The literary power of the whole is great, and may be recommended to the general reader as comparing often with that shown in the satirical and social-didactic poems of Burns, though without much of the breath of poetry. Particularly noteworthy, in the historic retrospect, is the assimilization of the ancient Stoic philosophy of “living according to Nature,” set forth in the name of a “Reason” who is notably free from theological prepossessions. It is from this standpoint that Jean de Meung assails the mendicant friars and the monks in general: he would have men recognize the natural laws of life; and he carries the principle to the length of insisting on the artificial nature of aristocracy and monarchy, which are justifiable only as far as they subserve the common good. Thus he rises above the medieval literary prejudice against the common people, whose merit he recognizes as Montaigne did later. On the side of science, he expressly denies[432] that comets carry any such message as was commonly ascribed to them alike by popular superstition and by theology—a stretch of freethinking perhaps traceable to Seneca, but nonetheless centuries in advance of the Christendom of the time.[433] On the side of religion, again, he is one of the first to vindicate the lay conception of Christian excellence as against the ecclesiastical. His Naturalism, so far, worked consistently in making him at once anti-ascetic and anti-supernaturalist.
It is not to be inferred, however, that Jean de Meung had learned to doubt the validity of the Christian creed. His long poem, one of the most popular books in Europe for two hundred years, could never have had its vogue if its readers could have suspected it to be even indirectly anti-Christian. He can hardly have held, as some historians believe,[434] the status of a preaching friar; but he claims that he neither blames nor defames religion,[435] respecting it in all forms, provided it be “humble and loyal.” He was in fact a man of some wealth, much culture, and orderly in life, thus standing out from the earlier “Goliard” type. When, then, he pronounces Nature “the minister of this earthly state,” “vicar and constable of the eternal emperor,” he has no thought of dethroning Deity, or even of setting aside the Christian faith. In his rhymed Testament he expresses himself quite piously, and lectures monks and women in an edifying fashion.
To say therefore that Jean de Meung’s part of the Roman de la Rose is a “popular satire on the beliefs of Romanism” (Owen, Skeptics of Ital. Renais. p. 44) is to misstate the case. His doctrine is rather an intellectual expression of the literary reaction against asceticism (cp. Bartoli, Storia della letteratura italiana, i, 319, quoting Lenient) which had been spontaneously begun by the Goliards and Troubadours. At the same time the poem does stand for the new secular spirit alike in “its ingrained religion and its nascent freethought” (Saintsbury, p. 87); and with the Reynard epic it may be taken as representing the beginning of “a whole revolution, the resurgence and affirmation of the laity, the new force which is to transform the world, against the Church” (Bartoli, Storia, i, 308; cp. Demogeot, Hist. de la litt. fr. 5e éd. pp. 130–31, 157; Lanson, pp. 132–36). The frequent flings at the clergy (cp. the partly Chaucerian English version, Skeat’s ed. of Chaucer’s Works, i, 234; Bell’s ed. iv, 230) were sufficient to draw upon this as upon other medieval poems of much secular vogue the anger of “the Church” (Sismondi, Lit. of South. Europe, i, 216); but they were none the less relished by believing readers. “The Church” was in fact not an entity of one mind; and some of its sections enjoyed satire directed against the others.
When, then, we speak of the anti-clerical character of much medieval poetry, we must guard against exaggerated implications. It is somewhat of a straining of the facts, for instance, to say of the humorous tale of Reynard the Fox, so widely popular in the thirteenth century, that it is essentially anti-clerical to the extent that “Reynard is laic: Isengrim [the wolf] is clerical” (Bartoli, Storia della letteratura italiana, i, 307; cp. Owen, Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, p. 44). The Reynard epic, in origin a simple humorous animal-story, had various later forms. Some of these, as the Latin poem, and especially the version attributed to Peter of St. Cloud, were markedly anti-clerical, the latter exhibiting a spirit of all-round profanity hardly compatible with belief (cp. Gervinus, Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, 5te Ausg. i, 227–28; Gebhart, Les Origines de la Renais. en Italie, 1874, p. 39); but the version current in the Netherlands, which was later rendered into English prose by Caxton, is of a very different character (Gervinus, p. 229 sq.). In Caxton’s version it is impossible to regard Reynard as laic and Isengrim as clerical; though in the Latin and other versions the wolf figures as monk or abbot. (See also the various shorter satires published by Grimm in his Reinhart Fuchs, 1834.) Often the authorship is itself clerical, one party or order satirizing another; sometimes the spirit is religious, sometimes markedly irreverent. (Gervinus, pp. 214–21). “La plupart de ces satires sont l’œuvre des moines et des abbés” (Lenient, La Satire en France au moyen âge, 1859, préf. p. 4); and to say that these men were often irreligious is not to say that they were rationalists. It is to be remembered that nascent Protestantism in England under Henry VIII resorted to the weapons of obscene parody (Blunt, Ref. of Ch. of England, ed. 1892, i, 273, note).
“In fine,” we may say with a judicious French historian, “one cannot get out of his time, and the time was not come to be non-Christian. Jean de Meung did not perceive that his thought put him outside the Church, and upset her foundations. He is believing and pious, like Rutebeuf.... The Gospel is his rule: he holds it; he defends it; he disputes with those who seem to him to depart from it; he makes himself the champion of the old faith against the novelties of the Eternal Gospel.... His situation is that of the first reformers of the sixteenth century, who believed themselves to serve Jesus Christ in using their reason, and who very sincerely, very piously, hoped for the reform of the Church through the progress of philosophy.”[436] “Nevertheless,” adds the same historian, “one cannot exaggerate the real weight of the work. By his philosophy, which consists essentially in the identity, the sovereignty, of Nature and Reason, he is the first link in the chain which connects Rabelais, Montaigne, Molière; to which Voltaire also links himself, and even in certain regards Boileau.”[437]
Men could not then see whither the principle of “Nature” and Reason was to lead, yet even in the age of Jean de Meung the philosophic heads went far, and he can hardly have missed knowing as much, if, as is supposed, he studied at Paris, as he certainly lived and died there. In the latter part of the thirteenth century, as before noted, rationalism at the Paris university was frequently carried in private to a rejection of all the dogmas peculiar to Christianity. At that great school Roger Bacon seems to have acquired his encyclopædic learning and his critical habit; and there it was that in the first half of the fourteenth century William of Occam nourished his remarkable philosophic faculty. From about the middle of the fourteenth century, however, there is a relative arrest of French progress for some two centuries.[438] Three main conditions served to check intellectual advance: the civil wars which involved the loss of the communal liberties which had been established in France between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries;[439] the exhaustion of the nation by the English invasion under Edward III; the repressive power of the Church; and the general devotion of the national energies to war. After the partial recovery from the ruinous English invasion under Edward III, civil strifes and feudal tyranny wrought new impoverishment, making possible the still more destructive invasion under Henry V; so that in the first half of the fifteenth century France was hardly more civilized than England.[440] It is from the French invasion of Italy under Charles VIII that the enduring renascence in France broadly dates. Earlier impulses had likewise come from Italy: Lanfranc, Anselm, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and others of lesser note,[441] had gone from Italy to teach in France or England; but it needed the full contact of Italian civilization to raise monarchic France to the stage of general and independent intellectual life.
During the period in question, there had been established the following universities: Paris, 1200; Toulouse, 1220; Montpellier, 1289; Avignon, 1303; Orléans, 1312; Cahors, 1332; Angers, 1337; Orange, 1367; Dôle, 1422; Poitiers, 1431; Caen, 1436; Valence, 1454; Nantes, 1460; Bourges, 1463; Bordeaux, 1472 (Desmaze, L’Université de Paris, 1876, p. 2. Other dates for some of these are given on p. 31). But the militarist conditions prevented any sufficient development of such opportunities. In the fourteenth century, says Littré (Études sur les barbares, p. 419), “the university of Paris ... was more powerful than at any other epoch.... Never did she exercise such a power over men’s minds.” But he also decides that in that epoch the first florescence of French literature withered away (p. 387). The long location of the anti-papacy at Avignon (1305–1376) doubtless counted for something in French culture (V. Le Clerc, Hist. Litt. de la France au XIVe siècle, i, 37; Gebhart, pp. 221–26); but the devastation wrought by the English invasion was sufficient to countervail that and more. See the account of it by Petrarch (letter of the year 1360) cited by Littré, Études, pp. 416–17; and by Hallam, Middle Ages, i, 59, note. Cp. Michelet, Hist. de France, vi, ch. iii; Dunton, England in the Fifteenth Century, 1888, pp. 79–84. As to the consequences of the English invasion of the fifteenth century see Martin, Hist. de France, 4e édit. vi, 132–33; Sismondi, Hist. des Français, 1831, xii, 582; Hallam, Middle Ages, i, 83–87.
In northern France of the fourteenth century, as in Provence and Italy and England, there was a manifold stir of innovation and heresy: there as elsewhere the insubordinate Franciscans, with their Eternal Gospel, the Paterini, the Beghards, fought their way against the Dominican Inquisition. But the Inquisitors burned books as well as men; and much anti-ecclesiastical poetry, some dating even from the Carlovingian era, shared the fate of many copies of the Talmud, translations of the Bible, and, à fortiori, every species of heretical writing. In effect, the Inquisition for the time “extinguished freethought”[442] in France. As in England, the ferment of heresy was mixed with one of democracy; and in the French popular poetry of the time there are direct parallels to the contemporary English couplet, “When Adam delved and Eve span, Where was then the gentleman?”[443] Such a spirit could no more prosper in feudal France than in feudal England; and when France emerged from her mortal struggle with the English, to be effectively solidified by Louis XI, there was left in her life little of the spirit of free inquiry. It has been noted that whereas the chronicler Joinville, in the thirteenth century, is full of religious feeling, Froissart, in the fourteenth, priest as he is, exhibits hardly any; and again Comines, in the fifteenth, reverts to the orthodoxy of the twelfth and thirteenth.[444] The middle period was one of indifference, following on the killing out of heresy:[445] the fifteenth century is a resumption of the Middle Ages, and Comines has the medieval cast of mind,[446] although of a superior order. There seems to be no community of thought between him and his younger Italian contemporaries, Machiavelli and Guicciardini; though, “even while Comines was writing, there were unequivocal symptoms of a great and decisive change.”[447]
The special development in France of the spirit of “chivalry” had joined the normal uncivilizing influence of militarism with that of clericalism; the various knightly orders, as well as knighthood pure and simple, being all under ecclesiastical sanctions, and more or less strictly vowed to “defend the church,”[448] while supremely incompetent to form an intelligent opinion. It is the more remarkable that in the case of one of the crusading orders heresy of the most blasphemous kind was finally charged against the entire organization, and that it was on that ground annihilated (1311). It remains incredible, however, that the order of the Templars can have systematically practised the extravagances or held the tenets laid to their charge. They had of course abused their power and departed from their principles like every other religious order enabled to amass wealth; and the hostility theirs aroused is perfectly intelligible from what is known of the arrogance of its members and the general ruffianism of the Crusaders. Their wealth alone goes far to explain the success of their enemies against them; for, though the numbers of the order were much smaller than tradition gives out, its possessions were considerable. These were the true ground of the French king’s attack.[449] But that its members were as a rule either Cathari or anti-Christians, either disguised Moslems or deists, or that they practised obscenity by rule, there is no reason to believe. What seems to have happened was a resort by some unbelieving members to more or less gross burlesque of the mysteries of initiation—a phenomenon paralleled in ancient Greece and in the modern Catholic world, and implying rather hardy irreligion than any reasoned heresy whatever.
The long-continued dispute as to the guilt of the Knights Templars is still chronically re-opened. Hallam, after long hesitation, came finally to believe them guilty, partly on the strength of the admissions made by Michelet in defending them (Europe in the Middle Ages, 11th ed. i, 138–42—note of 1848). He attaches, however, a surprising weight to the obviously weak “architectural evidence” cited by Hammer-Purgstall. Heeren (Essai sur l’influence des croisades, 1808, pp. 221–22) takes a more judicial view. The excellent summing-up of Lea (Hist. of the Inquis. bk. iii, ch. v, pp. 263–76) perhaps gives too little weight to the mass of curious confirmatory evidence cited by writers on the other side (e.g., F. Nicolai, Versuch über die Beschuldigungen welche dem Tempelherrenorden gemacht worden, 1782); but his conclusion as to the falsity of the charges against the order as a whole seems irresistible.