History of Christianity

John M. Robertson

Index

PART III
MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY

CHAPTER I.
EXPANSION AND ORGANISATION

1. Position in the Seventh Century.

WHEN the swift triumph of Islam had cut off from Christendom the populations among whom its creed had been evolved, that creed ruled in the Byzantine State; in Italy, still half-imperial, half-Lombardic; in Spain, then under Teutonic rulers; in Frankish Gaul; in parts of southern Germany; in Saxon Britain, of which the conversion was begun by the lesser Augustine under Gregory the Great, after the overthrow of the earlier church by the heathen invaders; and in Ireland, which had been largely Christianised in the fourth and fifth centuries, apparently by Greek or eastern means. In the Moslem world, Christianity existed on sufferance, and chiefly in heretical forms, being Nestorian in Persia and Monophysite in Egypt, as also in Abyssinia; but Christian Europe was now nominally agreed on the main official dogmas.

In the more civilised European States, specific paganism still throve more or less obscurely, both by way of educated antiquarianism and of peasant persistence in old ways; and the Church framed canons against the latter and treatises against the former. The mass of the population, however, was satisfied with the ample elements of the old system embodied in the new. In the more barbaric States, Christianity was even less of a modifying force than in the others. Like the people of the empire, the barbarians carried on their pagan rites, festivals, and superstitions under the name of Christianity; and whereas the educated world was in a measure forced by its pessimists and pietists to recognise the difference between its documents and its practice, the more primitive races simply translated Christian tradition and theory into the terms of their own life. Save for an exaltation of celibacy, and an inquisition, at once prurient and puerile, into the details of the sexual relation, it in no way changed the plane of their thought and conduct. What it did alter was their political life, inasmuch as the co-ordination of the priesthood made everywhere for the power of the prince, if he had the wit to use it, the church being everywhere shaped as far as might be on the model and the ideal set up by Constantine.

Wherever the Koman empire had been, unless anti-Christian violence has intervened, the church system to this day bears witness to the union of Church and State. In France, for instance, there is still a bishop, as a rule, wherever there was a Roman municipality, and an archbishop wherever there was a provincial capital; and where in imperial territory there were variations in the administration of rural districts some being under their own magistrates, some under those of neighbouring towns the church system varied similarly. In the East, rural bishops, or chorepiscopi, were common; but in the West they seem to have prevailed only in the Dark Ages, the general tendency being to give the rank of mere priests to the holders of country benefices, and to make bishops the rulers of dioceses from a civic seat or cathedral church. Country parishes, on the other hand, were formed into groups, presided over by an archipresbyter, without episcopal rank. The spirit of imperial rule pervaded all church life. Where large landowners under the Christian emperors had sought to resist the centralising system by appointing the priests on their own estates, they were compelled to obtain the approval of the nearest bishop; and when they sought next to do without priests, a law was passed forbidding laymen to meet for worship without an ecclesiastic. This principle was carried wherever the Church went, and rigid subordination was the general result. To secure stability, however, the Church had to rest on a recognised economic interest throughout the priesthood; and the early practice of a communal life for the bishop and his clergy, which was still common in Gaul and Spain in the seventh century, was gradually broken up. The competition of monasticism first forced upon all a stricter rule; and priests living in their bishop's house became known as canonici regular -es, canons regular, or under rule a duplication of terms, since canon originally meant rule, and canonical was simply regular. But the obvious financial advantages, as well as the liberties of the unattached priests, soon made their status the aim of all not devoted to the monastic ideals. The change was furthered by the habit of leaving endowments to individual churches and to individual offices; till at length even in the cathedral towns the canons lived apart, each with his own revenue, though often dining at a common table; while the country priests necessarily became still more their own masters in the matter of income. Thus arose the secular clergy, the title of regular being restricted to those who lived under a monastic rule as that of Benedict or that of Augustine; and these in turn came to be classed with monks as distinguished from the others. In addition, there sprang up in the Middle Ages a number of unattached or itinerant priests, as well as private chaplains.

In every order alike, however, an economic interest was sooner or later the ruling motive. Beneficed priests wrought for the church under which they had their income, keeping as much of it as they could, but recognising the need for official union; and the monastic orders in their turn grew wealthy by endowments, and zealous in proportion for the temporal power of the Church. As always, the self-denying and devoted were a minority; but the worldly and the unworldly alike wrought everywhere in the political interests of the kings, who had established and endowed the church to begin with, and who in return were long allowed many liberties in the appointment and control of bishops and priests. A common result was the appointment of lay favourites or benefactors of the king; and bishoprics seem almost as often as not to have been in some degree purchasable. The church, in short, was a social and political function of each State, with the papal system loosely and variably co-ordinating the whole.

METHODS OF EXPANSION

2. Methods of Expansion.

Every extension of the church being a means of power and revenue to priests, the process was furthered at once by motives of selfishness and by motives of self-sacrifice. In some cases the latter were effectual, as when a pious hermit won repute among barbarians for sanctity, and so acquired spiritual influence; but the normal process of conversion seems to have been by way of appeal to chiefs or kings. When these were convinced that Christianity was to their interest, the baptism of their more docile subjects followed wholesale. Thus ten thousand Angli were claimed as baptised by Augustine in Kent on Christmas Day in the year 597 a transaction which reduced the rite to nullity, and the individuality of the converts to the level of that of animals. In this case there can have been no rational consent. A little later, Heraclius in the East caused multitudes of Jews to be dragged to baptism by force; and the same course was taken in Spain and Gaul. Jews so coerced were only more anti-Christian than before; and wholesale relapses of barbarian converts were nearly as common as the wholesale captures, till the cause of kings won the mastery. Nowhere does the church seem to have grown from within and upward among barbarians as it had originally done in the empire : the process is invariably one of imposition from without and above, by edicts of kings, who supported the missionaries with the sword. As at the outset of the church, there were deadly strifes among the pioneers. The earlier British church having been formed under influences from Ireland, there was such utter hatred between its remnants and the Romanised church set up by Augustine that, apparently after his death, twelve hundred monks of the older church were massacred at Bangor in one of the wars between the two Christian parties; and the Britons, not unnaturally, refused to have any intercourse with their brethren, regarding them as worse than heathens. The Englishman Boniface, who played a large part (720-755) in the Christianisation of northern Germany, and who in the usual fashion claimed to have baptised a hundred thousand natives in one year, secured the excommunication of several rival bishops of the anti-Roman school; and those who would not accept re-ordination at his hands he sought to have imprisoned or flogged, denouncing them, in the style of the churchman of all ages, as servants of the devil and forerunners of Antichrist. His authority was established in new districts at the head of an armed force; and when with fifty priests he met his death (755) in Friesland at the hands of heathen natives, he was marching with a troop of soldiers. Even where force was not used, the persuasions offered were of the grossest kind. Thus a friend of Boniface is found advising him to point out to the heathen that the Christians have the bulk and the best of the world, possessing all the rich lands which yield wine and oil, while the pagans are now confined to the coldest and most barren regions. No religion was ever more un spiritually propagated.

Under Charlemagne, Christian missionary methods left those of Islam in the rear. For the subjection of the still free Saxons, between the Baltic and the borders of Thuringia and Hesse, he needed the aid of the church's organisation; and they, realising the state of the case, for the most part refused to be baptised. In his wars with them, accordingly, he decreed that those who rejected the gospel should be put to death. As the wars lasted thirty-three years, the number of the slain must be left to imagination. The survivors were finally bribed into belief by a restoration of their local rights, and by being freed from tribute to the king. They do not seem, however, to have been freed from the exactions of the church, which, according to the testimony of Charlemagne's adviser, Alcuin, had been a main cause of the exasperation of the Saxons against it. Among those exactions Alcuin mentions not only tithes which had now become a recognised form of church revenue but the infliction of many penalties for moral and ecclesiastical offences. Such exactions the monarch endorsed; and he it was who enforced the payment of tithes.

King and priest were thus natural allies as against the freemen or the chieftains in each territory; and the advance of the church was bloody or bloodless according as the king was able to enforce his will. In the Scandinavian countries the founding of Christianity was a life-and-death struggle, lasting in all for some two hundred and fifty years (820-1075), between the local liberties, bound up with pagan usages, and the centralising system of the church. Again and again the church was overthrown, with the king who championed it; and the special ferocity of the marauding vikings against churchmen wherever they went seems to have been set up by their sense of the church's monarchic function. The fact that many priests were ex-serfs made them the more obnoxious; and they in turn would strive the more zealously for the church's protecting power. But the church's political work did not end with the humbling of the vikings, as such, at the hands of the kings who finally mastered them : it endorsed the aggressive imperialism of the Danish king Knut as it had done that of Borne; and never till the time of the Crusades does the ostensible universality of the church seem to have checked the old play of racial hatreds and the normal lust of conquest. So clearly did Charlemagne realise the political use of the church that, while he imposed it everywhere in his own dominions, he vetoed its extension to Denmark, where it would be a means of organising a probably hostile power, many of the stubborn Saxons having fled thither. From the moment of its establishment it had been stamped with the principle of political autocracy; and only when its own mounting power and wealth made it a world-State in itself did it restrain, in its own interest, the power of kings. In the earlier stages, king and church supported each other for their own sakes; and it was as a political instrument, whose value had been proved in the Roman Empire, that the church was sooner or later accepted by the barbarian kings. All the while popes and prelates complained bitterly that many of the converts thus won were baptised and rebaptised, yet continued to live as heathens, slaying priests and sacrificing to idols. When, however, open heathenism was beaten down, the combined political and religious prestige of the Christian priest gave him a hold over the multitude, forever superstitious, such as those of the heathen times had never wielded save in Gaul. To the new regal tyranny was added that of the Church.

When the Servians, who had been nominally Christianised under the rule of Byzantium in the eighth century, regained their independence in the ninth, they significantly renounced Christianity; and only after re-conquest were they again converted.

To the general rule of propagation by regal edict or by bloodshed there were a few partial exceptions. Vladimir, the first Christian king of the Russians (980), destroyed the old monuments and images in the usual fashion; but under the auspices of his wife, the sister of the Byzantine emperor, Greek missionaries set up many schools and churches, and the kingdom seems to have been bloodlessly Christianised within three generations. It accordingly remained Christian under the two and a half centuries of Mongol rule, from 1223. Elsewhere the conversion of the Slavs was a process of sheer monarchic violence, as in Scandinavia. Always it was the duke or king who was converted, and always his propaganda was that of the sword. Through three reigns (870-936) heathen Bohemia was bedevilled by dukes who coerced their subjects with the church's help : a pagan prince who led a successful revolt, but was overthrown by a German invasion, lives in history as Boleslav the Cruel; and an equally cruel successor, who with German help used the same means on behalf of Christianity, figures as Boleslav the Pious (967-999). The same process went on in Poland; the converted duke (967) , backed by his German overlords, seeking to suppress pagan worship with violence and meeting violent resistance. So among the Wends, who were also under German vassalage, the missionary was seen to be the tool of the tyrant, and the cause of paganism was identified with that of national independence. After generations of savage struggle, Gottschalk, the pious founder of the Wendish empire, was overthrown (1066) and put to death with torture. So in Hungary, where king Stephen (997-1038) combined slaughter with better propaganda, the king's death was followed by a desperate pagan revolt, which was twice renewed under his son.

Century after century, expansion proceeded on the same lines. The Finns, conquered in the twelfth century by a Christian king of Sweden, were still persistently pagan in the thirteenth, and were bloodily coerced accordingly. In the conversion of the Slavonic Pomeranians in the twelfth century, armed force, headed by the duke, was needed to secure wholesale baptisms after the fashion of Augustine and Boniface; the people of Liibeck, on the opportunity of an emperor's death, revolted in favour of paganism and independence; and the pagans of the isle of Biigen were Christianised in mass by Danish conquest (1168). It is recorded by the biographer of St. Otho that the Pomeranians expressly rejected Christianity on the score of its cruelty, saying, among the Christians are thieves and robbers [unknown among the heathen Slavs] : Christians crucify men and tear out eyes and do all manner of infamies : be such a religion far from us. The attempt to convert Livonia by preaching was an absolute failure; two crusades had to be set on foot by the Pope and the surrounding Christians to crush its paganism (circa 1200); and finally an Order of the Sword had to be organised to hold the religious ground. A little later, two Orders of Teutonic Knights in succession were established to conquer and convert the heathen Prussians; and after sixty years of murderous and ruinous warfare, a broken remnant, shielded in some measure by the intervention of the popes, were induced to discontinue all the heathen rites, to recognise the claims of the Teutonic Order, and to welcome the instruction of the German priests. Another remnant, utterly unsubduable, sought refuge with the heathens of Lithuania.

The summary of seven hundred years of Christian expansion in northern Europe is that the work was in the main done by the sword, in the interests of kings and tyrants, who supported it, as against the resistance of their subjects, who saw in the church an instrument for their subjection. Christianity in short was as truly a religion of the sword as Islam. When the Mongols conquered part of Bussia in 1223 they not only left the Christians full religious liberty but let the priests go untaxed; and similarly the Turks left to the Bulgarians their faith, their lands, and their local laws. Christianity gave no such toleration; the lands of the heathen Slavs and Prussians being distributed among their German conquerors. The heathen, broadly speaking, were never persuaded, never convinced, never won by the appeal of the new doctrine : they were either transferred by their kings to the church like so many cattle or beaten down into submission after generations of resistance and massacre. For a long time after the German conquest any Slav found away from home was liable to be executed on the spot, or killed like a wild beast by any Christian who would. And centuries after the barbarian heathenism of Europe was ostensibly drowned in blood, Christian Spain, having overthrown the Moslem Moors, proceeded in the same fashion to dragoon Moslems and Jews into the true faith, baptising in droves those who yielded or dissembled, and driving out of the country myriads more who would not submit. The misery and the butchery wrought from first to last are unimaginable. If the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru, with their church-blessed policy of suppressing heathenism, be added to the record, the totality of evil becomes appalling; for the Spanish priest Las Casas estimated the total destruction of native life at twelve millions. All this slaughter took place by way of expansion, and is exclusive of the further record of the slaughters wrought by the Church for the suppression of heresy within its established field. It is a strange prepossession that, in face of such a retrospect, habitually concentrates Christian thought on the remote and transient persecutions of Christianity by ancient paganism. If the blood shed on the score of religion by paganism and Christianity respectively be carefully estimated, the former might say to the latter, in the words of the latter-day heathen king of the Zulus who was crushed by an ostentatiously Christian statesmanship : The blood shed in my reign was, to the blood shed since, as an ant in a pool of water.

3. Growth of the Papacy.

One marked result of the triumph of Islam in the east and of barbarism in the west was the growth of the Roman Papacy as the supreme ecclesiastical power in Latin Christendom. So long as an emperor had his seat in Italy, the bishop or patriarch of Rome was kept in subordination to the State; and at Constantinople the subordination of the patriarch never ceased. But even in the period from the reconquest of Italy under Justinian to the final renunciation of Byzantine rule, though the Roman patriarchs depended on the emperor to ratify their election, the curtailment of the eastern empire, narrowing as it did the range of the eastern Church, weakened that relatively to the western; while the absence of local monarchy left the way open for an ecclesiastical rule, calling itself theocratic. Had the Italian kingdom of Theodoric subsisted, the development would certainly have been different. As it was, even he, an Arian, was called in to control the riotous strifes of papal factions in Rome. It belonged to all the patriarchates, as to all bishoprics, that their tenants should magnify their office; and even in the second century we have seen signs of an ambition in the Roman bishop to rule the rest of the Church. Already, presumably, there existed the gospel text : Thou art Petros, and upon this rock (petra) I will build my church an interpolation probably made in the Roman interest, and sure to sustain a Roman ambition for general headship. But as late as the fifth century some codices seem to have read simply Thou hast said; and in the third we find Cyprian of Carthage insisting on the independence of his church while admitting the ceremonial primacy of Rome a proof that the Roman claim was being pushed. In the fourth century, Pope Damasus sought to induce the eastern bishops to go to Rome for the settlement of disputes as to certain eastern bishoprics; but was sardonically admonished by a unanimous eastern council to alter his attitude. While the old empire subsisted, the Roman bishop could get no further than his old ceremonial status as holding the primary see in order of dignity. Neither the emperor nor the patriarch at Constantinople would consent to vest any supreme authority in the bishop of the ancient and relatively effete capital; and Theodosius definitely constituted the patriarch of Constantinople the equal of him of Rome (381), though ceremonially second to him. At the same time, the patriarch of Constantinople was set above those of Antioch and Alexandria, a step which promoted the worst of the later schisms and so helped to lose Egypt and Syria. On every side, the normal egoisms and racial instincts can thus be seen determining the fortunes of the faith. The fling of the Greek Basil at Rome, I hate the pride of that church, is typical. Even while the Roman bishop was pushing his claims to primacy, the see of Constantinople, backed by the emperor, was taking province after province from the Roman jurisdiction; and in 451 the Council of Chalcedon, with the support of the eastern emperor, decreed that the bishop of New Rome should enjoy equal honour and privilege with his rival. At the same period the bishop of Jerusalem, claiming primacy in his turn, contrived to gain ground as against those of Antioch and Alexandria. Each patriarchate fought for its own hand. The use of the special title of Papa by him of Rome was probably an imitation of Mithraism, in the hierarchy of which the chief priest was Father of Fathers, as the God was Father Mithra, and, like Attis, probably called Papa. In the Eastern church the name became general, all priests being popes.

In the history of the Papacy, it is the two early bishops most distinguished for widening the power of the church that alone have won the title of Great, to wit, Leo I. (440-461) and Gregory I. (590-604), of whom the first began to build up the Church's local patrimony on the fall of the western empire, and the second to establish her spiritual reign in the north. It is under the latter that the destiny of the Roman see as the head of the western churches begins clearly to reveal itself. The patriarch of Constantinople of that day took to himself the title of (Ecumenical or Universal; and Gregory, whose predecessors had aimed at that very status, pronounced the claim blasphemous, antichristian, and diabolical. A few years later, he was securing through the lesser Augustine his own supremacy over the previously independent churches of Britain. He even seems to have cringed to the usurping Byzantine emperor Phocas in order to get him to veto the claim of his rival, a concession which appears to have been granted to Boniface III. in 606. Still the papacy had to fight hard for its claims in Britain, Gaul, and Spain; and towards the end of the seventh century Bishop Julian of Toledo is found rating Benedict II. for ignorance and jealousy. As Julian was nevertheless sainted, we may infer that the jealousies of rival candidates for the papacy, leading to changes of policy, often checked its political growth. But events forced a policy. In the eighth century the iconoclastic emperors quarrelled with the papacy (under Gregory II.) as well as with Greek orthodoxy; whereupon the northern Lombards sought to become masters of what remained of imperial territory in Italy; and of a series of eight or nine Popes (730-772) the majority were fain to call in the help of the Franks. Charles Martel did not actively respond; but his son Pepin did twice, and as victor presented to the Pope (754) the sovereignty of the exarchate, receiving in return the pontiff's sanction to depose the last feeble Merovingian king, in whose name the house of Pepin had ruled. The end of the new departure was the conquest of the Lombards by Charlemagne in 774, and the establishment in 800 of the new Holy Roman Empire, wherein the Pope was the spiritual colleague of the emperor.

Hitherto the bishop of Rome had been popularly elected like every other, and subject like every other to acceptance by the emperor. But after Pope Zacharias (741-752) the eastern emperor was ignored; and Charlemagne was crowned as the successor, by Roman decision, not of the old emperors of the west, but of the line of emperors which in the east had never ceased. Constantine VI., who had just been deposed by his mother Irene (797), was the sixty-seventh Roman emperor in order from Augustus, and Charlemagne was enrolled in the west as the sixty-eighth. He even received, with the diplomatic assent of Haroun Alraschid, the keys of the Holy Sepulchre from the Patriarch of Jerusalem an empty but suggestive honour. It was thus inevitable that the new imperial line should sooner or later seek to hold power over the papacy as the old had claimed to do; and Charlemagne made his force felt very much as Constantine had done, going even further in the way of appointing bishops, and lecturing the pope at times with the consciousness of virtual supremacy. So long as the emperor, needing and using the services of the church to organise his administration, enriched the hierarchy on all hands, enforcing tithes and protecting the entire priesthood against lay turbulence, his pretensions were naturally allowed. Everything depended on the strength of the ruler; and already under Charlemagne's good but weak son Louis we find many of the bishops, backed by the pope, supporting the emperor's rebellious sons and claiming to depose him. About 875, again, we find Pope John VIII. not only hectoring the weak Charles the Fat but claiming the right to choose the emperor. Until, however, there began to rise in Italy a new and vigorous civilisation, the papacy was on the whole discreetly subject to the ratification of the northern emperors; and this is perhaps the period of maximum demoralisation and dishonour in its history; its economic evolution being very much on the lines of that of the original Church in the centuries from its establishment by Constantine till the humiliation of the empire by the Moslems. Intellectually, the papacy had no prestige within the Church. It was in 824 that a council of Prankish bishops at Paris, following on previous declarations, denounced as absurdity the decrees of the Pope enjoining the worship of images. Even when the Pope Gregory IV. entered France to support the bishops who backed the rebellious sons of Louis, and threatened to excommunicate those on the emperor's side, the latter treated him with indignant contempt.

It is in this period, however, that there begins the process of documentary fraud by which the Church, wielding the power of the pen, gradually circumvented that of the sword. Centuries before, the Roman see had made use of forged documents in its disputes with Constantinople; and the Greeks of the day declared such forgeries to be a special Roman industry. As a matter of fact, most of the early ecclesiastical forgeries had been of eastern origin : for instance the so-called Apostles' Creed and the Apostolical Constitutions. Of these the first grew up fortuitously in the third century, and received its name after it won currency. Only in the later middle ages was it adopted by the Latin Church. The Constitutions again were a deliberate compilation; and the Koman Church had invented nothing on the same scale. But in the ninth century there was trumped-up among the Frankish bishops, under the name of Isidore (ostensibly the popular encyclopedist of Seville, d. 636), a collection of professedly ancient but really spurious papal decretals, partly proceeding on previous practice, but greatly developing it as regarded the local independence of bishops and their right of appeal to Kome. The original motive of the fraud was local episcopal interest, the bishops having endless causes of grievance against their archbishops, kings, and lay lords. But Pope Nicholas I. (858-867) adroitly adopted the forged decretals, professing to have had ancient copies of them, and thenceforth they were made the basis of the papal claims wherever political circumstances gave a good opportunity. The bishops, being thus delivered over to the papacy, lost much more than they gained. A common use now made of the growing papal power was to give monasteries an exemption from the local bishop's rule; and as the monks in general at this period had a higher character for sanctity than the bishops, who were often extremely unreverend, local sympathy was apt to go with the former, and with the pope, whose distant misdeeds were little known to the laity.

As in previous ages, nevertheless, the disorders of the papacy itself greatly hampered its advance. In the period from John VIII. to Leo IX. (1048) six popes were deposed, two murdered, and one mutilated; prolonged contests for the chair were frequent; and in the main it was disposed of by factions of the Roman and Italian nobility. For a time the counts of Tuscany made it hereditary in their family; and once a Roman courtesan of the higher order decided the election, by help of the general worthlessness of the Roman electoral populace, who, having neither commerce nor industry, were fed by papal doles as of old they had been by the emperors. In the tenth century, the papacy had reached its nadir. The general expectation, based on the Apocalypse and other Christian tradition, that the world would end with the year 1000, seems to have turned the thoughts of the more serious away from worldly questions; while the more reckless types, lawless at best in that age, exhibited something of the wild licence seen at times in cities stricken by pestilence, and ships about to sink. When the dreaded year was past, riot was even quickened; but in the eleventh century a moral instinct began slowly to assert itself. The elections to the papacy had become so scandalous and ruinous three pretenders claiming the chair at once that the clergy themselves conceded to the emperor Henry III., in the year 1047, the right to appoint popes; and he used his power four times with judgment and success.

Naturally, however, the reform strengthened the papacy rather than the emperor. Pope Nicholas II., acting on the advice of his powerful secretary, the monk Hildebrand, who was to be one of his successors, decreed (1059) that the election of all bishops should lie with the local chapters and the pope; and that the election of the pope should in future be made by the seven cardinal bishops of the Roman district, with the assent first of the cardinal priests and deacons of the Roman churches, and next of the laity; the choice to be ratified by Henry IV., then a minor, or by such of his successors as should obtain the same privilege. Yet on the death of Nicholas, Hildebrand procured the election and consecration of Alexander II. without waiting for any ratification; and when he himself became Pope as Gregory VII. (1073) he was on the alert for his famous struggle with Henry over the claim of the temporal power to appoint bishops. Standing on the forged decretals, with an almost maniacal belief in his divine rights, he claimed as pope not only the sole power to confirm bishops but the power to take or give the possessions of all men as he would; and he threatened deposition to any king who dared to gainsay him. It was in the course of the struggle with Henry, by the use of the now common weapon of excommunication, that he reduced the emperor to his historic act of self-abasement (1077) at Canossa.

The circumstances were in the main in the pope's favour, Henry being rebelled against in Germany, and Gregory being well able to manipulate disaffection. At the same time, Gregory's strenuous efforts to reform the church by forcing celibacy on the entire priesthood had set against him multitudes of the Italian and northern clergy, married and otherwise; and these were indignant at Henry's surrender. Stimulated by their protests, and by the sympathy of various kings whom the pope had arrogantly menaced, he took heart, put down his rebels and rivals at home, and marched in force into Italy, where he met almost no resistance and was crowned by the antipope Clement III., whom he and his party had appointed. Gregory, besieged by his own flock in the castle of St. Angelo, called in his late-made ally the Norman Robert Guiscard, Duke of Sicily, who in releasing him burnt much of the city, and, after a sack and massacre, sold most of the remaining inhabitants as slaves. Everywhere the Pope's cause was lost, and he died defeated, in exile at Salerno under Norman protection, hated by both priests and people as the bringer of slaughter and misery on Germany and Italy alike. The reforming pontiff had wrought far more evil than his most sinful predecessors, and still the church was not reformed.

Henry, rebelled against by his sons, died brokenhearted like his enemy; and for half a century the strife over lay investitures was carried on by popes and emperors. The papacy had thus become the evil genius at once of Italy and of Germany, entering into and intensifying every Italian feud, and giving to German feudalism a fatal ground of combat for centuries. Out of all the strife the papacy made profit. When the war of the investitures was over, it built up the Decretum of the monk Gratian, a code embodying the Isidorean frauds with others, such as the gross pretence that St. Augustine had declared the Decretals to be of the same status with the canonical scriptures. The war, meantime, had ended in a compromise from which the papacy substantially gained. The result was to turn it ere long into a vast system of financial exploitation. Every evil in the way of simony and corruption against which Hildebrand had revolted was further developed under papal auspices. The people lost all power of electing their bishops; and the rich chapters, on whom the right devolved, became the field of simony for the nobles; while the pope drew from the sale of his ratifications an immense revenue. So rapid was the effect of the new relation that by the middle of the twelfth century the bulk of the current literature of Europe, serious and satirical, was bitterly hostile to Rome, which now impressed instructed men chiefly as a great machine for extortion. While the church officially denounced usury, its own usurers were everywhere drawing interest from prelates who had had to borrow money to buy their investitures. The pretence of making the clergy unworldly by enforced celibacy was under such circumstances not edifying. Needless to say, while clerical marriage could be officially put down, clerical concubinage was not.

The strength of the papacy as against its many enemies lay (1) in the strifes of States and nations, in which the pope could always intervene; (2) in the feeling of serious men that a central power was needed to control strife and tyranny; (3) in the compiled system of canon law, which expanded still further the code of the Decretals and of Gratian, and constantly exalted the papal power; (4) in the orders of preaching friars, who acted as papal emissaries, and kept in partial discredit the local clergy everywhere; and (5) in the power of the pope to appeal to the worst motives of ignorant believers. Thus at the beginning of the thirteenth century Innocent III., a zealous champion of the papal power, was able in the teeth of the common hostility of educated men to evoke an immense outburst of brutal fanaticism by offering indulgences, spiritual and temporal, to all who would join in a crusade of massacre against the Albigensian and other heretics of Languedoc, where the Paulician and other anti-clerical doctrines had spread widely. Twenty years of hideous bloodshed and demoralization went far to create an atmosphere in which criticism could not breathe; and the whole evocation of the eastern Crusades, both before and after this period, was carried on by the popes with a clear perception of the gain to their authority from the armed consensus of Christendom under their appeal, on the proffer of indulgences. They had hoped to extend their rule over the East, Christian and paynim; but though this dream came to nothing they were nonetheless aggrandised by the effort. The revived pretensions to dispose of all unclaimed territory on the globe, to depose heretic princes, and to confer sovereignties, were all reinforced.

When the Crusades had ceased, the papal curia, growing ever more exacting, began to draw all manner of yearly dues from churchmen throughout its jurisdiction, so that whereas in the thirteenth century it had only one auditor camera, in 1370 the pope had more than twenty, and every cardinal had a number in addition, they living like their superior by traffic in privileges. Under Gregory XI. (1370-78), seven bishops were excommunicated by one order for failure to pay their dues. Complaint was universal; but the vested interests made reform impossible. When, therefore, the Renaissance gradually gained ground against all obstacles, and masses of men became capable of judging the papacy in the light of history and reason as well as of its own code, it was inevitable that as soon as local economic interests became sufficiently marked, an institution which was everywhere an economic burden should incur an economic revolution.

In the meantime, the papacy had possessed itself of the power of life and death in the intellectual as well as in the religious sphere. The power it arrogated to itself under the false Isidorean Decretals carried implicitly if not explicitly the attribute of infallibility. To pronounce doctrines true or false had anciently been the function of councils; it now became the function of the pope, who thus treated councils exactly as kings later treated parliaments. Of old, successive popes had notoriously declared for contrary dogmas; many had contradicted themselves; and down to the thirteenth century there had been a score of papal schisms, all of which were surpassed by those of the fourteenth century; but that reflection put no check on later decisions on the most momentous problems. The religion which began in private dissidence from Jewish and pagan orthodoxies had become the most iron dogmatism the world had ever seen; and the whole system of Christian credence had come to turn on the fiat of one man. At his sole veto the sciences must be dumb; and to him must come for sanction those who would found new schools. The faith that had begun as liberty from the yoke of the law had come to elevate the negation of mental liberty into a principle of universal polity, translating into the inner life the despotism which the older Home had placed on the outer. Latin Christianity had thus duplicated on the one hand the development of ancient Gaulish Druidism, wherein the priests were a sacred and ruling caste and the arch-Druid semi-divine, and on the other hand the evolution of the ancient Egyptian system, under which latterly the priesthood compelled the king to obtain the approbation of the sacred statues before taking any public step, till at length the true master of Egypt was the Premier Prophet of the Theban Ammon, interpreter of the God, and priest also of the mediatorial Son-God Khonsu. In all cases alike the sociological causation is transparent from first to last; and equally clear are the special conditions which prevented the Holy Roman Empire from following to the end the path trodden by ancient Egyptian and Roman imperialism.

CHAPTER II.

RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION AND STRIFE.

1. Growth of Idolatry and Polytheism.

BY the seventh century all that idolatry had meant for the early Christists was reproduced within the Christian Church in east and west. There was nothing, to begin with, in the inner life of the populace in the Christian period that could keep them from the kinds of belief natural to the multitude in pagan times. Only under the stress of a zealous movement of reform, backed up by fanatical power, had image-worship ever been put down for a single nation, as among the Persians and later Jews; and only the original Jewish taboo, backed by the Jewish sacred books, could have kept Christism anti-idolatrous for any length of time after it had passed beyond the sphere of Jewish proselytism. After it had become a State religion, the adoption of images was as necessary to its popularity as the adoption of pagan festivals and rites. Images of martyrs and holy men deceased seem to have been first venerated; and when the bones of such were held to have miraculous virtue, and their spirits were believed to haunt their tombs, it was impossible that their effigies should not come to have similar repute. Dust from Palestine or other holy places, again, was early regarded as having magical virtue a permitted belief which prepared the way for others. So with the figure of the Christ. From the first, the sign of the cross was held to be potent against evil spirits; and Helena, the mother of Constantine, gave an irresistible vogue to the worship of what was alleged to be the true cross, and to have worked miraculous cures. As early as the fourth century the Christians at Paneas in Palestine seem to have taken an old statue of a male and a female figure as representing Jesus healing the believing woman; and in the sixth century paintings on linen, held to have been miraculously made by the face of the Saviour, began to be revered. Being so different from pagan statues, the idols of Jewish aversion, they readily passed the barrier of the traditional veto on idolatry. Here again, however, the lead came from paganism, as we know from Juvenal that many painters in his day lived upon Isis, then the fashionable foreign deity at Rome. Crucifixes and images of all kinds inevitably followed. Valens and Theodosius passed laws forbidding pictures and icons of Christ; but such laws merely emphasized an irrepressible tendency. As for Mary, her worship seems from the first to have been associated with that of old statues of a nursing Goddess-Mother, and the statues followed the cult, some black statues of Isis and Horus being worshipped to this day as representing Mary and Jesus.

When an image was once set up in a sacred place, there soon came into play the old belief, common to Egyptians and Romans, that the spirit of the being represented would enter the statue. Hence all prayers to saints were addressed wherever possible to their images, and the same usage followed the introduction of images of Jesus and the Virgin. And while the Theodosian code contained laws prohibiting on pain of death the placing of wreaths on pagan statues and the burning of incense before them, the Christian populace within a century was doing those very things to the statues of saints. In the same way the use of holy water, which in the time of Valentinian was still held un-christian, became universal in the church a century or two later. Images could not well be left out. The old Judaic conception of the supreme being was indeed too strong to permit of his being imaged; though in the fourth century the Audaeans, a Syrian sect of a puritan cast, held that the deity was of human shape, and were accordingly named Anthropomorphites; but the orthodox insistence on the human form of Jesus was a lead to image-making. Thus for the Moslems the eastern Christians were idolaters as well as polytheists; and the epistles of Gregory the Great show him to have zealously fostered the use of miraculous relics and sacred images in the west. Professing to condemn the worship of images, he defended their use against Bishop Selenus of Marseilles, who ejected them from his church. One of Gregory's specialties in relics was the chain of St. Paul, from which filings could be taken daily without diminishing the total bulk. It was presumably while all pagan usages were still familiar that the Italian Christians adopted the custom of painting the statues of saints red, in the common pagan fashion, as they did the old custom of carrying the images in procession. For the rest, they had but to turn to the lore of the pagan temples for examples of statues brought from heaven, statues which worked miracles, statues which spoke, wept, perspired, and bled all of which prodigies became canonical in Christian idolatry.

Some scrupulous and educated Christians, such as Epiphanius and Augustine, had naturally set their faces against such a general reversion to practical idolatry, just as many educated pagans had done on philosophical grounds; and the council of Elvira in the fourth century condemned the admission of pictures into churches, but without any lasting effect. In the eighth century, when it could no longer be pretended that Christian images served merely for edification, the Greek emperor Leo the Isaurian began the famous iconoclastic movement in the east. It is probable that he was influenced by Saracen ideas, with which he often came in contact; though it has been held that his motive was mainly political, the local worship of images having weakened the central authority of the Church. But after some generations of struggle and fluctuation, despite the ready support given to iconoclasm by many bishops, the throne reverted to orthodoxy, and idolatry thenceforth remained normal in the Greek as in the Latin Church. The one variation from pagan practice lay in the substitution of pictures and painted wooden images or icons for the nobler statues of past paganism, with which indeed Christian art could not pretend for a moment to compete.

In the west, though the iconoclastic emperors met from the popes not sympathy but intense hostility, leading soon to the severance of Rome from the empire, we find in the ninth century a remarkable opposition to image-worship on the part of Claudius bishop of Turin, and Agobard bishop of Lyons, both of whom show a surprising degree of rationalism for their age. Claudius opposed papal claims as well as saint-worship and image-worship, and when condemned by a council of bishops called them asses; and Agobard opposed all the leading superstitions of his day, even going so far as to pronounce the theory of plenary inspiration an absurdity. As both men were born in Spain there is reason to suspect that they like Leo had been influenced by the higher Saracen thought of the time. In any case, their stand was vain; and though the northern nations, mainly perhaps by reason of their backwardness in the arts, were slow to follow the Italian lead, a century or two sufficed to make the whole Latin Church devoutly image-worshipping. At no time, of course, had any part of it been otherwise than boundlessly credulous as to miracles of every order, and as to the supernatural virtue of relics of every species; and both, accordingly, abounded on all hands. The average mass of Christendom was thus on the same religious and psychological plane as pagan polytheism.

Polytheistic, strictly speaking, Christianity had been from the first, the formula of the Trinity being no more truly monotheistic for the new faith than it had been for ancient Egypt; and the mere belief in an Evil Power being a negation of monotheism. But when saints came to be prayed to at separate shrines, and every trade had its saint-patron, the Christian system was both theoretically and practically as polytheistic as that of classic Greece, where Zeus was at least as truly the Supreme God as was the Father for Christians. And in the elevation of Mary to Goddesshood even the formal semblance of monotheism was lost, for her worship was in the main absolute. The worship, indeed, was long established before she received technical divinisation from the Church, such Fathers as Epiphanius and Augustine having too flatly condemned her early worship to permit of a formal declaration to the contrary. But in the thirteenth century, St. Bonaventura, who expressly maintained that the same reverence must be paid to the Virgin's image as to herself a doctrine established in the same period by Thomas Aquinas in regard to Christ arranged a Psalter in which domina was substituted for dominus (in te domina speravi); and this became the note of average Catholicism. In the twelfth century began the dispute as to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin the doctrine, that is, of her supernatural birth on which in later ages the Dominicans and Franciscans fought a bitter and obstinate battle, the latter affirming and the former denying the dogma. After seven centuries of temporising, the Papacy has in recent times endorsed it (1854); but for a thousand years it has been implicit in the ritual of the Catholic Church.

It is not generally known among Protestants that the deification of Joseph has long been in course of similar evolution. In the fifteenth century, Saint Teresa seems to have regarded him as the plenipotentiary of God (= Jesus), obtaining from the deity in heaven whatever he asked, as he had done on earth according to the Apocrypha. The cult has never been very prominent; but the latter-day litany of St. Joseph treats him as at least the equal of the Virgin. The devotion to him, says Cardinal Newman, is comparatively of late date. When once it began, men seemed surprised that it had not been thought of before; and now they hold him next to the Blessed Virgin in their religious affection and veneration. It had of course been dogmatically retarded by the insistence on the virginity of Mary. But Gerson, one of the most distinguished theologians of the fourteenth century, is credited by modern Catholics with having suggested the recognition of a second or created Trinity of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And seeing that Joseph in the popular medieval representations of the Advent Mystery is a constant figure, it is inferrible that for the multitude he had practically a divine status. The process is strictly in keeping with religious evolution in general; and the official apotheosis of Joseph may one day take place.

2. Doctrines of the Eucharist, Purgatory, and Confession.

In the first ages of the Church, the notion of the divinity of the body and blood of the communion meal was vague and undefined. The partakers certainly regarded the consecrated bread and wine as carrying some supernatural virtue, since they took away portions for medicinal use; but they thought of the meal very much as devout pagans thought of one of the same kind in their mysteries or temple ritual. When their ritual phraseology was challenged as giving colour to the charge of cannibalism, the Fathers seem always to have explained that the terms were purely figurative; and such was the doctrine laid down by Augustine. But when pagan culture had passed away, and there were none in the barbarised West to challenge the Church as such, the strange literalness of the original liturgy set up the stranger belief that what was eaten in the eucharist was by transubstantiation the actual flesh and blood of the God-Man. Where such a belief was possible, it was the special interest of the priesthood to make the affirmation. A stupendous miracle, they claimed, was worked every time the eucharist was administered; but it was worked through the priest. He and he only could bring it about; and thus the central mystery and prodigy of the faith, the command of its most essential ministry, was a clerical monopoly. The economic and spiritual centre of gravity of the entire system was fixed in the priestly order.

Under such a dominating conception, Christianity was for the majority a religion neither of faith nor of works : it was a religion of sacerdotal magic. Not he that believed, still less he that loved his neighbour, but he only that received the mystic rite at consecrated hands, was to be saved. Moral teaching there might be, but more than ever it was supererogatory. Already in the fourth century the sacerdotal quality of the rite was defined by the practice of solemnly elevating the wine and the hostia or sacrifice, as the bread was termed, before every distribution; and it had become common to administer it two or three times a week. Thus the missa or Mass, as it had come to be termed (presumably from the formula of dismissal, lie, missio est, corrupted into Missa cst another pagan detail), had passed from the status of a periodical solemnity to that of a frequent service; and the rite was developed by the addition of chants and responses till it became the special act of Christian worship. The symbols were thus already far on the way to be worshipped; and at the beginning of the seventh century Gregory the Great enacted that the slightest irregularities in their use should be atoned for by penances. Thus if a drop from the cup should fall on the altar, the ministering priest must suck up the drop and do penance for three days; and the linen cloth which the drop touched must be washed three times over the cup, and the water in which it is washed be cast into the fire.

In various other ways the traditional practice was modified. Originally a supper, it was frequently partaken of after the Agapa or love feasts; but in the fourth century the irrepressible disorders of those assemblages led to their being officially discountenanced, and they gradually died out. Soon the Mass in the churches became a regular morning rite, and the eucharist was taken fasting. After Leo the Great, in the Roman services, it was even administered several times in the day. Finally, in or before the eleventh century, the priesthood, from motives either of economy or of sobriety, began to withhold the wine-cup from communicants, and to reserve it for the priests a practice which Leo the Great had denounced as heretical. The official argument seems to have been that the body must include the blood, and that the miracle which turned the bread into flesh created the divine blood therein. One of the most popular miracle stories was to the effect that when once a Jew stabbed a Host, it bled; and the Host in question was long on exhibition. Of older date, apparently, is the administration of the bread in the form of a wafer, this being admittedly an imitation either of the ancient pagan usage of consecrating and eating small round cakes in the worship of many deities, or of the Jewish unleavened bread of the Passover. It may, indeed, have come through Manichseism, which at this point followed Mazdean usage; and as the Manichaeans also had the usage of bread without wine, it may be that both practices came from them in the medieval period. But as the priestly practice of turning round at the altar was taken direct from ancient paganism, with the practice of shaving the head, it is likely that the wafer was also. The rite thus settled being a conditio sine qua non of church membership and spiritual life, it became the basis of the temporal power of the church. Without it there was no religion ; and as the communicant in order to retain his rights must make confession to the priest at least once a year, the hold of the church on the people was universal. Any one rejecting its authority could be excommunicated; and excommunication meant the cessation of all the offices of social life, each man being forced by fear for himself to stand aloof from the one condemned. The obligation to confess, in turn, was an evolution from the primitive practice of voluntary public confession of sin before the church. When that went out of fashion, private confession to the priest took its place; and when the public reading of such confessions by the priest gave offence, Leo the Great directed that they should be regarded as secret. What was thus made for criminals an easy means to absolution became at length an obligation for all. In the East, indeed, it seems to have reached that stage in the fifth century, when a scandal caused the rule to be given up, leaving to the Western church its full exploitation. Sacerdotal confession, thus instituted, was one more hint from the book of paganism, sagaciously developed. In the ancient Greek mysteries, priests had unobtrusively traded on the principle that the initiate must be pure, first inviting confession and then putting a scale of prices on ceremonial absolution; but in the pagan world the system had never gone far. It was left to Roman Christianity to make it coextensive with the Church, and thus to create a species of social and economic power over mankind which no other religion ever attained.

But yet a third hold over fear and faith was wrought by the priesthood. Even as the priestly saying of Masses, bought at a price, was needed to keep the Christian safe in life, so the buying of Masses could hasten the release of his soul from purgatory after death. Purgatory was, to begin with, yet another pagan tenet, which in the first five centuries was regarded by the Church as heretical, though the text about the spirits in prison (1 Peter iii. 19; cp. 1 Cor. v. 5) gave colour to it, and Origen had entertained it. In all the writings of Ambrose it is not mentioned; Augustine treats it as dubious in despite of the authority of Origen; and the Eastern church has never accepted the tenet. But in the writings of Gregory the Great it is treated as an established principle, with the economic corollary that he who would save himself or his kindred from prolonged pains in purgatory must lay out money on atoning Masses. Thus the whole cycle of real and supposed human experience was under the church's sway, and at every stage on the course the pilgrim paid toll. The episodes of birth, marriage, and death were alike occasions for sacraments, each a source of clerical revenue : the fruits of the earth paid their annual tithe; and beyond death itself the church sold privilege in the realm of shadows, winning by that traffic, perhaps, most wealth of all.

It was a general corollary from the whole system that the Church had the right to grant indulgences for sin. If the church could release from penalties in purgatory, it might grant pardons at will on earth. Such a doctrine was of course only very gradually evolved. First of all, perhaps again following a Manichaean precedent, the bishops individually began to waive canonical penances in consideration of the donation by offenders of sums of money for religious purposes. The principle is expressly laid down by Gregory I. There was at the outset no thought of selling the permission to commit an offence; the bishop merely used the opportunity of committed offences to enrich his church, very much as the law in so many cases inflicts fines instead of imprisonment. The procedure, too, was local and independent, even as that of abbots and monks who sold the privilege of seeing and kissing holy relics, which they often carried round the country in procession for revenue purposes. Only after such means of income had long been in use did the papacy attempt to monopolise the former, in virtue of its prerogative of the keys. But step by step it absorbed the power to release from ordinary penances and to grant plenary remission from penances; and finally it undertook, what the bishops had never ventured on, to remit the penalties of purgatory in advance. Such enterprise was evoked only by a great occasion the Crusades.

The earlier papal indulgences were remissions of penance, and were often given on such tolerable grounds as pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and loyal observance of the papal institution of a Truce of God on certain days of the week; indeed one of the original motives may even have been that of controlling the mercenary proceedings of bishops. But when once the popes had proffered plenary indulgence to all crusaders, decency was at an end. It was obvious that the effect was demoralising to the last degree; and still the practice continued. At the beginning of the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III. offered absolution from all sins past and future, dispensation from the payment of interest on debts, and exemption from the jurisdiction of the ordinary law courts, to all who would serve for a given period in the crusade against the Albigensian and other heretics in the territory of the Count of Toulouse. Later, similar inducements were offered to all who would take up arms against the Moors in Spain. If the moral sense of Christendom were not thus wholly destroyed, it is because all social life necessitates some minimum of morality, which no system can uproot.

Thenceforth the practice went from bad to worse, despite many earnest protests from the better and saner sort of churchmen, till it became possible for popes to allot the traffic in indulgences in given districts as kings allotted trading monopolies, and the enormity of the practices of the agents gave a sufficient ground for the decisive explosion of the Reformation. Before that explosion an attempt was made, on the lines of ancient Roman law, to give the practice plausibility by the formula that the indulgence was granted out of the superfluous merits of Christ and the saints, a treasure of spare sanctity which it lay with the Pope to distribute. But this doctrine, which savoured so much of the counting-house, was contemporaneous with the worst abuse the principle ever underwent after the age of the Crusaders.

3. Rationalistic Heresies.

As we have seen in connection with the growth of idolatry, there was even in the Dark Ages an earnest minority within the Church which resisted the downward bias of the majority and of their hierarchical rulers. In no period, probably, was the spirit of reason wholly absent; and from time to time it bore distinct witness. Thus we find alongside of the effort of Claudius and Agobard against idolatry and extraneous superstitions a less vigorous but no less remarkable testimony against the central superstition of the priestly system. When the Frankish monk Paschasius Radbert (831) put flatly what had become the orthodox doctrine of Rome as to the transubstantiation of the eucharist, some of the northern scholars who had preserved the pre-barbaric tradition were found to gainsay him. As the discussion continued long the liberal-minded Frankish emperor, Charles the Bald, invited special replies; and a learned monk, Ratramnus, wrote a treatise to the effect that the real presence was spiritual, not corporeal. But John the Scot (then = Irishman) , otherwise known as Erigena, wrote on the same invitation to the effect that the bread and wine were merely symbols or memorials of the Last Supper a heresy so bold that only the emperor's protection could have saved the utterer. And his freethinking did not end there, for in the discussion on predestination begun by the monk Gottschalk, in which John was invited to intervene by the bigoted abbot Hincmar, the Irish scholar was again recalcitrant to authority; while on the question of Deity and Trinity he held a language that anticipated Spinoza, and brought upon his memory, when he was long dead, the anathema of the papacy. Another Irishman of the same period, Macarius or Macaire, taught a similar pantheism in France.

John Scotus, however, was by far the greatest thinker of the Dark Ages, and it was impossible that his ideas should become normal. Not for two hundred years was there any overt result from his and Ratramnus's heresy on the eucharist. Then (1045) Berengar of Tours set forth a modified doctrine of the eucharist which rested on that of Ratramnus, and brought on him a series of prosecutions at Rome for heresy, from the punishment for which he was saved by Hildebrand, as papal adviser and later as Pope; but also by his own formal retractations, to which however he did not adhere. The populace, he tells us, would gladly have slain him; and more than once he had narrow escapes. After all he did but affirm a spiritual real presence ; and while some of his party went as far as John Scotus, the stand for reason was soon tacitly abandoned, the great majority even of the educated class accepting the priestly dogma. Not till the Reformation was it again firmly challenged, and even then not by all the reformers.

A similar fortune attended the attempt of the French canon Rousselin (Roscellinus), also in the twelfth century, to rationalise the doctrine of the Trinity. Proceeding logically as a Nominalist, denying the reality of abstractions, he argued that if the Three Persons were one thing it waa only a nominal thing. His heresy, however, admittedly ended in simple tritheism; and after he, like Berengar, had on pressure recanted, his subsequent withdrawal of his recantation did not revive excitement. Not till the sixteenth century did Unitarianism assert itself against Trinitarianism, and Deism against both. There was indeed a great development of general rationalism in philosophy in the twelfth century, especially in France, as represented by Abailard; and even in the eleventh the argument of Anselm to prove the existence of God shows that very radical scepticism had indirectly made itself heard; but no philosophic movement affected the teachings and practices of the Church as such. As for the kind of rationalism which denied the immortality of the soul, though it seems to have been somewhat common at Florence early in the twelfth century, it never took such propagandist form as to bring on it the assault of the papacy; and the occasional philosophic affirmation of the eternity of matter met the same immunity. It is remarkable that, despite the denunciation of all the truths of ancient science by the church, the doctrine of the roundness of the earth was still affirmed in the eighth century by a priest of Bavaria named Virgilius, who was duly denounced for his heresy by St. Boniface, and excommunicated by the pope. Still the knowledge persisted; and though in the fourteenth century Nicolaus of Autricuria was compelled to recount his teaching of the atomistic theory, in the fifteenth his namesake of Cusa taught with impunity the rotation of the earth on its axis, being despite that made a cardinal; while the Italian poet Pulci with equal impunity affirmed the existence of an Antipodes. Nicolaus of Cusa even put forth the doctrine of the infinity of the physical universe the beginning of modern pantheistic and atheistic philosophy.

As the Renaissance began to glimmer, a new source of heresy can be seen in the higher teaching heretical in its own sphere of Saracen philosophy, which under Aristotelian and Jewish influences had gone far while Christendom was sinking in a deepening darkness. The effects of Saracen contacts, acting on minds perhaps prepared by the doctrine of John Scotus, first became obvious in the pantheistic teaching of Amalrich of Bena and David Dinant at the end of the twelfth century. Amalrich was forced to abjure; and after his death his bones were dug up and burned (1209), and many of his followers burned alive; David of Dinant having to fly for his life. Then it was that a Council held at Paris vetoed all study of Aristotle at the university. Yet in 1237 the veto was withdrawn; and as Aristotle became the basis of the systematic theology of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), his philosophy was thenceforth the orthodox system in the schools. From the first it must have counted for indirect scepticism; and in the great Summa Tlieolocjice of Thomas himself are to be seen abundant traces of the new doubt of the age, much of it set up by reflection on the spectacle of conflicting religious dogmatisms in the Crusades, some of it by Saracen philosophy, especially that of Averroes. In Sicily and Southern Italy, which under Frederick II. were the special seat of this doubt and of the tendency to tolerance which it generated, the spirit of reason ultimately fared ill; but thenceforth an element of scepticism pervades the higher life of Europe. Saracen science, medical, chemical, and astronomical the virtual foundation of all the modern science of Europe tended in the same direction. In Italy, in particular, respect for the church and papacy almost ceased to exist among educated men; and the revival of such specific heresies as disbelief in immortality and belief in the eternity of matter prepared the way for simple deism.

But against all such heresy the Church could hold its ground in virtue of its vast vested interests, as well as of the subjection of the mass, superstitious even when irreverent. The practical danger to the Church's power lay first in the growth of anti-clerical feeling among people with religious instincts, and secondarily in the anti-clerical economic interest of the nobility and upper classes in all the northern countries. What delayed disaster was the slowness of the two hostile elements to combine.

4. Anti-clerical Heresies.

The kind of heresy which first roused the Church to murderous repression was naturally that which struck at its monopolies. After the ancient schism of the Donatists, which so organised itself as to set up a rival church, the sect which was most bloodily persecuted in the period of established Christianity from Theodosius onwards was the Manichaean, visibly the Church's most serious rival. So, in the dark ages, the heresies which roused most priestly anger were the movement against image-worship; the predestinarian doctrine of Gottschalk, which, though orthodox and Augustinian, was now felt to undermine the priest's power over souls in purgatory; and that which impugned the priestly miracle of the eucharist, the main hold of the priesthood over society. And the first resort to general and systematic massacre as against heresy in the west was made after there had arisen in the eleventh and twelfth centuries a movement of popular schism which assailed not only a number of leading rites and dogmas, but flatly denied the priestly prerogative.

Of this movement the first stages occurred in the eastern empire, in the sect known as Paulicians, who are first heard of under that name in Armenia in the seventh century. Their founder however, one Constantine, afterwards known as Sylvanus, worked on existing bases. The name of the sect seems to have stood for an appeal to Paul as against paganised Christianity; and it had Marcionite elements; but though it was at first anti-Gnostic and anti-Manichsean, it acquired both Gnostic and Manichaean or at least Mazdean characteristics, even in the teaching of Sylvanus. On the face of the case, it suggests both Persian and Moslem influences. Its practical heresies were opposition to the adoration of images and relics, to the use of the Old Testament, to the worship of saints, angels, and the Virgin; and to the prerogatives of monks and priests, the sectaries claiming to read the New Testament for themselves, in defiance of the virtual veto of the Greek Church on such study by the laity. For the rest, they insisted that baptism and the eucharist were spiritual and not bodily rites, and even reaffirmed the Docetic doctrine that Jesus had not a true human body, and so was incapable of suffering. Their flat denial of priestly claims marked them out as a specially obnoxious body, and they were fiercely persecuted, the founder being stoned to death.

Like all the other sects, they were in turn divided, and one section had the protection of Leo the Iconoclast, who agreed with them as to images. A later leader, Sergius or Tychicus, won for his sect the favour of Nicephorus I.; but the next iconoclast, Leo the Armenian, resenting their other heresies, cruelly persecuted them; and like previous heretical sects they were driven over to the national enemy, which was now Islam. Constantine Copronymus, seeking to remedy this state of things, transplanted many of them to Constantinople and Thrace, thus bringing their heresy into Europe; but in the ninth century, on the final restoration of image-worship, a vast multitude was massacred in Armenia, most of the remnant going over to the Saracens, and becoming the fiercest enemies of the empire.

From Thrace, meanwhile, their propaganda spread into Bulgaria, where it prospered, with the help of refugees from Armenia. In the tenth century they were to some extent favoured as a useful bulwark against the Slavs; but in the eleventh they were again persecuted; and as the malcontents of the empire in general tended to join them they became the ruling party in Bulgaria. Thus it came about that the name Bulgar, Bulgarian, became a specific name in mid-Europe for heretic, surviving to this day in that sense in the French form of bougre. The Paulicians, further, had their own extremists, who held by the old Marcionite veto on marriage, and received the Greek name of cathari, the pure a title sometimes given to the whole mass, from whom, however, the purists were in that case distinguished as perfccti. Either from the Cathari or from the Chazari, a Turkish tribe whose Christianity in the ninth century was much mixed with Mohammedanism, came the Italian nickname yazzari, and the German word for heretic, ketzer. Yet another eastern sect, the Slavonic Bogomilians, who remained monotheistic as against the dualism of the Paulicians, joined in the wave of new beliefs which began to beat from the east on central Europe.

From the very beginning of the eleventh century, outbreaks of the new heresy, always anti-clerical and anti-ceremonial, occurred at intervals in France, northern Italy, and Germany. In some cases, the opposition to priests, images, and Virgin-worship extended to a denial of all miracles and sacraments, and an assertion of the eternity of matter apparent signs of Saracen philosophic influence. But the movement developed a thoroughness of enmity to everything ecclesiastical, that told of a quite independent basis in the now widespread hostility to the Church of Home outside of its centre of wealth and power. For one or two generations the crusades drew off the superfluous energy of Europe, and the new heresies were somewhat overshadowed; but in the first half of the twelfth century, when the crusades had lost all religious savour, anti-clericalism sprang up on all hands. Tanquelin in Flanders; Peter de Brueys (founder of the Petrobrussians) in Languedoc; the monk Henry in Switzerland and France; Eudo of Stello in Brittany, and Arnold of Brescia in Italy, all wrought either religiously or politically against the Church; and all died by her violence, or in prison. Arnold, the most capable of all, was a pupil of Abailard, and his doctrine was that the entire vested wealth of the Church should be taken over by the civil power, leaving the clergy to live sparingly by the gifts of the faithful. His movement, which lasted twenty years, and was very strong in Lombardy, went so far as to set up a short-lived republic in Rome; but it needed only a combination of the pope and the emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, to bring the republic to the ground, and Arnold to crucifixion.

Among the other revolters there was a good deal of fanaticism; but all were more or less emphatic in denouncing priestly pretensions, sacraments, cross-worship, prayers for the dead, penance, image-worship, church bells, altars, and even churches. It seemed as if the end of the Church had begun. For, though each new prophet in turn was slain, new heretics seemed to rise from the ashes. With various positive tenets, they were at one in their enmity to the priesthood. In Italy there nourished a sect called the Pasagini (apparently = Passac/ieri, Crusaders) or the Circumcised, who returned to the law of Moses and to Ebionite views of Jesus; in France, a different order of zealots, called Caputiati from the habit of carrying an image of the Virgin on their hats, stood for a return to primeval equality and liberty. Between such types of heresy stood the Apostolici, mostly poor working-folk, but with powerful sympathisers, who urged a return to the apostolic ideal of poverty and simplicity, and further discouraged marriage, calling themselves the chaste brethren and sisters. Two of their leaders, Sagarelli and Fra Dolcino, had shown the usual aversion to the Church, Dolcino predicting the formation of native States and the purification of the Papacy; so they, too, were put to death, being burnt at the stake. And still new revolters appeared.

At this stage there came to the front the sectaries known in history as the Vaudois or Waldenses, a name standing properly for the inhabitants of the Vaux or Valleys of Piedmont, but further connected with the teaching of one Peter Waldus, a Lyons merchant, whose followers received also the name of the Poor Men of Lyons. How far the anti-Catholic tenets of the Waldenses derive from ancient heresy is uncertain; but it is clear that late in the twelfth century they were acted on by the immense ferment of new ideas around them. Like the Paulicians, they insisted that the laity should read the Bible for themselves; and their men and women members went about preaching wherever they could get a hearing, and administering the eucharist without priestly sanction. At the same time they condemned tithes, opposed fasting and prayers for the dead, preached peace and non-resistance, denied the authority of the Pope, and impeached the lives of the clergy.

All of these forces of heresy, and yet others, were specially at work in the rich and prosperous region of Languedoc, the patrimony of Count Raymond of Toulouse. Paulicians and Waldenses, Cathari, Albanensians or sectaries of Albano, Albigensians or sectaries of the town of Alby or the district of Albigensium, Bogomilians, Apostolici, Caputiati, and nondescript Paterini (a Milanese name for a popular faction) all were active in the name of religion; and in addition there were at work heretics of another stamp the gay, wandering Goliards or satirical poets and minstrels, who loved the priests and the papacy as little as did the zealots; and the graver doubters who had got new views of life from Saracen science and philosophy. As against the whole amorphous mass of misbelief, the Papacy planned and effected a stupendous crusade of slaughter.

From the first the Manichteans, as the church loved to call the heretics indiscriminately, had been bloodily punished. One bishop of the eleventh century, Wazon of Liege, is to be remembered as having protested against the universal policy of slaughter; and another, Gerhard of Cambrai and Arras, is said to have won over some heretics by persuasion; but these were voices in the wilderness. Fire, sword, halter, and cross were the normal methods of repression; and during the eleventh and twelfth centuries thousands probably so perished. But the campaign which came to be known as the Albigensian crusade was planned by Pope Innocent III. to outdo all the isolated punishments of the past, and it succeeded. Grounds for quarrel with the Count of Toulouse were easily found; and the offer of indulgences, on the lines laid down in the crusades against the Saracens, brought eager volunteers from all parts of Europe, for only forty days' service was now called for. The submission of Count Raymond was not permitted to check the massacre of his subjects. It was in the first campaign that the papal legate Arnold, abbot of Cliteaux, when asked at the storming of Beziers how the heretics were to be distinguished from the true believers, gave the historic answer, Kill all; God will know. By his own account they killed in that one place fifteen thousand men, women, and children. The chroniclers, who make the slain twice or thrice as many, tell how seven thousand of them were found in the great church of Mary the Magdalene her from whom, in the legend, had been cast out seven devils without letting of blood. Begun in 1209, the Albigensian crusades outlasted the life of Innocent III., who grew sick of the slaughter while the priesthood were calling for its extension. They praised in particular the Anglo-French Simon de Montfort, who slew many of his victims by torture, and tore out the eyes of many more. For nearly twenty years the wars lasted, plunder being a sufficient motive after heresy had been drowned in blood or driven broadcast throughout Europe. It has been reckoned that a full million of all ages and both sexes were slain. Yet as late as 1231 Pope Gregory IX. was burning troops of the heretics at Rome, and causing many more to be burned in France and Germany.

The precocious civilisation of Languedoc and Provence was destroyed, and the region became a stronghold of Catholic fanaticism; but the political diversity of Europe baffled the papal hope of destroying heresy. Thenceforth the anti-clerical animus never died out : in the course of the thirteenth century it reached even England, then the most docile section of the Catholic fold. Generations before Wiclif, there were heretics in the province of Canterbury who denied the authority of the Pope and even of the Fathers, professing to stand solely on the Bible and the principle of necessary reason. Wiclif stood on a less heterodox plane, impugning chiefly the extreme form of transubstantiation and the practices of the begging friars; and he was proportionately influential. In the fourteenth century, when international crusades of repression had become politically impossible, the critical spirit is seen freshly at work on anti-papal lines in England, Flanders, France, Germany, and Bohemia, as well as in Italy; and again the more energetic began in their earnest ignorance to frame new schemes of life in the light of their sacred books. The lapse of time and the continuance of orthodox culture had made an end of the old Paulician heresy as such; and of the new movements many, like that set up by Saint Francis in the period of the Albigensian crusades, were meant to be strictly obedient to the Church. Such were the Brethren of the Common Lot, a body set up in Holland by educated Churchmen after the so-called Beghards (otherwise Beguins or Beguttae) had there for a time flourished and degenerated. But the Beghards and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who spread widely over northern Europe, had not only aimed at a communal life, but developed the old tendency to pantheism, now gaining ground philosophically on the lines of Averroism. Even among the Franciscans the Spirituals, who resented the falling away of the order from its ideals of poverty, became heretical. Some adopted the new Eternal Gospel, by Abbot Joachim of Flora in Calabria, in which it was declared that there now began a new dispensation of the Holy Spirit, superseding that of Jesus. Others, called the Fraticelli, or Little Brothers, had a Gospel of the Holy Spirit, composed by John of Parma. In both cases the spirit of revolt against the Church was marked.

Of the heresy of the fourteenth century the high-water mark is seen in English Lollardism, which, without touching on the philosophical problem, proceeded on the basis of the teaching of Wiclif to a kind of religious rationalism which not only repudiated the rule of the Pope but rejected the institutions of religious celibacy, exorcisms, priestly benedictions, confession and absolution, pilgrimages, masses for the dead, and prayers and offerings to images; and even carried the ethical spirit to the point of denouncing war and capital punishment. In that age, such an ethic could not long thrive. Lollardism, encouraged by the self -seeking nobility while it menaced only the wealth of the church, which they hoped to gain, was trodden down by them in conjunction with the king and the church when it turned against the abuses of feudal government. But its destruction was most effectually wrought through the national demoralisation set up by the new imperialism of Henry V., who, after passing a new statute for the burning of heretics, won the enthusiastic loyalty of his people by his successful invasion of France. In the corruption of that policy of plunder, and in the ensuing pandemonium of the Wars of the Hoses, Lollardism disappeared like every other moral ideal. The time for a union of critical and rapacious forces against the hierarchy was not yet; and when it came in the sixteenth century the critical spirit was on the whole less rational than it had been at the beginning of the fifteenth.

CHAPTER III.

THE SOCIAL LIFE AND STRUCTURE.

1. The Clergy, Regular and Secular.

IN a world so completely under priestly rule, the character of the priest was in general the image of his influence. Whatever good organised Christianity did was in virtue of the personal work of good men in holy orders; and it is comforting to believe that in all countries and in all ages there were some such, after the fashion of the parson in Chaucer. To such men, the priestly status might give a special power for righteousness. But seeing that in the average man righteousness is in the ratio of reflection on knowledge, there is no escape from the conclusion that in the middle ages most priests were poor moral forces. For their general ignorance is beyond doubt. The number who in a given district at a given time were unable to read Latin may be a matter for dispute; but it is clear that what they did read was as a rule merely distilled ignorance. And if we turn to the records of ecclesiastical legislation, we find constant evidence, for many centuries, of the laxity of priestly life in all grades.

To say nothing of the perpetual scandal about concubinage an artificial form of sin, in itself no more decisive against a priest's character than celibacy in its favour there is in the canons of the councils a most significant repetition of vetoes on various lines of conduct which stand for a lack of single-mindedness, and of serious interest in moral tasks. Century after century, the bishops are found forbidding the clergy to tell fortunes, to practise magic, to get drunk, to commit perjury, to take usury, to swear, and to haunt taverns, as well as to keep concubines. At the same time many of the bishops themselves had to be perpetually admonished. Under Justinian we hear of two eastern bishops convicted of unnatural vice, and the law as usual exceeding the crime punished by mutilation. Throughout the middle ages, as to-day, the normal complaints against bishops are on the score of avarice, luxury, and worldliness; but drunkenness is not unheard of; and whatever might be said in councils as to concubinage, it was certain that bishops took at least as much liberty of life as popes and presbyters. So far as moral example went, then, the social influence of the priesthood was mostly on the wrong side, since its normal concubinage was a perpetual lesson in hypocrisy.

On this side, doubtless, the priests were no worse than other men; the trouble was that they set up to be better, and that the hierarchy was always seeking to keep up the repute of clerical sanctity by a claim to asceticism rather than by social beneficence. Thus they put it in the power of the average sensual man to convict of moral imposture a priesthood which, if free to marry, would have been much less vulnerable; and by constantly stressing selfdenial on a wrong line they missed promoting selfcontrol on right lines. The primary social needs of the middle ages were peace, civism, and cleanliness; and for none of these things did clerical teaching in general avail. On the contrary, it was in effect hostile to all three, since it made virtue consist in a right relation to the other world rather than to this, made religion a special ground for warfare, and made uncleanliness a meritorious form of self-mortification, which in the middle ages was the last thing that could be truly said of it.

It is not to be forgotten, indeed, that among the monks or other clerical scholars of the Dark Ages was to be found most of what learning and philosophy survived. The reason was that men and youths with the studious instinct, averse to the brawling life around them, turned to the monasteries and monastic schools as their one refuge. But sloth and impotence equally turned thither; and when the stronger spirits could find a peaceful and useful life without, the sluggards stayed. Monasteries were thus always half filled with men to whom their vows were irksome; and as women were at the same time frequently sent to convents against their will, nothing but an iron discipline could keep the professed order. Given an easy abbot or abbess, they became centres of scandal; and in the average they were homes of fairly well-fed idleness. But the full fatality of the case is seen only when we realise that their very successes, their provision of a dim retreat for many men and women of refined and unworldly type, worsened society by leaving the reproduction of the race to the grosser and harder natures.

The ostensible merit of monasteries, in the medieval period, was their almsgiving. Without endorsing the mercantilist impeachment of all such action, we are forced to recognise that theirs demoralised as many as it relieved. Of a higher order than mere almsgiving, certainly, was the earlier self-sacrificing service of the mendicant orders of friars, whose rise is one of the great moral phenomena of the middle ages. For a time, in the thirteenth century, the order of St. Francis in particular not only organised but greatly stimulated human devotion of the kind that, happily, is always quietly present somewhere; and the contrast between the humble beneficence of the earlier friars and the sleek self-seeking of the average secular priest at once accredited the former and discredited the latter. But the history of the mendicant friars as of the previous orders is a crowning proof of the impossibility of bettering society on a mere religious impulse, without social science.

Credit for holiness brought large gifts and legacies from well-meaning but ill-judging laymen and women; and nothing could prevent the enrichment of orders which had begun under special vows of poverty. Francis had expressly ruled that his friars should not on any pretext hold property, and should not even be able to profit by it through trustees; but the latter provision was annulled, and ere long the order was as well provided for as any. The better the financial footing, the more self-seekers entered; and these overruled the more single-minded. This was the law of development of every self-denying order of the Dark and Middle ages, from the Benedictine monks to the Knights Templars. One of the most rigorously planned monasteries of the Middle Ages, that of the lonely Chartreuse, founded by St. Bruno late in the eleventh century, at length relaxed its austerities, and is to-day known as a wholesale manufactory of a liqueur the distinction by which most men now know also the name of the Benedictines. In the end, the orders of monks and friars did something for scholarship and education, after the institution of lay brothers, who did the menial work, left the donrini in certain orders, especially the Benedictine, free to devote themselves to learning; but socially they achieved nothing. When once they had acquired foundations they became plunderers instead of helpers of the poor, exacting from them gifts, selling them post-mortem privileges, taking the widow's mite and the orphan's blanket for verbal blessings.

It is always to be remembered, here as before, that Christianity is not the efficient cause of the failures or the evils which happen under its auspices : we are not to suppose that had Osirianism or Judaism or Manichaeism or Mithraism chanced to be the religion of Europe these failures and evils would have been averted. What we are to realise is, on the other hand, that the conventional view as to Christianity having been an abnormally efficient cause for good is a delusion. It is not Christianity that has civilised Europe, but Europe the complex of political and culture forces that has civilised Christianity. Byzantium and Abyssinia show what the religious system could amount to of itself. Western Europe surpassed these States in virtue of conditions more propitious to energy and to freedom : that was the difference. At the best, medieval Europe was a world of chronic strife, daily injustice, normal cruelty, abundant misery, and ever-present disease. To show that Christianity, that is, the holding of the Christian creed by the men of that world, made these evils less than they would have been in the same place under any other creed, is impossible. On the other hand, it is clear that the influence of Christian doctrine and tradition was on some sides conservative of evil and obstructive of good.

Those tendencies may indeed be regarded as operating in the intellectual life, which, though it is in reality only a side of the sociological whole, we shall conveniently consider apart. Under that head too we shall note the influence of the Church for culture on the side of art. But on the side of ordinary life the influence of the clergy as teachers had two specific tendencies which may here be noted. One was the disparagement of women; the other the encouragement of cruelty.

On the first head, as on so many others, the conventional view is a fallacy. That Christianity raised the status of women is still a general assumption; but exact research, even when made by an orthodox theologian, proves the contrary. Down to the nineteenth century, the solidest rights women possessed were those secured to them by ancient Roman law; and the tendency of Christian legislation was certainly to restrict rather than to expand such rights. At the same time the so-called Manichsean element in gospel Christianity, the tendency to regard the sexual instinct as something corrupt and unclean, gave to the ordinary language of the Fathers concerning women a tone of detraction and aversion. The one remedy for an overpoise of the sexual element in life, and for over-emphasis of female function on that side, is to secure the community of the sexes in the intellectual life; and organised Christianity, instead of inculcating this, minimised the intellectual life all round, thus making self-restraint a matter of morbid asceticism as against the excess inevitably following on disuse of mind. In particular, a priesthood nominally committed to celibacy, yet always practising in the confessional a morbid inquisition into sexual matters, was committed to treating women disparagingly as forces of temptation when it was not yielding thereto. Nothing could be more injurious to women's real credit. It is true that the worship of the Virgin would in some measure counteract the discredit; but this held equally true of the worship of many pagan Goddesses; and there is nothing to show that the status of women was higher in medieval Christendom than in ancient Egypt. Among the Teutons, the moral status of women seems to have been greatly lowered by the introduction of Christianity.

As regards cruelty, the evidence is only too abundant. Mosheim admits that in the Crusades the Christians were more ferocious than the Saracens. In the old burg of Nuremberg there is preserved a collection (sometimes exhibited elsewhere) of the instruments of torture in common use down to the age of the Reformation. It is an arsenal of horror. Such engines of atrocity were the normal punitive expedients of a world in which the image of the Saviour on the cross was supposed to move men to compassion and contrition; and in which that Saviour's death was held to redeem men from the penalties of their sins. Here the practical teaching and example of the priesthood was all for cruelty. They presided or assisted when the heretic was racked or burned alive; and their whole conception of morals made for such methods. Holding the madman as possessed by a devil, they taught that he should be cruelly scourged : holding that the leper was stricken by God for sin, they taught that he should be shunned the more. Paganism was saner.

Nothing is more true in social psychology than the hard saying of Feuerbach, that only where reason rules, does universal love rule : reason is itself nothing else than universal love. It was faith, not love, not reason, that invented Hell. Faith has within it a malignant principle. Medieval Christendom is the demonstration. In that age the spirit of reason was but occasionally glimpsed. It is seen in the teaching of John Scotus, who, besides his concrete heresy on the eucharist, held the all-embracing heresy that authority is derivable solely from reason, and from his pantheism deduced the conviction that the doctrine of hell is but an allegory, the actuality of which would be the negation of divine goodness. But such teaching belonged rather to pagan philosophy than to Christian faith, and was anathematised accordingly. It never reached even the scholarly class in general; and specifically Christian teaching which aimed at softening the heart was spread abroad to little purpose.

2. The Higher Theology and its Effects.

There is something saddening, though not really strange, in the failure even of the most attractive elements in medieval Christianity to better the world. To read of the life and teaching of St. Francis of Assisi is to come as it were in the presence of a really elemental force of goodness. His namesake of Sales was a persecutor; but the founder of the Franciscan order seems free of that taint. In him the ecstasy of pietism seems purified of that correlative of fanatic malignity which so constantly dogs it in the literature of ancient Christianity, from the epistles of Paul to the treatises of Augustine. We hear of his love for all animals, his seldom-failing goodwill to men, and his sweet contentment in humble contemplation. Yet when we study him in relation to his age there fronts us the startling fact that while his active career is almost exactly synchronous with the horrible Albigensian crusades, there is no trace in the records that he was even saddened by them. They ought to have darkened for him the light of the sun; but not once does he seem to have given even a deprecating testimony against them. In him, the flower of medieval Christianity, loyalty to the faith seems to have annulled some of the most vital modes of moral consciousness.

So again with the influence of such a religious classic as the Imitatio Christi, attributed to Thomas a Kempis, but probably the work of several hands, in different countries and centuries. Many men and women must have supposed themselves to live by it; and its influence seems wholly for peace and self-surrender. Yet it would be hard to show that it ever restrained any corporate tendency of a contrary kind, or ruled the corporate life of a single religious sect. The truth is that its message was for a life of isolation, as that of the ideal monk in his cell. Seclusion and not social life, mystic contemplation and not wise activity, duty to God and not duty to man, are its ideals. It was in a manner the Christian counterpart of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or the Enchiridion of Epictetus a manual of the higher or inner life, making Christianity do for medieval men what Stoicism could do for pagans in the decadent Roman empire. But Stoicism, by Christian consent, made for good government; and there is no trace of any such result from the Imitatio. The model Christian monarch, St. Louis of France, lived in an earlier age; and even he was a fanatic where heresy was concerned, and a promoter of religious wars.

The same fatality appears, again, when we turn to the mystical theology of the German fourteenth-century school of Tauler and Eckhart, in which both Luther and some of our own day see a high inspiration. Here, perhaps, we come on the secret of the failure we are considering. Eckhart was a scholar, who had studied and taught at Paris, and ranked as provincial of the Dominican order for Saxony; and Tauler was his pupil before settling at Basle. Both men undoubtedly influenced the Brethren of the Free Spirit and others of the so-called Beghards and Beguins, before mentioned, in particular the sect who called themselves the Friends of God ; and they may so be said to have affected society practically, since these movements aimed at a species of communism. But the essence of their theology was alien to that or any organised movement, and if lived up to would have dissolved it without the interference of the priests and others who under authority drove women of the Beguine movement from their homes and seized their poor goods. If thou wouldst have the Creator, says Tauler, thou must forego the creature. The less of the creature, the more of God. Therefore abjure all creatures, with all their consolations. Not thus were men in general to be taught to live more brotherlike. The rude world of the Middle Ages went on its way, unaffected in the main either by mysticism or by the movements which set up self-centred societies within society. It needed a more human spirit to affect humanity in mass.

Such a human spirit, indeed, may be held to have shown itself in the movement set up in Florence by Girolamo Savonarola near the end of the fifteenth century. Savonarola was moved by a high concern for individual conduct; and his gospel was substantially that of an Ebionite Christian, wroth with all luxury as well as with all levity of life. Thus he wielded a great influence, setting up in the splendid Florence of the later Renaissance a forecast of the iron-bound Geneva of Calvin. It is no final impeachment of him to say that, having gone so far, he failed and fell; but it is clear that he could not have been a durable civilising force. His influence was that of a fanatic, operating by contagion of excitement and superstitious fear, not that of an enlightener or a statesmanlike guide. To him amenity and luxury, art and vice, selfishness and scepticism, were alike anathema; and he set up in Florence a kind of pietistic reign of terror, driving impressionable believers to give up their pictures to the fire for peace' sake, and even letting others be forced to it by fear. On the great political need of the Italian cities, a fraternal federation, he had no light whatever; and we find him encouraging his fellow citizens in their fatal passion for dominating Pisa instead of making of her an ally and a friend. Lacking light, he finally lacked force; and when he fell, he fell utterly, leaving no enduring ideal or discipline to his countrymen.

Thus on every side and at every point in the history of the ages of faith the ostensibly best religious influences are found failing to heal society, failing to check the forces of oppression and dissolution and strife. If we would trace the forces which really affected social structure and raised masses of men some way in the scale of manhood, we must turn to the clash of interests and classes, the play of secular knowledge, the undertakings of laymen on normal lines of aspiration and on secular views of right.

3. Christianity and Feudalism.

We have seen, in studying the expansion of the Church, how it grew by lending itself to the interests of kings and chiefs as against subjects. On the same grounds, it made for empires as against self-governing States. But inasmuch as the papacy ere long fell out with the emperors of tlia new line it had itself consecrated, it also contributed to the break-up of feudalism, in the widest sense of the term; and it is possible to claim for the church, further, a restraining influence on the oppressive action of feudalism, early and late, in various directions. Under this head would fall to be judged, in particular, its action on slavery.

As the institution of slavery was taken over by the Christian emperors from the pagan without any hint of disapproval, it is clear, to begin with, that the Church had in its days of struggle made no sign of such condemnation. Nor was there anything in its sacred books to suggest a repudiation of slavery : on the contrary, Jesus is made to accept it as a matter of course (Luke xvii. 7-10. Gr.); and Paul, in a passage which has been garbled in the English translation, expressly urges that a Christian slave should remain so even if he have a chance to become free (1 Cor. vii. 20, 21). He and some of the Fathers certainly urge that slaves should be kindly treated; but many pagans had done as much, and Seneca on that theme had outgone them all. Laws for the protection of slaves, too, had been enacted by many emperors long before Constantine. The only ground, then, on which Christianity could be credited with setting up on religious grounds an aversion to slavery would be a visible increase in manumissions after the time of Constantine. No such increase, however, took place.

A misconception on the subject has arisen by way of a hasty inference from the fact that in the Christian period all manumissions were religious acts, performed through the Church. This was no result of any Christian doctrine, being in fact a deliberate imitation of pagan practice. Before Constantine, as we have seen, the act of manumission was a religious one, performed as such in the pagan temples; and when Constantine adroitly transferred the function from those temples to the churches, he probably put a check on the process of liberation, since pagans would long be reluctant to go to the churches for any purpose. For centuries manumission had been a common act, the number of freedmen in Rome being notoriously great at all times, from the day of Cicero onwards. It was almost a matter of course for a Roman master to free a multitude of his slaves on his death-bed or by his will, till Augustus enacted that no one should emancipate more than a hundred at once. A diligent slave, in fact, could usually count on getting his freedom by five or six years of service; and many were allowed to buy it out of their savings, or out of earnings they were permitted to make.

So far were the earlier Christian emperors, with one exception, from seeking to raise the status of slaves, that they re-enacted the rule excluding them from the purview of the law against adultery, because of the vileness of their condition. The exception was a law of Con stan tine forbidding the separation of slaves from their families a humane veto disregarded by Christian slaveowners in recent times. But Constantine on the other hand enacted that if a freewoman should cohabit with a slave, she should be executed, and he burned alive; and the laws against fugitive slaves were made more cruel. Gratian even enacted that any slave who dared to accuse his master of any crime, unless it were high treason, should be burned alive, without any inquiry into the charge. For the rest, the Fathers justified slavery on the score of the curse passed on Ham; and the theses of the Stoics as to the natural equality of men had from them no countenance.

Only in the reign of Justinian did the law begin expressly to encourage manumission, to recognise freedmen as full citizens, and to raise the slave status; and several circumstances are to be noted as giving a lead to such a course. Justinian had pursued a policy of great outlays where his immediate predecessors had been frugal, and to sustain it he had to impose much fresh taxation on the land. For fiscal purposes, it had long been recognised, the government did well to limit the power of proprietors to dispose of their slaves; and it is probable that the humane law of Constantine really had this end in view. By raising slaves to the status of half-free peasants, the State increased the number of its taxpayers. The labourer of the soil then became an object of great interest to the treasury, and obtained almost as important a position in the eyes of the fisc as the landed proprietor himself. In the process the small freeman was put in a worse position than before; but the slave was at the same time bettered the hereditary slave, that is, for captives were enslaved or bought throughout the history of the Byzantine empire.

The legal change was thus made from economic motives; but one moral gain did indirectly accrue from the existence of the Church as such. Under Justinian the empire was re-expanded after having been for a time curtailed; and this would under paganism have meant a large addition to the number of slaves. The recovered lands, however, were peopled by Christians; and all bishops were bound in their own interest to resist the enslavement and deportation of their flocks; so that Christianity at this point was favourable to freedom exactly as was Islam, which forbade Moslems to enslave Moslems. And the indirect benefit did not end there. The Church, like the fisc, had a good deal to gain pecuniarily from the freeing of slaves; and, especially in the west, though it supported slave-laws, it encouraged masters to manumit for the sake of their souls' welfare in the next world. That the motive here again was political and not doctrinal is clear from the two facts (1) that even when making serfs priests for its own service the Church often did not legally free them, thus keeping them more fully subject to discipline; and (2) that while urging laymen to free the slaves or serfs on their lands churchmen were the last to free those on their own, on the score that no individuals in orders had the right to alienate the property of the order as such. Other economic causes, of course, effectually concurred to further the freeing of slaves and serfs, else the institution would not have decayed as it did in the Middle Ages. It is noteworthy, too, that while the Jews were the great slave dealers for Europe in the Dark Ages, thus dangerously deepening their own unpopularity and moving the Church to thwart the traffic on Christian grounds, Christians everywhere were long eager to buy and sell barbarians such as the Slavs (from whose name came the very term slave in the modern languages); while the Christian Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans for centuries maintained a trade in kidnapped Anglo-Saxon or British children and young women, selling them to Ireland after they were no longer saleable on the continent. A similar traffic went on among the Bohemians, before the eyes of St. Adalbert. What the Church did, broadly speaking, was to restrain the enslavement of Christians by their fellows; and to raise funds to redeem Christian captives from the Saracens. To a certain extent the motive was religious : otherwise it was self-regarding.

In similarly indirect ways, organised Christianity tended at times to restrain feudal tyranny. The bishop and the abbot were territorial magnates, who to some extent counterpoised the baron; and though the bishops were too often only barons with a difference, they were often a barrier to lay ambition and violence. Even as the king's rule might protect the common people as against their local lords though the feudal system did not originally suppose this so the Church might be a local benefactor in virtue of its local interests. Here again, however, the influence was not doctrinal; and churchmen in general endorsed the feudal law in letter and in spirit, always availing themselves of its machinery to extort their own dues. On the other hand, insofar as the papacy in the twelfth century began to throw its weight on the side of the popular party in Italy as against the aristocratic and imperial party, thus constituting the Guelph faction as against the Ghibeline, it indirectly furthered the cause of self-government; and even in its official doctrine there thus came to be inserted provisions in favour of the claim of subjects to choose their rulers. The teaching of Thomas Aquinas to this effect must have counted for something in the later evolution of political doctrine. Nothing however is more remarkable than the ease with which dutiful kings, as those of later Spain and France, secured the assent of the Church, as the early barbarian kings had done, to the suppression of all popular liberties. The economic or administrative interest of the Church was always the determinant of its action. It supplied no fixed principle conducive to peace; on the contrary, it was always a force the more for war in Europe.

4. Influence of the Crusades.

That some social gains may be correlative with great historic evils is perhaps best seen in the case of the Crusades organised by the Church against the Saracens in Palestine. These campaigns were first conceived in the interests of the papal power; and as early as 999 Pope Sylvester II. (Gerbert), who had been anti-papal before his elevation, sent a letter through Europe appealing for united action on behalf of the Church of Jerusalem. There was no response. In 1074 Gregory VII. strove hard to the same end, seeing in a conquest of the Turks a means to extend his power over the Eastern Church. Not, however, till Europe was full of tales of the cruelties wrought by the new Eastern power, the Turks, against Christian pilgrims a marked change from the comparative tolerance of the Caliphs was it possible to begin a vast crusading movement among all classes, aiming at the recovery of the empty sepulchre from which the Christ had risen. To this movement Pope Urban II. zealously lent himself, backing up the wild appeal of Peter the Hermit (1094) with the fatal bribe of indulgences.

The first effect (1096) was to collect several immense and almost formless mobs of men and women who by all accounts were in the main the refuse of Europe. That the vast majority looked upon their vow as a licence for the commission of any sin, there can be no moral doubt. The devout exaltation of the few was submerged by the riot of the many, who began using their indulgences when they began their march, and rolled like a flood across Europe, massacring, torturing, and plundering Jews wherever they found them, and forcibly helping themselves to food where plunder was easy. Multitudes perished by the way; multitudes more were sold as slaves in Byzantium to pay for the feeding of the rest there; and of the seven thousand who reached Asiatic soil with Peter the Hermit, four thousand were slain by the Turks at Nicaea; some 800,000 thus perishing in all. Inasmuch as Europe was thus rid of a mass of its worst inhabitants, the first crusade might be said so far to have wrought indirect good; but the claim is hardly one to be pushed on religious grounds.

The more organised military forces who soon followed under Godfrey of Bouillon and other leaders, though morally not better witnesses to Christianity, achieved at length (1099) the capture of Jerusalem, and founded the Latin kingdom of Palestine, which subsisted in force for less than a hundred years, and in a nominal form for a century longer. As a display of Christian against pagan life and conduct, the process of conquest was worse than anything seen in the east in the Christian era. No armies were ever more licentious than those of the cross ; and those of Attila were hardly more ferocious. Their own lives were lost in myriads, by the sword, by disease, and by debauchery; they were divided by mutual hatreds from first to last; and the one force to unify them was the hatred against the infidel which wreaked itself in the massacre of men, women, and children after the capture of a city. Besieging Antioch, they shot heads of hundreds of slain Turks into the city from their engines, and dug up hundreds of corpses to put the heads on pikes. It is even recorded that when their savage improvidence left them starving at the siege of Marra they fed on the corpses they dug up; and when the place was stormed Bohemond gave up to the general massacre even those inhabitants who had paid him large sums for their lives, sparing only the young, whom he sent to the slave-markets of Antioch. When Godfrey took Jerusalem, the Jews there were all burned alive in their synagogues; and the chronicles tell that the crusaders rode their horses to the temple knee-deep in the blood of many thousands of slain misbelievers. On the second day, in cold blood, there was wrought a fresh massacre by way of solemn sacrifice; and in the name of Jesus were slain a great multitude of every age mothers with the infants in their arms, little children, youths and maidens, and men and women bowed with age. Thus was retrieved the mythic Saviour's Sepulchre.

Eight times, during two hundred years, was the effort repeated, as the fortunes of the Christian principalities in the East were shaken or overthrown by successive Moslem assailants, and as the papacy saw its chance or need to weaken the emperor, or otherwise avert danger to itself, by renewing the call to arms. No religious teacher seems ever to have doubted the fitness of the undertaking : St. Bernard preached the second Crusade as zealously as Peter did the first; eloquent monks were found, as they were needed, to rouse enthusiasm for each of the rest in turn; and King Louis IX. of France, the model monarch of Christendom, saw in his vain expedition to recover Jerusalem (1248) the highest service he could do to God or man. As each successive crusade failed in the act or was followed by decadence and defeat, the church professed to see in the disaster a penalty for Christian sin; and under Innocent III. the very cardinals of Rome vowed to mend their ways, by way of reviving the warlike zeal of the laity. Among other fruits of the crusading movement had been a vast increase in the papal revenues; and whereas the imposts specially laid on for crusading purposes were said by many to have been appropriated by the papal court, the Pope undertook to put the administration of all such revenue under non-clerical trustees. But between the hardness of the military task and the endless strifes and degeneracies of the leaders on the one hand, and the growing distrust of the Church on the other, the crusading spirit died out in the thirteenth century.

To all who could sanely judge, it had become clear that the crusades were at once a vast drain on the blood and treasure of Europe and a vast force of demoralisation. In the course of the fifth, the government of Venice succeeded in using the crusaders, in despite of the protests of Innocent III., to wrest the city of Zara from the king of Hungary, himself a zealous crusader. Then the expedition, with the pope's approval, proceeded to interfere in Byzantine strifes, making and unmaking emperors, until they had created chaos, whereupon they sacked Constantinople (1204) with every circumstance of vileness and violence. The Pope, who had hoped to reconcile the Byzantines to papal rule, burst out in bitter indignation at the deeds of the men to whom he had given his indulgences; but morality was at an end all round, as might have been foretold; and the Pope accepted the conquest for what it was to bring him in new power. Christendom thenceforth crusaded with its tongue in its cheek. From the first the papacy had taught that no faith need be kept with unbelievers; and so was given a very superfluous apprenticeship to bad faith between Christians. When in 1212 there broke out the hapless Children's Crusades, out of the 30,000 who followed the boy Stephen some way through France, 5,000 were shipped at Marseilles by merchants who, professing to carry them for the cause of God, and without charge, sold them as slaves at Algiers and Alexandria. The last recruits furnished by Pope Nicholas IV. to the Grand Master of the Templars were drawn from the jails of Italy : the papacy itself had ceased to put any heart in the struggle. It is a reasonable calculation that in the two centuries from the first crusade to the fall of Acre (1291) there had perished, in the attempts to recover and hold the Holy Land, nine millions of human beings, at least half of them Christians. Misery and chronic pestilence had slain most; but the mere carnage had been stupendous.

Much has been written as to the gains to civilisation from the intercourse thus set up between West and East. Gains there were; and if we remember that thus to have gained was the measure of the incapacity of Christendom for peaceful traffic with the world of Islam, we can learn from the process something of real sociological causation. Men who, from ferocity and fanaticism, could not make quiet acquaintance with their neighbours, were hurled against them in furious hordes, generation after generation, and in the intervals of fighting came to know something of their arts and their thought, exchanging handicrafts and products. The crowning irony of the evolution lay in the entrance of unbelief into the Christian world through the very contact with the infidel who was to have been crushed. This perhaps was the discovery that disillusioned the papacy. And but for the spirit of faith and hate the true correlatives in Christian history every gain from the Crusades might have been made ten times over in commerce. To make such gains at the price of nine million lives and unutterable demoralisation is the contribution of the Crusades to civilisation.

It is true that from the East the later crusaders learned what chivalry they evolved; that Saladin became a kind of model hero for Christian knights; and that he could hold knightly friendship with Richard of England. But Richard nevertheless could massacre two thousand hostages in cold blood for an unpaid debt; and his crusading left him as it found him, a faithless ruffian, whom to honour is to be cheated by a romance. Nor did passages of chivalry ever root out of crusaders' hearts the creed that no faith need be kept with a misbeliever.

It is true again that the Crusades involved much social metabolism in Europe. The papal indulgence freed serfs from their masters, and debtors from their usurers, while the crusade lasted : the crusading barons freed many more serfs for a price down, and sold broad lands to middle-class buyers in order to furnish themselves for the campaign. And the mere stir of the exodus and the return, repeated for so many generations, was a vivifying shock to the torpor of medieval Europe, where war was for many the one relief to a vast tedium. But the torpor must go to the credit of the creed if the shock does, since the faith had vetoed the intercourse of peace : and to the same account must be put the throwing back upon itself of the Saracen civilisation, of which Christian enmity directly or indirectly wrought the arrest and ruin, first in the East, later in Spain. Such wreckages surely block the path of the wrecker. If, finally, we seek to measure the reactions of crusading savagery on the life of those who wrought and those who applauded it a reaction seldom reckoned in the discussion of the results we shall be well prepared for the discovery that in the fourteenth century the general lot of men in Europe showed no betterment; that the tillers of the soil had still to sweat blood under feudal masters, save where the enormous loss of life through the pestilence known as the Black Death had for a time raised the price of labour; and that the institution which above all embodied for Europe the memory of the Crusades, the Order of the Knights Templars, was at length crushed in its home by as base a conspiracy and as cruel a slaughter as ever marked the struggle of Christian with Mohammedan. It was pretended by Philip the Fair of France, who began the plot, that the Order was anti-Christian, and devoted to blasphemous rites; but there is no proof of the occurrence of anything more than irregular acts of irreverence, answering to the artistic ribaldries of the mason-companies who built the cathedrals. That phenomenon is in itself noteworthy, as showing how the Crusades had tended to shake faith; but the Templars as a whole were no more unbelievers than the kings who coveted their wealth. It was for that wealth, which was indeed incongruously great, that they were conspired against by their fellow Christians, who in two hundred years of a precarious union of enmity against men of another faith had not learned goodwill towards those of their own. The drama ended as it began, in hatred and crime.

CHAPTER IV.

THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE.

1. Superstition and Intolerance.

IN judging of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, account must always be taken of the fact that their earlier literature is mainly religious and ecclesiastical, and that such literature often gives a very faint idea of the higher mental life