Chapter VI

THE MENDICANT ORDERS AND THE INQUISITION.

The political decision achieved by the Albigensian Crusade, in the hands of the French Crown, against the House of Toulouse, permitted the establishment of the Inquisition in Languedoc, the centre of thirteenth century heresy. Now the subject of this book is not so much the Inquisition itself as the forces which established it. Therefore the military and political struggle in which the House of Toulouse went under has been narrated at some length, as well as the events leading up to that struggle. But it is also necessary to our subject to note the workings of these forces when regular armed resistance had ceased.

That resistance had not been in the name of heresy against Catholicism, but only in defence of some measure of toleration from the State to the heretical bodies. Tolerance was not even expressly stated as the motive of those who resisted the Crusade, but only implied by their conduct. The point is worth noting. Not one of the southern lords who resisted the Crusade was himself a heretic. None of them, except Raymond Roger of Foix, was ever proved to have so much as taken any particular interest in heresy as a fad, an object of curiosity. Pedro of Aragon was the Pope’s vassal and “First Standard Bearer of the Church.” Raymond VI of Toulouse had been all his life a Catholic, and died with all the consolations of religion, having on the morning of his sudden death gone twice to the church of La Daurade in Toulouse to pray. After his death the honour of burying his remains was disputed for years between the Parish of St. Sernin and the Knights Hospitallers of Toulouse. Those who resisted the Crusaders fought so that they might not be compelled to suppress the heretics among whom they lived, and especially that they might not be deprived of power and possessions by North Frenchmen who came to seize their lands in perpetuity as a reward for bringing about suppression of heresy.

Nowhere else in Europe was there regular armed opposition. In Italy, which was (after Languedoc) the stronghold of mediæval Manicheanism, the heretics of Orvieto had caused a riot and the assassination of a zealous Catholic magistrate in 1199-1200. In Viterbo, a few years later, the citizens elected certain heretical magistrates, and it needed harsh words from Innocent before they would consent to disqualify them. But compared to the Albigensian business this was child’s play. In Languedoc the battle was fought and won.

But in order to hold a country it is necessary not only to conquer it, but also to organize it. After the conquest force is no longer needed on a large scale, it still plays its part, but only in the enforcement of decisions arrived at by some form of law. And although force plays a greater part in the conflicts of ideas than is theoretically admitted nowadays, nevertheless it is not the chief instrument of those conflicts. The chief instrument is, of course, persuasion. At the end of the Albigensian war there was no longer organized opposition in Europe to the enforcement of judicial decisions against heresy, and these judicial decisions were made by the Inquisition. Meanwhile, before the fighting had ceased, there were already in existence two powerful new bodies organized for the use of persuasion in the cause of the Church, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, who may be grouped as the Mendicant Orders.

From the beginning, Francis and Dominic agreed in this, that they uncloistered the monk. Instead of withdrawing their friars from the world, they launched them into the midst of it to strive, by precept and example, to win souls. In particular St. Dominic enlisted his “Friar Preachers” to preach against heresy, and St. Francis to preach the love of God after a fashion that did away with that grimness of early mediæval religion which had nourished the over-ascetic heresies such as the Manichean.

It is hard not to linger over St. Francis of Assisi. A true Italian and a child of his time, it is not surprising that he sometimes seems to us extravagant. When we hear of him rolling naked in a rose bush to drive away the temptations of sex, or having himself dragged through the streets and beaten, as penance for having eaten a morsel of chicken in Lent, we are as much puzzled as repelled. We may even lend an ear to doctors who tell us that there is a perversion of the lusts of the flesh called Masochism, in which the subject derives pleasure from pain. The saint himself repented at the end of having caused his body to suffer as he had done; “I have sinned against my brother the ass,” he said as he lay dying. And yet, all in all, he remains the most Christ-like of Christians. His tenderness to mankind was all-embracing, and went out beyond man to the beasts, and even to natural objects. To him all nature was a fascinating little sister, to be laughed at, petted and caressed. The sun was our brother: to him he wrote a canticle. The birds were our little brothers: to them he preached as they clustered around him. Even the wolf, whom the saint turned from his evil courses, was “Brother Wolf.” Death was but “our sister, the death of the body,” and the very devils were “God’s warders.”

This spirit was the precise opposite to that grimness in the religious feeling of a century before. To the men of the early twelfth century, for instance to Abelard, the claims of religion were inexorably stern. They could no more be reconciled with any sort of human affection, than could the unyielding round arch adjust itself to vault the irregular compartments of nave and ambulatory. In human feeling, as in architecture, the result was ugly distortion, and it was precisely this distorted feeling that produced Manicheanism. Clearly, if God was good and loving and the world utterly vile, then God had not made the world. The Devil had made it, and was by that act co-equal, if not for the time being, superior, in power to God Himself. Not so, said St. Francis, the earth is the Lord’s, and it is beautiful. Only pride, both pride of possessions and pride of intellect, stands in the way of happiness. So he joyously married his “Lady Poverty,” and once refused to let a hesitating novice possess so much as a breviary. Under the busy brushes of Giotto and the other painters of the Franciscan legend, the Holy Family, without ceasing to be a symbol of the faith, became also the emblem of innocent and happy domestic life.

St. Francis did not begin the humanizing of religion. The change had already begun before the middle of the twelfth century with the cult of the Virgin. There is a legend that once, when St. Bernard was praying to her, and had come to the words, “Show that thou art the mother,” Our Lady appeared to him and from her breast dropped on his lips three drops of the milk that had nourished the Saviour. That is already far from the atmosphere of Abelard and Heloise. Already, in St. Bernard’s time, the north-French architects were beginning to break up the unyielding Norman and Lombard round arches into the pointed form, and the same period was evidently trying to resolve the distortion of religion and human love. St. Francis enormously enlarged and deepened the new current of religious thought. The climax was reached after his death in the story of the Miracle of Bolsena. Here, in 1263, a priest without faith in the Real Presence of our Lord in the Host, saw the wafer which he himself had just consecrated covered with drops of blood. About half a century before, in neighbouring Orvieto, a zealous Catholic magistrate had been murdered by the Manichees. Now the Church insisted that God gave His very self to be the food of all men, even to the poor, the serf, and the humble.

St. Dominic was of a different temper, and attacked the problem in a different way. Dante calls him—

“... the holy athlete, Benignant to his own and cruel to his foes,”

and praises him for wisdom, whereas he praises St. Francis for “seraphic ardour.” Instead of being above all a poet and mystic, like the Poverello of Assisi, St. Dominic was an organizer and statesman. There was a strain of ecclesiastical anarchism in the early Franciscan Order; certain “spiritual” Franciscans of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century rebelled against religious authority as no Dominicans have ever done. Where the Italian saint puts an example ahead of precept, the Spaniard put precept ahead of example. To him the weakness of the Church was that not enough of her clergy knew thoroughly her doctrine and were able to teach it. For him, as for the prophet Hosea, the “... people were destroyed for lack of knowledge.” His order was vowed to learning. Indeed, it was a Dominican, St. Thomas Aquinas, who has left us the most complete and harmonious of all human attempts to analyse the universe. Instead of attacking in flank by destroying the mood out of which the ultra ascetic, and in particular the Manichean heresies grew, St. Dominic attacked heresy in front by direct argument. His “Preaching Friars” observed strict poverty, not so much as a good in itself, as did St. Francis, but rather in the spirit of the soldier who lightens his pack the better to take the field. As they went to and fro, begging their bread, they escaped the poor man’s envy which dogged the footsteps of the wealthy bishops and the abbots of the older orders. Thus they were equally free to debate with the philosophers in the turbulent universities, or to set forth the Faith in words of one syllable to simple folk.

The organizers, those carpenters and stonemasons of history, are obscure by contrast with its artists and sculptors. Just so the personality of St. Dominic (at least in the Protestant world) has been overshadowed by that of St. Francis. Even the Church which they both served canonized Francis within two years after he was dead, and waited thirteen before canonizing Dominic.

But if the Poverello of Assisi had more poetry in him, the Spanish gentleman had more statesmanship. The organization of the Franciscan Order fluctuated violently and finally settled down into a copy of the Dominican. According to the first Franciscan Rule, that of 1221, a Friar is not bound to obey his superiors when that superior commands him to do something against the “life,” a proposition so impossible in practice that it survived only two years. On the other hand, down to 1240, the Head of the Franciscan Order was undisputed Cæsar, nominating lesser officers and legislating either without any Chapter (i.e., Assembly) or with a Chapter composed exclusively of officers appointed by himself. This again worked so badly that in 1240 the organization was changed so as to add elected representatives of the Chapter General, and to make the nomination of lesser officers a function of the Chapter General so constituted; both of which features were typically Dominican, and had been part of the first Constitution of that Order.

As with the constitution of their Order so with the Higher Learning. Here too the Franciscans found themselves compelled by force of circumstances to abandon their own founder’s distinctive teaching and follow the lead of the Dominicans. Whereas St. Francis himself feared and hated learning, even before his death some of the greatest scholars in Christendom wore the Franciscan habit.

To the subjects of representative government and of learning I shall return for a moment at the close of the chapter in the attempt to estimate the permanent value of the thirteenth century achievement. The point I now make is that, in both respects, St. Dominic builded so much better (at least for his generation) than St. Francis that the Franciscans themselves soon adopted Dominican methods. And this was true not only in regard to learning and representative government, but also with regard to the Inquisition.

Both of the mendicant orders were formed, as a modern would say, “for service.” They were democratic in constitution: the Dominicans had been so from their origin. Indeed it has been claimed with some show of reason that it was the Dominicans who first brought representative government from its original home near the Pyrenees into England. They addressed themselves particularly to the poorer and the less fortunate of mankind. Whereas the older orders of monks had retired to the wilderness, or at least to the country, the mendicants laboured chiefly in the fast growing towns characteristic of the new and sudden mediæval rise out of the Dark Ages. It is always in towns that the human struggle for life is sharpest and the results of defeat most provocative of pity.

Although the ministrations of the friars were often very different in kind from those of the “social worker” of to-day, inasmuch as they were concerned first of all to bear witness to the Faith whereas the average “social worker” is concerned chiefly with conferring material benefits (I suspect that is why he, or she, does not accomplish more), still social worker and mendicant friar have this essential in common in that the purpose of both was to “do things” for the poor. Alas! in the garden of “social service” a serpent lies in wait for poor erring humans, and his name is Tyranny. Those who are the objects of ministrations, being human, too often receive them unwillingly and prefer their own ways. And those who would minister, being equally human, when they see their good works (as they think them) rejected by those whom they would benefit, too often seek forcibly to compel acceptance.

Of course such people believe that they know better than the rejectors (who are, in practice, the more independent and self-respecting of the poor) what is good for the latter. But the student of history shakes his head sadly, in the knowledge that the innumerable oppressors of mankind have all believed that they could govern people better than those whom they oppressed could govern themselves.

The connection of St. Dominic himself with the Inquisition (using the word loosely to cover all legal and judicial action against heretics), although much disputed, is clear. The evidence consists of two documents of St. Dominic’s own, and a tradition, written down in its present form sixty-seven years after his death, which has been accepted by all students of his life, including those who hold that he had no connection with the Inquisition whatsoever. The first document is a licence to a citizen in Toulouse to board a certain converted heretic in his house until St. Dominic or the Cardinal Legate should give orders to the contrary. The second enumerates the provisions of the penance imposed upon another converted heretic.

Although this last has already been quoted in another chapter, nevertheless it may be well to repeat it here. “Until the Lord Legate (Arnaut Amalric) shall otherwise ordain” the unhappy man is to fast forever “from flesh, eggs, cheese and all which comes from flesh except at Easter, Pentecost and Christmas, when he shall eat some to protest against his former errors.” He is to keep three Lents each year, “fasting and abstaining from fish, unless from bodily infirmity or the heat of the weather he shall be dispensed.” As make-weights, he is to be beaten with rods upon his bare back, three Sundays running, by his village priest; he is forever to wear a distinctive dress marked with crosses to designate him as a former heretic, hear mass every day “if possible” and vespers as well on festival days, recite seventy paternosters a day and twenty in the middle of the night. How this last provision was to be enforced unless some almost equally unfortunate soul stayed awake to watch him is not stated. Finally, once a month he is to show the parchment on which all this is written to the village priest.

So much for the documents. The tradition is that the Saint secured the release of a certain heretic who had been convicted and sentenced to be burnt, acting on the strength of his own personal belief that this particular culprit would eventually repent. Twenty years after, the tradition goes on to say, the man did repent, and died in the odour of sanctity, clad in Dominican habit.

For our purposes, the point of all three pieces of evidence is that the power to loose implies an intimate connection with the power to bind. The President of the United States and the Governors of States, who have the pardoning power, are themselves the chief executive officers of the nation and the States, and it is their sworn duty to see that the laws are enforced. In St. Dominic’s case, the verdict is conclusive. Virtually every reputable scholar of the present day is agreed upon the point, including Roman Catholics writing under the _nihil obstat_ and _imprimatur_ of Cardinals and Archbishops.

Among these last, Giraud sums up the verdict neatly: “Comparing with all these documents the canon of the Council of Verona, renewed in 1208 by the Council of Avignon, which orders that apostates who, after being convicted of heresy by their Bishops or their representatives, should obstinately persist in their errors, should be delivered over to the secular arm, it would seem that it must be concluded that, by virtue of the delegated authority of the Cistercian monks, St. Dominic was to convict the heretics; and that, in convicting them he delivered them up, indirectly but surely, to execution, unless he suspended, by an act of clemency, the action of that docile instrument of the Church, the secular arm. Doubtless he did not himself pronounce the fatal sentence; but during their trial he played the part of an expert in the matter of orthodoxy, or even of a juror, transmitting to the court a verdict of guilty while capable at the same time of signing a recommendation to mercy.”

It is, of course, true that the “bloody-minded Dominic,” that favourite scarecrow of old-fashioned Protestant historians, never existed. Not only the Bollandists and Lacordaire but also the whole weight of modern scholarship agree on this point. Even Lea, almost always accurate on points of fact even when he is most exasperating in his utter lack of the realizing imagination so necessary to a modern historian of the Middle Ages; even Lea, I say, admits that the miracles ascribed to St. Dominic are almost all kindly ones, and that the Saint was by no means notable among his contemporaries for ferocity against heretics. Nor was he the “founder of the Inquisition,” although he was a worker in it. It was the force of circumstances and, in particular, the fact that both mendicant orders were particularly dependent upon the Pope (and correspondingly independent of the local clergy) that afterwards pushed forward first the Dominicans and then the Franciscans into prominence as Inquisitors.

The Albigensian struggle brought the Papal, as distinguished from the Episcopal, Inquisition into being. Formerly the bishops had had sole jurisdiction in matters of faith. Naturally, their policy against heretics varied widely, so that, as we have seen in Chapter II, the secular government and even the local mob often acted on their own responsibility. Evidently the bishops were not in a position to deal with heresy on a large scale. Attempts to hold them to their work, such as the Imperial-Papal decree issued from Verona in 1184 (see