CHAPTER II.LANGUEDOC AND THE ALBIGENSES.
I have chosen to call the district in question “Languedoc” because the literature which was the mark of its distinctive culture was written in the “langue d’Oc” (in contra-distinction to the North French langue d’Oïl which later became the master idiom), and because the actual fighting to be described in the fourth chapter took place within (or just outside) the territories later known as the Province of Languedoc under the French monarchy, until the old administrative divisions were wiped out by the Revolution. I have rejected the various more definite names given by recent historians to the heretical movement in question because the word “Albigenses” is in general usage, and because I believe that general usage ought not to be lightly disturbed by the preciosity of individual scholars careless of the bewilderment of the non-specialist reader.
First, then, of the general physical characteristics of the country with which we are concerned. The southern half of France is definitely bounded by great mountain chains. The Alps separate it from Italy, the Pyrenees from Spain. It is true that there is a little room for doubt in the Roussillon and around Nice where the Pyrenees and the Alps respectively approach the Mediterranean Sea, but, on the whole, the natural boundaries are quite clear, and modern France in establishing them has resumed the natural frontiers of ancient Gaul, one of those major divisions of Europe that go back beyond recorded history. This southern part of France, besides the mountains which limit it, contains within itself a lesser mountain mass central to itself, the Cévennes. It contains two principal river basins, on the east that of the Rhône, which flows almost due south to the Mediterranean, draining the country between the Cévennes and the Alps; on the west that of the Garonne,which flows in a general direction north-west to the Atlantic, draining the country between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees. It contains also a curved strip of coastal plain from the mouths of the Rhône west and south to the eastern Pyrenees, and between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees a region of moderate uplands, broken by a single notch, so low that the highest point of its watershed between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean lies below the 200-metre line.
With the upper basin of the Rhône this study has little to do. The lower Rhône country enters into our story, although not as the main theatre in which its events took place. We are mainly concerned with the upper Garonne basin, the strip of Mediterranean coastal plain curving from the lower Rhône to the Pyrenees, the mountain slopes which border upon these two regions and the passage, or gap, of Carcassonne which connects them. For in that space (roughly of a hundred by a little over a hundred and fifty English miles) was decided the failure of the first attempt to break the moral unity of mediæval Christendom. And in that struggle the Inquisition for the first time definitely appears.
Even this small stretch of country presents great differences of climate and of appearance.
The landscape of the coastal plain between the Rhône and the Pyrenees is of the typical Mediterranean sort which hardly changes all around the inland sea. The sea itself is intensely blue and the boats upon it are rigged with slim lateen sails pointed like sharks’ fins. Within sight of the sea are mountains, great stark masses of rock like the bare bones of the world. No forests, but between the sea and the mountains extends a strip of land systematically cultivated down to its last square inch, showing everywhere the vine and the olive, and built up in terraces wherever there is a slope. This strip of land is always narrow—from the town of Beziers, for instance, both mountains and sea are full in sight. When rain falls it comes down fiercely as it does in America, unlike the gentle misty rains of England and Northern France. Usually the air is so clear that all outlines come out sharp and strong—one thinks of the trenchant Latin phrase and the fixed lines of classic columns. The sun is dazzling and powerful, and the roads are full of whitedust. The houses are of stone, flat topped or nearly so, and generally roofed in red tile.
The people, as befits the heirs of an immemorial and still vigorous civilization, are loud-voiced, vivacious in gesture, ceremonious in compliment, and both easy and dignified in repose.
Westward from Narbonne, a sharply defined valley, deep and regular like a vast trench, seems to open a path toward the Atlantic. A man going east or west is held to this valley; to leave it is to be caught in the deep irregular gorges of the Montagne Noire (which is the southernmost outlier of the Cévennes) to the north of the valley, or in the equally hopeless gorges of the Corbières (which are the north-eastern outliers of the Pyrenees) to the south of it.
This valley culminates in what may be called the gap of Carcassonne, for in the neighbourhood of that town it is deepest and most clearly marked, although the actual water parting between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean is somewhat to the west.
The Montagne Noire, the northern limit of the gap, is well named, for it is all of dark slatey rock. The Corbières, on the contrary, are of white limestone, and a man standing a little way above the valley floor can see behind them the snow peaks of the high Pyrenees.
To the west of Carcassonne the hills are lower but the gap continues none the less, with Montreal and Fanjeaux, each on an outstanding buttress of hill, for sentinels upon its southern side. Of these two Montreal stands out against the horizon as one looks west from Carcassonne, and in turn hides Carcassonne as one looks east from the height of Fanjeaux. West from Fanjeaux the hills become mere downs, and the landscape quite loses its Mediterranean look and becomes that of the Toulousain.
About Carcassonne itself the landscape is of an intermediate sort between the Mediterranean and the Toulousain. Between the bare hills one still sees the olive, but more rarely than on the Mediterranean side, and (as in the Toulousain) grain fields begin to alternate with the vine.
The Toulousain, although it is altogether of the south, is a different sort of country from the Mediterraneanslope. In the first place it is not a mere strip of land between sea and mountains, but a broad, fan-shaped arrangement of valleys running together in the general neighbourhood of Toulouse, and separated only by ridges or downs regular in outline and no great height. As on the Mediterranean side the ground is minutely and intensely cultivated; still one sees more trees and shrubs growing freely, although by no means as many as in Northern and Central France. The type of cultivation, too, is different. One no longer sees the olive, and the vineyards are outnumbered by grain fields. Furthermore, it is not the valleys alone that are cultivated, the flat or gently rolling summits of the downs are worked as well.
Although the people are the same, their houses are different from those of the Mediterranean in that their material is brick. Indeed, one sees no masses of rock in the Toulousain, and the bits of stone in the larger buildings are brought from outside the district.
In spite of these physical differences in their country, the men of the three regions have a distinctive character of their own. The north Frenchman will tell you that they are noisy and boastful, fond of jewellery and all sorts of display, better suited to politics than to soldiering. And yet both Joffre and Foch are from the Pyrenees. Certainly the Southern Frenchman’s skin is darker and his speech is not quite the same as that of the Northerner; it is nearer to the old Latin speech in that Gascon and Provençal alike have followed the Italians and Spaniards in keeping the grand broad vowels that make the southern tongues peculiarly adapted to song. In the early Middle Ages this tongue of theirs, the langue d’oc, was spoken as far north as Geneva on the east and Poitou on the west (the first troubadour that we know was Count of Poitiers, not far from the central Loire), but the royal province afterwards called Languedoc was much smaller, and included, roughly, only the land already marked off as the theatre of the Albigensian war.
Civilization was very old there. Before the beginnings of recorded history, when Rome was an obscure village, the shores of the Mediterranean were already covered with highly organized little city states, building solidly in stone, possessing law, plastic art, and intense localpatriotism. The Gallic coast of the Mediterranean became one of the earliest Roman provinces. It had already been so for more than half a century when Cæsar, burdened with his debts but full of ambition, began those northward marches that were to make civilization not so much a Mediterranean as a European thing. The schoolboy remembers how throughout the Commentaries there is continually talk of calling drafts for the cavalry from “Tolosa et Narbone.” This country came to be called “The Province,”par excellence; the name survives in the modern word “Provence.”
Incidentally it is interesting to note that “Provincia” was not confined to the Mediterranean lands. Scarcely had the Romans occupied these than they went forward, over the gap of Carcassonne, the saddle between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees, where the railway and the canal go to-day. They took the upper Garonne country, then as now centreing about Toulouse as its chief town, and connected it for administration with the Mediterranean coastal plain from the Rhône to the Pyrenees.
This arrangement, after enduring for five hundred years under the Romans, reappears in the Dark Ages under the Counts of Toulouse, and, first under them and later under the Kings of France, lasts for eight hundred years more. It is astonishing to see how closely the Roman administrative division called “Narbonensis Prima” ofB.C.100 corresponds with the province of Languedoc of the French monarchy ofA.D.1790.
Everywhere she went Rome stamped upon the land its permanent form. But nowhere, outside of Italy itself, does she seem to have “Romanized” more thoroughly than in “Provincia.” To this day, “The valley banks of the Rhône ... have still a greater mass of imperial remains than the city [of Rome] itself,”[5]and the churches of Toulouse show the round arch and the small Roman bricks.
When the Empire became Christian, Toulouse still grouped itself, as it does to this day, around its municipal building, the “Capitol.” That building and the “Place du Capitole” continued central in the town. The churches of Toulouse are fitted in like after-thoughtsin the town plan. They do not dominate everything as do the cathedrals of the old towns of Northern France, as Notre Dame must have dominated mediæval Paris. This difference in town-planning[6]seems to be accompanied by a greater measure of continuity in municipal institutions: mediæval Toulouse called her chief magistrates “consules.”
In the decline, when the Roman auxiliaries were fighting their aimless civil wars (much as if the “colonial troops” of to-day were to become dominant in armies and go about setting up their Europeanized leaders as chief executives), Toulouse was for a time the capital of one of their shifting sovereignties, that of the Visigoths, whose power, at its greatest, extended from the Loire and the Alps clear down to Gibraltar. After a few years, another little group of auxiliaries, the Franks, defeated the Visigoths, drove them out of south-western Gaul clear down to the Pyrenees, and took Toulouse. But although the Frankish chiefs would now and then raid Spain itself for plunder, they never cleared the Goths out of the coastal plain from the Rhône to the eastern Pyrenees. So matters stood when the first of the three great scourges of the Dark Ages, the Mohammedan Saracens, fell upon Europe.
In their first rush north from Spain, the Mohammedans swept the Mediterranean coastal plain. Narbonne resisted them, and saw its people duly massacred, but some of the cities seemed to have surrendered (as many of the Spanish towns had done) on condition that their lawsshould be respected. The “Visigothic” State was a flimsy affair. That part of Gaul which submitted to the Saracens corresponded almost exactly to that which the Goths had held. Carcassonne, Beziers, Agde, Maguelonne, Lodève, and Nismes had Mohammedan garrisons. East of the Rhône they went beyond the Gothic boundaries, and for three or four years, with the support of local rebels, held Arles and Avignon.
Toulouse they never could take. Once they raided up the Rhône and Saône and burned Autun, but with Toulouse in Christian hands they could never hope to do much with the central Rhône valley. It was the successful defence of Toulouse, quite as much as the victory of Charles Martel, that checked their greatest effort in the familiar year 732. Coming over the west central Pyrenees, they turned north-east to attack Toulouse, compelled (like Wellington in 1814) to deal with such a centre of population and communications in order to secure their right flank for a move northward. So that when Toulouse held out, their stroke which took Bordeaux and failed against Charles Martel near Poitiers, was no longer a regular campaign, but merely a plundering raid on a great scale.
It is worth insisting on the resistance of Toulouse to the Mohammedan invasions in order to emphasize the importance of the town. But although the infidel could not take Toulouse, he held Narbonne, eighty miles away, for forty years. He was in Saragossa for just over four hundred years until 1119, and Saragossa, the great town and road centre south of the Pyrenees (corresponding to Toulouse to the north of them), is only 250 miles from Toulouse as the crow flies. Sometimes, from either city, the crest of the mountain chain can be seen. The two faced one another, Toulouse as the untaken pivot of the Christian defence, Saragossa as the bastion of the long, but finally unsuccessful, defence of Islam. For about the same length of time as that which separates Americans of 1920 from the death of Christopher Columbus, Saragossa stood for Asia in the face of Christian Europe.
Naturally, Languedoc felt the Moslem influence in every sort of way. The other two foes of the Dark Ages, the Viking and the Magyar, appear and ravage thecountry but leave no trace except ruins. Alone of the three the Mohammedan remained long close by, and he differed from the other two in that he knew that cities were meant to live in, as well as to burn, and in that he had ideas of a sort of his own. It was too much trouble to keep fighting him all the time, and, in the intervals of peace, his ideas sifted in through the intercourse, north and south, over the border. In his train, as it were, came also the Jew; already, in the early eighth century, an archbishop of Lyons was troubled by the “aggressive prosperity” of Jews in Southern Gaul.
In vain we ask ourselves how much all this fighting and plundering left standing of the institutions of the country, and how far it destroyed them. Later we find the cities governed by elected magistrates under the name of “consuls,” while similar magistrates in the French towns outside of Languedoc go by other titles. At first blush this seems to suggest that the Roman municipal organization had been kept up. But whether or not this is true, we cannot tell. The weighty opinion of Brutails is against the idea of continuity. He makes the point that in Roussillon no title deed reposing on any right of ownership before the Mohammedan invasion has come down to us. He reminds us that Charlemagne’s father and grandfather when driving out the Saracen pillaged the country quite as heartily as any misbeliever. Still, the Roussillon of which he writes was the last foothold of the Saracen in Gaul, whereas Toulouse, as we have seen, was never theirs. Therefore the question remains doubtful.
The sudden eleventh century rise out of the sleepy Dark Ages into the true Middle Ages shows us the Counts of Toulouse among the greatest lords in Europe. The office had become hereditary around the middle of the ninth century, about the same time as did so many of the imperial offices. Count Raymond IV, sixth in descent from the first Count who had handed down Toulouse to his son, was the richest of the chiefs that took the Cross for the First Crusade. Already, between the “Provençal” southerners and the North French who were still called simply “French,” there was bad feeling, at least on the part of the latter. A “French” chronicler seems to lump Burgundians, Auvergnats,Gascons, and “Goths” (that is, men from the Rhône-Pyrenees coast plain) all together under the name of “Provençals,” and says that they excelled in nosing out foodstuffs, and were accordingly very useful in times of famine, but had little stomach for fighting. The antagonism is significant. Whether it was justified or not is another matter; the accusation of cowardice does not clearly appear in the records of the fighting, and does not seem to have affected Raymond’s position. One fancies that, in such an age, his riches would not have kept him among the half-dozen leaders of the Crusade had his eleventh century Provençals been really notorious cowards. Certainly the North Frenchman’s prejudice against the “meridional” as a soldier remains to this day.
Even before the Counts of Toulouse appear as one of the richest families in Europe, we can trace the beginning of the troubadour poetry. It is probably the most distinctive contribution by the lands, now Southern France, to the world’s history. The word troubadour to-day means a poet of lyric love.
The twelfth century was its golden age, although we can just hear its notes beginning in the eleventh, and dying away in the thirteenth.
The language of the troubadour poetry was the “langue d’oc” (as opposed to the North French “langue d’oïl” or “langue d’oui”). It was spoken over a stretch of country far more extensive than was later the province of Languedoc. Thus there were troubadours in the central mountain mass of Auvergne and in the broad Atlantic coastal plain from the Pyrenees up to the Loire. Nevertheless, Toulouse remained its centre.
The first thing that strikes its readers is the familiarity of many of its rhythms. The Greek and Latin classic rhythms have to be learnt. The “Song of Roland,” with all its power, strikes uncouthly on the modern ear. But the troubadour poetry, after seven centuries, sings itself as if it had been written yesterday, in such stanzas as this of Bernard de Ventadour:—
“Quan la douss avra ventaDeves vostre paisM’es vejaire qu’ev sentaOdor de paradis.”
“Quan la douss avra ventaDeves vostre paisM’es vejaire qu’ev sentaOdor de paradis.”
“Quan la douss avra ventaDeves vostre paisM’es vejaire qu’ev sentaOdor de paradis.”
“Quan la douss avra venta
Deves vostre pais
M’es vejaire qu’ev senta
Odor de paradis.”
Notwithstanding English blank verse from the sixteenth century on, and notwithstanding the pathetic efforts of our contemporary crew of “free versifiers” feeling ignorantly back to unrhymed rhythms such as the ancients knew, notwithstanding these, I say that Provençal stanza, with its rhyme and regular accents, still represents exactly the sort of lyric rhythm we use. As far as verse form goes, the troubadours were beyond all question the first of the modern poets, in the easy skill and variety of their measures, some simple, some as intricate as any verse ever written. Dante revered them second only to Virgil.
What is most important to us is the picture they give of their society. First of all they represent the chief end of man to be the worship of woman. We have seen in the last chapter that feminism in religion, i.e., the cult of the Virgin, was one of the twelfth century master-passions. In Italy, towards the end of the thirteenth century, poets intertwined love with philosophy, somewhat as the Platonists had before them. The troubadours concerned themselves not at all with philosophy and little with religion. Here and there they bring in religion as a sauce to flavour more piquantly their love for their lady, very much in the manner of our modern decadents. Thus the poet may protest that he loves his lady “more than God loves Our Lady of Puy de Dôme.” Incidentally, the devotion of the poets is almost always for someone else’s wife.
The essential thing about all this “courteous love” is that it is unmistakably the most cultivated and civilized thing that had been since Rome had fallen asleep.
Furthermore, the appearance of the troubadour poetry in Southern Gaul is still another fact proving that the Dark Ages were not a murder but a sleep. The foolish historians of the last generation who attributed the vigour and the chivalric romance of the Middle Ages to an infusion of “Teutonic” blood, got a hard knock when Belloc[7]noted that after the Dark Ages a comparatively high civilization expressing itself in poetry full of the “romantic” idealization of woman arose in precisely oneof the districts least affected by the handfuls of barbarian auxiliary troops of the fifth and sixth century. The soul of Europe was not moulded anew by the barbarians of the northern forests. That soul fell asleep, as it were, from weariness, and then having slept, it awoke and sang.
The courtly fashion set by the troubadours overspread Christendom. Indeed, it became a characteristic of the later twelfth century, as we saw in the last chapter. Treitschke has a lively passage on the “chivalrous, polished” time of the Hohenstaufen in Germany, “the age of gallantry and the Minnesingers, quite distinctly feminine in its universal attempt to adorn itself with womanly graces,”[8]in contrast to the harsher time which had preceded it. But the fact that the new fashion so quickly became European must not blind us to the fact that it began in Languedoc. The troubadour poetry is already fully developed in William Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, who was born in 1071. The first Hohenstaufen king did not reign over Germany until 1138, and it was Count William’s granddaughter Eleanor, Queen to Henry II, who first brought the cultivation of Provence to England about the middle of the twelfth century.
Even in the troubadours, however, the near savagery of the Dark Ages had been merely overlaid and not destroyed. Vivid memories of a time at once feeble and gross swelled up in them sometimes. One poet, that Sordello whose name Dante and Browning have combined to keep alive, when singing the death of a brave knight, amiably suggests that a long list of coward princes would do well to eat of the dead man’s heart to better their courage! The idea was familiar to our Red Indians.
Unfortunately, as events were to prove, their society which still kept something of the underlying spirit of the savage, was losing the spirit of the soldier. The statement needs qualification, especially in the case of one of the greatest troubadours, Bertran de Born, who was never happy without a fight unless he was rhyming aboutone. But, although a striking exception he was only an exception. Even if none of the troubadour poetry had survived, we could perhaps prove that the “Provençal” was less warlike than the North Frenchman, or even than most Christians of the time, by the fact that local wars had to be fought with a larger proportion of mercenaries than was the case elsewhere; so large indeed that their roving bands became a serious “social problem,” as we shall see. Even if we assume that the high proportion of mercenaries was due to the wealth of Languedoc, still it is hard for us to imagine any twelfth-century hero of song or story, outside of Provence, who would lose himself so deeply in day dreams of his beloved as to be captured by his enemies, like Aucassin in “Aucassin and Nicolette,” without so much as striking a blow in his own defence.
The evidences of the wealth and refinement of this cultivated and unwarlike society are not confined to the written records of chroniclers and poets. Their buildings prove the same thing. For combined breadth of composition and elegance of detail the porches of such churches as St. Trophimus at Arles or the great church at St. Gilles, are equalled by nothing in the Romanesque. Often their detail is exactly that of the antique world to which they looked back over the intervening lowlands of the Dark Ages.
Further, we have seen that the society for which the troubadours sang was close to the Moslem, and was moved by currents Asiatic in their origin both Moslem and Jew. Moslem coins circulated freely there. The fact is proved beyond reams of learned stuff by such unconscious evidence as that of one troubadour’s simile:—
“... Like a child which a man makes stop crying with a ‘marabotin’ ...”
The poet does not think it necessary to stop and explain that a marabotin was a Moorish penny, and being unconscious his testimony cannot be challenged. Of the Universities, while Bologna studied law and Paris theology, Languedoc in her greatest University, that of Montpellier, studied medicine. This fact again proves her intercourse with the “Paynim,” for it is a commonplace that the Arabs of Spain were the great physiciansof the Middle Ages. Saracen slaves, and negroes brought from Africa by Saracens to be slaves, continued to be held there centuries after slavery was extinct everywhere else in Christendom. As for the Jews, they were so many and so prominent that some chroniclers called Languedoc “Judea secunda.”
In such a society, it would have been strange if the different forces which worked against the Church had not been active. No word remains to us from twelfth-century Languedoc so bold as that of Henry II of England, when in his rage against Becket he threatened to turn Moslem. And Henry was half “Aquitanian,” that is South-Western French, by blood. All the forces hostile to the Church were active in the South. It is the South that has left us Aucassin’s outburst:—
“In Paradise what have I to do? I do not care to go there unless I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend that I love so much. For to Paradise goes no one but such people as I will tell you of. There go old priests, and old cripples and the maimed, who all day and all night crouch before altars, and in old crypts, and are clothed with old worn-out capes and old tattered rags, who are naked and footbare, and sore, who die of hunger and want and misery. These go to Paradise; with them I have nothing to do. But to Hell I am willing to go; for to Hell go the fine scholars, and the fair knights who die in tourneys and in glorious wars, and good men-at-arms and the well born. With them I will gladly go. And there go the fair courteous ladies which have two or three friends besides their lords also thereto. And the gold, and the silver go there, and the ermines and sables; and there go the harpers, and jongleurs, and the kings of the world. With these will I go, if only I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, with me.”[9]
It is clear that the idea of “Heaven for climate and Hell for company” is not new. Nietzsche himself has nowhere put it better. And it is perhaps significant that of all that glittering company of servants of the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, first of all come churchmen—the “fine scholars.”
Of course, all this sort of thing is not heresy. Logically it might just as well have ended in mere negation. These volatile southerners with their envy of the riches of the Church and their contempt, too often well deserved, for her ministers—so that instead of saying like most Christians “Rather than do so and so I would be a Jew,” they said, “I would rather be a priest”—might have gone on their way without troubling themselves about things not of this world. Nevertheless, they lived in an age which hardly took Nature and her secrets seriously, so absorbed were its thinkers in the nature of God and man and their relation to each other. The other world of the supernatural was as real and vivid to them as, in a different way, it was to the New England Puritans. Irrespective of their own temper, the currents of their time carried them away from secularism and mere denial.
Like practically all keen and vivid times, the twelfth century was full of religious debate. Among the learned the discussion turned largely upon philosophy. The speculative and transcendental doctrines of the Church might be called in question. In this way heresy, that is religious error among those who claimed to be Christians, might arise from intellectual speculation upon intellectual and philosophic themes. Thus the early Church, in the high Imperial time before the Dark Ages, thought of heresy first of all as erroneous speculation. But theology and morals are not and can never be really separate. The very idea of their possible separation could not have arisen except in an age so bent upon “observing” as to be contemptuous of reason. Theology and morals being merely mutually indispensable different sides of religion, it therefore follows that speculative heretics tended to become moral heretics. Now, in the Middle Ages, as we have seen, the scholars were always in minor orders. At least outside of Italy, learned heretics were rare. Therefore a good deal of speculative heresy and near-heresy could, and did, exist without doing much harm to the Church as an institution. A scholar who fell foul of authority with regard to some article of faith was punished of course, but his punishment was merely a matter of internal Church discipline about which the “general public” usually knew or cared very little.
It was very different when a dissenter, instead of confining himself to philosophy, went further and took the logical next step of “stirring up the people” by attacking not only the doctrine of the Church but also the moral conduct of her officials. To-day when a man attacks the idea of property as such, we smile. But when he attacks the excessive inequality of its distribution, that is more serious, because, however false some of his conclusions may be, a part of his major premise is undeniably true. Just so, in the twelfth century, the Church realized that her wealth laid her open to envy, and the evil conduct of many of her ministers was a scandal. Her own true leaders, those who were the most zealous for her honour, spent much of their energy in trying to bring about a wider distribution of morals within the ranks of her own clergy, just as to-day those who believe in the idea of private property would do well to work for a wider distribution of that. Accordingly heresy in the Middle Ages, although necessarily arising, like all heresy, in speculation, based its propaganda upon moral protest.
The tireless Lea has made a long list of preachers who went up and down crying against the wealth and vices of the clergy. Sometimes they opposed a crude abuse of Christian symbols as tending towards idolatry. Sometimes they taught that the sacraments had no virtue when administered by a priest unshriven from mortal sin. This idea, however strongly it might appeal to natural feeling, was utterly anarchic. For instance, marriage was a sacrament and therefore entirely in the Church’s hands, civil marriage being unknown. What a charming state of affairs, then, if a marriage could be pronounced null and void if it were discovered, no matter how many years afterward, that the priest had been in a state of mortal sin when he performed the ceremony! We know to-day how wide is the no man’s land between destructive and constructive reform. We are familiar with the typical, noisy evangelist, whose stock in trade is his abuse of established Churches. The early twelfth century shouters began by playing lone hands, like our own Billy Sunday and his tribe. Their stormy careers left little definite trace. At most they set in motion a general criticism of the wealth and pride of the Church in comparison with the poverty of her founder and of the humility which she taught.
After a while these sporadic reformers, each setting up his own little whirlpool or eddy, began to be merged into distinguishable currents each flowing in a definite direction. In the third decade of the century we begin to hear of “Waldenses,” members of a religious body so called after its founder Waldo, a rich but unlearned merchant of Lyons. The Waldenses began in reform and ended in heresy. They are heard of principally in Languedoc, in North-Eastern Spain, and in Lombardy. They were loosely organized, consequently their teaching varied; but, in general, they prized the letter of the Gospel and minimized the distinction between clergy and laity. They translated the Scriptures into the vernacular, read them zealously, and applied rigorously their commandments against lying or oaths of any sort whatsoever. To forbid even “white” lies is certainly harmless enough, although if pushed to an extreme it partakes of the character of impossibilism and eccentricity which the Catholic Church has always avoided. But, in a society knit together by the feudal oath of allegiance, to say that a Christian man ought not to take any sort of oath smelled of nihilism and anarchy. So too, the Waldensian enlargement of the functions of the laity. Granting, for the sake of the argument, that even in those times it might have been wise to enlarge the part to be played by laymen in the work of Christian teaching, still nothing but harmful irregularities could be expected from the Waldensian idea that “any good man” might perform the Sacraments. For instance, take their practice of confession to a layman. Personal and private confessions give to the one who hears them great power for good or evil in families and communities. If his secrecy cannot be guaranteed by the strongest possible means we must admit (whatever our view of confession in general) that the thing would be dangerous. Further, the Waldenses seem to have gone beyond even the Quakers, in that they had their doubts as to the moral right of judges to punish. Nevertheless, Waldensianism had considerable momentum.
At first they insisted vehemently that they were good Catholics, and came not to destroy but to fulfil. After being forbidden to preach by the Archbishop of Lyons, they appealed boldly to the Lateran Council of 1179.When that Council forbade them to preach without permission from the local bishop the turning point came. Waldo, their leader, preferred his own private judgment to obedience to constituted authority, and refused to abide by the Council’s decision. In a phrase that many have since used he said that he preferred to obey God rather than man.
Still they were slow to break completely with the Church. Not until 1184, five years after the Council, were they definitely excommunicated by the Pope, Lucius III. This was done at the Council of Verona, an assembly of which we shall hear again. Even then, a distinction was sometimes made between them and more pestilent forms of heresy. The fact that, as late as 1218 in the ninth year of the Albigensian crusade, a sort of Waldensian Council including delegates from north and west of the Alps could meet in Bergamo may possibly stand as evidence of an easy-going attitude of the authorities toward them. To-day, the Protestant remembers affectionately that their Provençal translation of the Scriptures, or at least of the New Testament, was the first rendering of the Bible into the vernacular tongues of Western Europe, and the most that a militant Roman Catholic can find to say of their system is that it was a “vapid degradation of religion.”[10]Now “vapid degradations” do not produce great wars like the Albigensian crusade or great systems of persecution like the Inquisition established after that crusade. For my own part I am convinced that, had the Waldenses been the only heretical body in the field, there would have been no crusade against heresy and perhaps no Inquisition.
The movement which called out such resistance from those who repeated the ancient creed of Europe was of a different sort. On its negative side it echoed the same charges brought against the Church by the isolated heretics and by the Waldenses, repeating them so exactly that certain superficial Protestant scholars once maintained that it was little more than a protest against Roman abuses. Even Limborch, whose learning forces him to admit that it was more than this, naively remarksà propos of their genial custom of starving themselves to death as the highest possible act of faith:—
“’Tis rather to be wondered at, that in so barbarous an age, they should throw off so many errors rather than that they should retain some.”[11]It now seems certain that the movement based itself on a philosophy fundamentally hostile to Christianity and nauseous to us who have breathed no other air than that of Christendom.
Before considering the nature of this philosophy, and of its logical developments in the sphere of morals, let us reject the various names by which it has been called by modern scholars, and refer to it as the “Albigensian” movement. It is true that “Manichean,” “neo-Manichean,” and “Catharist” (after the habit of the sect of referring to themselves as the “Cathari” or “pure”), are more descriptive. “Albigensian” is sanctioned by usage, and usage should prevail over the preciosity of the pedant.
The un-Christian creed of the “Albigenses” began to sift into Western Europe soon after the year 1000. It was very old, for it represented one of the few fundamentally different ways of looking at life, and it is probably indestructible as long as the world endures. Its central idea is that the universe is dual and was created by two Gods, or if you will, two principles, of about equal strength, one Good and one Evil. The attempt to reconcile this idea with Christianity is as old as Manes who lived in Mesopotamia in the third century and founded the heretical sect of the Manicheans. Back of Manes, again, at the very beginning of recorded history, we find the Persians with a dualist religion which they attributed to a shadowy prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra. To-day three striking examples of its survival come to mind. First, Dualism, with its scorn for matter as inherently evil, is not far from Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science. Second, in 1909, Paul Elmer More, one of the foremost of American scholars and critics, who would rank among the great critics of all times did he but possess the gift of vivid phrase, published a book, “Studies in Dualism,” which bore on its titlepage the following quotation from another modern worthy, Sir Leslie Stephen:—
“Manicheanism may be disavowed in words. It cannot be exiled from the actual belief of mankind.”[12]
Third, in 1917, under the influence of the war, H. G. Wells (whom I hesitate whether to characterize as a sort of prose Shelley, “beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” or as an æolian harp upon which almost any passing wind of doctrine can play) thus sets forth the thoughts of his imaginary Englishman mourning for the death of his soldier son:—
“His mind drifted back once more to those ancient heresies of the Gnostics and the Manicheans which saw the God of the World as altogether evil. For a while his soul sank down into the uncongenial darknesses of these creeds of despair....
“Is the whole scheme of Nature evil? Is life in its essence cruel?”[13]
I hasten to add that the Manicheans, following the little-known Gnostics, made matter the evil principle in Nature, as opposed to spirit, the principle of good.
We have seen that it had come originally from the East. Manes himself, away back in the third century, had been a Mesopotamian, and in the fourth century his disciples seem to have been widely distributed from Persia to the Atlantic. They were hated. “Manicheans and Mathematicians (i.e., sorcerers) were alone excepted from the general toleration of Valentinian, in the fourth century.”[14]They reappear, under the name of Paulicians, in the East Roman Empire, during the tenth century, and thence passed into Bulgaria. Later, in Western Europe, they were often known as Bulgars, “Bougres,” or “Buggers.” From Bulgaria they spread westward into what is now Bosnia, and from Bosnia westward again into Northern Italy. By the middle of the eleventh century they were numerous and influential throughout Lombardy and especially in Milan.
Lea suggests that without the impulse these people gave to extreme asceticism, and especially their contempt for marriage, Pope Gregory VII would not have been able to get his decrees forbidding the marriage of priests obeyed in Northern Italy.
“Vernon Lee”[15]gives ... “a very curious anecdote, unearthed by the learned ecclesiastical historian Tocco, and consigned in his extremely suggestive book on mediæval heresies. A certain priest of Milan became so revered for his sanctity and learning, and for the marvellous cures he worked, that the people insisted on burying him before the high altar, and resorting to his tomb as to that of a saint. The holy man became even more undoubtedly saintly after his death; and in the face of the miracles which were wrought by his intercession, it became necessary to proceed to his beatification. The Church was about to establish his miraculous sainthood, when, in the official process of collecting the necessary information, it was discovered that the supposed saint was a Manichean heretic, aCatharus, a believer in the wicked Demiurgus, the creating Satan, the defeat of the spiritual God, and the uselessness of the coming of Christ. It was quite probable that he had spat upon the crucifix as a symbol of the devil’s triumph; it was quite possible that he had said masses to Satan as the true creator of all matter. Be this as it may, that priest’s half-canonized bones were publicly burnt and their ashes scattered to the wind. The anecdote shows that the Manichean heresies, some ascetic and tender, others brutal and foul, had made their way into the most holy places. And, indeed, when we come to think of it, no longer startled by so extraordinary a revelation, this was the second time that Christianity ran the risk of becoming a dualistic religion—a religion, like some of its Asiatic rivals, of pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base according to the individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such views, identical with those of the transcendental theologians of the fourth century, and equivalent to the philosophical pessimism of our own day, as expounded particularly by Schopenhauer, shouldhave found favour among the best and most thoughtful men of the early Middle Ages. In those stern and ferocious yet tender-hearted and most questioning times, there must have been something logically satisfying, and satisfying also to the harrowed sympathies, in the conviction, if not in the dogma, that the soul of man had not been made by the maker of the foul and cruel world of matter; and that the suffering of all good men’s hearts corresponded with the suffering, the humiliation of a mysteriously dethroned God of the Spirit. And what a light it must have shed, completely solving all terrible questions, upon the story of Christ’s martyrdom, so constantly uppermost in the thoughts and feelings of mediæval men!”
The same author noting what seems to be the intentionally hopeless, repulsive, and horrible nature of twelfth century (or, as she puts it, pre-Franciscan) Italian sculpture, goes on to argue from this that such “Nightmare pessimism had honeycombed the twelfth century Italian mind.” How uncertain was the popular distinction between orthodox and heretical asceticism is attested by many humorous-pathetic stories like that of the priest of Milan. What the distinction actually was may well be considered later in connection with the Dominican order.
The man of European stock cannot but wonder why any Christian people, especially the volatile Provençals, could accept so savage a creed. Perhaps people ready to “... jump the life to come” might be attracted by the moral latitude allowed the Albigensian “Believers” during life, and would, meanwhile, banish the thought of death, as so many moderns do, or else hope to be “consoled” even at the last gasp. But this is guesswork. What is certain is that the sect prospered.
We have seen that the Middle Ages, although weaker than we in the observation of Nature, had a stronger faith in logic, and were, therefore, bolder in the application of formally reasoned, logical, ideas of life. Accordingly, those of them who were possessed of the dualistic idea proceeded to all sorts of perfectly logical extremes in showing their hatred and contempt for matter.
Thus their fully initiated members, or “Perfect,” were sworn never to eat meat, eggs, milk, cheese or anythingwhich was the result of sexual procreation. Fish was permitted because they thought that fish did not reproduce themselves by the coming together of the male and female! To eat any sort of food which came from a warm-blooded animal might be murder, for they believed in the transmigration of souls, and therefore such an animal might be the dwelling-place of a human soul. This, again, was perfectly logical; to be born again, after death, in another body was, according to this theology, a proper and necessary punishment for sin. All sexual acts which might possibly produce offspring were forbidden to the “Perfect”; they must purify themselves by fasts and elaborate ceremonies if they so much as touched a woman by accident. The propagation of human beings, with their sinful, material bodies, was clearly the worst of crimes. Hence the “Perfect” would sometimes tell a pregnant woman that she had a devil within her. Marriage was a perpetual state of sin; it was worse than adultery and fornication because the married felt no shame, and were, therefore, more likely to persist in cohabitation. It was even whispered that, just as sexual intercourse out of marriage was better than intercourse between married people because the married felt no shame, so, too, any unnatural form of intercourse from which children could not be conceived was better than natural cohabitation. Finally, the horrible and perfectly logical climax to all this was that suicide was the deed above all others most pleasing to God.
It was one of the charges against the sect that their professed hatred for life and its pleasures was accompanied by promiscuous sexual orgies. Nor is there anything improbable in such accusations: they have been true of occasional heretical bodies from the earliest Christian times to Rasputin and certain contemporary Russian sects. Nevertheless, there is no evidence to prove that such sexual orgies were ever regularly practised or officially encouraged by the sect. The weight of testimony would rather seem to prove their extreme asceticism, out of which would naturally come occasional excesses of self-indulgence on the part of the “weaker brethren.”
Naturally, with such arégimeas that laid down for them, the Albigensian “Perfect” were few. The sectmade up its numbers by including also “Believers,” who were admitted on their mere promise to renounce the Catholic faith and to receive the Albigensian “Consolamentum” or initiation of the “Perfect,” at least in the hour of death, as many of the early Christians used to receive baptism. The lives of the “Believers” were as unrestrained as those of the “Perfect” were strict. Except to “venerate” or do homage to the “Perfect” according to certain prescribed forms and ceremonies whenever they met, their religion seems to have laid upon them no prescribed duties whatsoever. They were allowed to marry and to eat meat. To be sure they could not be finally saved without undergoing the “Consolamentum,” and, when this was once received, the jaws of the system closed upon them with a ferocity so extraordinary that we shudder at it as we shudder at the lurid horrors imagined by Poe. But this ugly possibility weighed light in comparison with the easy absence of any code of morals for everyday living. Clearly, Albigensianism aimed to meet all tastes.
If we ask why such a life as that of the Albigensian “Perfect” ever attracted anyone, we must go back one step further and ask why asceticism, deprivation for its own sake, has always had such power over mankind. It is one of the unanswerable mysteries of the human soul why men have so often felt that their God, or Gods, would be pleased at seeing the worshipper voluntarily submit to deprivation, discomfort and pain. It has been argued that limitation in pleasure is necessary for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being and that asceticism (itself a word derived from the training of the Greek athletes) merely sets one free for undivided effort. But this does not meet the case. For the fact is that there is always in man the tendency to condemn pleasure for its own sake, as evil in itself, as if there was something holy in the mere state of being deprived or uncomfortable. And this curious state of mind is as strong to-day as it ever was, witness the extraordinary savageness of the campaign waged by what an Englishman would call the “Dissenting” religious bodies in America to-day against any pleasure or amusement that strikes them as “sinful.” Finally, it is also the fact that many who would not dream of denying themselves a certainamount of physical satisfaction of different sorts will applaud ascetics. Accordingly, the Albigensian system addressed itself to a fundamental instinct of human nature.
Finally, it must be remembered that the Albigenses claimed to be purifying, not destroying, Christianity. Just so, the Humanitarians of to-day reduce Christianity to “Social Service” and throw over supernatural teaching altogether. In most cases the Albigensian system had certain outward likenesses to the Catholic. Their distinction between “Perfect” and “Believers” was somewhat like the Catholic distinction between clergy and laity, or that between monastic people and people “living in the world.” The form of their promise to renounce “Satan” (i.e., the Catholic Church), by which one became an Albigensian believer, was a little like baptism, and their “Consolamentum” was like Communion and Extreme Unction combined. They claimed to be true followers of Christ, they particularly reverenced the Lord’s Prayer, and they even went through a form of Lord’s Supper. The fasts of the “Perfect,” except when prolonged into the “Endura,” were not altogether unlike the Catholic fasts. As to the points in which they differed from the Church, they made the usual heretical claim of following “purer” traditions. Certain modern scholars see reason for believing that they possessed apocryphal writings dating from the apostolic or post-apostolic age.[16]In their propaganda they laid stress upon the negative side, that is, of their opposition to the “corruptions” of Catholicism, and thus secured for themselves the support of much of the prevailing dissatisfaction with the Church.
Why their practice of fasting themselves to death, in what they called the “Endura,” did not drive away converts is the hardest question to answer concerning them. That the “Perfect” voluntarily practised it was bad enough. What was worse was their treatment of believers who had received the “Consolamentum” when thought to be on death-beds and had then been so unlucky as to begin to get well. The “Perfect” had probably learned byexperience that “Believers” who had been “consoled” on their death-bed and had then recovered, were not likely to follow the extraordinarily strict rules for the “Perfect” as all “consoled” persons were bound to do. For them, the relapse of a “consoled person” was the greatest conceivable horror. Therefore, when a “consoled” sick person showed signs of recovery the “Perfect” forbade the family to give the patient food, and, if the family showed signs of weakening, they stationed themselves by the bedside or took away the sufferer to some place of safety where they might starve him or her to death in peace!
How such amiable folk ever led away much people after them is a riddle. And yet, despite the appalling features of their system, during the eleventh century Manicheanism is found sprouting up here and there throughout Western Europe. In the second half of the eleventh century we find it powerful in Northern Italy, and especially in Milan, but it seems not to have had any deep root north or west of the Alps before 1100. We hear of Manicheans at Toulouse in 1018, at Orleans in 1022, at Cambrai and Liège in 1025, and at Châlons in 1045. By the middle of the century they had penetrated north into the Germanies as far as the city of Goslar. Nowhere do we hear of their appearance without hearing also of their persecution.
It is one of man’s deepest instincts to defend that which he holds sacred, and to the man possessed of a religion, nothing is so sacred as his gods. What can be more natural than to wish to punish offences against the gods? Limborch has a long account of “Persecution among the Pagans.” For us it will be enough to remember that Athens itself put Socrates to death on the charge of teaching men not to believe in the gods of the city. And this in spite of the fact that Bacon truly says, “... the religion of the heathens consisted rather in rites and ceremonies, than in any constant belief; for you may imagine what kind of faith theirs was, when the chief doctors and fathers of their church were the poets.”[17]
Roman tolerance was born of the necessities of ruling over many races, none of whom except the Jews had anexclusive, “Jealous” God. Almost all the other people of the Empire were willing to accept the gods of strangers as differing from their own merely in name. Naturally, when one fanciful story about a god or goddess was as good as another, the educated man cared little about the whole body of myths. As an administrator, this same educated man was easily able to be “tolerant” to all religions because he cared little or nothing for his own, and was, in reality, indifferent and therefore not “tolerant” at all in the strict sense of the word. St. Paul’s Gallio, so much maligned by fools but so worthily celebrated by Kipling, is a fine specimen of the type. Such a man was devoted solely to the public interest. His feeling would not be as clear cut as our national patriotisms: “Rome” was almost the whole civilized world, so that the chance of her perishing was unthinkable. Nevertheless, she could still be an object of affection; her government represented the definite benefit of order. Devotion to her was not vague emotionalism like that of our internationalists of to-day. After a fashion she could be worshipped.
On the other hand when any religion or religious practice seemed to threaten the government upon which order reposed, the Roman magistrate struck at once. The rediscovered Roman law, remember, was to be a great force actively informing the twelfth century.
In adopting Christianity, Europe exchanged a religion in which one god, or one story about a god, was about as good as another, for a religion which claimed a definite, historical founder who had left behind him a corporate teaching body, the Church. To such a body, the out-and-out pagan or disbeliever is an open and possibly generous enemy. Whereas he who proclaims himself a fellow Christian, but meanwhile falsifies the Church’s doctrine by twisting and altering it to suit himself, is a traitor, a snake in the grass compared to whom the heathen is an angel of light.
Leaving on one side all discussion as to the damnation of the heathen, the fact remains that the Christian Church is bound to maintain her faith and practice as an essential, nay the essential, of human life. Otherwise she has no reason for being at all. She must, therefore, contend especially against the heretic, theenemy from within, who would disfigure the faith by which she lives; and she has done so, from the “false teachers” and “heretics” whom St. Paul so often urged his flock to avoid, down to the poor creatures who would reduce her Saviour to the stature of a “social uplifter” or the walking delegate of a labor union. To keep the faith is a perpetual warfare.
Make what you will of the body empowered to interpret and define Christian doctrine and of the means of defending that doctrine when defined: the necessities of some sort of definition and authority will remain as long as the Christian name endures.
Granted, then, the permanent necessity of some sort of reaction against heresy, what then would be the past precedents upon which a learned twelfth-century churchman could look back, in order to guide his action? In the Gospels themselves he would find the Pharisees denounced in violent terms. He would read St. Paul writing of “... Hymenæus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.”[18]Later, he would find Christian Emperors (beginning with Constantine, the first of them) enacting laws against the defeated party in Church councils, which laws went so far at one time as to threaten with death those in whose possession Arian writings should be found. In particular, he would find Manicheanism constantly under the ban. Diocletian, among the last of the pagan Emperors, as well as his Christian successors, including those who tolerated all other sects claiming to be Christian, so he might learn, had all persistently attacked the Manicheans. To be sure he would find almost no capital sentences, and a good deal of insistence, from various fathers and early doctors of the Church, upon the idea that faith was necessarily a matter of persuasion, and therefore could not be imposed by force. Nevertheless, he would learn that a goodly number of writers, among them the two great names of St. Augustine and Pope St. Leo, had gone so far as to approve of the death penalty when inflicted upon heretics by the State. Even in the times nearer to him, the Dark Ages, when heresy and philosophic discussion had been equally rare, ourimagined twelfth-century scholar might learn by reading Alcuin, Charlemagne’s teacher, that the principal use of philosophy is that by its aid “... the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith have triumphed over all heresiarchs.”[19]Even in those sleepy days, then, the Christian scholar was ardently concerned with the refutation of heresy.
But in all probability, even the twelfth century scholar was more concerned with the Church as a factor in social life than with the intellectual pros and cons as to the lawfulness of taking action against her enemies. To the mediæval, no other centre of organized charity, of hospitality to travellers, above all of education, was even thinkable. If men travelled, they would be going on pilgrimage to the shrine of some saint; if they made war they preferred to make it against the “paynim.” The learned man, who would almost certainly be in orders himself, would think of the Church as the chief bond of human society, and the unlearned laity, whether gentle or simple, would feel this quite as strongly, and without the qualifications and distinctions which go with the intellectual life. Furthermore, had not the Church herself laid it down, in the rolling phrases of the Athanasian creed, that unless a man hold the Catholic Faith (therein defined) he cannot be saved?
Finally, we must struggle to think ourselves back inside the skin, as it were, of the Christian of those days who was unaccustomed to open denial of the faith. Such a man or woman would be leading a rough and ready sort of life, without many of the physical comforts of to-day. But that life would be sustained by the belief that God was, that He acted by the Church, and that through the Sacramental ministry of the Church, man with all his grossness and meanness was, or might make himself, secure, and would at the end have the last laugh on all the devils. To read one after the other, or still better to see, as I did once, two such plays as “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” and then Wilde’s “Birthday of the Infanta,” may hint to us all that they had and that we have lost. In the old play the Universe is known and friendly; inthe modern it is infinite, uncharted, and cruel. Imagine, then, the effect upon such a man of hearing the Manichean teaching that all material things, and especially all material pleasures, were utterly devil-begotten, but that until their death-beds the common man and woman might do as they liked in all things, since God cared nothing for their observance of any commandments, except to forbid them to take oaths! Remember that to deny the value of oaths was to attack the all-important feudal oath of allegiance, the one theoretical basis of secular mediæval society. Here was an explosive mixture indeed.
But no matter how we seek to realize the mind of our forefathers in Western Europe, we cannot help shuddering at their immediate and ferocious action. In Orleans, in 1022, when the Manicheans were first discovered in the French “Royal Domaine” the king promptly called a council of bishops to decide what should be done. Meanwhile there was such an explosion of popular fury against the heretics that it was feared that they would be lynched when they should be brought out of the church in which they were being tried. To prevent this, the king had the queen stand at the church door, but when she recognized among them a priest to whom she had been used to confess she jabbed at him so savagely with a stick that she put out his eye. The heretics were taken outside the walls, a great fire was lit, for the last time they were called upon to repent and turn from their errors, and when they refused they were burned to death. One chronicler says that they went to their death cheerfully, but that when they were actually in the flames the agony was too much for some who cried out that they repented, although too late to be rescued.
The points to be noted are: First, the execution by order of the king, the highest authority in the land. Second, the fury of the queen and mob. What part, if any, the clergy had in stirring up this feeling we are not told, neither do we know exactly what action, or recommendation to action, came from the assembled bishops. Third, the constancy of the heretics and, fourth, the fearful nature of their punishment, go to make this first case a typical one. To the manner of the punishment we shall in a moment return.
We hear of the execution of heretics here and therethroughout Northern France, Belgium, the Rhineland, and Lombardy from this time on. Sometimes the authorities would act, although the canon law was vague on the subject. When they would not, the people would rush the jail and burn the accused, quite in the style of our Southern lynchings. When the higher clergy protested and tried to save them, as they sometimes did, it made no difference. Once in Germany we hear of their being hanged, but in the other cases they were burned.
If anyone asks why burning was thought appropriate for the heretic, there is no answer to be given. These people were raised to the same pitch of fury by heresy, and avenged it in the same fashion, as a Southern mob of to-day in the case of negro rape upon a white woman. A difference appears in the attitude of the authorities. Throughout the twelfth century many of the higher clergy continued opposed to harsh measures. But other churchmen and invariably the civil government were usually ready to burn by full process of law, methodically, as if they were seizing property for debt. As time went on and the law on the subject became fixed, we lose the atmosphere of lynching and mob fury. Early in the fifteenth century, when the fiendish Breton noble, Gilles de Rais, was about to be burned, he repented and asked the people to pray for him; whereupon they went so far as to parade the streets, chanting and praying earnestly for the soul of the monster whom their authorities, with the entire approval of the paraders, were to burn on the morrow. To quote Belloc there was in all this “... cruelty which to us as we read of it seems something quite remote from human habit and experience.... You will perpetually hear vigorous protests against the justice of some particular sentence, but you will very rarely (but for the fear of such a negative I should say never) find men saying ‘just or unjust, the cruelty of the execution is so revolting that I protest against it.’ Men believed something with regard to the whole doctrine of expiation, of penal arrangements which they have not described to us and which we cannot understand save through the glimpses, sidelights, and guesses through what they imagine to be their plainest statements. Thus in the particular case of burning alive ... a thing we can scarcely bear to contemplateeven in words ... the framers of the statutes seem to have thought not of the thing as a horror but as a particular type of execution symbolic of the total destruction of the culprit. It is quite easy to prove, from numerous instances ... Savonarola is one in point ... that the judges often appeared indifferent whether the body consumed were alive or dead. The chance pity of spectators in some cases, the sentence of the court in others, is permitted to release the sufferer long before the flames. To us it is amazing that such an attitude towards such a pain could have existed, but it did exist.”[20]
It is possible to go even further than the passage quoted above. For, if the culprit had died, it was thought worth while to dig up his corpse and at least burn that. Certainly, then, it would seem as if there was something almost sacramental about burning the heretic.
Study of the discussion of witch-burning in the “Golden Bough” suggests the idea that heretics were burned, as witches were, because it was believed that fire was the one adequate means of purifying the community from the pollution which they had brought upon it. If this is so, then heretic- and witch-burning is connected with the most primitive superstitions, not only long before Christianity, but before the possibility of any systematized religion.
On the other hand, burning alive conformed after a grisly fashion to the letter of an old saying that “the Church abhors bloodshed.”
Cardinal Newman has left us an interesting passage combining extreme hatred for the heretic, or rather for the heresiarch (i.e., the active preacher of heresy and corrupter of the faithful), with the typical modern sensitiveness to the sight of physical pain:
“Contrasting heretics and heresiarchs I had said: the latter should meet with no mercy; he assumes the office of the Tempter; and so far as his error goes, must be dealt with by the competent authority, as if he were embodied evil. To spare him is a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable toward himself. I cannot deny that this is a very fierce passage; but Arius was banished, not burned;and it is only fair to myself to say that neither at this nor at any other time of my life, not even when I was fiercest, could I have even cut off a Puritan’s ears, and I think the sight of a Spanish auto-da-fé would have been the death of me.”[21]
It would be a study in itself to work up the evidence as to the toughness of the mediæval mind with respect to disagreeable ideas and to the actual infliction of pain. To-day, in America, we have our lynchings, and we have the ugly stories of torture inflicted in revolutionary Russia. But, on the other hand, we have a crew of drivellers against capital punishment, and many people can hardly bear the idea of hell. As Zarathustra puts it, of the God of the Christians:—
“When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh and revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his favourites.”
“At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old grandmother.”
“There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world-weary, will-weary, and one day he suffocated of his all too great pity.”[22]
Whereas in the Middle Ages—
“The twelfth century men” (as Henry Adams puts it with his unfailing instinct and sympathy) “troubled themselves about pain and death much as healthy bears did in the mountains.”[23]
With respect to Hell, it was a literary commonplace for the lover (like Aucassin) to declare that, for the love of his lady, he cheerfully risked being roasted eternally.
As for the infliction of pain, Huysmans puts the contrast between mediæval and modern as follows:—
“Nervousness ... for no one knows exactly what this disease is from which everyone is suffering; it is certain, nowadays, people’s nerves are more easily shaken by the least shock. Remember what the papers say about theexecution of those condemned to death; they reveal that the executioner works timidly, that he is on the point of fainting, that he suffers from nerves when he decapitates a man. What misery. When one compares him with the invincible torturers of old time. They used to enclose people’s legs in wrappings of wet parchment which shrank when placed before a fire and slowly crushed the flesh; or indeed they drove wedges into your thighs and so broke the bones; they crushed the thumbs in vices worked by screws, raked off strips of skin with a rake, rolled up the skin of your stomach as if it had been an apron, quartered you, put you in the strappado, roasted you, watered you with burning brandy, and all this with impassive face and tranquil nerves unshaken by any shriek, any groan. These exercises being a little fatiguing, after the operation they found themselves with a fine thirst and a great hunger. They were full-blooded, well-balanced fellows, whereas now....”[24]
Why these things are so we cannot say. We may hold that mediæval man lived under more primitive conditions, hence that his nerves were sounder; that he was comparatively near, in time, to the Dark Ages when the European mind had lain fallow and reposed for centuries. Moreover, it is possible that educated men of the time were influenced by the fact that torture had played a part, although a restricted part, in the Roman Law. But all these are only suggestions. The important thing to remember is that laymen of every class and condition were for burning the heretic, lawfully, if possible, by lynching if necessary, while some of the higher clergy were in favour of mildness, but by no means all.
With the twelfth century the scene changed ominously. Throughout considerable districts in Languedoc, Manicheanism began to gain such headway that heretics were no longer lynched but protected there. They had become so numerous in the district around Toulouse, and especially in its neighbouring town of Albi, that they began to be called Albigenses. Just when the change took place is hard to say. “Early in the century,” we are told by Lea, “the people of Albi prevented the bishopand a neighbouring abbot from imprisoning certain ‘obstinate heretics.’” And yet as late as 1126 we find the mob at St. Gilles lynching Peter of Bruys, a notorious anti-sacerdotal heretic who had taken it upon himself to show his contempt for Christian symbolism by burning a pile of crosses on Good Friday and roasting meat at the flame. However, this seems to have been the only instance of heretic-lynching in Languedoc. In 1119, Pope Calixtus II, held a council in Toulouse which declared the Albigensian Manicheans excommunicate. Henceforward we begin to get a whole series of councils. Pope Innocent II, presiding over the second General Council of the Lateran in 1139, again excommunicated the Albigenses, and went further by ordering the civil authorities to prosecute them. Only nine years later, Eugenius III, through the Council of Rheims, forbade anyone to give them aid and comfort. Under Alexander III the Council of Tours, in 1163, solemnly cursed all who might give aid and comfort to heretics; and in 1179, the third General Council of the Lateran repeated the curse once more.