Chapter V: Societal Selection (3)

+224. The mediæval church operated societal selection.+ It is evident that the mediæval church was a machine to exert societal selection. The great reason for its strength as such is that it never made the mores of the age; it proceeded out of them. It contributed, through a thousand previous years, phantasms about the other world and dogmas about the relation of this world to that one. These dogmas became mixed with all the experience of life in the days of civic decline and misery, and produced the mores of the tenth and eleventh centuries. All the great doctrines then took on the form of manias or delusions. In the early centuries of the Christian era "catholic" meant Christendom in its entirety, in contrast with the separate congregations, so that the concepts "all congregations" and the "universal church" are identical. However, the church over the whole world was thought to have been founded by the apostles, so that that only could be true which was found everywhere in Christendom. So "catholic" came to have a pregnant meaning, and got dogmatic and political connotations.[471] In the eleventh century all Christendom was reduced to civic fragments in which tyranny, oppression, and strife prevailed. It was not strange that "catholicity" was revived as an idea of a peace pact by means of which the church might unite Christendom into a peace group for the welfare of mankind (sec. 14). This was a grand idea. If the Christian church had devoted itself to the realization of it, by forms of constitutional liberty, the history of the world would have been different. The church, however, used "catholicity" as a name for universal submission to the bishop of Rome and for hierarchical discipline, and used all means to try to realize that conception. By the Inquisition and other apparatus it attempted to enforce conformity to this idea, and exercised a societal selection against all dissenters from it. The ecclesiastics of Cluny, in the eleventh century, gave form to this high-church doctrine, and they combined with it a rational effort to raise the clergy to honor for learning and piety, as a necessary step for the success of their church policy. The circumstances and ideas of the time gave to these efforts the form of a struggle for a monarchical constitution of the church. In the thirteenth century this monarchy came into collision with the empire as the other aspirant to the rule of Christendom. Already the papacy was losing moral hold on its subjects. The clergy were criticised for worldliness, arrogance, and tyranny, and the antagonism of the dynastic states, so far as they existed, found expression in popular literature. Walter von der Vogelweide is regarded as a forerunner of the Reformation on account of his bitter criticisms of the hierarchy.[472] It is, however, very noteworthy that, in spite of the popular language of the writers and their appeals to common experience, they did not break the people away from their ecclesiastical allegiance, and also that the church authorities paid little heed to the criticisms of these persons. The miracle and moral plays were in the taste of the age entirely. Besides being gross, they were irreligious and blasphemous. Ecclesiastics tolerated them nevertheless.[473] The authorities moved only when "the faith" was brought in question. "The faith," therefore, acquired a technical signification of great importance. It was elevated to the domain of sentiment and duty and surrounded with pathos (sec. 178), while its meaning was undefined. In time it came to mean obedience to papal authority. Thus all the circumstances and streams of faith and sentiment of the eleventh and twelfth centuries concentrated in the hands of the hierarchy the control of society, because there was no other organ to accept the deposit. The Cluny programme was a programme of reform in the church such as everybody wanted. It gathered all "the good men" in a common will and purpose. The ideals and the means were selected, and the advocates of the same became the selected classes in society. They remained such long after the movement was spent and lost, but the notion remained that every good man, or would-be good man, ought to stand with the church.

+225. The mediæval church.+ In the crusades the church went to war with Islam, another aspirant to rule mankind. It undoubtedly drilled and disciplined its own adherents by the crusades and thus confirmed its power. It is also certain that the crusades were popular and only put into effect the wish of the great body of Christians. It was the masses, therefore, who made the mediæval church. It possessed a corporate organization and hierarchy which was a body of personal interests, in which ambition, cupidity, and love of power were awakened. The church was venal, sensual, gross, and inhuman, because the mores of the age were such. How could the church be other than the age was? Where was it to find inspiration or illumination from without which should make ecclesiastics anything but men of their age? The men of that age left on record their testimony that the church was in no way better than the society.[474] From the end of the twelfth century man after man and sect after sect arose, whose inspiration was moral indignation at the vices and abuses in the church. Wycliffe denied transubstantiation on rationalistic grounds, but his work all consisted in criticism of hierarchical abuses and of the principles which made the abuses possible. The church never was on the level of the better mores of any time. Every investigation which we make leads us not to the church as the inspirer and leader, but to the dissenting apostles of righteousness, to the great fluctuations in the mores (chivalry, woman service, city growth, arts, and inventions), to the momentum of interests, to the variations in the folkways which travel (crusades and pilgrimages), commerce, industrial arts, money, credit, gunpowder, the printing press, etc., produced.

+226. Sacerdotal celibacy.+ The church rode upon the tide and tried to keep possession of the social power and use it for the interest of ecclesiastics. Asceticism was in the mores. Everybody accepted the ascetic standard of merit and holiness as correct and just, whether he lived by it or not. Sacerdotal celibacy was a case of asceticism. Every one knew that it had come about in church history and was not scriptural or primitive. It was in the notions of the age that there were stages in righteousness, and that religious persons were bound to live by higher stages than persons not technically religious. Renunciation of sex was higher righteousness than realization of sex, as is taught in the seventh chapter of First Corinthians. This notion existed amongst heathen and pagans. The priests in the Melkart temple at Gades (Cadiz) were bound to celibacy.[475]

The merit of celibacy is a very old religious idea in Hindostan. The Todas have a celibate priesthood.[476] "It is one of the inconsistencies of the Hindu religion that it enjoins the duty of marriage on all, yet honors celibacy as a condition of great sanctity, and a means of acquiring extraordinary religious merit and influence."[477] "All the ascetic sects of the Saivas are celibates."[478] Lamas at Shang (98° E. 36° N.) are allowed to marry, but not in Tibet.[479] The Christian notion of the third century was that clerics ought to come up to the higher standard. This was the purest and highest reason for celibacy. It had been a standard of perfection in the Christian church for six hundred years before Hildebrand. Whatever motives of policy or ecclesiastical ambition may have been mixed with it in the eleventh century, it had the merit of bringing doctrine and practice into accord.

+227. The masses wanted clerical celibacy.+ It is to be noticed that clerical celibacy was a demand of the masses amongst church members, and that the demand came directly out of Christian mores. In the fourth century this doctrine was derived from sacramentarianism. The notion became fixed that there was an inherent and necessary incongruity between marriage and the celebration of the sacrament of the mass. "In the course of the fourth century it was a recognized principle that clerical marriages were criminal. They were celebrated, however, habitually, and usually with the greatest openness."[480] That means that they were in antagonism with church opinion and its tendency at that time. Sacerdotalism triumphed in the fifth century. "Throughout the struggle the papacy had a most efficient ally in the people." Preachers exhorted the people to holiness, and the people required this of the clergy, and enforced it by riots and mob violence. Cases are cited which "bring before us the popular tendencies and modes of thought, and show us how powerful an instrument the passions of the people became, when skilfully aroused and directed by those in authority."[481] The fundamental notion which underlies all asceticism was here at work, viz., that virtue has stages, that a man can be more than good, or worse than bad. The council of Constantinople, in 680, made new rules against the marriage of the clergy, because the old ones were neglected and forgotten. The motive stated was the welfare of the people, who regarded such marriages as scandalous. The excess in temper and doctrine was a mark of the period. The learned would have held the doctrine as a metaphysical truth only, but the masses turned it into a practical rule. The share of the masses in the establishment of the rule is a very important fact. Lea thinks that they were manipulated by the ecclesiastics.[482] In the religious revival of the eleventh century the marriage of the clergy was "popularly regarded as a heresy and a scandal." There was no defense of it.[483] It was an undisputed fact that celibacy was not scriptural or primitive.[484] At that time "all orders, from bishops down, without shame or concealment, were publicly married and lived with their wives as laymen, leaving their children fully provided for in their wills.... This laxity prevailed throughout the whole of Latin Christendom, sacerdotal marriage being everywhere so common that it was no longer punished as unlawful and scarcely even reprehended."[485] "Not a thought of the worldly advantages consequent on the reform appears to have crossed the mind of Damiani. To him it was simply a matter of conscience that the ministers of Christ should be adorned with the austere purity through which alone lay the path to salvation. Accordingly, the arguments which he employs in his endless disputations carefully avoid the practical reasons which were the principal motive for enforcing celibacy. His main reliance was on the assumption that, as Christ was born of a virgin, so he should be served and the eucharist be handled only by virgins."[486] This took up again the fifth-century doctrine in its popular form, but it evidently led directly up to the heresy that the validity or benefit of the sacrament depended on the purity of the priest. In his zeal for celibacy Hildebrand fell into this heresy, although a man was burned for it at Cambrai in 1077.[487] Hildebrand also gave civil authorities power over ecclesiastics in order to carry out his reform.[488] In the middle of the twelfth century the "reform" was directed against the women (wives), for fear of the resistance of the men. In Rome the women were enslaved and given to the church of the Lateran. All bishops were ordered to seize the women for the benefit of their churches.[489] In 1095 the sacrament of marriage was declared by the lateran council less potent than the religious vow, although the contrary had been the church doctrine.[490] Thus what came out of the popular mores underwent the growth of formulated dogma and deduction. In the thirteenth century marriage of the clergy ceased, but concubinage continued, concubines being a legitimate but inferior order of wives, whose existence was tolerated on payment of a fee known as _cullagium_.[491] "Scarcely had the efforts of Nicholas and Gregory put an end to sacerdotal marriage at Rome when the morals of the Roman clergy became a disgrace to Christendom."[492] "Those women [clerical concubines] came to be invested with a quasi-ecclesiastical character, and to enjoy the dearly prized immunities attached to that position."[493] Gerson (1363-1429) paid admiration to virginity and celibacy, but he "saw and appreciated its practical evils, and had no scruple in recommending concubinage as a preventive, which, though scandalous in itself, might serve to prevent greater scandals." In districts it became customary to require a new parish priest to take a concubine.[494] "This was the inversion which the popular opinion had undergone in four centuries."[495] "The principles of the church led irrevocably to the conclusion, paradoxical as it may seem, that he who was guilty of immorality, knowing it to be wrong, was far less criminal than he who married, believing it to be right."[496] At Avignon, when it was the seat of the papacy, sex license and vice became proverbial. A speech of the most shameless cynicism is attributed to Cardinal Hugo, in which he described the effect, in 1251, of the residence of the papal court there for eight years. In the fourteenth century that city became the most wicked, and especially the most licentious, in Christendom.[497] The first case of the presence of women at a feast in the Vatican is said to have been at the marriage of Teodorina, daughter of Innocent VIII, in 1488. Comedies were played before the mixed company.[498]

+228. Abelard.+ A cleric who married flinched from the standard of his calling, in the view of the church. Hildebrand's decrees were like the other crowning acts of great men,--they came at the culmination of a great movement in the mores. They accorded with the will and wish of the masses. In all ages acts are due to mixed motives, but in the Middle Ages the good motives were kept for show and the bad ones controlled. Clerics did not cease to have concubines until after the Council of Trent, and the difference between law and practice (bridged over by pecuniary penalties) called for special ethics and casuistry. The case of Abelard (1079-1142) shows what tragedies were caused. He claimed to be, and to some extent he was, a champion of reason and common sense, and he was a skeptic as to the current philosophy. He was vain, weak, and ambitious. He selected the loveliest woman he knew, and won her love, which he used to persuade her to be his concubine, that she might not hinder him in his career.[499] The treatment accorded to Heloise shows that a woman could be a concubine of an ecclesiastic, but not his wife, without condemnation. That was the allowance for human despair under the ecclesiastical rules.[500] Thus the church first suggested views of life and dogmas of religion, with which the masses combined their mores and returned them to the church as a gift of societal power. The church then formulated the mores and created disciplinary systems to use the power and make it institutional and perpetual. Then the mores revolted against the authority and the religion, and the ethics which it taught. A Roman Catholic writer says that a study of the Middle Ages will produce this result: "We shall have recognized in the church the professional peacemaker between states and factions, as well as between man and man, the equitable mediator between rulers and their subjects, the consistent champion of constitutional liberty, the alleviator of the inequalities of birth, the uninterested and industrious disseminator of letters, the refiner of habits and manners, the well-meaning guardian of the national wealth, health, and intellect, and the fearless censor of public and private morality."[501] These are, indeed, the functions which the church ought to have fulfilled, and about which ecclesiastics said something from time to time. Also, the church did do something for these interests when no great interest of the church was at stake on the other side. No unbiased student of the Middle Ages has been convinced that, in truth and justice, the work of the mediæval church could be thus summed up. The one consistent effort of the church was to establish papal authority. Its greatest crime was obscurantism, which was war on knowledge and civilization. This nothing can palliate or offset.

+229. The English church and the mores.+ The church, however, from 1000 A.D. on was a machine of societal selection, and it pursued its work, suggesting and administering a work of that kind, grand results of which have come down to us in the civilization we have inherited. Our work largely consists in rational efforts to eliminate the elements which the church introduced. In some respects the history of clerical celibacy in England best illustrates the mores. In the sixteenth century the rule and usage of the church had inculcated, as a deep popular prejudice, the notion that a priest could not be married. Cranmer, in ordering a visitation, directed investigation "whether any do contemn married priests, and for that they be married will not receive the communion or other sacrament at their hands."[502] This prejudice very slowly died out, but it did die out and the popular judgment favored and required clerical marriage. In the nineteenth century popular judgment rose in condemnation of fox-hunting parsons, and also of pluralists, and it has caused reforms and the disappearance of those classes.

+230. The selection of sacerdotal celibacy.+ If it had not been for sacerdotal celibacy, there would have been ecclesiastical feudalization and the ecclesiastical benefices would have become hereditary. The children of priests inherited benefices and intermarried so long as the marriage of priests was allowed. There would have been a priestly caste.[503] The church as an institution would have been greatly modified. The consequences we cannot imagine. If Hildebrand and the other eleventh-century leaders foresaw the effect, it was statesmanship on their part to establish the celibacy of the clergy. That institution has molded the priesthood and the mores of all who have adhered to the mediæval church. The Latin people of southern Europe are now horrified at the notion of a married priest. The concubine of a priest is a wicked woman, but she is not a social abomination. All protest and resistance seems to have passed away and, since the sixteenth century, sacerdotal celibacy has been accepted as a feature of the Romish Church, which all its members are expected to accept. It is a grand triumph of social selection.

+231. How the church operated selection.+ The church was a great hierarchical organization for social power and control, which inherited part of the intense integration of the Roman empire. Fra Paolo Sarpi said of it, in the seventeenth century: "The interests of Rome demand that there shall be no change by which the power of the pontiff would be diminished, or by which the curia would lose any of the profits which it wins from the states, but the novelties by which the profits of the curia would be increased, or by which the authority of the states would be diminished and that of the curia increased, are not abhorred, but are favored. This we see every day."[504] The church decided all recognition and promotion, and disposed of all rewards of ambition. The monarchical and autocratic tendency in it was the correct process for attaining the purposes by which it was animated. Its legitimacy as an organization for realizing faiths and desires which prevailed in society is beyond question. It drew towards itself all the talent of the age except what was military. It crushed all dissenters and silenced all critics for centuries. Its enginery was all planned for selection. It disposed of the greatest prizes and the most dreadful penalties. All its methods were positive and realistic, and whatever can be accomplished by authority, tyranny, penalty, and repression it accomplished. In modern times political parties offer the nearest parallels. They are organizations for societal control, which distribute rewards and penalties and coerce dissenters. The history of the papacy in the fifteenth century reminds one of the history of Tammany Hall in the nineteenth century. The strength of Tammany is due to the fact that it fits the tastes and needs of a great modern city under democracy. When Tammany won an election it was said that the people had put the city in their hands and that they ought to profit by it. When Leo X was elected pope he said, "God has given us the papacy; now let us enjoy it."[505]

+232. Mores and morals; social code.+ For every one the mores give the notion of what ought to be. This includes the notion of what ought to be done, for all should coöperate to bring to pass, in the order of life, what ought to be. All notions of propriety, decency, chastity, politeness, order, duty, right, rights, discipline, respect, reverence, coöperation, and fellowship, especially all things in regard to which good and ill depend entirely on the point at which the line is drawn, are in the mores. The mores can make things seem right and good to one group or one age which to another seem antagonistic to every instinct of human nature. The thirteenth century bred in every heart such a sentiment in regard to heretics that inquisitors had no more misgivings in their proceedings than men would have now if they should attempt to exterminate rattlesnakes. The sixteenth century gave to all such notions about witches that witch persecutors thought they were waging war on enemies of God and man. Of course the inquisitors and witch persecutors constantly developed the notions of heretics and witches. They exaggerated the notions and then gave them back again to the mores, in their expanded form, to inflame the hearts of men with terror and hate and to become, in the next stage, so much more fantastic and ferocious motives. Such is the reaction between the mores and the acts of the living generation. The world philosophy of the age is never anything but the reflection on the mental horizon, which is formed out of the mores, of the ruling ideas which are in the mores themselves. It is from a failure to recognize the to and fro in this reaction that the current notion arises that mores are produced by doctrines. The "morals" of an age are never anything but the consonance between what is done and what the mores of the age require. The whole revolves on itself, in the relation of the specific to the general, within the horizon formed by the mores. Every attempt to win an outside standpoint from which to reduce the whole to an absolute philosophy of truth and right, based on an unalterable principle, is a delusion. New elements are brought in only by new conquests of nature through science and art. The new conquests change the conditions of life and the interests of the members of the society. Then the mores change by adaptation to new conditions and interests. The philosophy and ethics then follow to account for and justify the changes in the mores; often, also, to claim that they have caused the changes. They never do anything but draw new lines of bearing between the parts of the mores and the horizon of thought within which they are inclosed, and which is a deduction from the mores. The horizon is widened by more knowledge, but for one age it is just as much a generalization from the mores as for another. It is always unreal. It is only a product of thought. The ethical philosophers select points on this horizon from which to take their bearings, and they think that they have won some authority for their systems when they travel back again from the generalization to the specific custom out of which it was deduced. The cases of the inquisitors and witch persecutors who toiled arduously and continually for their chosen ends, for little or no reward, show us the relation between mores on the one side and philosophy, ethics, and religion on the other. (See Chapters IX, XIV, and XV.)

+233. Orthodoxy in the mores.+ +Treatment of dissent.+ +Selection by torture.+ It has been observed above (sec. 100) that the masses always enforce conformity to the mores. Primitive taboos are absolute. There is no right of private judgment. Renegades, apostates, deserters, rebels, traitors, and heretics are but varieties of dissenters who are all subject to disapproval, hatred, banishment, and death. In higher stages of civilization this popular temper becomes a societal force which combines with civil arrangements, religious observances, literature, education, and philosophy. Toleration is no sentiment of the masses for anything which they care about. What they believe they believe, and they want it accepted and respected. Illustrations are furnished by zeal for political parties and for accepted political philosophy. The first punishment for dissent less than death is extrusion from the society. Next come bodily pains and penalties, that is, torture. Torture is also applied in connection with the death penalty, or modes of death are devised which are as painful as they can be made. The motive is to deter any one from the class of acts which is especially abominated. In the cases above cited (sec. 211), under criminal law, it will be observed that death by burning was applied in the case of incest, or other very abominable crime, in the laws of Hammurabi and other ancient codes (sec. 234). Such extreme penalties are first devised to satisfy public temper. The ruler is sure of popularity if he shows rigor and ferocity. His act will be regarded as just. It is now the popular temper, when any one commits a crime which is regarded as very horrible, to think and say what frightful punishment he deserves. It is a primary outpouring of savage vengeance. When precedents have been established for frightful punishments, the rulers apply the same in cases of disobedience against themselves or their authority. Now torture and ferocious penalties have reached another stage. They were invented by the masses, or in order to appeal to the masses. They have now become the means of authority and discipline. The history of torture is a long development of knowledge of pain, and of devices to cause it. Then it becomes a means which is at the disposal of those who have the power. The Dominican Izarn, in a chant of triumph over the Albigenses, represents himself as arguing with one of them to whom he says, "Believe as we do or thou shalt be burned."[506] This is the voice of a victorious party. It is the enforcement of uniformity against dissent. Systematic and legal torture then becomes an engine of uniformity and it acts selectively as it crushes out originality and independent suggestion. It is at the disposal of any party in power. Like every other system of policy it loses its effect on the imagination by familiarity, and that effect can be regained only by intensifying it. Therefore where torture has been long applied we find that it is developed to grades of incredible horror.

+234. Execution by burning.+ In the ancient world execution by burning was applied only when some religious abomination was included in the crime, or when it seemed politically outrageous. In the laws of Hammurabi an hierodule who opened a dramshop or entered one to get a drink was to be burned.[507] One who committed incest with his mother was to meet the same punishment,[508] also one who married a mother and her daughter at the same time.[509] In Levit. xx. 14 if a man marries a mother and her daughter together, all are to be burned, and in Levit. xxi. 9 the daughter of a priest, if she becomes a harlot, is to be burned. At the end of the seventh century b.c. some priestly families connected with the temple of Amon at Napata, Egypt, by way of reform, introduced the custom of eating the meat of sacrifices uncooked. They were burned for heresy.[510] In the year 5 B.C., upon a rumor of the death of Herod I, some Jews tore down the Roman eagle from the gate of the temple. Herod caused forty-two of them to be burned.[511] Caligula caused an atellan composer to be burned in the arena for a sarcasm on the emperor.[512] Constantine ordered that if a free woman had intercourse with a slave man, the man should be burned.[513] In all the ancient and classical period, burning was reserved as a most painful form of death for the most abominable criminals and the most extravagant and rare crimes. By another law of Constantine it was ordered that if Jews and heaven worshipers should stone those who were converted from their sects to the Catholic faith, they should be burned.[514] In the Theodosian Code, also, any slave who accused his master of any crime except high treason was to be burned alive without investigation.[515] Thus burning became the penalty for criminals of a despised class or race.

+235. Burning in North American colonies.+ In the colonial laws of Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia it was provided that negroes should be executed by burning. Here we have a recrudescence of the idea that great penalties are deterrent. Modern penologists do not believe that that is true. It is, however, the belief of the masses, which they have recently shown in methods of lynching. It might have been believed ten years ago that it would be impossible to get a crowd of Americans to burn a man at the stake, but there have been many cases of it.[516]

+236. Solidarity of group in penalty incurred by one.+ In primitive society any one who departed from the ways of ancestors was supposed to offend their ghosts; furthermore, he was supposed to bring down their avenging wrath on the whole group of which he was a member. This idea has prevailed until modern times. It aroused the sentiment of vengeance against the dissenter, and united all the rest in a common interest against him. Especially, if any misfortune befell the group, they turned against any one who had broken the taboos. Thus goblinism was united to the other reasons for disliking dissenters and gave it definite direction and motive. At Rome, "in the days of the republic, every famine, pestilence, or drought was followed by a searching investigation of the sacred rites, to ascertain what irregularity or neglect had caused the divine anger, and two instances are recorded in which vestal virgins were put to death because their unchastity was believed to have provoked a national calamity."[517] In the Roman law is found a proposition which was often quoted in the Middle Ages: "That which is done against divine religion is done to the harm of all."[518] Hale[519] explains the tortures inflicted by the Iroquois, by their desire to mark some kinds of Indian warfare as very abominable, and so to drive them out of use. Torture always flatters vanity. He who inflicts it has power. To reduce, plunder, and torment an enemy is a great luxury. The lust of blood is a frightful demon when once it is aroused. A Hungarian woman of noble birth, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, tortured to death thirty or forty of her maidservants. She began by inflicting severe punishments and developed a fiendish passion for the sight of suffering and blood.[520] It is the combinations of the other elements, religion, ambition, sex, vanity, and the lust of blood, with the dislike of dissenters, which has caused the most frightful developments of torture and persecution. This brings us to the case of the mediæval inquisition. It is not to be expected that a phenomenon of high civilization will be simple and uniform. So the motives of Christian persecution to enforce conformity are numerous and mixed. It was directly against some of the leading principles of Christianity, but there are texts in the New Testament which were used to justify it.[521]

+237. Torture in ancient states.+ The Egyptians used torture in all ordinary investigations to find out the facts.[522] The Greeks had used torture. It was common in the Periclean age in the courts of Athens. The accused gave his slaves to be tortured "to challenge evidence against himself."[523] Plutarch[524] tells of a barber who heard of the defeat of Nicias in Sicily and ran to tell the magistrates. They tortured him as a maker of trouble by disseminating false news, until the story was confirmed. Philotas was charged with planning to kill Alexander. He was tortured and the desired proof was obtained.[525] Eusebius,[526] describing the persecution under Nerva, says that Simeon, Bishop of Jerusalem, being one hundred and twenty years old, was tortured for several days and then crucified. Torture underwent a special development in the Euphrates valley. The Assyrian stones show frightful tortures which kings sometimes inflicted with their own hands. Maiming, flaying, impaling, blinding, and smothering in hot ashes became usual forms in Persia. They passed to the Turks, and the stories of torture and death inflicted in southeastern Europe, or in modern Persia, show knowledge and inventive skill far beyond what the same peoples have otherwise shown. The motives have been religious contempt, hereditary animosity, and vengeance, as well as political and warlike antagonism.

+238. Torture in the Roman empire.+ The Roman emperors lived in a great fear of supernatural attack. There was a very great interest for many people in the question: When will the emperor die? Many, no doubt, made use of any apparatus of astrology or sorcery to find out. To the emperor and his adherents this seemed to prove a desire that he should die, and was interpreted as treasonable. The Christians helped to develop demonism. They regarded all the heathen gods as demons. As they gained power in society this notion spread, and there was a great revival of popular demonism. By the _lex Julia de Majestate_ torture might be applied to persons charged with treason, and the definition of treason was greatly enlarged. Torture was used to great excess under Tiberius and Nero. In the fourth century, after the emperors became Christians, it was feared that persons who hated them would work them ill by sorcery with the aid of the demons, formerly heathen gods. Sorcery and treason were combined and strengthened by a great tide of superstition which overspread the Roman world.[527] The first capital punishment for heresy in the Christian church seems to have been the torture and burning of Priscillian, a Manichæan, at Treves, in 385, with six of his adherents, by the Emperor Maximus. This act caused a sensation of truly Christian horror. Of the two bishops who were responsible, one was expelled from his see; the other resigned.[528] In 579 King Chilperic caused ecclesiastics to be tortured for disloyal behavior. About 580 the same king, having married a servant maid, an act which caused family and political trouble, upon the death of two of her children, caused a woman to be tortured who was charged with murdering the children in the interest of their stepbrother. She confessed, revoked her confession, and was burned. Three years later another child of the queen died, and several women were tortured and burned or broken on the wheel for causing the death by sorcery.[529] Pope Nicholas I, in 866, opposed the use of torture as barbaric, and the pseudo-Isidorian Decretals take the same position in regard to it. Indeed, that was the orthodox Christian view in the dark ages.

+239.+ Such was the course of descent by which torture came to the Middle Ages. It was in connection with the revival of the eleventh century that the Roman law of treason was made to apply to heresy by construing it as treason to God.[530] It is, however, of the first importance to notice that it was the masses which first applied death by burning to heretics. The mob lynched heretics long before the church began to persecute.[531] (See, further, sec. 253.)

+240. Jewish and Christian universality. Who persecutes whom?+ The Jews held that their God was the only real God. The gods of other nations were "vanity," that is, nullity. They held that their religion was the only true one. When about the time of the birth of Christ they stepped before the Greco-Roman world with this claim, it cost them great hatred and abuse. In the history of religion it counts as a great fact of advance in religious conceptions. Christianity inherited the idea and applied it to itself. It has always claimed to be absolutely and alone true as a religious system. Every other religion is an invader of its domain. It was this attitude which gave a definition to heresy. Under paganism "speculation was untrammeled. The notion of there being any necessary guilt in erroneous opinion was unknown."[532] When once this notion found acceptance it produced a great number of deductions and corollaries and gave form to a great number of customs, such as they had never had before. The effect on the selection of articles of faith out of the doctrines of warring sects and philosophies is obvious, also the effect on methods of controversy. The effects are important in the fourth and fifth centuries, and the notion became one of the postulates of all thinking. This is the ultimate reason for the wickedness of heresy and for the abomination of all heretics. Certainly Christianity did not, in this matter, improve on the philosophy of paganism. It was this attitude of Christianity and its neglect of the existing political authority which drew upon it the contempt, derision, and hatred of the heathen. The persecution of Christians was popular. It expressed the popular feeling, which was more constantly expressed in the popular comedy and the improvised popular play.[533] The persecution in Nerva's time was more popular than political.[534] In the following century the Christians denounced heathenism as a worship of demons. "It is not surprising that the populace should have been firmly convinced that every great catastrophe that occurred was due to the presence of the enemies of the gods."[535] "The history of the period of the Antonines continually manifests the desire of the populace to persecute, restrained by the humanity of the rulers."[536] In the third century the Decian persecution was largely due to the "popular fanaticism caused by great calamities, which were ascribed to the anger of the gods at the neglect of their worship."[537] "The most horrible recorded instances of torture were usually inflicted, either by the populace, or in their presence, in the arena."[538] Frightful tortures were inflicted in the attempt to make Christians sacrifice to the heathen gods. This effort was due to the popular apprehension of solidarity in responsibility for the neglect by the Christians of the state gods, to the decline of all social welfare and the implied insult to the state. In the fourth century Christianity became the religion of the state and took up the task of persecuting the heathen. "The only question is: In whose hands is the power to persecute?" That question alone determines who shall persecute whom. Literature was produced which uttered savage hatred against all who were not fully orthodox, and the sects practiced violence and cruelty against each other to the full extent for which they found opportunity. "Never, perhaps, was the infliction of mutilation, and prolonged and agonizing forms of death, more common" than in the seventh and eighth centuries.[539] "Great numbers were deprived of their ears and noses, tortured through several days, and at last burned alive or broken slowly on the wheel."[540] At Byzantium, in the ninth century, a prefect of the palace was burned in the circus for appropriating the property of a widow. It became the custom that capital punishments were executed in the circus.[541] All this course of things was due to popular tastes and desires, and it was a course of popular education of the masses in cruelty, love of bloodshed, and gratification of low hatred and other base passions. All the laws, the exhortations of the clergy, and the public acts of torture and execution held out the suggestion that heresy was a thing deserving the extremest horror and abomination. What was heresy? No one knew unless he was an educated theologian, and such were rare. The vagueness of heresy made it more terrible. "The long-continued teaching of the church, that persistent heresy was the one crime for which there could be no pardon or excuse, seemed to deprive even the wisest and purest of all power of reasoning where it was concerned."[542]

+241. The ordeal.+ The doctrines and sentiments of this early age were seed planted to produce an immeasurable crop in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when they were brought forth again and quoted with the authority of the church fathers. The ordeal is a question addressed to the superior powers in order to learn the truth. The question is always categorical: Is this man guilty or not? The irrationality is that there is a third possibility which cannot be tested; the superior powers may not answer at all. In the early Middle Ages the ordeal was in common use in all civil and ecclesiastical trials. Experience proved the fallacy of it. We are led to believe that the people of the dark ages, not yet being locked in dogmatism, although stupid and ignorant, were better able to learn from experience than those of later times. Innocent III, in 1212, forbade the use of the ordeal, the occasion being its use by the Bishop of Strasburg against heretics.[543] The Lateran Council of 1215 forbade ecclesiastics to take any part in ordeals. It is perhaps true that torture was introduced from the Roman law after the ordeal was ruled out.[544]

+242. Irrationality of torture.+ Torture was far more irrational than the ordeal. The Roman authorities had recorded warnings of its fallacy.[545] Torture destroys nerve power, will, and consciousness. There comes a point at which the victim will assent to anything to escape pain, or to get a quick and easy death. Therefore "confessions" under torture are of no value. Ulpian said of it, "_Res est fragilis et periculosa et quae veritatem fallat_."[546] One of the templars said that if he was tortured further he would confess that he had murdered the Saviour. Another said that he would confess anything if he was tortured further, although he was ready to suffer any death for the Order of Templars. He would confess that he had killed the mother of God.[547] A heretic under torture cried out that Christ, if so treated, would be proved a heretic.[548] Bernard Delicieux declared before King Philip that Peter and Paul could be convicted of heresy by the methods of the inquisitors.[549] Count Frederick von Spee, a Jesuit who opposed the witch persecutions, is quoted as saying, in 1631, "Treat the heads of the church, the judges, or me, as you treat those unhappy ones [accused of witchcraft], subject any of us to the same tortures, and you will discover that we are all sorcerers."[550] He quoted an inquisitor who boasted that if he could get the pope on the rack he would prove him a sorcerer.[551] In the thirteenth century "judges were well convinced of the failure of the procedure with its secret and subjective elements, but they could not in any other way cope with crime."[552]

This means, of course, that by long and manifold suggestion certain selected forms of crime had been stigmatized until the masses regarded them with horror. Then the apparatus of the administration of justice was brought to bear to exterminate all who could be charged with them, and when the process was objected to as horrible, it was defended on grounds of necessity to meet the horrible crime. By this action and reaction a great body of interests was enveloped in a special atmosphere, within which any excess of savagery was possible. The societal selection was prosecuted by murder of all dissenters.

+243. Inquisitorial procedure from Roman law.+ The Roman criminal procedure was, in part, inquisitorial.[553] In the later period of the republic a private accuser, who must be an injured party, started and conducted the prosecution, but the magistrates could proceed on their own motion, upon denunciation, or by inquisitorial process. The last method became the custom under the empire. Prosecutions for treason were thus carried on, and by the end of the empire sorcerers and heretics, as _hostes publici_, like traitors, were thus tried. All citizens were bound to denounce such criminals. This procedure was taken up into the canon law, so that the Christian church inherited a system of procedure as well as the doctrines above stated.[554]

+244. Bishops as inquisitors.+ In the Carolingian period bishops were instructed to seek out heretics and to secure their conversion, but they rarely distinguished themselves by zeal in this matter. The procedure was that of a grand jury set in motion by common report. Lucius III and Barbarossa, acting together in 1184, prepared a decretal in which the duty of bishops was reaffirmed and an attempt was made to give sharper method to their proceedings. They were to seek out heretics, holders of secret conventicles, or any who "in any way differed, in mode of life, from the faithful in general." Those who refused to be disciplined and to conform were to be abandoned to the secular arm for fitting punishment. All civil officers were to swear to enforce laws against heretics. Here we find the fundamental notions of the later Inquisition, but zealous executioners were wanting. If the decretal had been "obeyed strictly and energetically, it would have established an episcopal instead of a papal Inquisition."

+245. Definition of heretic.+ The definition of a heretic just quoted occurs often and is the only one which could be formulated. A person was as liable to be charged with heresy if better than the crowd as if worse. "In fact, amid the license of the Middle Ages ascetic virtue was apt to be regarded as a sign of heresy. About 1220 a clerk of Spire, whose austerity subsequently led him to join the Franciscans, was only saved by the interposition of Conrad, afterwards Bishop of Hildesheim, from being burned as a heretic, because his preaching led certain women to lay aside their vanities of apparel and behave with humility.... I have met with a case, in 1320, in which a poor old woman at Pamiers submitted to the dreadful sentence for heresy simply because she would not take an oath. She answered all interrogations on points of faith in orthodox fashion, but though offered her life if she would swear on the gospels, she refused to burden her soul with the sin, and for this she was condemned as a heretic."[555] "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."[556] There could be no definition of a heretic but one who differed in life and conversation from the masses around him. This might mean strange language, dress, manners, or greater restraint in conduct. Pallor of countenance was a mark of a heretic from the fourth century to the twelfth.[557] In the thirteenth century Franciscans were preëminently orthodox, but when John XXII stigmatized as heretical the assertion that Christ and his Apostles never had any property, they became criminals whom civil officers were bound to send to the stake.[558] John was himself a heretic as to the "beatific vision." He thought that the dead would not enter the presence of God until the judgment day.[559] The Franciscans held that the blood shed by Christ in the Passion lost its divinity, was separated from the Logos, and remained on earth. This was heresy.[560] The Dominicans, with Thomas Aquinas, were heretics as to the immaculate conception.[561] All the disputants on all sides of these questions went into the dispute at the risk of burning or being burned, as the tide should run.

+246. The Albigenses.+ For some reason which is not easy to understand, the Manichæan doctrine took deep root in the Christian church from the fourth century on. To us the doctrine seems ethically bad, but that only shows how little religious dogmas make ethics. The enemies of the Albigenses recognized their high purity of life.[562] They called themselves kathari, or puritans. Popular fanaticism commenced persecution against them in the eleventh century. They were in antagonism to the hierarchy and the Catholic system, especially to papal autocracy. "Even with those abhorred sectaries, the church was wonderfully slow to proceed to extremities. It hesitated before the unaccustomed task. It shrank from contradicting its teachings of charity, and was driven forward by popular fanaticism. The persecution of Orleans, in 1017, was the work of King Robert, the Pious. The burning at Milan, soon after, was done by the people against the will of the archbishop.... Even as late as 1144, the church of Liège congratulated itself on having, by the mercy of God, saved the greater part of a number of confessed and convicted kathari from the turbulent mob which strove to burn them.... In 1145 the zealous populace seized the kathari and burned them, despite the resistance of the ecclesiastical authorities."[563] These cases of lynching are the first cases, in the Middle Ages, of burning heretics. They show that the masses in the Christian church thought that the proper treatment of enemies of God, the church, and all men.

+247. Persecution popular.+ Innocent III began war on the Albigenses at the beginning of the thirteenth century, as rebels and heretics. All Catholics approved what he did, and thought that the Albigenses richly deserved all the treatment they received. The age was not religious, but it had intense religiosity, and the whole religiosity was heated to a high pitch by the contest with the Albigenses. The pride, ambition, and arrogance of the hierarchy and the basest greed and love of plunder of the masses were enlisted against them. Lea's statement is therefore fully justified that "the Inquisition was not an organization arbitrarily devised and imposed upon the judicial system of Christendom by the ambition or fanaticism of the church. It was rather a natural--one may almost say an inevitable--evolution of the forces at work in the thirteenth century, and no one can rightly appreciate the process of its development and the results of its activity without a somewhat minute consideration of the factors controlling the minds and souls of men during the ages which laid the foundation of modern civilization."[564] In the mind of the age "there was a universal consensus of opinion that there was nothing to do with a heretic but to burn him." This was one of those wide and popular notions upon which mores grow, because the folkways are adjusted to it in all departments of life as a rule of welfare. The courts of Toulouse at first, not recognizing the forces against the Albigenses, tried to protect their subjects, but "to the public law of the period [Raymond II of Toulouse] was an outlaw, without even the right of self-defense against the first-comer, for his very self-defense was rated among his crimes. In the popular faith of the age he was an accursed thing, without hope, here or hereafter. The only way of readmission into human fellowship, the only hope of salvation, lay in reconciliation with the church through the removal of the awful ban which had formed half of his inheritance. To obtain this he had repeatedly offered to sacrifice his honor and his subjects, and the offer had been contemptuously spurned.... The battle of toleration against persecution had been fought and lost; nor, with such a warning as the fate of the two Raymonds, was there risk that other potentates would disregard the public opinion of Christendom by ill-advised mercy to the heretic."[565]

+248.+ An annalist of Worms is quoted about Dorso's operations on the upper Rhine in 1231. Dorso burned many persons of the peasant class. The annalist adds, "The people, when they saw this, were favorable to the inquisitors and helped them; and rightly, since those heretics deserved death. Confident in the approval of the masses, they went on to make arrests in towns and villages, as they pleased, and then they said to the judges, without further evidence, 'These are heretics. We withdraw our hands from them.' The judges were thus compelled to burn many. That was not according to the sense of the Holy Scriptures, and the ecclesiastics everywhere were greatly troubled. Since, however, the people took sides with the unjust judges, their will was executed everywhere." "The pitiless and incompetent judges later saw that they could not maintain their conduct without the help of great men, whom they won by saying that they would burn rich people, whose goods the great men should have." "That pleased the great men, who helped them, and called them to their cities and towns." "The people, when they saw this, asked the reason, to which the persecutors answered, 'We would burn a hundred innocent if there was one guilty amongst them.'"[566]

+249.+ It was also true of the persecutions of the philosophers in Mohammedan Spain that they were popular. "The best educated princes allowed themselves to be driven to persecute, in spite of their personal preferences, as a means of winning popularity."[567]