Heresies and schisms are always accompanied by social revolutions. However, the irreligious antagonism of capital and labor, which is one of the causes of modern socialism, did not exist in the twelfth century under the learned and redoubtable form of our day. The reason is a simple one, and we should be proud of our age: labor, of which Christianity has made a duty, had not then in political society the great and legitimate importance it has now. The problem of pauperism had never been solved politically except in densely populated countries, and in the twelfth century the population of Europe was relatively less considerable. Hatred of capital only manifested itself among the idle, among certain sects, (the Cathares, the Frerots, the Apostoliques, the Begghards, the Lollards, etc.,) and particularly in "the wars of the castle and the hut;" violent wars which were not only carried on by poor devils hardened by passions, but by the châtelains, (governors or keepers,) thieves only distinguishable from the others by new titles given them through euphemism. This category of men was then more numerous than in our time. We respect a mill, but we steal a province. Then they took the province and the mill also.
Great luxury existed in all the towns of Italy. Money was a courted power. The bankers' families became the source of dynasties.
A portion of the secular clergy lived in the relaxation of discipline, and even morals. Neither the energy of the great Hildebrand, nor the activity of the admirable Alexander III., the friend of the Lombard communities, had been powerful enough to completely reform the regular clergy. Neither in the fifteenth nor in the eighteenth century were more scandals seen than those which disheartened the great St. Bernard. "Oh! for the power to see again, before my death," wrote he to the pope, Eugene III., "those happy days of the church when the apostles cast their nets for souls, and not for gold." This Pope Eugene was not permitted to die at Rome. The Eternal City was in the hands of the Garibaldians of the time, the Mazzini of whom was named Arnold, a clerk of Brescia, of austere manners and quick-witted oratory. After having studied philosophy in Paris under the cold and licentious Abelard, Arnold commenced to traverse the Lombard cities. Imposing upon himself a mission altogether political, he pretended not to wish to injure the Catholic faith.
"Detractor of clergymen and bishops, persecutor of monks, he reserved," said a chronicler of the time, "all his flattery for the laity. He sustained the theory of no salvation for clergymen possessing lands, for bishops disposing of regal rights, or monks owning valuables; that all these things belonged to the state, and it alone should dispose of them in favor of the laity. It is said also that he did not reason sanely on the eucharist and the baptism of infants." His partisans, called politicians, called him to Rome, where he had resolved to establish a new government. Forced to fly from this city after the second council of Lateran, he wandered for several years in France, in Germany, and in Switzerland, promulgating everywhere the doctrines which he applied to his Italian friends. During an insurrection, the pope, Lucius II., was killed by a blow from a stone, (to-day they only kill ministers,) and his successor, Eugene III., took refuge in Viterbo, and afterward in France. Arnold was in Switzerland with 2000 soldiers collected there; the multitude having granted him the dictatorship, he proclaimed the fall of the temporal power of the popes, and the re-establishment of the Roman republic; then, carried away by the logic of his ideas rather than by his situation, he called to Rome the emperor, the monarch of Italy, in order that he would deign to restore to the empire the lustre it had under Justinian. Demagogues naturally advocate Caesarism.
The emperors rushed to Rome. Arnold and his government were thrown into the Tiber. Then recommenced, under a new form, the quarrel between the priesthood and the empire, existing still in Europe. Never had the pride of the depositaries of the civil power, the absolutism of the god state, and the tyranny of the supreme authority, representatives more complete, and in certain respects more sympathetic, than the emperors of the house of Hohenstaufen. How many laws vaunted by certain schools of our day of progress have been dressed in the signature of these fierce Sonabes, then abrogated as despotic and contrary to the liberty and dignity of citizens.
The Staufen were fanatics in law when it was a question of their authority. Frederic I. had for his witnesses the four famous doctors of Bologna, who, with Irnerius, their professor, were masters of the study of modern law. It was these four doctors who, by the aid of texts and juridical interpretations, were ready to impose on the Lombard cities represented at the diet of Roncaglia the chains which the entire material power of the German emperors had never been able to forge. It was the chancellor of Frederic II., Pierre Des Vignes, who is the author of the Recueil des Lois de Sidle, the first code of despotism of modern times.
In few words, then, we have here the state of Europe, in its most civilized centre, in the second half of the twelfth century. The truth was at once attacked in church and state, with the view of corrupting both; in the church, with an aim at her authority; in the state, to banish liberty.
II.
It is the glory of the epoch which begins with the Lombard League and the pontificate of the English Mendicant, Adrian IV., to have re-established a moral equilibrium in Christian society, and to have saved Europe from a lethargy similar to that in which a Caesaro-papacy has plunged the East.