History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

by John William Draper

But the inevitable day came at length. Assertions and doctrines based upon such preposterous evidence were involved in the discredit that fell upon the evidence itself. As the thirteenth century is approached, we find unbelief in all directions setting in. First, it is plainly seen among the monastic orders, then it spreads rapidly among the common people. Books, such as "The Everlasting Gospel," appear among the former; sects, such as the Catharists, Waldenses, Petrobrussians, arise among the latter. They agreed in this, "that the public and established religion was a motley system of errors and superstitions, and that the dominion which the pope had usurped over Christians was unlawful and tyrannical; that the claim put forth by Rome, that the Bishop of Rome is the supreme lord of the universe, and that neither princes nor bishops, civil governors nor ecclesiastical rulers, have any lawful power in church or state but what they receive from him, is utterly without foundation, and a usurpation of the rights of man."

To withstand this flood of impiety, the papal government established two institutions: 1. The Inquisition; 2. Auricular confession—the latter as a means of detection, the former as a tribunal for punishment.

In general terms, the commission of the Inquisition was, to extirpate religious dissent by terrorism, and surround heresy with the most horrible associations; this necessarily implied the power of determining what constitutes heresy. The criterion of truth was thus in possession of this tribunal, which was charged "to discover and bring to judgment heretics lurking in towns, houses, cellars, woods, caves, and fields." With such savage alacrity did it carry out its object of protecting the interests of religion, that between 1481 and 1808 it had punished three hundred and forty thousand persons, and of these nearly thirty-two thousand had been burnt! In its earlier days, when public opinion could find no means of protesting against its atrocities, "it often put to death, without appeal, on the very day that they were accused, nobles, clerks, monks, hermits, and lay persons of every rank." In whatever direction thoughtful men looked, the air was full of fearful shadows. No one could indulge in freedom of thought without expecting punishment. So dreadful were the proceedings of the Inquisition, that the exclamation of Pagliarici was the exclamation of thousands: "It is hardly possible for a man to be a Christian, and die in his bed."

The Inquisition destroyed the sectaries of Southern France in the thirteenth century. Its unscrupulous atrocities extirpated Protestantism in Italy and Spain. Nor did it confine itself to religious affairs; it engaged in the suppression of political discontent. Nicolas Eymeric, who was inquisitor-general of the kingdom of Aragon for nearly fifty years, and who died in 1399, has left a frightful statement of its conduct and appalling cruelties in his "Directorium Inquisitorum."

This disgrace of Christianity, and indeed of the human race, had different constitutions in different countries. The papal Inquisition continued the tyranny, and eventually superseded the old episcopal inquisitions. The authority of the bishops was unceremoniously put aside by the officers of the pope.

By the action of the fourth Lateran Council, A.D. 1215, the power of the Inquisition was frightfully increased, the necessity of private confession to a priest—auricular confession—being at that time formally established. This, so far as domestic life was concerned, gave omnipresence and omniscience to the Inquisition. Not a man was safe. In the hands of the priest, who, at the confessional, could extract or extort from them their most secret thoughts, his wife and his servants were turned into spies. Summoned before the dread tribunal, he was simply informed that he lay under strong suspicions of heresy. No accuser was named; but the thumb-screw, the stretching-rope, the boot and wedge, or other enginery of torture, soon supplied that defect, and, innocent or guilty, he accused himself!

Notwithstanding all this power, the Inquisition failed of its purpose. When the heretic could no longer confront it, he evaded it. A dismal disbelief stealthily pervaded all Europe,—a denial of Providence, of the immortality of the soul, of human free-will, and that man can possibly resist the absolute necessity, the destiny which envelops him. Ideas such as these were cherished in silence by multitudes of persons driven to them by the tyrannical acts of ecclesiasticism. In spite of persecution, the Waldenses still survived to propagate their declaration that the Roman Church, since Constantine, had degenerated from its purity and sanctity; to protest against the sale of indulgences, which they said had nearly abolished prayer, fasting, alms; to affirm that it was utterly useless to pray for the souls of the dead, since they must already have gone either to heaven or hell. Though it was generally believed that philosophy or science was pernicious to the interests of Christianity or true piety, the Mohammedan literature then prevailing in Spain was making converts among all classes of society. We see very plainly its influence in many of the sects that then arose; thus, "the Brethren and Sisters of the Free. Spirit" held that "the universe came by emanation from God, and would finally return to him by absorption; that rational souls are so many portions of the Supreme Deity; and that the universe, considered as one great whole, is God." These are ideas that can only be entertained in an advanced intellectual condition. Of this sect it is said that many suffered burning with unclouded serenity, with triumphant feelings of cheerfulness and joy. Their orthodox enemies accused them of gratifying their passions at midnight assemblages in darkened rooms, to which both sexes in a condition of nudity repaired. A similar accusation, as is well known, was brought against the primitive Christians by the fashionable society of Rome.

The influences of the Averroistic philosophy were apparent in many of these sects. That Mohammedan system, considered from a Christian point of view, led to the heretical belief that the end of the precepts of Christianity is the union of the soul with the Supreme Being; that God and Nature have the same relations to each other as the soul and the body; that there is but one individual intelligence; and that one soul performs all the spiritual and rational functions in all the human race. When, subsequently, toward the time of the Reformation, the Italian Averroists were required by the Inquisition to give an account of themselves, they attempted to show that there is a wide distinction between philosophical and religious truth; that things may be philosophically true, and yet theologically false—an exculpatory device condemned at length by the Lateran Council in the time of Leo X.

But, in spite of auricular confession, and the Inquisition, these heretical tendencies survived. It has been truly said that, at the epoch of the Reformation, there lay concealed, in many parts of Europe, persons who entertained the most virulent enmity against Christianity. In this pernicious class were many Aristotelians, such as Pomponatius; many philosophers and wits, such as Bodin, Rabelais, Montaigne; many Italians, as Leo X., Bembo, Bruno.

Miracle-evidence began to fall into discredit during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The sarcasms of the Hispano-Moorish philosophers had forcibly drawn the attention of many of the more enlightened ecclesiastics to its illusory nature. The discovery of the Pandects of Justinian, at Amalfi, in 1130, doubtless exerted a very powerful influence in promoting the study of Roman jurisprudence, and disseminating better notions as to the character of legal or philosophical evidence. Hallam has cast some doubt on the well-known story of this discovery, but he admits that the celebrated copy in the Laurentian library, at Florence, is the only one containing the entire fifty books. Twenty years subsequently, the monk Gratian collected together the various papal edicts, the canons of councils, the declarations of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, in a volume called "The Decretum," considered as the earliest authority in canon law. In the next century Gregory IX. published five books of Decretals, and Boniface VIII. subsequently added a sixth. To these followed the Clementine Constitutions, a seventh book of Decretals, and "A Book of Institutes," published together, by Gregory XIII., in 1580, under the title of "Corpus Juris Canonici." The canon law had gradually gained enormous power through the control it had obtained over wills, the guardianship of orphans, marriages, and divorces.