. Not till his death in 1292 was Bacon released—to die two years later.
He was in fact, with all his dogmatic orthodoxy, too essentially in advance of his age to be otherwise than suspect to the typical ecclesiastics of any time. The marvel is that with his radical skepticism as to all forms of human knowledge; his intense perception of the fatality of alternate credulity and indifference which kept most men in a state of positive or negative error on every theme; his insatiable thirst for knowledge; his invincible repugnance to all acknowledgment of authority,[399] and his insistence on an ethical end, he should have been able to rest as he did in the assumption of a divine infallibility vested in what he knew to be a corruptible text. It was doubtless defect of strictly philosophic thought, as distinguished from practical critical faculty, that enabled him to remain orthodox in theology while anti-authoritarian in everything else. As it was, his recalcitrance to authority in such an age sufficed to make his life a warfare upon earth. And it is not surprising that, even as his Franciscan predecessor Robert Grosstête, bishop of Lincoln, came to be reputed a sorcerer on the strength of having written many treatises on scientific questions—as well as on witchcraft—Roger Bacon became a wizard in popular legend, and a scandal in the eyes of his immediate superiors, for a zest of secular curiosity no less uncommon and unpriestlike.[400] “It is sometimes impossible to avoid smiling,” says one philosophic historian of him, “when one sees how artfully this personified thirst for knowledge seeks to persuade himself, or his readers, that knowledge interests him only for ecclesiastical ends. No one has believed it: neither posterity ... nor his contemporaries, who distrusted him as worldly-minded.”[401]
Worldly-minded he was in a noble sense, as seeking to know the world of Nature; and perhaps the most remarkable proof of his originality on this side is his acceptance of the theory of the earth’s sphericity. Peter de Alliaco, whose Imago Mundi was compiled in 1410, transcribed from Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus almost literally, but without acknowledgment, a passage containing quotations from Aristotle, Pliny, and Seneca, all arguing for the possibility of reaching India by sailing westward. Columbus, it is known, was familiar with the Imago Mundi; and this passage seems greatly to have inspired him in his task.[402] This alone was sufficient practical heresy to put Bacon in danger; and yet his real orthodoxy can hardly be doubted.[403] He always protested against the scholastic doctrine of a “twofold truth,” insisting that revelation and philosophy were at one, but that the latter also was divine.[404] It probably mattered little to his superiors, however, what view he took of the abstract question: it was his zeal for concrete knowledge that they detested. His works remain to show the scientific reach of which his age was capable, when helped by the lore of the Arabs; for he seems to have drawn from Averroës some of his inspiration to research;[405] but in the England of that day his ideals of research were as unattainable as his wrath against clerical obstruction was powerless;[406] and Averroïsm in England made little for innovation.[407] The English Renaissance properly sets-in in the latter half of the sixteenth century, when the glory of that of Italy is passing away.
In the fourteenth century, indeed, a remarkable new life is seen arising in England in the poetry and prose of Chaucer, from contact with the literature of Italy and France; but while Chaucer reflects the spontaneous medieval hostility to the self-seeking and fraudulent clergy, and writes of deity with quite medieval irreverence,[408] he tells little of the Renaissance spirit of critical unbelief, save when he notes the proverbial irreligion of the physicians,[409] or smiles significantly over the problem of the potency of clerical cursing and absolution,[410] or shrugs his shoulders over the question of a future state.[411] In such matters he is noticeably undevout; and though it is impossible to found on such passages a confident assertion that Chaucer had no belief in immortality, it is equally impossible in view of them to claim that he was a warm believer.