Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

§ 1. Heresy in Byzantium

§ 2. Critical Heresy in the West

That John the Scot was an Irishman remains practically certain, even if we give up the term “Erigena,” which, as has been shown by Floss, the most careful editor of his works, is not found in the oldest MSS. The reading there is Ierugena, which later shades into Erugena and Eriugena. (Cp. Ueberweg, i, 359; Poole, pp. 55–56, note; Dr. Th. Christlieb, Leben und Lehre des Johannes Scotus Erigena, 1860, p. 14 sq.; and Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie im Mittelalter, 1861, pp. 38–40.) From this elusive cognomen no certain inference can be drawn, too many being open; though the fact that John had himself coined the term Graiugena for a late Greek writer makes it likely that he called himself Ierugena in the sense of “born in the holy (island)” = Ireland. But the name Scotus, occurring without the Ierugena, is common in old MSS.; and it is almost impossible that any save a Scot of Ireland should have possessed the scholarship of John in the ninth century. In the west, Greek scholarship and philosophy had been special to Ireland from the time of Pelagius; and it is from Greek sources that John draws his inspiration and cast of thought. M. Taillandier not unjustly calls the Ireland of that era “l’île des saints, mais aussi l’île des libres penseurs.” (Scot Érigène et la philosophie scolastique, 1843, p. 64.) To the same effect Huber, pp. 40–41. In writing that Johannes “was of Scottish nationality, but was probably born and brought up in Ireland,” Ueberweg (i, 358) obscures the fact that the people of Ireland were the Scoti of that period. All the testimony goes to show “that Ireland was called Scotia, and its ruling people Scoti, from the first appearance of these names down to the eleventh century. But that [the] present Scotland was called Scotia, or its people Scoti, before the eleventh century, not so much as one single authority can be produced” (Pinkerton, Enquiry into the History of Scotland, 1789, ii, 237). Irish Scots gave their name to Scotland, and it was adopted by the Teutonic settlers.

While the land of John the Scot’s birth is thus fairly certain, the place of his death remains a mystery. Out of a statement by Asser that King Alfred made one John, a priest, Abbot of Athelney, and that the said Abbot was murdered at the altar by hired assassins, there grew a later story that Alfred made John the Scot Abbot of Malmesbury, and that he was slain with the styli of two of his pupils. It is clear that the John of Asser was an “Old Saxon,” and not the philosopher; and it is difficult to doubt that the second story, which arises in the twelfth century, is a hearsay distortion of the first. Cp. Christlieb, who argues (p. 42 sq.) for two Johns, one of them Scotus, and both assassinated, with Huber, who sets forth (p. 108 sq.) the view here followed. There is really no adequate ground for believing that John the Scot was ever a priest. We know not where or when he died; but the presumption is that it was in France, and not long after the death of his patron Charles—877. (Huber, p. 121.)

Gottschalk later challenged a fourfold ordeal of “boiling water, oil, and pitch.” His primary doctrine had been the immutability of the divine will; but he brought himself to the belief that God would work a miracle in his favour. His conception of “foreordination” was thus framed solely with regard to the conception of a future state. The ordeal was not granted, the orthodox party fearing to try conclusions, and he died without the sacraments, rather than recant. Then began the second reaction of feeling against his chief persecutor, Hincmar. Neander, vi, 190.

A recent writer, who handles very intelligently and temperately the problem of persecution, urges that in that connection “one ought not to lay great stress on the old argument of the Hallam and Macaulay school as to the strength of vested interests, though it has a certain historical importance, because the priest must subsist somehow” (Religious Persecution: a Study in Psychology, by E. S. P. Haynes, 1904, p. 4). If the “certain importance” be in the ratio of the certainty of the last adduced fact, the legitimate “stress” on the argument in question would seem sufficient for most purposes. The writer adds the note: “It is not unfair, however, to quote the case of Dr. Middleton, who, writing to Lord Radnor in 1750 in respect of his famous work on Miracles, admits frankly enough that he would never have given the clergy any trouble, had he received some good appointment in the church.” If the essayist has met with no other historic fact illustrative of the play of vested interests in ecclesiastical history, it is extremely candid of him to mention that one. Later on, however, he commits himself to the proposition that “the history of medieval persecution leads one to infer that the clergy as a whole were roused to much greater activity by menaces to their material comforts in this world than by an altruistic anxiety for the fate of lay souls in the next” (id. p. 60. Cp. p. 63). This amount of “stress” on vested interests will probably satisfy most members of the Hallam and Macaulay school; and is ample for the purposes of the present contention.

Berengar’s forced prevarications, which are unsympathetically set forth by Mosheim (11 Cent., pt. ii, ch. iii, §§ 13–18), are made much more intelligible in the sympathetic survey of Neander (vi, 225–60). See also the careful inquiry of Reuter, Gesch. der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, i, 91 sq. As to Berengar’s writings, see further Murdock’s note to Mosheim, last cit., § 18. The formal compromise forced on him by Pope Hildebrand, who was personally friendly to him, consisted in adding to his denial of the change of the bread and wine into “body and blood” the doctrine that the body and blood were “superadded to the bread and wine in and by their consecration.” This formula, of course, did not represent the spirit of Berengar’s polemic. As to the disputes on the subject, which ran to the most unseemly length of physiological detail, see Voltaire, Essai sur les Mœurs, ch. xlv. It is noteworthy that Augustine had very expressly set forth a metaphorical interpretation of the Eucharist—De doctrina christiana, l. iii, c. 16. But just as the Church later set aside the verdict of Thomas Aquinas that the Virgin Mary was “born in sin,” so did it reverse Augustine’s judgment on the Eucharist. Always the more irrational view carried the day, as being more propitious to sacerdotal claims.

So far as the Church by her keenly self-regarding organization could attain it, all opinion was kept within the strict bounds of her official dogma, in which life in the Middle Ages so long stagnated. For centuries, despite the turmoil of many wars—which, indeed, helped to arrest thought—the life of the mind presented a uniformity hardly now conceivable. The common expectation of the ending of the world, in the year 1000, in particular had an immense prepotency of paralysing men’s spirits; and the grooves of habit thus fixed were hard to alter. For most men, the notion of possible innovation in thought did not exist: the usual was the sacred: the very ideal of an improvement or reformation, when it arose, was one of reaching back to a far-away perfection of the past, never of remoulding things on lines laid down by reason. Yet even into this half-stifled world there entered, by eastern ways, and first in the guise of rude demotic departures from priestly prescription, the indestructible spirit of change.

§ 3. Popular Anti-Clerical Heresy

It could hardly, however, have been the ascetic doctrine that won for the new heresy its vogue in medieval Europe; nor is it likely that the majority of the heretics even professed it. If, on the other hand, we ask how it was that in an age of dense superstition so many uneducated people were found to reject so promptly the most sacrosanct doctrines of the Church, it seems hardly less difficult to account for the phenomenon on the bare ground of their common sense. Critical common sense there must have been, to allow of it at all; but it is reasonable to suppose that then, as clearly happened later at the Reformation, common sense had a powerful stimulus in pecuniary interest.

§ 4. Heresy in Southern France

In Provence and Languedoc, the scene of the first great papal crusade against anti-clerical heresy, there were represented all the then existing forces of popular freethought; and the motives of the crusade were equally typical of the cause of authority.

According to a long current fiction, it was the Pope who first faltered when “the whole of Christendom demanded the renewal of those scenes of massacre” (Sismondi, Crusades, p. 95); but this is disproved by the discovery of two letters in which, shortly before his death, he excitedly takes on himself the responsibility for all the bloodshed (Michelet, Hist. de France, vii, introd. note to § iv). Michelet had previously accepted the legend which he here rejects. The bishops assembled in council at Lavaur, in 1213, demanded the extermination of the entire population of Toulouse. Finally, the papal policy is expressly decreed in the third canon of the Fourth General Council of Lateran, 1215. On that canon see The Statutes of the Fourth General Council of Lateran, by the Rev. John Evans, 1843. On the crusade in general, cp. Lea, History of the Inquisition, bk. i, ch. iv; Gieseler, Per. III, Div. iii, § 89.

It is still common to speak of the personnel of the Inquisition as disinterested, and to class its crimes as “conscientious.” Buckle set up such a thesis, without due circumspection, as a support to one of his generalizations. (See the present writer’s ed. of his Introduction to the History of Civilization in England, pp. 105–108, notes, and the passages in McCrie and Llorente there cited.) Dr. Lea, whose History of the Inquisition is the greatest storehouse of learning on the subject, takes up a similar position, arguing (i, 239): “That the men who conducted the Inquisition, and who toiled sedulously in its arduous, repulsive, and often dangerous labour, were thoroughly convinced that they were furthering the kingdom of God, is shown by the habitual practice of encouraging them with the remission of sins, similar to that offered for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land”—a somewhat surprising theorem. Parallel reasoning would prove that soldiers never plunder and are always Godly; that the crusaders were all conscientious men; and that policemen never take bribes or commit perjury. The interpretation of history calls for a less simple-minded psychology. That there were devoted fanatics in the Inquisition as in the Church is not to be disputed; that both organizations had economic bases is certain; and that the majority of office-bearers in both, in the ages of faith, had regard to gain, is demonstrated by all ecclesiastical history.

Dr. Lea’s own History shows clearly enough (i, 471–533) that the Inquisition, from the first generation of its existence, lived upon its fines and confiscations. “Persecution, as a steady and continuous policy, rested, after all, upon confiscation.... When it was lacking, the business of defending the faith lagged lamentably” (i, 529). “But for the gains to be made out of fines and confiscations its [the Inquisition’s] work would have been much less thorough, and it would have sunk into comparative insignificance as soon as the first frantic zeal of bigotry had exhausted itself” (pp. 532–33). Why, in the face of these avowals, “it would be unjust to say that greed and thirst for plunder were the impelling motives of the Inquisition” (p. 532) is not very clear. See below, ch. x, § 3, as to the causation in Spain. Cp. Mocatta, The Jews and the Inquisition, pp. 37, 44, 52. On the Inquisition in Portugal, in turn, Professor W. E. Collins sums up that “it was founded for reasons ostensibly religious but actually fiscal” (in the “Cambridge Modern History,” vol. ii, The Reformation, ch. xii, p. 415). Every charge of economic motive that Catholicism can bring against Protestantism is thus balanced by the equivalent charge against its own Inquisition.

§ 5. Freethought in the Schools

It is doubtless true of the Paulicians that “there was no principle of development in their creed: it reflected no genuine freedom of thought” (Poole, Illustrations, p. 95); but the same thing, as we have seen, is clearly true of scholasticism itself. It may indeed be urged that “the contest between Ratramn and Paschase on the doctrine of the Eucharist; of Lanfranc with Berengar on the same subject; of Anselm with Roscelin on the nature of Universals; the complaints of Bernard against the dialectical theology of Abelard; are all illustrations of the collision between Reason and Authority ... varied forms of rationalism—the pure exertions of the mind within itself ... against the constringent force of the Spiritual government” (Hampden, Bampton Lectures on The Scholastic Philosophy, 3rd ed. p. 37; cp. Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, p. 203); but none of the scholastics ever professed to set Authority aside. None dared. John Scotus indeed affirmed the identity of true religion with true philosophy, without professing to subordinate the latter; but the most eminent of the later scholastics affirmed such a subordination. “The vassalage of philosophy consisted in the fact that an impassable limit was fixed for the freedom of philosophizing in the dogmas of the Church” (Ueberweg, i, 357); and some of the chief dogmas were not allowed to be philosophically discussed; though, “with its territory thus limited, philosophy was indeed allowed by theology a freedom which was rarely and only by exception infringed upon” (ib. Cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ix, 151). “The suspicion of originality was fatal to the reputation of the scholastic divine” (Hampden, pp. 46–47). The popular heresy, indeed, lacked the intellectual stimulus that came to the schools from the philosophy of Averroës; but it was the hardier movement of the two.

As to William’s doctrines and writings see Poole, pp. 124–30, 346–59. His authorship of one treatise is only latterly cleared up. In the work which under the title of Elementa Philosophiae is falsely ascribed to Bede, and under the title De Philosophia Mundi to Honorius of Autun (see Poole, pp. 340–42, 347 sq.), but which is really the production of William of Conches, there occurs the passage: “What is more pitiable than to say that a thing is, because God is able to do it, and not to show any reason why it is so; just as if God did everything that he is able to do! You talk like one who says that God is able to make a calf out of a log. But did he ever do it? Either, then, show a reason why a thing is so, or a purpose wherefore it is so, or else cease to declare it so.” Migne, Patrolog. Latin. xc, 1139. It is thus an exaggeration to say of Abailard, as does Cousin, that “il mit de côté la vieille école d’Anselme de Laon, qui exposait sans expliquer, et fonda ce qu’on appelle aujourd’hui le rationalisme” (Ouvr. inédits d’Abélard, 1836, intr. p. ii).

Dr. Rashdall pronounces Abailard “incomparably the greatest intellect of the Middle Ages; one of the great minds which mark a period in the world’s intellectual history”; and adds that “Abailard (a Christian thinker to the very heart’s core, however irredeemable (sic) the selfishness and overweening vanity of his youth) was at the same time the representative of the principle of free though reverent inquiry in matters of religion and individual loyalty to truth.” (The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 1895, i, 56–57.) If the praise given be intended to exalt Abailard above John Scotus, it seems excessive.

§ 6. Saracen and Jewish Influences

What he did for his church was to combine so ingeniously the semblance of Aristotelian method with constant recurrence to the sacred books as to impose their authority on the life of the schools no less completely than it dominated the minds of the unlearned. Meeting method with method, and showing himself well aware of the lore he circumvented, he built up a system quite as well fitted to be a mere gymnastic of the mind; and he thereby effected the arrest for some three centuries of the method of experimental science which Aristotle had inculcated. He came just in time. Roger Bacon, trained at Paris, was eagerly preaching the scientific gospel; and while he was suffering imprisonment at the hands of his Franciscan superiors for his eminently secular devotion to science, the freer scholars of the university were developing a heresy that outwent his.

§ 7. Freethought in Italy

The Pope’s letter, dated July 1, 1239, is given by Matthew Paris (extracts in Gieseler, vol. iii, § 55), and in Labbe’s Concilia, t. xiii, col. 1157. Cp. the other references given by Renan, Averroès, 3e édit. pp. 296–97. As Voltaire remarks (Essai sur les Mœurs, ch. lii), the Pope’s statement is the basis for the old belief that Frederick had written a treatise dealing with Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as The Three Impostors. The story is certainly a myth; and probably no such book existed in his century. Cp. Maclaine’s note to Mosheim, 13 Cent. pt. i, end; Renan, Averroès, pp. 280–81, 295. The authorship of such a book has nevertheless been ascribed by Catholic writers successively to Averroës, Simon of Tournay, Frederick, his Minister, Pierre des Vignes, Arnaldo de Villanueva, Boccaccio, Poggio, Pietro Aretino, Machiavelli, Symphorien, Champier, Pomponazzi, Cardan, Erasmus, Rabelais, Ochinus, Servetus, Postel, Campanella, Muret, Geoffroi Vallée, Giordano Bruno, Dolet, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Vanini (cp. Sentimens sur le traité des trois imposteurs in the French ed. of 1793; and Lea, Hist. of the Inquis. iii, 560); and the seventeenth-century apologist Mersenne professed to have seen it in Arabic (Lea, iii, 297). These references may be dismissed as worthless. In 1654 the French physician and mathematician Morin wrote an Epistola de tribus impostoribus under the name of Panurge, but this attacked the three contemporary writers Gassendi, Neure, and Bernier; and in 1680 Kortholt of Kiel published under the title De tribus impostoribus magnis an attack on Herbert, Hobbes, and Spinoza. The Three Impostors current later, dealing with Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, may have been written about the same time, but, as we shall see later, is identical with L’Esprit de Spinoza, first published in 1719. A Latin treatise purporting to be written de tribus famosissimis deceptoribus, and addressed to an Otho illustrissimus (conceivably Otho Duke of Bavaria, 13th c.), came to light in MS. in 1706, and was described in 1716, but was not printed. The treatise current later in French cannot have been the same. On the whole subject see the note of R. C. Christie (reprinted from Notes and Queries) in his Selected Essays and Papers, 1902, pp. 309, 315; and the full discussion in Reuter’s Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung, ii, 251–96. The book De tribus impostoribus, bearing the date 1598, of which several copies exist, seems to have been really published, with its false date, at Vienna in 1753.

“Le 16e siècle n’a eu aucune mauvaise pensée que le 13e n’ait eue avant lui” (Renan, Averroès, p. 231). Renan, however, seems astray in stating that “Le Poème de la Descente de Saint Paul aux enfers parle avec terreur d’une société secrète qui avait juré la destruction de Christianisme” (id. p. 284). The poem simply describes the various tortures of sinners in hell, and mentions in their turn those who “en terre, à sainte Iglise firent guerre,” and in death “Verbe Deu refusouent”; also those “Ki ne croient que Deu fust nez (né), ne que Sainte Marie l’eust portez, ne que por le peuple vousist (voulait) mourir, ne que peine deignast soffrir.” See the text as given by Ozanam, Dante, ed. 6ième, Ptie. iv—the version cited by Renan.

§ 8. Sects and Orders

These in turn are to be understood in connection with developments which took place in the thirteenth century within the Church—notably the rise of the great orders of Mendicant Friars, of which the two chief were founded about 1216 by Francis of Assisi and the Spanish Dominic, the latter a fierce persecutor in the Albigensian crusade. Nothing availed more to preserve or restore for a time the Church’s prestige. The old criticism of priestly and monastic avarice and worldliness was disarmed by the sudden appearance and rapid spread of a priesthood and brotherhood of poverty; and the obvious devotion of thousands of the earlier adherents went to the general credit of the Church. Yet the descent of the new orders to the moral and economic levels of the old was only a question of time; and no process could more clearly illustrate the futility of all schemes of regenerating the world on non-rational principles. Apart from the vast encouragement given to sheer mendicancy among the poor, the orders themselves substantially apostatized from their own rules within a generation.

§ 9. Thought in Spain

The error as to the original or anciently ingrained fanaticism of the Spanish people, first made current by Ticknor (Hist. Spanish Lit., 6th ed. i, 505), has been to some extent diffused by Buckle, who at this point of his inquiry reasoned à priori instead of inductively as his own principles prescribed. See the notes to the present writer’s edition of his Introduction (Routledge, 1904), pp. 107, 534–50. The special atrocity of the Inquisition in Spain was not even due directly to the papacy (cp. Burke, ii, 78): it was the result first of the rapacity of Ferdinand, utilizing a papal institution; and later of the political fanaticisms of Charles V and Philip II, both of Teutonic as well as Spanish descent. Philip alleged that the Inquisition in the Netherlands was more severe than in Spain (ed. of Buckle cited, p. 107, note). In the words of Bishop Stubbs: “To a German race of sovereigns Spain finally owed the subversion of her national system and ancient freedom” (id. p. 550, note).

§ 10. Thought in England

Through all three documents there runs the same inspiration, the Opus Tertium and the Majus constituting a complete treatise, which gives at once the most vivid idea of the state of culture at the time, and the most intimate presentment of a student’s mind, that survive from the thirteenth century. It was nothing less than a demand, such as was made by Francis Bacon three hundred and fifty years later, and by Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century, for a reconstruction of all studies and all tuition. Neither pope nor emperor could have met it; but Clement gave Roger his freedom, and he returned to Oxford, papally protected, at the end of 1267. Four years later Clement died, and was succeeded by Gregory X, a Franciscan.

Prof. Lounsbury, who has gone closely and critically into the whole question of Chaucer’s religious opinions, asks concerning the lines in the Knight’s Tale on the passing of Arcite: “Can modern agnosticism point to a denial more emphatic than that made in the fourteenth century of the belief that there exists for us any assurance of the life that is lived beyond the grave?” (Studies in Chaucer, 1892, ii, 514–15). Prof. Skeat, again, affirms (Notes to the Tales, Clar. Press Compl. Chaucer, v, 92) that “the real reason why Chaucer could not here describe the passage of Arcite’s soul to heaven is because he had already copied Boccaccio’s description, and had used it with respect to the death of Troilus” (see Troil. v, 1807–27; stanzas 7, 8, 9 from the end). This evades the question as to the poet’s faith. In point of fact, the passage in Troilus and Criseyde is purely pagan, and tells of no Christian belief, though that poem, written before the Tales, seems to parade a Christian contempt for pagan lore. (Cp. Lounsbury, as cited, p. 512.)

The ascription of unbelief seems a straining of the evidence; but it would be difficult to gainsay the critic’s summing-up: “The general view of all his [Chaucer’s] production leaves upon the mind the impression that his personal religious history was marked by the dwindling devoutness which makes up the experience of so many lives—the fallings from us, the vanishings, we know not how or when, of beliefs in which we have been bred. One characteristic which not unusually accompanies the decline of faith in the individual is in him very conspicuous. This is the prominence given to the falsity and fraud of those who have professedly devoted themselves to the advancement of the cause of Christianity.... Much of Chaucer’s late work, so far as we know it to be late, is distinctly hostile to the Church.... It is, moreover, hostile in a way that implies an utter disbelief in certain of its tenets, and even a disposition to regard them as full of menace to the future of civilization” (Lounsbury, vol. cited, pp. 519–20).

Against this general view is to be set that which proceeds on an unquestioning acceptance of the “Retractation” or confession at the close of the Canterbury Tales, as to the vexed question of the genuineness of which see the same critic, work cited, i, 412–15; iii, 40. The fact that the document is appended to the concluding “Parson’s Tale” (also challenged as to authenticity), which is not a tale at all, and to which the confession refers as “this little treatise or rede,” suggests strongly a clerical influence brought to bear upon the aging poet.

§ 11. Thought in France

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).

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.

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.

The solution that offensive practices occurred irregularly (Lea, pp. 276–77) is pointed to even by the earlier hostile writers (Nicolai, p. 17). It seems to be certain that the initiatory rites included the act of spitting on the crucifix—presumptively a symbolic display of absolute obedience to the orders of those in command (Jolly, Philippe le Bel, pp. 264–68). That there was no Catharism in the order seems certain (Lea, p. 249). The suggestion that the offensive and burlesque practices were due to the lower grade of “serving brethren,” who were contemned by the higher, seems, however, without firm foundation. The courage for such freaks, and the disposition to commit them, were rather more likely to arise among the crusaders of the upper class, who could come in contact with Moslem-Christian unbelief through those of Sicily.

For the further theory that the “Freemasons” (at that period really cosmopolitan guilds of masons) were already given to freethinking, there is again no evidence. That they at times deliberately introduced obscene symbols into church architecture is no proof that they were collectively unbelievers in the Church’s doctrines; though it is likely enough that some of them were. Obscenity is the expression not of an intellectual but of a physical and unreasoning bias, and can perfectly well concur with religious feeling. The fact that the medieval masons did not confine obscene symbols to the churches they built for the Templars (Hallam, as cited, pp. 140–41) should serve to discredit alike the theory that the Templars were systematically anti-Christian, and the theory that the Freemasons were so. That for centuries the builders of the Christian churches throughout Europe formed an anti-Christian organization is a grotesque hypothesis. At most they indulged in freaks of artistic satire on the lines of contemporary satirical literature, expressing an anti-clerical bias, with perhaps occasional elements of blasphemy. (See Menzel, Gesch. der Deutschen, Cap. 252, note.) It could well be that there survived among the Freemasons various Gnostic ideas; since the architectural art itself came in a direct line from antiquity. Such heresy, too, might conceivably be winked at by the Church, which depended so much on the heretics’ services. But their obscenities were the mere expression of the animal imagination and normal salacity of all ages. Only in modern times, and that only in Catholic countries, has the derivative organization of Freemasonry been identified with freethought propaganda. In England in the seventeenth century the Freemasonic clubs—no longer connected with any trade—were thoroughly royalist and orthodox (Nicolai, pp. 196–98), as they have always remained.

§ 12. Thought in the Teutonic Countries

Dr. Lasson pronounces (Ueberweg, i, 483) that the type of Eckhart’s character and teaching “was derived from the innermost essence of the German national character.” At the same time he admits that all the offshoots of the school departed more or less widely from Eckhart’s type—that is, from the innermost essence of their own national character. It would be as plausible to say that the later mysticism of Fénelon derived from the innermost essence of the French character. The Imitatio Christi has been similarly described as expressing the German character, on the assumption that it was written by Thomas à Kempis. Many have held that the author was the Frenchman Gerson (Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872, i, 139–40). It was in all probability, as was held by Suarez, the work of several hands, one a monk of the twelfth century, another a monk of the thirteenth, and the third a theologian of the fifteenth; neither Gerson nor Thomas à Kempis being concerned (Le Clerc, Hist. Litt. du XIVe Siècle, 2e édit. pp. 384–85; cp. Neale’s Hist. of the so-called Jansenist Church of Holland, 1858, pp. 97–98).