THE INQUISITION OF THE MIDDLE AGES

BOOK 1 - ORIGIN AND ORGANIZATION OF THE INQUISITION

CHAPTER VI

11

STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY. 

The University of Paris was the centre of scholastic theology. Cosmopolitan in its character, a long line of great teachers had lectured to immense masses of students from every land, until its reputation was European and it was looked upon as the bulwark of orthodoxy. In every episcopate it could count its graduates and the holders of its degrees, who looked back upon it with filial affection as to their alma mater. It had welcomed Dominic’s first missionaries when they came to Paris to found a house of the Order, and it had admitted Dominicans to its corps of teachers. Suddenly there arose a quarrel, the insignificance of its cause showing the tension which existed and the eagerness of all classes of the clergy to repress the growing influence of the Mendicants. The University had always been jealous of its privileges, among which not the least was the jurisdiction which it enjoyed over its students. One of these was slain and several were wounded by the Paris watch in a disturbance, and the reparation tendered for the offence was deemed insufficient. The University closed its doors, but the Dominican teachers, Bonushomo and Elias, continued their lectures. To punish this contumacy they were ordered to be silent, and students were forbidden to listen to them. They appealed to the pope, but their appeal was disregarded; and when the University resumed its functions, they were required to take an oath to observe its statutes, provided there was nothing therein to conflict with the Rule of the Order. This they refused unless they were allowed two teachers of theology, and after a delay of a fortnight they were expelled. The provincials of both Orders at Paris took up the quarrel and appealed to Rome, and Innocent IV demanded the repeal of the obnoxious rules.

The gage of battle was thrown and the university was resolved on no half-measures. It would reduce the Mendicants to the condition of the other religious orders and earn the gratitude of all the prelates and clergy by stripping them of the privileges which rendered them so dangerous. For this purpose it was necessary to win the favor of Rome, and the students enthusiastically assessed themselves, economizing in their expenses that they might contribute to the fund which was necessary if anything was to be done with the curia. The leader of the faculty in the quarrel was William of St. Amour, noted both as a preacher and a teacher, learned, eloquent, and inflexible of purpose. He was sent to the Holy See, where he found Innocent IV in a frame of mind adapted to listen to his arguments that the Mendicant Rules were fitted only to lead souls to perdition. The pope had been the friend of the Orders, and had confirmed and enlarged their privileges, but just now was out of humor. The Dominicans asserted that this arose from their having secretly received into the Order one of his cousins whom he loved greatly and intended to advance in the world; and also from the malevolence of another cousin, who proposed to build at Genoa a fortress-palace to dominate the city, and had been prevented by the Dominicans refusing to sell a piece of ground essential to his purpose. Innocent’s mind must indeed have been receptive of William of St. Amour’s arguments. In July and August, 1254, he had issued repeated briefs in favor of the Mendicants and against the University. On November 21 he promulgated the bull Etsi Animarum, known among the MIendicants as the “terrible” bull, by which the members of all religious orders were forbidden to receive in their churches on Sundays and feast-days the parishioners of others; they were not to hear confessions without the special license of the parish priests, they were not to preach in their own churches before mass, so that parishioners should not be drawn away from their parish churches, nor were they to preach in the parish churches, nor when bishops preached or caused preaching to be done.

The bull was in reality a terrible one, for it shattered at a blow the edifice erected with such infinite labor and self-sacrifice. To meet it, the Dominicans not only summoned their greatest and wisest members, but appealed to Heaven. Every friar was ordered daily after matins to recite seven psalms and the litanies of the Virgin and St. Dominic. A brother, during this exercise, was encouraged with a vision of the Virgin pleading with the Son and saying “Listen to them, my Son, listen to them!” He did listen to them, for though we may doubt the Dominican story that Innocent was stricken with paralysis the very day that he signed the “crudelissimum edictum”, he certainly did die on December 7, within sixteen days after it, and a pious Roman had a vision of his soul handed over to the two wrathful saints, Dominic and Francis. Moreover the Cardinal of Albano, whose hostility to the Orders had led him to take an active part in advising Innocent to the measure, was imprudent enough to boast that he had caused the subjugation of the Mendicants to the bishops and would place them under the feet of the lowest priests. The same day a beam in his house gave way; he fell and broke his neck. It would perhaps be unjust to accuse the Dominicans of having assisted nature in these catastrophes; but, strange as it seems to hear them boast of having prayed a pope to death, they certainly do relate with pride that “Beware of the Dominican litanies, for they work miracles”, became a common phrase.

The death of Innocent saved the Mendicant Orders. That his successor was elected after an interval of only fourteen days was due to the provident care of the Prefect of Rome, who, distrusting the operation of the Holy Ghost, put the fathers of the Conclave on short rations, resulting in the election of Alexander IV. The new pope was specially favorable to the Mendicants. When John of Parma, the Franciscan general, came to him with the customary request that he would appoint a cardinal as “Protector” of the Order, he refused, saying that so long as he lived it should need no other protector than himself; and his selection of the Dominican Raymond of Pennaforte and the Franciscan Ruffino as papal chaplains showed how willingly he subjected himself to their influence. On December 31, ten days after his elevation, he addressed letters to both Orders asking their suffrages and intercession with God, and the same day he issued an encyclical, revoking the terrible bull of Innocent and pronouncing it void.

Before such a judge the case of the University was evidently lost. On April 14, 1255, appeared the bull Quasi lignum vitae, deciding the quarrel in favor of the Dominicans. Yet William of St. Amour returned to Paris resolved to carry on the war. In pulpit he and his friends thundered forth against the Mendicants. They were not specifically named, but there was no mistaking the ingenious application to them of the signs foretold by the prophets of those who should usher in the days of Antichrist, nor the description of the Pharisees and Publicans made to fit them. New and unimagined perils threatened the Church in the last times. The devil has found that he gained nothing in sending heretics who were easily confuted, so now he has sent the Pale Horse of the Apocalypse—the hypocrites and false brethren who, under an external guise of sanctity, convulse the Church. The persecution of the hypocrites will be more disastrous than all previous persecutions. Another weapon which lay to his hand was eagerly grasped. In 1254 there appeared a work under the name of “Introduction to the Everlasting Gospel”, of which the authorship was ascribed to John of Parma, the Franciscan general. We shall have occasion to recur to this, and need only say here that a section of the Franciscans were strongly inclined to the mysticism which now began to show itself, and that the writings of Abbot Joachim of Fiore, now revived and hardily developed, predicted the downfall, in 1260, of the existing order of things in Church and State, the substitution of a new evangel for that of Christ, and the replacement of the hierarchy by mendicant monachism. The “Introduction to the Everlasting Gospel” attracted universal attention and offered too tempting an opening for attack to be neglected.

The University sullenly held out, while Alexander fulminated bull after bull against the recalcitrants, threatening them with varied penalties, and finally calling in the assistance of the secular arm by an appeal to St. Louis. The clergy of Paris, delighted with the opportunity afforded by the temporary unpopularity of the Mendicants, reviled them from the pulpit, and even attacked them personally with blows and threats of worse treatment, till they scarce ventured to appear in the streets and beg their daily bread. The controversy raged wilder as the indomitable St. Amour, undeterred by Alexander’s request to the king to throw him into jail, issued a tract entitled De Periculis novissimorum Temporum, in which he boldly set forth all the arguments of his discourses against the Mendicants. He proved that the pope had no right to contravene the commands of the prophets and apostles, and that they were convicted of error when they upturned the established order of the Church in permitting these wandering hypocrites and false prophets to preach and hear confessions. “Those who live by beggary are flatterers and liars and detractors and thieves and avoiders of justice. Whoever asserts that Christ was a beggar denies that he was the Messiah, and thus is a heresiarch who destroys the foundation of all Christian faith. An able-bodied man commits sacrilege if he receives the alms of the poor for his own use, and if the Church has permitted this for the monks it has been in error and should be corrected. It rests with the bishops to purge their dioceses of these hypocrites; they have the power, and if they neglect their duty the blood of those who perish will be upon their heads”. This was answered by Aquinas and Bonaventura. The former, in his tract “Contra Impugnantes Religionem”, proved in the most finished style of scholastic logic that the friars have a right to teach, to preach and hear confessions, and to live without labor; in the same mode he rebutted the charges as to their morals and influence, showing that they were not precursors of Antichrist. He also demonstrated the more suggestive theorems that they had a right to resist their defamers, to use the courts in their defence, to secure their safety if necessary by resort to arms, and to punish their persecutors. That his dialectics were equal to bringing out any desired conclusion when once his premises were granted is well known, and they did not fail him on this occasion. Bonaventura also replied in several treatises—“De Paupertate Christi”, in which he earnestly pleaded the example of Christ as an argument for poverty and mendicancy; the “Libellus Apologeticus” and the “Tractatus quia Fratres Minores praedicent” in which he carried the war into the enemy’s territory with a vigorous and plain-spoken onslaught on the shortcomings and defects and sins and corruption and vileness of the clergy. Heretics might well feel justified in seeing the two parties into which the Church was divided thus expose each other; and the faithful might well doubt whether salvation was assured with either.

Yet this wordy war was mere surplusage. On the appearance of St. Amour s book, St. Louis had hastened to send copies to Alexander for judgment. The University likewise sent St. Amour at the head of a delegation to demand the condemnation of the Everlasting Gospel. Albertus Magnus and Bonaventura came to defend their Orders, and a hot disputation was held before the consistory. The Everlasting Gospel and its Introduction were condemned with decent reserve by a special commission assembled at Anagni, in July 1255, but St. Amour’s book was declared by the bull Romanus Pontifex, October 5, 1256, to be lying, scandalous, deceptive, wicked, and execrable. It was ordered to be burned before the curia and the University; every copy was to be surrendered within eight days to be burned, and any one presuming to defend it was pronounced a rebel. The envoys of St. Louis and the University were obliged to subscribe to a declaration assenting to this and to the right of the Mendicants to preach and hear confessions and to live on alms without labor, William of St. Amour alone resolutely refusing. Alexander moreover ordered all teachers and preachers to abstain from reviling the Mendicants and to retract the abuse they had uttered under pain of loss of preferment —a command which was but slackly obeyed.

The victory was won for the Mendicants. The University submitted ungraciously to the irresistible power of the papacy, and the unconquerable William of St. Amour alone held out. He would make no acknowledgments, no concessions. He had sworn to abide by the mandates of the Church, but he refused to recant like his comrades. When about to return, in August, 1257, Alexander forbade him to go to France and perpetually interdicted him from teaching, and so great was the dread which he inspired that the pope wrote to St. Louis asking him to prevent the inflexible theologian from entering his kingdom. Yet from abroad he maintained an active correspondence with his old colleagues, and the University continued in a state of disquiet. It was in vain that Alexander prohibited all intercourse with him. Though the Mendicants were allowed to teach, they were ridiculed in indecent rhymes and lampoons, which were eagerly circulated; and, on Palm Sunday of 1259 the beadle of the University, Guillot of Picardy, interrupted the preaching of Thomas Aquinas by publishing a scandalous and libelous book against the Mendicants. Yet this gradually died out, and the final act of the quarrel is seen in an epistle of Alexander’s, December 3, 1260, authorizing the Bishop of Paris to absolve those who had incurred excommunication by keeping copies of St. Amour’s book, on their surrendering them to be burned, the number of these “rebels” apparently being quite large. Still St. Amour remained steadfast in exile. He was allowed to return to Paris by Clement IV who ascended the papal throne in 1264, and in 1266 he sent to the pontiff another book on the same theme. Clement had hastened, in 1265, to proclaim his good-will to the Mendicant Orders by a bull in which he confirmed in the amplest manner their independence of the bishops, and, as was inevitable, he rejected St. Amour’s new book as filled with the old virus. William died in 1272, obstinate and unrepentant, and was honorably buried in his native village of St. Amour, though he is reputed as a heretic by all good Dominicans and Franciscans.

The embers of the controversy had been rekindled in 1269 by an anonymous Franciscan who assailed St. Amour’s book. Gerald of Abbeville, who is ranked with Aquinas, Bonaventura, and Robert of Sorbonne, as one of the four chief theologians of the age, replied with an attack on the doctrine of poverty and a defence of the ownership of property. Bonaventura rejoined with his “Apologia Pauperum”, an eloquent defence of poverty, and the Franciscan annalists relate with natural glee how Gerard was so overcome by his adversary’s logic that, under the vengeance of God, he lost the faculty of reasoning, sank into paralysis, and ended with a horrible death by leprosy.

Though an occasional outbreak like this might occur, the victory was won. The aggressions of the Mendicants had raised a deep and widespread hostility against them in all ranks of the clergy, who recognized not only that their privileges and wealth were impaired, that the reverence of the people was intercepted, but, what was even more important, that this new papal militia was subjecting them to Rome with a force that would deprive them of what little independence had been left by former encroachments. When, therefore, the upstarts had dared a combat with the honored and powerful University of Paris—the shining sun, to use the words of Alexander IV, which pours the light of pure doctrine through the whole world, the body from which, as from the bosom of a parent, are born the noble race of doctors who enlighten Christendom and uphold the Catholic faith—it might well be thought that the rash interlopers had provoked their fate. Everything had been tried—learning and wit, reverence for established institutions, popular favor, the long-enjoyed right of the governing faculty to regulate its internal affairs—yet everything had failed against the steadfastness of the Mendicants supported by the unwavering favor of Alexander. When the University of Paris had been worsted in the struggle, though aided with the sympathy of all the prelates of Christendom, there was little hope in further opposition to those whom the pope, in forbidding the prelates to side with the University, described as “Golden vials filled with sweet odors”.

CONTINUED ANTAGONISM.