Читать книгу The Inquisition - A Political And Military Study Of Its Establishment - Hoffman Nickerson - Страница 7

WHAT was the society in which the Inquisition, that great attack upon human liberty, succeeded? To answer this, in the case of that other great attack of which we are the unhappy spectators, it would be necessary to estimate first the chief forces active in the world, and second their modification by local circumstance in America. A man, having done this, is able to get a just idea of Prohibition. He must get into the picture of the great nineteenth century expansion of civilization, and the fact that this expansion was, in great part, due to increased command over material nature through what we call “science.” He must see, contemporary with this, the rapid decay of Protestantism, its abandonment of theology and concentration upon taboos. Given then, in his mind, a clear notion of the extreme importance attributed by our society to power over material things, in which power it has so clearly surpassed all other known societies, and from this the resulting importance granted to the opinions of the masters of this “science” which has done such fine things (although morally, and therefore politically, such men may be, and often are, grossly ignorant and stupid); given further a true estimate of our warped Protestant morals now consisting principally of savage taboos, and such a man is able to estimate justly the “Prohibition” movement.

What, then, were the forces which led to the very similar “Inquisition” movement?

First of all, the time felt itself strong and confident. We are apt to think of the world in which the Inquisition was set up as feeble and crack-brained, shrouding itself in elaborately useless pageantry. But this is error, due partly to our pre-occupation with our own age, and with the Imperial Roman time which of all past ages most nearly resembles our own in high energy, strict government, frequent communication, positivist view of life and consequent lack of any defined general code of morals. In reality, most of the fantastic trappings belong to the later Middle Ages, the Middle Ages in their decline, and only because we do not see the stagnant “Dark Ages” clearly enough do we fail to grasp the height and suddenness of the mediæval rise. In the opening years of the thirteenth century, men rightly felt themselves to be a society growing and expanding (as we say in our contemporary jargon “progressing”) so rapidly on all sides that they must have been almost dizzy with a success so sudden and vast. Perhaps not even at the beginning of our own twentieth century did the slope just climbed seem so high, and so steep, and the future so full of the promise of continued ascent. For, as in the early years of the twentieth century, there was no sign that the expanding movement had reached its term. It was still going on, full of the promise of further achievement, and men hardly seemed to have the right to be anything but hopeful.

Although the twelfth century resembled the nineteenth in vastness of achievement, it differed from the nineteenth in the quality of that achievement, and in the nature of the forces which made it possible. Of course the vigour of human will is the prime mover in both cases. In the twelfth century men felt that their strength had been magnified not so much by new processes giving them an increased command over physical nature as by moral forces suddenly making them aware of unsuspected strength within themselves. I do not mean that the nineteenth century felt that it possessed no new elements of moral strength. It did. The ideas of the American and French Revolution thrilled it profoundly; to a lesser extent it was touched by a limited but nevertheless keen, new, sympathy with those very Middle Ages with which we are concerned. Nor do I mean that the Middle Ages enjoyed no greater power over material things than had been possessed by the simple and childlike Dark Ages immediately preceding them. I do say that in the twelfth century, as compared with the nineteenth, the sense of new power over physical nature played a lesser, and the confidence in new powers within man’s own nature played a correspondingly greater, part.

Two causes brought about this greater importance of the moral as compared with the physical factors of power. First, the twelfth century successes were, in all outward and secular things, no more than the partial reconquest of the Roman order which, after a fashion, men still remembered. Whereas the nineteenth century, instead of partly restoring that which had been, and had then been lost, conquered nature and barbarism in regions where such conquest had never been attempted. Hence the twelfth century in the full flush of its achievement was less subject to pride and the illusions which wait upon pride. Second, the moral (and intellectual) life of the twelfth century revolved about a single many-sided institution, the Church, which affected all departments of human life.

It is the task of this chapter to set the stage for the events which follow. The reader must have a notion of the slack and sunken age of Gerbert (the great Pope of the year 1000), secondly the vigorous fighting age of Hildebrand and the great Norman chiefs, of the First Crusade and the Song of Roland, that is, the later eleventh century. Next he must grasp the twelfth century itself, Abelard, the teaching of the Roman law at Bologna, the enrichment and refinement of life, chivalry, “feminism,” and the continuing quarrel of the central and all-pervasive Church with the developing civil governments. Finally, towards the end of the century, he must appreciate the beginnings of the Gothic, the rise of strong and turbulent towns and guilds, and the promise of the long and fruitful marriage of government with the idea of nationality.

There will be no space for anything more than the merest sketch—as if one should set himself to draw a cathedral with half a dozen strokes of the pen. The analysis must of necessity be slight. I shall try to make it just. Especially the influence of the Church must be grasped and also (a thing often missed in accounts of the time) the limitations of that influence.

Before entering upon such a task, I cannot refrain from warning my reader of the necessary limitations and imperfections of history.

The scantiness of record, the bias and the inherent imperfections of human testimony, the tendency of the striking and exceptional fact to get itself recorded and thereby destroy the average (to which I shall return in considering baronial and private wars and comparing them with our strikes); all these things make us see the past not outlined clearly but through a haze.

Finally, we must beware of trying to understand the past too well, when we cannot even understand the present. What evil spell is over the modern male to keep him in such ugly and often uncomfortable clothes? The pedants used to go about solemnly pretending to assay the most inward motives of the great of old time (who were better men than they, and could they come back to the sunlight to deal with these same pedants, would have soused and slimed them in the nearest duck-pond for their prying impudence). They went on doing this, I say, until about the year 1905, when Chesterton asked them whether they themselves put flowers on a dead man’s grave in the belief that their dead could smell.¹ Since then they have been a little quieter.

And yet all this seems forgotten by most of the writers and practically all the readers of history. Never mind. When the wretched historians call on the name of “Science,” that modern Mumbo-jumbo idol before whom we are all expected to bow down, let us save our self-respect as honest men by thumbing our noses and wriggling our fingers at such silly superstitions. They are all of a piece with the venerable dotard of an idea that proclaims the Infallibility of the Press and makes people believe a thing “because they see it in print”—pah!

Let us thus absolve ourselves from the sin of pride. The Middle Ages began with the decline of Rome. That high and complex civilization (which, as I have said, with all its divergencies, corresponded with ourselves more than did that of any other past age) saw its great energies slacken. It fell asleep. Nowadays we hear less than formerly about vice as a symptom of that decline, and more recognition of the economic breakdown caused by the crushing of the middle class under a system of taxation such as our own time would call socialistic. At any rate, the process was extremely gradual. It was accompanied, more in the way of an effect than as a cause, by the slow sifting in of comparatively small numbers of barbarians, first into the professional army which was the sole military reliance of the Empire, and thence, when they had become dominant in that army, inevitably into political office. The manner and stages of this decline (fascinating subjects to which justice is only beginning to be done) do not concern this study. What is important is to seize the depth of degradation which was reached.

To judge how low Christendom had fallen, let us glance at the evidence as to three capital points: decrease of population, loss of the power to build, and the substitution of mere folly for judicial weighing of evidence in matters of law.

For the enormous decrease of population, with all that it implied, we may take the two towns of London and Paris. London had been one of the principal towns of Roman Britain, the centre towards which the road system of the island converged. From early in the fifth to the opening years of the seventh century the place is not even mentioned in any document known: so that (in defiance of all probability) certain foolish scholars have been able to maintain that, in the interval, London did not even exist. Like London, Paris had been a capital, and to this day the blackened remains of its Roman palace that look down upon the comings and goings of the Latin Quarter in the “Boul Mich” are well out from the central “island of the city” on which the place began. The amphitheatre is even further away, behind the Pantheon, and anyone can appreciate how necessary it is that a place of public entertainment should not be too far out from the centre of things. And yet towards the end of the ninth century, when the Viking pirates besiege the place, only the little central island is held against them. Admitting fully that neither London nor Paris meant to Britain and Gaul what they mean to-day, still, I repeat, they were both very considerable towns, and it is entirely fair to use them as tests. The cities of Western Christendom had been” minished and brought low.”

Second, as to the loss of the power to build. That loss was well-nigh complete. Any history of architecture in England will parade before its reader the puny relics of Anglo-Saxon building. Paris has a few such things as the rude tower of St. Germain des Prés and a few doubtful stones in the low little church of St. Julien le Pauvre. In Italy, the “carnivorous” Lombard style which Ruskin so vividly identifies with the handful of seventh century “Lombard” freebooters, is now believed by scholars to belong entirely to the eleventh and twelfth centuries that saw Europe resurgent, the Crusades, and the rediscovered Roman law. Except Charlemagne’s octagon at Aix, it is hard to remember a single considerable monument certainly belonging to the four stagnant centuries between the years 600 and 1000. Everywhere men sheltered in corners of the magnificent structures that had come down from the imperial past, like swallows in the eaves of a building. Usually they could not even keep them from decay. Even repair was beyond them.

By what processes of law were civil disputes judged in these diminished cities in which architecture was growing ever ruder, feebler, and more squat? These men, our own ancestors, whose ancestors again had enjoyed the Roman law, decided between litigants by a series of tests or “ordeals” which are a catalogue of trivial stupidity. Merely to give the list will be enough to allow the reader to judge them. There was the “wager of battle,” which was not a duel on the point of honour, but a deliberate judicial test; plaintiff and defendant fought, and the victor won his case. Perhaps the greatest man of the Dark Ages, Charlemagne, is found striving against this custom. In his will he provides that disputes between his heirs as to titles to land are not to be so settled. And for it he substitutes a mild form of ordeal much in favour in settling titles to land, that of the cross. The disputants held out their arms horizontally, and he that endured the longest had the land! There was the ordeal by boiling water, red hot iron, or by fire, all three of which scalded or burned the guilty and spared the innocent. Sometimes lots were drawn, and sometimes the truth or falsity of a statement was tested by whether or not the taking of the consecrated eucharist harmed him who maintained the statement in question. Of course all these tests were accompanied by religious ceremony, and were believed to be especially subject to the direct interposition of God. But the mental stature of those who maintained them:—

“Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa.”

(We will not speak of them but look and pass on).

The mention of the direct interposition of God brings us naturally to the supernatural bias of the time. Here judgment is not so easy. It is possible to represent the replacement of the old positivism of the educated ancients (by supernaturalism and the transcendental formulas of the creeds) as part of the general decline. It is equally possible to represent it as the one leaven in an unsatisfactory lump. Certainly the divorce between the thought of the (largely positivist) educated class of our own day and that of the populace, now (as ever) full either of religious or political superstition and careless both of philosophic theory and scientific fact, this divorce, I say, is certainly evil. But in the Dark Ages popular superstition ran riot without qualification or corrective.

It is a commonplace that the officials of the Church retained a measure of organization and discipline when civil government was going to pieces, that the Church was the central institution of the time, and that most of its outstanding personalities were churchmen. What is not always seized is the extreme importance of the monastic institution. The monk scholars, whom the Church alone sheltered, could at least hand on the knowledge of the great books of the past, although when they wrote they could make only huge, dull commentaries on those same books.

How then did such a time get any business done at all? Economically, by raising the slave to a serf; politically, by an increase of local power.

With the decay of communications and police, the slave could simply run away and could not be brought back. Clearly, to get any work out of him at all, it must be made to his interest to stay. This was done by requiring of him only a fixed and comparatively small amount of his produce as dues for the land he tilled, and permitting him to enjoy the surplus which he could increase up to the limit of his power. This arrangement “worked” after a fashion. In giving to the labourer more dignity and independence, it had an intimate (although apparently quite unconscious) connection with the Church’s doctrine of an equal worth of all souls in the sight of God.

Politically, the financial exhaustion of the central governments, and the slackening of communications, as the great Roman roads were not kept up, helped to throw more and more power and initiative upon local governors; until at last, instead of appointed officers they became almost local kings who could, and did, hand their offices to their sons as they could their property. This last capital change did not occur until midway in the ninth century, the second of three centuries of attacks from without which broke upon the degraded Roman society and almost destroyed it.

I have spoken of the society as degraded Roman because I believe that the entire weight of the evidence is against the idea of a conquest of civilization by rudely noble “Teutons” who then proceed to invigorate the decaying Roman system. The fact is that the coming of the little barbaric war bands, who were not “Teutonic” at all but of mixed bloods, was only a step, although an important step, in a long and gradual process of decay from within. No contemporary writer, except St. Jerome, seems to have seen anything particularly significant or striking in the event when the barbarian “Auxiliaries” (who for a hundred years had made up the chief part of the imperial armies) sacked the city of Rome itself. Such forces were the “Colonial troops” of the time who would occasionally run amuck in the course of their squabbles with other bands of auxiliaries, or with the impoverished government which had contracted to pay them. Throughout the greater part of the Empire, they seem never to have dreamed of an organized campaign against civilization although they indulged in occasional outbreaks of plundering and disorder. I have not space here in which to combat the vague notion of a sudden destruction and thereafter a distinctly “Teutonic” renewal. Let it suffice that not one single institution not common to all primitive folk, such as the council of warriors or of the elders of the tribe, appears. The tie of personal devotion and loyalty to a chieftain, which they brought with them, belongs not only to every barbarian but also to every schoolboy.

Another line of reasoning which would tend to prove the gradual nature of the decline and the absence of definite break with the past would be to trace the considerable beginnings in the “lower” or later Empire, of the tendencies recognized as marking particularly the Dark Ages. Depopulation, building with the fragments of older and better work, in letters the replacement of any criticism of life by glamour and marvels, all these go back to the fourth and sometimes even to the third century. Nor does the list end here. The fourth century saw cavalry replace infantry as the main reliance of armies, and the third century already saw the wise man thought of more as a magician than a philosopher.

Upon this degraded Roman society fell the triple scourge of Mohammedan, Viking and Magyar. It is perhaps the best answer to the assertion that the “Teutons” had poured new life into Western Christendom to note that it barely weathered the storm. For most of these attacks were not much more than great plundering raids. It was the Mohammedan more than the others who influenced particularly the southern part of France with which we are to be concerned. But it was the Viking who brought our Christendom to its lowest ebb. All three were alike in hatred and contempt for the enfeebled Roman civilization which they ravaged, especially for the religion which had become its bond of union. It was particularly the shrines, where so much of the movable wealth of the time had been concentrated in the form of gold, jewels and precious stuffs, that they went for. They, and not the “Teutons” of the fifth and sixth centuries, made the real barbarian invasions. However, they failed. Before the end of the eighth century, the Moslem, on the whole, was falling back. By 900 the worst of the fearful Viking harry was passed, and a little more than fifty years later the Magyar was held. Thenceforward the inner parts of Christendom were safe from raids. The struggle had so long seemed hopeless that a disembodied spirit, looking down on the thing, might well have called the final victory a miracle.

Following the repulse and (in the case of Viking and Magyar) the conversion of the “paynim” came a pause. The mean and wretched time, which had barely beaten off the pagan, could now take stock of itself. After all, it had achieved three things. The first of these achievements was negative. Leading their petty lives as they did among the colossal wreckage of Rome, they had preserved precious fragments of that which had been the soul of her civilization: her letters, law and philosophy. This living memory of Rome was scattered here and there, almost all of it hidden away in monasteries, as it were underground, without power to act upon the half bestial world around. Still it was there waiting for a time that could make use of it, in a deep sleep but not dead, like the princess in the fairy tale. The second and third achievements were positive, and of them the second was the most immediately useful and perhaps the most apparent. The Dark Ages, as we have seen, had placed authority on the widest possible basis. It was no longer a trust; it was a possession, and therefore to be tenaciously held and (in the main) moderately used, as one does of possessions. The conception of legal right had given way to that of privilege. Take a crude illustration; we know that many of our public men think of government not as something to live under but as something to live upon, that is, a means of prey upon their fellows. The “spoils system” we call it. Suppose a political organization composed of this sort of men getting complete control over elections for a time long enough to enable its local leaders to hand down their power to their sons. Clearly, after the first disorder the change would cause, there would come a time when each “leader” of a community, no matter how dull, could not help seeing that it was to his own immediate personal benefit to see that his domain was prosperous. To a time like our own such a change would be disaster; to a time struggling doubtfully to keep alive some vestige of civilized living, it was salvation. Finally, as we have seen, the great step of abolishing the old slavery in favour of serfdom had been taken, and the average labourer was more than half a free man.

These primitive arrangements had come into being through no set purpose but through the need of the miserable time for guarantees of any sort of defence and production. The men who established them (or rather fell into them) were not self-conscious, had no “political theory” whatsoever. Their actions were spontaneous, and all their simplicities came into and overspread the Roman order like weeds growing on a ruin.

This same lack of self-consciousness helped to prevent any clear-cut break with the past. The local nobles, each all but a little king, continued to be called by the titles of imperial functionaries; the count was still the “comes.” Because they had no political theory, and lived in a world which had no memory of a time without kings and emperors, it never occurred to them to propose that kings and emperors should not be at all, although the homage of the local lord to the overlord would clearly be a far flimsier thing than the homage of their own needy little vassals to them.

There was a tendency on the part of the secular rulers, emperors, kings, and nobles alike, to mike of the officers of the Church the instruments and functionaries of their own power. The local noble wished to choose the village priest, his overlord wished to “invest” the bishop. What would have happened had this tendency been unchecked we cannot say. We know that only the Church stood for the preservation of the great past through scholarship, for a moral ideal, and above all for the unity of Europe. Therefore, it is just to call the effort of the secular powers against her independence a disintegrating tendency.

There was, however, a protest against lay supremacy, coming principally from the monks and especially from the new order of Cluny, so that the whole effort is called the Cluniac movement. Meanwhile the Vikings who had settled in Normandy (alone of all the outland barbarians who had come into the Empire and then disappeared, sunk almost without a trace) had crossed with the native stock to breed a strong new race that was to fight and govern. In the year 1000 the monkish protest and the Norman energy were just sprouting above ground, and in the main the time was anarchic, formless.

The great Gerbert, Pope in the year 1000 under the name of Sylvester II, stands as a symbol. Great as an intriguer, to us he is even greater as a scholar. He had studied mathematics and “al-gebra” (the word is Arabic) with the Arabs in Spain, and like every scholar worthy of the name he loved the classics. His mathematics made him feared as a wizard, and when writing to a friend in Italy for unchurchly, Latin books, we find him asking that they be “procured quietly,” promising that he will tell no one of the favour done him.

I have called Gerbert a symbol of his time. To call that time the “Dark Ages” is just to a degree that few of the stock epithets of our school are just. They were the morasses from which the Mediæval rise begins.

For, after the doubtful pause of which I have spoken, Europe arose. The Normans conquer England and Sicily, and set up systems of government and administration fit to be models for all the West. The Hildebrandine reforms free the Church from the feudal anarchy, and the Church in her new strength fills Christendom with a new sense of unity and common purpose. This common purpose hurls Europe against Asia, in the tidal wave of the First Crusade, which breaks down the barrier between East and West and begins a new day.

It is important to note how short was this Norman-Hildebrandine period, and how many-sided was its accomplishment.

At the most it covered less than fifty years in time. The first stroke of the Church to make itself independent of the State comes after the mid-century. The Normans conquer England in the familiar year 1066. The Crusade mobilized in 1096 and returned in 1099. Thus, if we take the Church, the Crusaders were a trifle nearer in time to the period in which she was the submissive creature of lay government than an American of the Great War is to the War of Secession. They were distant from the conquest of England about as we (1920) are from M’Kinley’s first election and the prosperity that came with it. Of course there had been preparation. William the Conqueror found London already so large that his troops could not even blockade it. The Italian sea-faring republics were already turning the tables on the Saracen in the Mediterranean in the early part of the century. Nevertheless, the phase of the first great struggles and great accomplishment falls into the little space of years I have marked out. It is an astonishing time.

In moral purpose, the haphazard speech of to-day would say in “Idealism,” this short period stands supreme in all our long tradition. The First Crusade proves it. Whether or not Hildebrand’s new insistence upon the celibacy of priests and upon private, specific confession were in themselves good, we need not discuss. At any rate, never before or since, not even in the great war just over, has Christendom put forth such an effort as the First Crusade.

And this effort came from a Europe that had suddenly remembered how to think, to govern and to build. Instead of stupidly piling up extracts, like their predecessors of the five slow centuries just passed, we now find the best of the monk-scholars, such as Anselm, reasoning clearly on the greatest themes of how we may prove that God exists, and why He became man. And this Italian from the Southern Alps, in whom thought had replaced pedantry, could see from his Norman monastery new political operations going on about him, as strong and startling as the sweep of his own reason. The new Norman race was ruling, taxing, and administering justice with an order and method that had not been seen in the West since Justinian. In war, that important subdivision of politics, they could combine the fire power of infantry with the shock of mail-clad cavalry.¹ In military engineering they could make fast the lands they had won by great square towers of masonry that stand to this day. Besides castles, they built great churches, and in their building they rediscovered height, the power of throwing up great stone vaults, and the effect of majesty. Meanwhile the Italians were building fine churches too. Sant’ Ambrogio, in Milan (to name only one that comes to mind), can stand comparison with any Norman church. In everything this rudely powerful time stood erect and wrought as European men had not wrought for half a thousand years. The Dark Ages had gone; the Middle Ages had begun.

What was the spirit of these men in their new power? We can try to feel it in their buildings and writings, but the answers to such questions are elusive and as baffling as any that the human mind can put to the sphynx of history. It is a paradox that this time, with its furious energy and rage of creation, seems to have left us in its buildings not only an expression of strength, but also of a self-reliant completeness and repose. The plain round arches, the heavy pillars, the decoration at once rude and severe, have a sense of restraint, of balance and solidity about them that the Gothic never has. They seem akin to the “Song of Roland” with its

“Pagans are wrong and Christians are right,”

as unfaltering as the swing of a great sword. No breath of doubt or uncertainty as to the faith has come down to us from this eleventh century. At the same time, it was a brutal age of strong appetites and passions. Energy and not refinement is its note; war and not love. The imagination of the time, when it set itself to carving stone, played often with wild and impossible monsters that throw into strong relief the strict, clear lines of the architecture. There is extravagance in it too, for it is Roland’s pride in refusing to sound his horn in time to summon help that brings him and the peers to their death.

Meanwhile art and scholarship remained monastic. The architects were monks and the cathedrals belonged to monks and priests more than to the layman. Of laymen the almost universal type is the warrior.

In 1099, just before the turn of the century, the Crusaders returned. They had come together from all over Europe, and together had seen the world and done their great deeds. Their homecoming issues in a new time, the twelfth century.

I have spoken of the Crusade as a tidal wave. The expression is just so far as it suggests its enormous effort. It is also just in that it was a breaker down of barriers, not only the barriers between the divisions of Christendom, which it united in a common effort, but also the barrier between Europe and the East. But the expression of a tidal wave is incorrect in suggesting a levelling and destructive force. For what followed was the continuation and enlargement of what the Norman-Hilde-brandine eleventh century had done, with greater riches, complexity and refinement. There appear, also, new forces, but there is no conscious break with the immediate past.

In obedience to the returning Crusaders’ new sense of power came increase of commerce and intercommunication, of population and of wealth. Thus government and administration worthy of the name, which had been the creation of the eleventh century, continue to grow stronger and more centralized. But to them is added a new thing, the knowledge of the Roman law, with its large reasoning and its great sense of the State.

So also building was continued, and the bases of design do not change, but the severity of the older work begins to be lost in encrusted masses of sculptured detail. Most of the carving strikes us as crude; a good deal of it is meant to be grotesque and much of the rest is grotesque—unintentionally. But there is vigour about it; and an effect of richness, through painstaking repetition of simple motifs. This richness of decorative sculpture links up naturally with the new social tendency to refinement in manners.

With refinement in manners we come to our first sharp contrast with that which had been. William the Conqueror, annoyed at having his bastardy continually thrown in his face by his wife, is said to have relieved his feelings by tying her by the hair to his horse’s tail and dragging her out to a neighbouring suburb. Now we find William’s great grandson’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the foremost figure in a totally new sort of “high society” among the governing class of the time in which it was becoming the fashion to concern oneself with an elaborately courteous worship of idealized woman. Not that the eleventh century woman had been nobody. Countess Matilda of Tuscany had been a tower of strength to Hildebrand in his tireless political struggles. But now we find noblewomen taking the lead in social observance (and in literary appreciation) somewhat as they do in the United States to-day. It is true that the lay part of the movement had its centre, as we shall see in the next chapter, in Southern France. But it was general throughout the society of the time, and along with the lay movement went the new cult of the Virgin.

This new religious feeling came as abruptly as the corresponding change in lay society. Whereas Roland had prayed to God the Father, now everyone, even the knight in battle and the austere religious reformer like Saint Bernard, preferred to pray to the Mother of God. What they saw in her, those brought up in the Protestant tradition can scarcely feel. She stood for the illogical, affectionate side of religion. She loved all sorts of flattery and attention and everyone loved her and paid her the court she loved. She loved beautiful and pretry things too, and, womanlike, all the decorative side of life, so that her cult played a great part in the cathedral building. In poems and tales of her it is possible to feel, at least faintly, the tremendous out-pouring of devotion she inspired. It was the twelfth century that placed her among the gods of our West European stock.

Most men worthy of the name dislike feminism. There is something unnatural and strained about it. In civilized times, made possible only by the highest human energy, it is a perpetual riddle to find the sex which is less vigorous, both in body and mind, coming to the fore. Therefore many men have called the feminism of the Cæsarean-Augustan age in Rome, and also of to-day, a sign of social decay. But this will not fit the case of twelfth-century feminism. If feminism is a sickness of society it would seem sometimes to be a growing sickness. It would seem that, in times of rapid expansion of civilized things, the energy of man is so taken up with taming the wilderness, fighting back the barbarian, and producing the wealth by which the body of society must live, that he is surpassed by woman in knowledge of all the arts and studies that make life rich and beautiful, all those things in short that the business man of to-day despises under the name of “general culture.” The woman, then, seeing that she surpasses him in so much, sets up in her own mind to be his superior, and is half acknowledged by him as such. But the man of to-day may console himself with the thought that about feminism there is something forced and malformed, and that, in the past, its excess has never lasted long.

The time that saw the kings strengthened by the Roman law, the new refinement of the rich dominated by the noble lady, and all classes of men and women worshipping the Virgin, saw also a new spirit of civic liberty. The growing towns began to set up as “communes,” practically self-governing corporations. When they could, they bought their freedom in the form of a charter from the feudal overlord; when they could not come to terms they fought him cheerfully. They were turbulent, always rioting about something or other, and the glimpses we get of their municipal finance suggest that the city grafter of to-day could learn from them. Nevertheless, they concentrated in themselves much of the confused, but happy and conquering, energies of the time. Politically, they half realized, without knowing it, the ideal of the ancient free city. Through them and their independence we touch Athens, which they knew not at all. Economically, they brought art and industry out of the monasteries, and organized the craftsman and the artisan in guilds which largely checked competition between their members. Thus they guaranteed to the workman his independence and security so well that our labour unions grope after them to-day like blind giants. Soon, here and there, they were to feel for a new architecture that (as we shall see) was to be the Gothic. All these things they did, not because of any rule or precept but spontaneously, for their own sake, as things that ought to be done.

While the townsman was setting up for a free citizen, the country serf was establishing himself as a practically free peasant. The arrangement grew up that so long as a given family of serfs kept up the payment of the lord’s dues for the land they tilled, members of that family might leave freely to become “guildsmen” (what we should call “union men”) in the towns, could enter the Church, or do what they pleased. A dissatisfied serf might run away to some town where his lord had no jurisdiction, so that lords had to make things easy for serfs. The great tradition of the eighteenth century, out of which our political morality came, makes the idea of feudal dues stink in our nostrils. Nevertheless, we must admit that the new status of the serf class represented substantial freedom. The unconscious, and therefore impregnable, evidence of contemporary literature proves beyond question that the countryman was now, in fact, free. The independent “villeins” of “Aucassin and Nicolette” or “Robin and Marion” are essentially the free French peasants of to-day.

Perhaps the sharpest apparent contrast with that which had been, was that thought, like the arts and crafts, came out of the monastery into the town. Anselm in his cloister had reasoned clearly as churchmen before him had not. The great scholar of the new time reached out, through the faith, as it were, to the metaphysical foundations of all knowledge. His name was Abelard; he “woke the great curiosity from its sleep of a thousand years . . .” (as Belloc says with a fine flourish), and his glory, his love, and his misfortunes have become a legend. Great as he was in himself, the picture of him as a lad of scarcely twenty, standing up in public to the greatest professor of his time and besting him in debate, is even greater as a parable. It would not be altogether true to say, as has been said, that with his generation scholarship became secularized, but it certainly became public. From top to bottom the faith (which the learned, to a man, continued to maintain) became matter for discussion and was expected to justify itself by rational demonstration. The student, although still at least in minor orders, ceased to be a monk, and roamed at will. He loved thought for its own sake, and grouped himself in communities that were already, in substance, universities.

I have said that the time was spontaneous, and in general that is true. The emergence of the serf as a practically free peasant came about quietly, of itself. Even the noisy communes troubled themselves little about the larger implications of their acts. But one man at least, Arnold of Brescia, a pupil (or at least a follower) of Abelard, brought the new learning to the support of the new municipalities. He broke with the Church, his success was short, and he soon went under; but such was his fame that after his execution his body was burned and the ashes thrown into the Tiber for fear that his bones might be cherished as relics, and certain heretics called themselves “Arnoldists” well into the next century.

So the time went on, everywhere making all things new, roads, buildings, philosophies; happy like a young god in creating, and, like God, seeing that its works were good. Its cities were growing fast. Even in Central Europe it was clearing the forests until their extent was reduced almost to what it is to-day.¹ No new process to spin cloth, smelt steel, or make steam engines, had given it power over material nature. Its learned men were too deeply fascinated with looking into the meaning and end of our human life in God, to experiment in physics. Its material conquests were won by the leaping energy of its own vigorous will.

In the second half of the century appear new elements of artistic and intellectual power, the Gothic and the rediscovered works of Aristotle. In France, the great, new, idea of nationality began dimly to emerge. With the fall of Jerusalem to the Moslem, for the first time since the last ninth-century raids of the heathen Vikings, Christendom feels a great calamity.

The Gothic was altogether new, and was the creation of the new lay spirit of the time. It has been written a thousand times how the pointed arch solved structural difficulties, and gave to men intent upon height the opportunity of building still higher. Its broken line gave them also, as we shall see in a moment, a new expression of their own spirit. As yet, however, the change was only beginning, and buildings showed the broken arch mingled in fellowship with the round.

While the pointed arch was beginning to be seen in building, the texts of Aristotle were coming in from Spain. Abelard’s time had known of Aristotle only his Logic. But now scholars might read in Latin (translated from the Arabic) the Physics, the Metaphysics, and Ethics. Thus, these men, with their keen and active minds, were suddenly face to face with one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, intellect of all mankind. Upon the crowds of students full of discussion and debate, believing confidently that they could build themselves a tower of logic that would reach heaven, the effect was electric. For such men to have for their study Aristotle’s enormous range of thought, to feel his luminous common sense, was to give them more than their youth had dreamed, the discovery of a new world.

Meanwhile, behind the endless political squabbles, the vast idea of nationality could be seen just looming up, faint and dim, but enormous. It harked back to the dim, prehistoric forces that had wrought out the words “Gaul,” “Britain,” “Italy,” and “Spain.” Such words had never been represented by governments. They had stood always for ideas only. But in France, where ideas have power, a sort of underlying force in men’s minds was conjuring up, behind the king, the nation. This force acted through the Roman law which was illuminating the active intellect of the time, but the soul of it was a blind instinct.

This growing and vigorous time that had made and done so many new things, had forgotten what it was to feel a check, until, towards the end of the century, Saladin broke the Syrian Franks at Hattin, and took Jerusalem. The disaster did not seem hopeless. Christendom began forthwith to hum with preparation for a new crusade. Nevertheless, this first great experience of failure throws into high relief, as it were, the buoyancy of the time, and gives us, therefore, a point from which we may survey its accomplishment and seek to fix its spirit.

First of all, it is necessary to insist upon the straightforwardness, the downright directness of that spirit. It is true that the Courts of Love preached far-fetched doctrines, but they were a conscious revolt against grossness of manners, a sort of counter-excess. With this exception, the time nowhere attempted extravagance. The elaborate sculpture of its buildings is framed in structural lines that are firm and even severe. As vet the Gothic (which was to be the expression of the mediæval temper in its completeness and in its decline) gives only here and there a hint of its coming. Height is indeed attempted, but everywhere the general lines of the buildings remain square and solid. Wherever the architect has expressed his own thought in altering the inherited arrangement of the Roman column and arch, the change tends towards frankness and logic. Each part aims to express its function, whether structural or decorative, in relation to the whole. The classic forms begin to be rationalized so as to be not a façade but living parts of the structure; the column begins to be wedded to the arch. As in architecture, so in the other arts and handicrafts. In general, clothes were cut on simple and serviceable lines without hint of theatricality or excess, either fitting close to the body, or falling in simple and graceful folds. Arms, and especially armour, remained light and simple. In the second half of the century the cylindrical pot-helm, completely covering the face, came in and took the place of the open conical helmet with its nose-guard. Already before the new fashion in helmets had come in, the mail shirt had had its sleeves lengthened to the wrist, and now mittens and separate leg coverings of mail were in use also. But the heavy body armour of plate that was to encumber the warriors of later centuries was unknown. The horse-equipment, too, was simple, made for use and not for parade. In all things the time observed simplicity and, as it were, a natural and effortless logic in the outline of that which it made.

The seeming contradiction between the simplicity everywhere aimed at by the men of the twelfth century and the confusion of their society was the natural and inevitable result of the conditions which limited their action. They, with their keenness of mind, could almost remember ancestors who had been half barbarians. The material with which they had to work was painfully scanty. It was not only that the time, with its fluidity and the swiftness and extent of its social changes, had as yet found no formula that might approach a definition of its inmost spirit. That difficulty was met a generation later in the mid-thirteenth century, with Aquinas, St. Louis, and the culmination of the Gothic. The underlying trouble was that, even at their best, the Middle Ages had no sufficient accumulation either of knowledge or of material resources. For want of ordered and detailed knowledge, the complexity of problems could not be grasped, and for want of resources the material disasters of the fourteenth century were to be fatal to the mediæval experiment. As yet, about the year 1200, synthesis and such near approach to perfection as is permitted to man were in process of attainment. There was no muddle-headed modern illusion of the necessary goodness of change under the name of “progress.” It was because the new things that they had made were certainly good that men felt that they had reason to hope.

Our books over-emphasize the deficiencies of the Middle Ages as compared with ourselves. But it is true that they were unable to transform completely the unpromising material they had at hand.

Examples of their limitations could be catalogued without end, all springing from one or the other, or from both of these causes. Thus, in spite of the Roman law, the folly of the ordeal and the judicial combat went on. The new logic had by no means fully penetrated these populations full of their natural human stubbornness and perversity. Where a new town was built, the streets of it were as straight and regular as those of an American or South African city to-day. Viollet-le-Duc has assembled the evidence on this point, and it is conclusive. But most of their towns had come down to them from the Dark Ages as tangles of crooked streets, resulting from centuries of weak government, and hence of unpunished encroachment upon the public way. To-day, oppressed with regularity, many of us find such crooked streets charming. The point is that they seem nowhere to have tried to straighten out the lines of their old towns so as to make them conform to the straight streets of their new towns which must have been a truer expression of their taste. Paris was now a considerable town, and the King of France might, and did, wall it in and pave its streets. But to straighten them, even if he had had the money, he would have had no right, and seems never even to have had the idea, more than he would have had the idea of large scale water supply or of drainage. As with the streets of the towns, so with the roads that connected them. There was no thought-out system of communication such as Rome had had, or such as we have to-day. Nor did the traveller over the ill-kept roads enjoy regular and sufficient protection from the State. The insecurity was not due to “baronial war” between nobles. Usually such nobles would fight it out between themselves and their own immediate followers. Not any more than our own strikes (often accompanied with violence on a scale that would make a mediæval wonder whether the world was not coming to an end) was such disorder meant to be directed against the community as a whole. But to protect society against stray robbers or bands of robbers, government made no effort, any more than in our “wild west” before the coming of the sheriff. This lack of police protection seems to have been accepted as a matter of course, and no one seems to have tried to think it out and apply the remedy. Just so, when the later mediæval armies of the fourteenth century took the field they would sometimes wander about the theatre of war and meet one another by accident, solely from the want of any organized system of scouting to give the commander some notion of the enemies’ position and movements.

One must repeat that all such things were mere gaps, unfinished portions of the clearly outlined logical structure which the time was struggling to build as an expression of its own strong and eager spirit.

Unlike ourselves, the twelfth century possessed moral unity. Alone of all the great eras of growth and change, its movement was practically without reactionaries, because it was without destructive moral change. What a contrast to the Cæsarean-Augustan age, the Renaissance-Reformation period, the French Revolution, and to ourselves! Here and there a monkish grumble at the action of the new forces comes to our ears. The new forces themselves were by no means adjusted to one another. But in all the debates of the time no one looks back upon the past as Arcadia. For all their differences, the men of the twelfth century were agreed in pressing onward without regret.

This moral unity, with its unbroken hopefulness, was due to the corporate body of the Church, which was central in society and pervaded it. It is a commonplace that in the Church were united learning and education, the public care of the sick in hospitals, and all sorts of “organized charity” and poor relief, that the monastery served as a hotel for travellers and that such travellers as were not upon worldly business would almost certainly be pilgrims to the shrine of some saint. No man was too low for the Church’s pity or too high for her effective correction. Her doctrine of the equal worth of souls before God, together with the common observance of her worship, made strongly for friendliness and confidence between classes. Her universality, her cosmopolitan officialdom, and her use of Latin, made for understanding and community of feeling between localities. So she gave to the time, with its accepted division of mankind into classes and its poor communications, a greater measure of fraternity than we possess to-day with all our talk of “equality” and all our devices permitting men to meet or to speak together. This she did, not by any forced, mechanical scheme of union, but by her presentation of a body of teaching which all accepted, and by accepting bound themselves by a common discipline to be members one of another.

We can never fully know what was the spirit of the centuries in which the Church was the unquestioned central institution and pervaded all society. A man unable to travel and steep himself in the atmosphere in the old towns and countrysides (photographs at best give only unrelated bits of them) might best look long at fourteenth-century Italian paintings, or read over and over the first and one of the happiest of English comedies: “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” which is in so many school-books. Before the “Revolution” the traveller in Russia could feel what a country was like wherein men had never shattered their holy things, in which society reposed upon an unquestioned religion, and men felt, therefore, that the universe was friendly. Russia still is mediæval in that the Russian cannot feel as we do for suffering and is alternately fiendish and innocent—

“Half devil and half child . . .”

Even pre-revolutionary Russia was mediæval only in seeming, and in reality was rocking, fatally as the event has proved, under the action of the same forces that disturb our industrial societies with their exaltation of power, and their dangerous instability. But outwardly she still suggested to the traveller from Western Christendom something of what the world of our ancestors must have been.

The fact that the Church thought of her teaching as above all an answer to the riddle of human life, rather than as a bundle of “Thou shalt nots,” made her tolerant of many things. Because she was not so much a separate institution as a part of the atmosphere breathed daily by everybody, she had no fear. Thus she permitted the yearly mockery of her own services in the “feast of fools” when a sham priest, covered with an ass’s false head burlesqued the mass before the altar itself, to the accompaniment of general popular horseplay. So, also, she seems to have permitted a good deal of divorce, at least among the upper class, by means of “annulments.” Finally, when so many people were under vows of one kind or another, it was out of the question to expect that all vows would be strictly kept, and the language of the reformers from within the Church itself proves that in general she was easy-going. Some travellers to Latin America tell us that in those countries where there are few Protestants, the Roman Church is still easy-going, but whether they are swayed by religious opposition or whether they are true witnesses I do not know. At any rate, before the Council of Trent militarized her against Protestantism, the Church permitted many things. As in Russia, religious dress covered many saints and also many sinners, some gross and some refined.

I have said that, in general, the Church was unquestioned. Nevertheless, there were, necessarily, forces working against her teaching and her discipline, just as there must always, in any society, be forces of opposition working against the forces which control that society. When a time is slack, like the Dark Ages, both master forces and opposition forces will be torpid, and when a time is keen, like the twelfth-century time we are considering, both will be active. Accordingly we find the moral and intellectual forces opposed to the Church clearly defined.

In the great Investiture quarrel between the papacy and the secular governments from the Empire down, the faith and morals of the Church were not at stake. But, at the same time, the claims of her champions in her good effort to untangle herself from feudalism were so extravagant that they suggested a downright theocracy, actual government by the ministers of religion, which has always been hateful to men of our European stock. Further, the twelfth century man, in so much fighting against the infidel, had learned that his enemy was no such bad fellow after all. We find at least one ruler, Henry Plantagenet in the heat of his quarrel with Becket, crying out that he would rather turn Mohammedan than yield to the Church! And the outburst does not seem to have weakened his position. Evidently the world was moving fast in his day. The noble, so far surpassing his fathers in riches, luxury, and refinement, often failed to see eye to eye with the churchman. The story of the time is full of despoilments of the Church and consequent excommunications. Now and then a commune, at the height of political struggle with its bishop, would physically maltreat him (or even kill him) and go off into a short spasm of blank irreligion.

Moreover, the Church had foes, or at least very lukewarm servitors, of her own household. We have seen that the student was usually still in minor orders. But now he was no longer shut up under strict control in a monastery, but free to wander at will. Under no constraint, and full of his classic learning with its glorification of every passion and appetite, he carelessly kicked clear over the monkish interpretation of the Christian ethic, and as often as not went wild altogether from any sort of check on his desires. John Addington Symonds has collected, and translated into English out of the original Latin, a number of these students’ songs, under the title of “Wine, Woman and Song.” They are often charming, but I cannot imagine literature better calculated to enrage a monk, or indeed anyone of a puritanic cast of mind.

Even the student’s professor, and the student himself in his serious moments, were not altogether Christians. The Arabian versions of Aristotle taught an imaginative pantheism, full of ideas about “the soul of the world” that were inconsistent with belief in any definite god. The recoil from such fantasies sometimes brought on an easy-going general scepticism. It was whispered about that the world had known three great impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The pride of the new logic equalled, in some men, our modern pride in physical science. Michelet tells the story of a learned professor of the University of Paris who delighted his hearers with a complete demonstration of our Lord’s divinity and then turned around and said that, had he chosen, his logic could have put down “little Jesus” as low as it had just raised him high. The common people would make up coarse “fabliaux,” tales and rhymes about the priest and his women parishioners, that sound harshly upon the ear even of a sceptic of to-day.

Finally, from top to bottom of society, there was an under-current of feeling that the wealth and power of the Church were over-tempting her officials into that pride which they were bound to oppose as the first of sins. Writing to magnify the work of the mendicant orders, Dante goes so far as to say that, just before their coming (that is, in the time we are considering), “The Army of Christ” . . . was . . .” laggard, fearsome, and thin-ranked.”¹

Michelet speaks of the Pope in the year 1200 lifted indeed to a dizzy height upon the topmost pinnacle of the great structure of the Church, but seeing therefrom armies marching from all sides to the attack. Dante and Michelet may exaggerate; nevertheless the situation was strained.

Still the Church won through. Tossed hither and thither by the swift new currents, she escaped shipwreck and kept her course. And that course was shaped by her determination to remain central in society and to unite all men under her. It was the strength of her position that, of all the forces we have so far seen to have been working against her, not one directly denied her teaching and substituted for it a different, hostile body of doctrine.

In one spot only was there organized, fundamental opposition. That spot was in the district of Southern France which was later to form the province of Languedoc. That opposition was a body of doctrine which has usually been called Albigenseanism (inasmuch as one of its chief centres was the town of Albi). What the nature of the crisis was, and what precedent that Church had for meeting it, the next chapter shall consider.

¹ “Heretics,” by G. K. Chesterton, chap. xi, “Science and the Savages.” Copyright, John Lane and Co., London, 1905.

¹ By “fire-power” I mean, of course, archery, not firearms.

¹ “Forests and Human Progress” by Raphael Zon, published in New York, Geographical Review, September 1920: “In Central Europe the period of the greatest clearing of forest land for settlement was practically completed by the end of the thirteenth century.”

¹ “. . . tardo, suspiccioso, e raro.”—“Paradiso,” canto xii, line 39.