Many of our contemporaries think they have done their duty if they have abused their own time, praised the past, and predicted a sombre future unable to confer upon us any blessings. It is so sweet to live in abstract contemplation of heroes or epochs of which inexorable time has deprived us; it is so easy to make an apology for them without combating the living men and the concrete ideas which in real history form the shadows to these brilliant pictures; it is so easy to choose from former ages models of virtue, of civil courage and faith, without preoccupying ourselves with obstacles that these just people, these citizens, these saints have conquered, and that our indifference, our idleness, our weakness, or our cowardice hinders us from looking fairly in the face, through the medium in which we live. We do not perceive often enough that the vulgar expression of the "good old time," which has been forbidden in every age, is in the moral history of a people a truly vicious circle. Indeed, we cannot pretend that every age is worth only so much, and, interpreting badly the proverb, "Man proposes, but God disposes," go to sleep in the false historical security called fatalism. It is legitimate to have our preferences for such and such an epoch, and it is not always difficult to give good reasons for them; but between these rational preferences and an unjustifiable disdain for our own time, there is an abyss.
To act with our own epoch we must love it; then we work with ardor and confidence for its reform. Who loves well, chastises well. I wish to show that our age merits to be loved as well as any other that has preceded it; and I will demonstrate this clearly by a moral, religious, and political sketch of the Christian age the most justly praised—the thirteenth. To circumscribe this vast subject as much as possible, I will speak of Italy alone; of that Italy which then, as now, was the object of the most audacious attacks and the theatre of the most instructive resistance. I will first tell what was the condition of the "Christian republic" at the end of the twelfth century. Then I will show the radiant transformation of society in the thirteenth century while determining its general causes, and finish by comparing this heroic age with our own.
I.
For most of Belgium, the history of civilization commences only with the day when General Dumouriez "brought them liberty at the point of the bayonet." Before the French revolution, it was the common error that the era of political and religious revolution only opened with the sixteenth century, and such error is common to-day. Yet Gnosticism, Manicheism, Arianism, and Greek schism have produced in Christian Europe commotions much greater and more fatal than those of which the predictions of Martin Luther have been the occasion, and of which the Protestant princes have so abundantly reaped the fruits. From the tenth to the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church suffered on the part of the state—of the empire, as they then termed it—assaults in comparison to which the thirty years' war and the revolutions fomented by the statolatres of the thirteenth century were only children's play.
Never was the spirit of sectarianism more active than in the twelfth century. The disguised partisans of Gnosticism, Manicheism, or Arianism, these habitual forms of antichristianism, were spread all over civilized Europe under the most diverse names: Cathares, Pauliciens, Petrobrusiens, Tanchelmites, Henriciens, Bogomiles, Apostoliques, Endistes, Arnoldistes, Circonsis, Passagieres, Publicains, Vaudois Bons Hommes, etc., etc. These names appear strange, but they are not more so than their actual partisans: socialists, free-thinkers, solid men, Fourierists, Saint Simoniens, etc.
And do not suppose that these sects, or these schools, as they are called nowadays, confined themselves to the innocent publication of their programme, and simply distributed a few partisans through anonymous societies, among the councils of administration, or in the senates of empires.
The Ambrosien church was during a certain time directed by the Nicolite priests of Milan, and supported violently by the emperor and by the government. Our compatriot, Dankelm, a deist a little sore, who preached against the corruptions of the monks, their artifices, the tithes and mortmain, was head of an organized church at Bruges, and also at Anvers. If the Vaudois had, like Luther, obtained the support of the corrupted and sensual bishops, and the ambitious princes so powerful and rapacious, their church would have taken root in a great part of Europe during the twelfth century; it has endured longer than will any Protestant church; for it still existed in the last century, and I believe there are still some communities in Holland and Suabia.
All these sects agreed on one point, their hatred of the Church of Rome. M. Renan, in his last book, Questions Contemporains, writing with a haughty moderation almost disdainful, feared for the Catholic Church of the nineteenth century a grand schism resulting in the simultaneous election of two popes. Such an apprehension denotes in this writer a defect of memory or a strange want of perspicacity; for in the church, anti-popes were counted by dozens, and in the twelfth century, this kind of schism appeared several times. The competitors or anti-popes of Calixtus II., (1119-1124,) of Innocent II., (1130-1143,) and of Alexander III., (1159-1181,) were sustained by emperors whose material power had but little weight in the then known world. Under Innocent II., the schism lasted only eight years. Sixty years later, Innocent III. governed Europe.