Chapter XXXVI: Conclusion (2)

This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of persecution embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who were admitted to be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminated in the name of Christ, while in the same holy name the orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins. When the only unpardonable offence was persistence in some trifling error of belief, such as the poverty of Christ; when men had before them the example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and debauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions of morality were destroyed and the confusion between right and wrong became hopeless. The world has probably never seen a society more vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us with their pictures of the artificial courtesies of chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and of Tauler show us that spiritual life survived in some rare souls, but the mass of the population was plunged into the depths of sensuality and the most brutal oblivion of the moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the priesthood were accountable, and that, in comparison with them, the laity were holy. What was that state of comparative holiness he proceeds to describe, blushing as he writes, for the benefit of confessors, giving a terrible sketch of the universal immorality which nothing could purify but fire and brimstone from heaven. The chroniclers do not often pause in their narrations to dwell on the moral aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals of Flanders, under date of 1379, tells us that it would be impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries, blasphemies, adulteries, hatreds, quarrels, brawls, murder, rapine, thievery, robbery, gambling, whoredom, debauchery, avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, drunkenness, and similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with the fact that in the territory of Ghent, within the space of ten months, there occurred no less than fourteen hundred murders committed in the bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses, taverns, and other similar places. When, in 1396, Jean sans Peur led his crusaders to destruction at Nicopolis, their crimes and cynical debauchery scandalized even the Turks, and led to the stern rebuke of Bajazet himself, who as the monk of Saint-Denis admits, was much better than his Christian foes. The same writer, moralizing over the disaster of Agincourt, attributes it to the general corruption of the nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an alternation of disorderly lusts and of incest; commerce was nought but fraud and trickery; avarice withheld from the Church her tithes, and ordinary conversation was a succession of blasphemies. The Church, set up by God as a model and protector for the people, was false to all its obligations. The bishops, through the basest and most criminal of motives, were habitual accepters of persons; they anointed themselves with the last essence extracted from their flocks, and there was in them nothing of holy, of just, of wise, or even of decent. Luke Wadding is a witness above suspicion; his conscientious study of original sources entitles his opinions to weight, and we may accept his description of Italy in the early part of the fifteenth century: "At that time Italy was sunk in vice and wickedness. In the Church there was no devotion, in the laity no faith, no piety, no modesty, no discipline of morals. Every man cursed his neighbor; the factions of Guelf and Ghibelline flooded the streets of the towns with fraternal blood, the roads were closed by robbers, the seas infested with pirates. Parents slew with rejoicing their children who chanced to be of the opposite faction. The world was full of sorcery and incantations; the churches deserted, the gambling-houses filled." The testimony is too uniform to explain it away with the assumption that it represents only the disenchantment of puritanism. Æneas Sylvius was no puritan, and his adventurous life had made him, perhaps, better acquainted with the whole of Christendom than any other man of his time, and in 1453 he says: "It is for this that I dread the Turks. Whether I look upon the deeds of princes or of prelates I find that all have sunk, all are worthless. There is not one who does right, in no one is there pity or truth. There is no recognition of God upon earth; you are Christians in name, but you do the work of heathen. Execration and falsehood and slaughter and theft and adultery are spread among you, and you add blood to blood. What wonder if God, indignant at your acts, places on your necks Mahomet, the leader of the Turks, like another Nebuchadnezzar, for you are either swollen with pride, or rapacious with avarice, or cruel in wrath, or livid with envy, or incestuous in lust, or unsparing in cruelty. There is no shame in crime, for you sin so openly and shamelessly that you seem to take delight in it." To what extent the Church was responsible for this may be judged by the terrible condition of Rome under Innocent VIII. as pictured in the diary of Infessura. Outrages of all kinds were committed with impunity so long as the criminal had wherewith to compound with the papal chancery; and when Cardinal Borgia, the vice-chancellor, was reproached with this, he piously replied that God did not desire the death of the sinner, but that he should pay and live. A census of the public women showed them to number sixty-eight hundred, and when the vicar of the city issued a decree ordering all ecclesiastics to dismiss their concubines, Innocent sent for him and ordered its withdrawal, saying that all priests and members of the curia kept them, and that it was no sin.[692]

This was the outcome of the theocracy whose foundation had been laid by Hildebrand in the honest belief that it would realize the reign of Christ on earth. Power such as was claimed and exercised by the Church could only be wielded by superhuman wisdom. Human nature was too imperfect not to convert it into an instrumentality for the gratification of worldly passions and ambition, and its inevitable result was to plunge society deeper and deeper into corruption, as unity of faith was enforced by persecution. In this enforcement, as I have said, faith became the only object of supreme importance, and morals were completely subordinated, tending naturally to the creation of a perfectly artificial and arbitrary standard of conduct. If, to win the favor of Satan, a man trampled on the Eucharist believing it to be the body of Christ, he was not liable to the pains of heresy; but if he did so out of disbelief, he was a heretic. If he took interest for money believing it to be wrong, he was comparatively safe; if believing it to be right, he was condemned. It was not the act, but the mental process, that was of primary importance, and wilful wrong-doing was treated more tenderly than ignorant conscientiousness. Thus the divine law on which the Church professed to be founded was superseded by human law administered by those who profited by its abuse. As Cardinal d'Ailly tells us, the doctors of civil law regarded the imperial jurisprudence as more binding than the commands of God, while the professors of canon law taught that the papal decretals were of greater weight than Scripture. Such a theocracy, practically deeming itself as superior to its God, when it had overcome all dissidence, could have but one result.[693]

When we consider, however, the simple earnestness with which such multitudes of humble heretics endured the extremity of outrage and the most cruel of deaths, in the endeavor to ascertain and obey the will of God in the fashioning of their lives, we recognize what material existed for the development of true Christianity, and for the improvement of the race, far down in the obscurer ranks of society. We can see now how greatly advanced might be the condition of humanity had that leaven been allowed to penetrate the whole mass in place of being burned out with fire. Unorganized and unresisting, the heretics were unable to withstand the overwhelming forces arrayed against them. Power and place and wealth were threatened by their practical interpretation of the teachings of Christ. The pride of opinion in the vast and laboriously constructed theories of scholastic theology, the conscientious belief in the exclusive salvation obtainable through the Church alone, the recognized duty of exterminating the infected sheep and preserving the vineyard of the Lord from the ravages of heretical foxes, all united to form a conservatism against which even the heroic endurance of the sectaries was unavailing. Yet there are few pages in the history of humanity more touching, few records of self-sacrifice more inspiring, few examples more instructive of the height to which the soul can rise above the weaknesses of the flesh, than those which we may glean from the fragmentary documents of the Inquisition and the scanty references of the chroniclers to the abhorred heretics so industriously tracked and so pitilessly despatched. Ignorant and toiling men and women--peasants, mechanics, and the like--dimly conscious that the system of society was wrong, that the commands of God were perverted or neglected, that humanity was capable of higher development, if it could but find and follow the Divine Will; striving each in his humble sphere to solve the inscrutable and awful problems of existence, to secure in tribulation his own salvation, and to help his fellows in the arduous task--these forgotten martyrs of the truth drew from themselves alone the strength which enabled them to dare and to endure martyrdom. No prizes of ambition lay before them to tempt their departure from the safe and beaten track, no sympathizing crowds surrounded the piles of fagots and strengthened them in the fearful trial; but scorn and hatred and loathing were their portion to the last. Save in cases of relapse, life could always be saved by recantation and return to the bosom of the Church, which recognized that even from a worldly point of view a converted heretic was more valuable than a martyred one, yet the steadfast resolution, which the orthodox characterized as satanic hardening of the heart, was too common to excite surprise.[694]

This inestimable material for the elevation of humanity was plucked up as tares and cast into the furnace. Society, so long as it was orthodox and docile, was allowed to wallow in all the wickedness which depravity might suggest. The supreme object of uniformity in faith was practically attained, and the moral condition of mankind was dismissed from consideration as of no importance. Yet the incongruity between the ideal of Christianity and its realization was too unnatural for the situation to be permanent. In the Church as well as out of it there was a leaven working. While St. Birgitta was thundering her revelations in the unwilling ears of Gregory XI., William Langland, the monk of Malvern, sharpened his bitter denunciations of friar and prelate by reminding the common-folk that love and truth were the sole essentials of Christianity--

"Loue is leche of lyf and nexte owre lorde selve,
And also the graith gate that goth in-to heuene;
For-thi I sey as I seide ere by the textis,
Whan alle tresores ben ytryed treuthe is the beste.
Now haue I tolde the what treuthe is, that no tresore is bettere,
I may no lenger lenge the with, now loke the owre lorde!"
(VISION, I. 202-7.)

All such warnings, however, were disregarded, and in the hour of its unquestionable supremacy the sacerdotal system, which seemed impregnable to all assaults and to have no assailants, was on the eve of its overthrow. The Inquisition had been too successful. So complete had been the triumph of the Church that the old machinery was allowed to become out of gear and to rust for want of daily use. The Inquisition itself had ceased to inspire its old-time terror. For a century it had little to do save an occasional foray upon the peasants of the Alpine valleys, or an extortion on the Jews of Palermo, or the fomenting of a witchcraft craze. It no longer had the stimulus of active work or the opportunity of impressing the minds of the people with the certainty of its vengeance and the terrors of its holocausts.

At the same time the Great Schism had inflicted a serious blow upon the veneration entertained for the Holy See by both clergy and laity, which found expression in the great councils of Constance and Basle. Dexterous management, it is true, averted the immediate dangers threatened by these parliaments of Christendom, and the Church remained in theory an autocracy instead of being converted into a constitutional monarchy, but nevertheless the old unquestioning confidence in the vicegerent of God was gone, while the aspirations of Christendom grew stronger under repression. The invention of printing came to stimulate the spread of enlightenment, and a reading public gradually formed itself, reached and influenced by other modes than the pulpit and the lecture-room, which had been the monopoly of the Church. No longer was culture virtually the sole appanage of ecclesiastics. The New Learning spread among a daily increasing class the thirst for knowledge and the critical spirit of inquiry, which insensibly undermined the traditional claims of the Church on the veneration and obedience of mankind.

Save in Spain, where racial divisions furnished peculiar factors to the problem, everything conspired to disarm the Inquisition and render it powerless when it was most sorely needed. Orthodox uniformity had been so successfully enforced that the popes of the fifteenth century, immersed in worldly cares beyond the capacity of the Inquisition to gratify, scarce gave themselves the trouble to keep up its organization; and, save when some madness of witchcraft called for victims, the people and the local clergy made no demand for vindicators of the faith. Scholastic quarrels, for the most part, were settled by the universities, which arrogated to themselves much of the jurisdiction of the Holy Office; and the episcopal ordinaries seemed almost to have forgotten the functions which were theirs by immemorial right.

Although German orthodoxy had been so uniform that the Inquisition there had always been weak and unorganized, yet Germany was the inevitable seat of the revolt. In England and France the power of a monarchy, backed by a united people, had set some bounds to papal aggression and assumption. In Italy the pope was regarded more as a temporal prince than as the head of the Church, and the Ghibellines had never hesitated to oppose his schemes of political aggrandizement. In Germany, however, the papal policy of disunion and civil strife had proved fatally successful, and since the untimely death of Louis of Bavaria there had been no central power strong enough to defend the people and the local churches from the avarice and ambition of the representatives of St. Peter. Luther came when the public mind was receptive and insubordinate, and when there was no organized instrumentality for his prompt repression. As I have already pointed out, his scholastic discussion as to the power of the keys seemed at first too insignificant to require attention; when the debate enlarged there were no means at hand for its speedy suppression, and, by the time the Church could marshal its unwieldy forces, the people had espoused his cause in a region where, as the Sachsenspiegel shows, there was no hereditary or prescriptive readiness to venerate the canon law. The hour, the place, and the man had met by a happy concurrence, and the era of modern civilization and unfettered thought was opened, in spite of the fact that the reformers were as rigid as the orthodox in setting bounds to dogmatic independence.

* * * * *

The review which we have made of the follies and crimes of our ancestors has revealed to us a scene of almost unrelieved blackness. We have seen how the wayward heart of man, groping in twilight, has under the best of impulses inflicted misery and despair on his fellow-creatures while thinking to serve God, and how the ambitious and unprincipled have traded on those impulses to gratify the lust of avarice and domination. Yet such a review, rightly estimated, is full of hope and encouragement. In the unrest of modern society, where immediate relief is sought from the mass of evils oppressing mankind, and impatience is eager to overturn all social organization in the hope of founding a new structure where preventable misery shall be unknown, it is well occasionally to take a backward view, to tear away the veil which conceals the passions and the sufferings of bygone generations, and estimate fairly the progress already effected. Human development is slow and irregular; to the observer at a given point it appears stationary or retrogressive, and it is only by comparing periods removed by a considerable interval of time that the movement can be appreciated. Such a retrospect as we have wearily accomplished has shown us how, but a few centuries since, the infliction of gratuitous evil was deemed the highest duty of man, and we learn how much has been gained to the empire of Christian love and charity. We have seen how the administration of law, both spiritual and secular, was little other than organized wrong and injustice; we have seen how low were the moral standards, and how debased the mental condition of the populations of Christendom. We have seen that the Ages of Faith, to which romantic dreamers regretfully look back, were ages of force and fraud, where evil seemed to reign almost unchecked, justifying the current opinion, so constantly reappearing, that the reign of Antichrist had already begun. Imperfect as are human institutions to-day, a comparison with the past shows how marvellous has been the improvement, and the fact that this gain has been made almost wholly within the last two centuries, and that it is advancing with accelerated momentum, affords to the sociologist the most cheering encouragement. Principles have been established which, if allowed to develop themselves naturally and healthfully, will render the future of mankind very different from aught that the world has yet seen. The greatest danger to modern society lies in the impatient theorists who desire to reform the world at a blow, in place of aiding in the struggle of good with evil under the guidance of eternal laws. Could they be convinced of the advance so swiftly made and of its steady development, they might moderate their ardor and direct their energies to wise construction rather than to heedless destruction.

A few words will suffice to summarize the career of the mediæval Inquisition. It introduced a system of jurisprudence which infected the criminal law of all the lands subjected to its influence, and rendered the administration of penal justice a cruel mockery for centuries. It furnished the Holy See with a powerful weapon in aid of political aggrandizement, it tempted secular sovereigns to imitate the example, and it prostituted the name of religion to the vilest temporal ends. It stimulated the morbid sensitiveness to doctrinal aberrations until the most trifling dissidence was capable of arousing insane fury, and of convulsing Europe from end to end. On the other hand, when atheism became fashionable in high places, its thunders were mute. Energetic only in evil, when its powers might have been used on the side of virtue, it held its hand and gave the people to understand that the only sins demanding repression were doubt as to the accuracy of the Church's knowledge of the unknown, and attendance on the Sabbat. In its long career of blood and fire, the only credit which it can claim is the suppression of the pernicious dogmas of the Cathari, and in this its agency may be regarded as superfluous, for those dogmas carried in themselves the seeds of self-destruction, and higher wisdom might have trusted to their self-extinction. Thus the judgment of impartial history must be that the Inquisition was the monstrous offspring of mistaken zeal, utilized by selfish greed and lust of power to smother the higher aspirations of humanity and stimulate its baser appetites.