The Inquisition - A Political And Military Study Of Its Establishment. Hoffman Nickerson
must repeat that all such things were mere gaps, unfinished portions of the clearly outlined logical structure which the time was struggling to build as an expression of its own strong and eager spirit.
Unlike ourselves, the twelfth century possessed moral unity. Alone of all the great eras of growth and change, its movement was practically without reactionaries, because it was without destructive moral change. What a contrast to the Cæsarean-Augustan age, the Renaissance-Reformation period, the French Revolution, and to ourselves! Here and there a monkish grumble at the action of the new forces comes to our ears. The new forces themselves were by no means adjusted to one another. But in all the debates of the time no one looks back upon the past as Arcadia. For all their differences, the men of the twelfth century were agreed in pressing onward without regret.
This moral unity, with its unbroken hopefulness, was due to the corporate body of the Church, which was central in society and pervaded it. It is a commonplace that in the Church were united learning and education, the public care of the sick in hospitals, and all sorts of “organized charity” and poor relief, that the monastery served as a hotel for travellers and that such travellers as were not upon worldly business would almost certainly be pilgrims to the shrine of some saint. No man was too low for the Church’s pity or too high for her effective correction. Her doctrine of the equal worth of souls before God, together with the common observance of her worship, made strongly for friendliness and confidence between classes. Her universality, her cosmopolitan officialdom, and her use of Latin, made for understanding and community of feeling between localities. So she gave to the time, with its accepted division of mankind into classes and its poor communications, a greater measure of fraternity than we possess to-day with all our talk of “equality” and all our devices permitting men to meet or to speak together. This she did, not by any forced, mechanical scheme of union, but by her presentation of a body of teaching which all accepted, and by accepting bound themselves by a common discipline to be members one of another.
We can never fully know what was the spirit of the centuries in which the Church was the unquestioned central institution and pervaded all society. A man unable to travel and steep himself in the atmosphere in the old towns and countrysides (photographs at best give only unrelated bits of them) might best look long at fourteenth-century Italian paintings, or read over and over the first and one of the happiest of English comedies: “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” which is in so many school-books. Before the “Revolution” the traveller in Russia could feel what a country was like wherein men had never shattered their holy things, in which society reposed upon an unquestioned religion, and men felt, therefore, that the universe was friendly. Russia still is mediæval in that the Russian cannot feel as we do for suffering and is alternately fiendish and innocent—
“Half devil and half child . . .”
Even pre-revolutionary Russia was mediæval only in seeming, and in reality was rocking, fatally as the event has proved, under the action of the same forces that disturb our industrial societies with their exaltation of power, and their dangerous instability. But outwardly she still suggested to the traveller from Western Christendom something of what the world of our ancestors must have been.
The fact that the Church thought of her teaching as above all an answer to the riddle of human life, rather than as a bundle of “Thou shalt nots,” made her tolerant of many things. Because she was not so much a separate institution as a part of the atmosphere breathed daily by everybody, she had no fear. Thus she permitted the yearly mockery of her own services in the “feast of fools” when a sham priest, covered with an ass’s false head burlesqued the mass before the altar itself, to the accompaniment of general popular horseplay. So, also, she seems to have permitted a good deal of divorce, at least among the upper class, by means of “annulments.” Finally, when so many people were under vows of one kind or another, it was out of the question to expect that all vows would be strictly kept, and the language of the reformers from within the Church itself proves that in general she was easy-going. Some travellers to Latin America tell us that in those countries where there are few Protestants, the Roman Church is still easy-going, but whether they are swayed by religious opposition or whether they are true witnesses I do not know. At any rate, before the Council of Trent militarized her against Protestantism, the Church permitted many things. As in Russia, religious dress covered many saints and also many sinners, some gross and some refined.
I have said that, in general, the Church was unquestioned. Nevertheless, there were, necessarily, forces working against her teaching and her discipline, just as there must always, in any society, be forces of opposition working against the forces which control that society. When a time is slack, like the Dark Ages, both master forces and opposition forces will be torpid, and when a time is keen, like the twelfth-century time we are considering, both will be active. Accordingly we find the moral and intellectual forces opposed to the Church clearly defined.
In the great Investiture quarrel between the papacy and the secular governments from the Empire down, the faith and morals of the Church were not at stake. But, at the same time, the claims of her champions in her good effort to untangle herself from feudalism were so extravagant that they suggested a downright theocracy, actual government by the ministers of religion, which has always been hateful to men of our European stock. Further, the twelfth century man, in so much fighting against the infidel, had learned that his enemy was no such bad fellow after all. We find at least one ruler, Henry Plantagenet in the heat of his quarrel with Becket, crying out that he would rather turn Mohammedan than yield to the Church! And the outburst does not seem to have weakened his position. Evidently the world was moving fast in his day. The noble, so far surpassing his fathers in riches, luxury, and refinement, often failed to see eye to eye with the churchman. The story of the time is full of despoilments of the Church and consequent excommunications. Now and then a commune, at the height of political struggle with its bishop, would physically maltreat him (or even kill him) and go off into a short spasm of blank irreligion.
Moreover, the Church had foes, or at least very lukewarm servitors, of her own household. We have seen that the student was usually still in minor orders. But now he was no longer shut up under strict control in a monastery, but free to wander at will. Under no constraint, and full of his classic learning with its glorification of every passion and appetite, he carelessly kicked clear over the monkish interpretation of the Christian ethic, and as often as not went wild altogether from any sort of check on his desires. John Addington Symonds has collected, and translated into English out of the original Latin, a number of these students’ songs, under the title of “Wine, Woman and Song.” They are often charming, but I cannot imagine literature better calculated to enrage a monk, or indeed anyone of a puritanic cast of mind.
Even the student’s professor, and the student himself in his serious moments, were not altogether Christians. The Arabian versions of Aristotle taught an imaginative pantheism, full of ideas about “the soul of the world” that were inconsistent with belief in any definite god. The recoil from such fantasies sometimes brought on an easy-going general scepticism. It was whispered about that the world had known three great impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The pride of the new logic equalled, in some men, our modern pride in physical science. Michelet tells the story of a learned professor of the University of Paris who delighted his hearers with a complete demonstration of our Lord’s divinity and then turned around and said that, had he chosen, his logic could have put down “little Jesus” as low as it had just raised him high. The common people would make up coarse “fabliaux,” tales and rhymes about the priest and his women parishioners, that sound harshly upon the ear even of a sceptic of to-day.
Finally, from top to bottom of society, there was an under-current of feeling that the wealth and power of the Church were over-tempting her officials into that pride which they were bound to oppose as the first of sins. Writing to magnify the work of the mendicant orders, Dante goes so far as to say that, just before their coming (that is, in the time we are considering), “The Army of Christ” . . . was . . .” laggard, fearsome, and thin-ranked.”1
Michelet speaks of the Pope in the year 1200 lifted indeed to a dizzy height upon the topmost pinnacle of the great structure of the Church,