Thus the Inquisition in its decrepitude had a temporary resumption of activity, before the Reformation came to renew its vigor in a different shape. Yet it was not everywhere allowed to work its will upon this new class of heretics. In France edicts of 1490 and 1493 treat them as subject exclusively to the secular courts, unless the offenders happen to be justiciable by the ecclesiastical tribunals, and no allusion whatever is made to the Inquisition. At the same time the growing sharpness of persecution is seen in provisions which subject those who consult necromancers and sorcerers to the same penalties as the practitioners themselves, and threaten judges who are negligent in arresting them with loss of office, perpetual disability, and heavy arbitrary fines. It was doubtless owing to this exclusion of spiritual jurisdiction over sorcery that the spread of witchcraft in France was slower than in Germany and Italy.[592]

Cornelius Agrippa, whose learned treatises on the occult sciences trench so nearly on forbidden ground, when he held the position of Town Orator and Advocate of Metz, had the hardihood, in 1519, to save from the clutches of the inquisitor, Nicholas Savin, an unfortunate woman accused of witchcraft. The only evidence against her was that her mother had been burned as a witch. Savin quoted the “Malleus Maleficarum” to show that if she were not the offspring of an incubus she must undoubtedly have been devoted to Satan at her birth. In conjunction with the episcopal official, John Leonard, he had her cruelly tortured, and she was then exposed to starvation in her prison. When Agrippa offered to defend her he was turned out of court and threatened with prosecution as a fautor of heresy, and her husband was refused access to the place of trial, lest he should interject an appeal. Leonard chanced to fall mortally sick, and, touched with remorse on his death-bed, he executed an instrument declaring his conviction of her innocence and asked the chapter to set her at liberty; but Savin demanded that she should be further tortured and then burned. Agrippa, however, labored so effectually with Leonard’s successor and with the chapter that the woman was discharged; but his disinterested zeal cost him his office, and he was obliged to leave Metz. Relieved of his presence, the inquisitor speedily found another witch, whom he burned after forcing her by torture to confess all the horrors of the Sabbat and customary evil deeds wrought through the power of Satan. Encouraged by this, he organized a search for others, doubtless based on the confessions of the victim, and imprisoned a number, while others fled, and there would have been a pitiless massacre had not Roger Brennon, parish priest of St. Cross, openly opposed him and vanquished him in disputation, whereupon the jail doors were thrown open and the fugitives returned.[593]

The most decided rebuff, however, which the Inquisition experienced in its new sphere of activity was administered by Venice. I have had occasion more than once to allude to the controversy between the Signory and the Holy See over the witches of Brescia, when the Republic definitely refused to execute the sentences of the inquisitors. To understand the full significance of its action, it is to be observed that for two generations the Church had been energetically cultivating witchcraft throughout Lombardy by unceasingly urging its persecution and breaking down all resistance on the part of the intelligent laity, until it had succeeded in rendering upper Italy a perfect hot-bed of the heresy. In 1457 Calixtus III. ordered his nuncio, Bernardo di Bosco, to use active measures in repressing its growth in Brescia, Bergamo, and the vicinage. Thirty years later Frà Girolamo Visconti found an abundant field for his labor in Como, the result of which he communicated to the world in his Lamiarum Tractatus, and Sprenger assures us that a whole book would be required to record the cases, in Brescia alone, of women who had become witches through despair in consequence of seduction, although the episcopal court had shown the most praiseworthy vigor in suppressing them. In 1494 we find Alexander VI. stimulating the Lombard inquisitor, Frà Angelo da Verona, to greater activity, assuring him that witches were numerous in Lombardy and inflicted great damage on men, harvests, and cattle. When at Cremona, in the early years of the sixteenth century, the inquisitor, Giorgio di Casale, endeavored to exterminate the numberless witches flourishing there, and was interfered with by certain clerks and laymen, who asserted that he was exceeding his jurisdiction, Julius II., following the example of Innocent VIII. in the case of Sprenger, promptly came to the rescue by defining his powers, and offering to all who would aid him in the good work indulgences such as were given to crusaders—provisions which, in 1523, were extended to the Inquisitor of Como by Adrian VI. The result of all this careful stimulation is seen in the description of the Lombard witches by Gianfrancesco Pico, and in the alarming report by Silvester Prierias that they were extending down the Apennines and boasting that they would outnumber the faithful. The spread of popular belief is illustrated in the remark of Politian, that, when he was a child he had great dread of the witches whom his grandmother used to tell him lie in wait in the woods to swallow little boys.[594]

Venice had always been careful to preserve the secular jurisdiction over sorcery. A resolution of the great council in 1410 allows the Inquisition to act in such cases when they involve heresy or the abuse of sacraments, but if injury had resulted to individuals the spiritual offence alone was cognizable by the Inquisition, while the resultant crimes were justiciable by the lay court; and when, in 1422, some Franciscans were charged with sacrificing to demons, the Council of Ten committed the affair to a councillor, a capo, an inquisitor, and an advocate. Brescia was a spot peculiarly infected with witchcraft. As early as 1455 the inquisitor, Frà Antonio, called upon the Senate for aid to exterminate it, which was presumably afforded, but when a fresh persecution arose in 1486 the podestà refused to execute the inquisitorial sentences, and the Signoria supported him, calling forth, as we have seen, the vigorous protest of Innocent VIII. Under the stimulus of persecution the evil increased with terrible rapidity. In 1510 we hear of seventy women and seventy men burned at Brescia; in 1514 of three hundred at Como. In such an epidemic every victim was a new source of infection, and the land was threatened with depopulation. In the madness of the hour it was currently reported that on the plain of Tonale, near Brescia, the customary gathering at the Sabbat exceeded twenty-five thousand souls; and in 1518 the Senate was officially informed that the inquisitor had burned seventy witches of the Valcamonica, that he had as many in his prisons, and that those suspected or accused amounted to about five thousand, or one fourth of the inhabitants of the valleys. It was time to interfere, and the Signoria interposed effectually, leading to violent remonstrances from Rome. Leo X. issued, February 15, 1521, his fiery bull, Honestis, ordering the inquisitors to use freely the excommunication and the interdict, if their sentences on the witches were not executed without examination or revision, showing how transparent were the subterfuges adopted to throw upon the secular courts the responsibility of putting to death those who were not relapsed. On March 21 the imperturbable Council of Ten quietly responded by laying down regulations for all trials, including the cases in question, of which the sentences were treated as invalid, and all bail heretofore taken was to be discharged. The examinations were to be made without the use of torture by one or two bishops, an inquisitor, and two doctors of Brescia, all selected for probity and intelligence. The result was to be read in the court of the podestà, with the participation of the two rettori, or governors, and four more doctors. The accused were to be asked if they ratified their statements, and were to be liable to torture if they modified them. When all this was done with due circumspection, judgment was to be rendered in accordance with the counsel of all the above-named experts, and under no other circumstances was a sentence to be executed. In this way the Signoria hoped that the errors said to have been committed would be avoided for the future. Moreover, the papal legate was to be admonished to see that the expenses of the Inquisition were moderate and free from extortion, and was to find expedients to prevent greed for money from causing the condemnation of the innocent, as was said to have often been the case. He should also depute proper persons to investigate the extortions and other evil acts of the inquisitors, which had excited general complaint, and he should summarily punish the perpetrators to serve as an example. He was further requested to consider that these poor people of Valcamonica were simple folk of the densest ignorance, much more in need of good preachers than of persecutors, especially as they were so numerous.[595]

In an age of superstition this utterance of the Council of Ten stands forth as a monument of considerate wisdom and calm common-sense. Had its enlightened spirit been allowed to guide the counsels of popes and princes, Europe would have been spared the most disgraceful page in the annals of civilization. The lesson of cruel fear so sedulously inculcated on the nations was thoroughly learned. Hideous as are the details of the persecution of witchcraft which we have been considering up to the fifteenth century, they were but the prelude to the blind and senseless orgies of destruction which disgraced the next century and a half. Christendom seemed to have grown delirious, and Satan might well smile at the tribute to his power seen in the endless smoke of the holocausts which bore witness to his triumph over the Almighty. Protestant and Catholic rivalled each other in the madness of the hour. Witches were burned no longer in ones and twos, but in scores and hundreds. A bishop of Geneva is said to have burned five hundred within three months, a bishop of Bamburg six hundred, a bishop of Würzburg nine hundred. Eight hundred were condemned, apparently in one body, by the Senate of Savoy. So completely had the intervention of Satan, through the instrumentality of his worshippers, become a part of the unconscious process of thought, that any unusual operation of nature was attributed to them as a matter of course. The spring of 1586 was tardy in the Rhinelands and the cold was prolonged until June: this could only be the result of witchcraft, and the Archbishop of Trèves burned at Pfalz a hundred and eighteen women and two men, from whom confessions had been extorted that their incantations had prolonged the winter. It was well that he acted thus promptly, for on their way to the place of execution they stated that had they been allowed three days more they would have brought cold so intense that no green thing could have survived, and that all fields and vineyards would have been cursed with barrenness. The Inquisition evidently had worthy pupils, but it did not relax its own efforts. Paramo boasts that in a century and a half from the commencement of the sect, in 1404, the Holy Office had burned at least thirty thousand witches who, if they had been left unpunished, would easily have brought the whole world to destruction.[596] Could any Manichæan offer more practical evidence that Satan was lord of the visible universe?

CHAPTER VIII.

INTELLECT AND FAITH.

There were two tendencies at work to provoke collisions between the schoolmen and the inquisitors. The ardor of persecution, which rendered the purity of the faith the highest aim of the Christian and the most imperative care of the ruler, secular and spiritual, created an exaggerated standard of orthodoxy, which regarded the minutest point of theology as equally important with the fundamental doctrines of religion. We have already seen instances of this in the questions as to the poverty of Christ, as to whether he was dead when lanced on the cross, and as to whether the blood which he shed in the Passion remained on earth or ascended to heaven; and Stephen Palecz, at the Council of Constance, proved dialectically that a doctrine in which one point in a thousand was erroneous was thereby rendered heretical throughout. Moreover, erroneous belief was not necessary, for the Christian must be firm in the faith, and doubt itself was heresy.[597]

The other tendency was the insane thirst which inflamed the minds of the schoolmen for determining and defining, with absolute precision, every detail of the universe and of the invisible world. So far as this gratified itself within the lines of orthodoxy laid down by an infallible Church it resulted in building up the most complex and stupendous body of theology that human wit has ever elaborated. The Sentences of Peter Lombard grew into the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, an elaborate structure to be grasped and retained only by minds of peculiar powers after severe and special training. When this was once defined and accepted as orthodox, theology and philosophy became the most dangerous of sciences, while the perverse ingenuity of the schoolmen, revelling in the subtleties of dialectics, was perpetually rearguing doubtful points, raising new questions, and introducing new refinements in matters already too subtle for the comprehension of the ordinary intellect. The inquirer who disturbs the dust now happily covering the records of these forgotten wrangles can only feel regret that such wonderful intellectual acuteness and energy should have been so wofully wasted when, if rightly applied, it might have advanced by so many centuries the progress of humanity.

The story of Roger Bacon, the Doctor Mirabilis, is fairly illustrative of the tendencies of the time. That gigantic intellect bruised itself perpetually against the narrow bars erected around it by an age presumptuous in its learned ignorance. Once a transient gleam of light broke in upon the darkness of its environment, when Gui Foucoix was elevated to the papacy, and, as Clement IV., commanded the Englishman to communicate to him the discoveries of which he had vaguely heard. It is touching to see the eagerness with which the unappreciated scholar labored to make the most of this unexpected opportunity; how he impoverished his friends to raise the money requisite to pay the scribes who should set forth in a fair copy the tumultuous train of thought in which he sought to embody the whole store of human knowledge, and how, within the compass of little more than a single year, he thus accomplished the enormous task of writing the Opus Majus, the Opus Minus, and the Opus Tertium. Unfortunately, Clement was more concerned at the moment with the fortunes of Charles of Anjou than with the passing fancy which had led him to call upon the scholar; in little more than two years he was dead, and it is doubtful whether he even repaid the sums expended in gratifying his wishes.[598]

It was inevitable that Bacon should succumb in the unequal struggle at once with the ignorance and the learning of his age. His labors and his utterances were a protest against the whole existing system of thought and teaching. The schoolmen evolved the universe from their internal consciousness, and then wrangled incessantly over subtleties suggested by the barbarous jargon of their dialectics. It was the same with theology, which had usurped the place of religion. Peter Lombard was greater than all the prophets and evangelists taken together. As Bacon tells us, the study of Scripture was neglected for that of the Sentences, in which lay the whole glory of the theologian. He who taught the Sentences could select his own hour for teaching, and had accommodations provided for him. He who taught the Scriptures had to beg for a time in which to be heard, and had no assistance. The former could dispute, and was held to be a master; the latter was condemned to silence in the debates of the schools. It is impossible, he adds, that the Word of God can be understood, on account of the abuse of the Sentences; and whoso seeks in Scripture to elucidate questions is stigmatized as whimsical, and is not listened to. Worse than all, the text of the Vulgate is horribly corrupt, and where not corrupt it is doubtful, owing to the ignorance of would-be correctors and their presumption, for every one deemed himself able to correct the text, though he would not venture to alter a word in a poet. First of moderns, Bacon discerned the importance of etymology and of comparative philology, and he exposed unsparingly the wretched blunders customary among the so-called learned, who only succeeded in leading their pupils into error. Bacon’s methods were strictly scientific. He wanted facts, actual facts, as a basis for all reasoning, whether on dogma or physical and mental experiences. To him all study of nature or of man was empirical; to know first, and then to reason. Mathematics was first in the order of sciences; then metaphysics; and to him metaphysics was not a barren effort to frame a system on postulates assumed at caprice and built up on dialectical sophisms, but a solid series of deductions from ascertained observations, for, according to Avicenna, “the conclusions of other sciences are the principles of metaphysics.”[599]

The vast labors of the earnest life of a great genius were lost to a world too conceited of its petty vanities to recognize how far he was in advance of it. It was enamored of words; he dealt in things: the actual was rejected for the unsubstantial, and an intellectual revolution of priceless value to mankind was stifled in its inception. It was as though Caliban should chain Prospero and cast him into the ocean. How completely Bacon was unappreciated by an age unable to understand him and his antagonism towards its methods is evidenced by the scarcity of manuscripts of his works, the fragmentary condition of some of them, and the utter disappearance of others. “It is easier,” says Leland, “to collect the leaves of the Sibyl than the titles of the works of Roger Bacon.” The same evidence is furnished by the absence of detail as to his life no less than by the vulgar stories of his proficiency in magic arts. Even the tragic incident of his imprisonment by his Franciscan superiors and the prohibition to pursue his studies is so obscure that it is told in contradictory fashion, and its truth has been not unreasonably denied. According to one account he was accused of unorthodox speculations, in 1278, to Geronimo d’Ascoli, General of the Order; his opinions were condemned, the brethren were ordered scrupulously to avoid them, and he himself was cast into prison, doubtless because he did not submit as serenely as Olivi to Geronimo’s sentence. He must have had followers and sympathizers, for Geronimo is said to have prevented their complaints by promptly applying to Nicholas III. for a confirmation of the judgment. How long his imprisonment lasted is not known, though there is a tradition that he perished in jail, either through sickness or the ill-treatment which we have seen was freely visited by the Franciscans on their erring brethren. Another statement attributes his incarceration to the ascetic Raymond Gaufridi, who was General of the Order from 1289 to 1295. In either case it would not be difficult to explain the cause of his disgrace. In the fierce passions of the schools, one who antagonized so completely the prevailing currents of thought, and who exposed so mercilessly the ignorance of the learned, could not fail to excite bitter enmities. The daring scholar who preferred Scripture to the Sentences, and pronounced the text of the Vulgate to be corrupt, must have given ample opportunity for accusations of heresy in a time when dogma had become so intricate, and mortal heresy might lurk in the minutest aberration. The politic Geronimo might readily listen to enemies so numerous and powerful as those whom Bacon must have provoked. The ascetic Raymond, whose aim was to bring back the Order to its primitive rudeness and simplicity, would regard Bacon’s labors with the same aversion as that manifested by the early Spirituals to Crescenzio Grizzi’s learning. It was a standing complaint with his section of the Order that Paris had destroyed Assisi. As Jacopone da Todi sang:

and the Spiritual General might well like to strike a blow at the greatest scholar of the Order.[600]

While Bacon suffered because he antagonized the thought of his time, there was much of scholastic bitterness which escaped animadversion because it was the development of the tendencies of the age, and the schoolmen were allowed to indulge in endless wrangling for the most part without censure. The great quarrel between the Nominalists and the Realists occupies too large a space in the intellectual history of Europe to be wholly passed over, although its relation to our immediate subject is not intimate enough to justify detailed consideration.

In the developed theory of the Realists, genera and species—the distinctive attributes of individual beings, or the conceptions of those attributes—are real entities, if not the only realities. Individuals are ephemeral existences which pass away; the only things which survive are those which are universal and common to all. In man this is humanity, but humanity again is but a portion of a larger existence, the animate, and the animate is but a transitory form of an Infinite Being, which is All and nothing in particular. This is the sole Immutable. These conceptions took their origin in the Periphyseos of John Scot Erigena in the ninth century, whose reaction against the prevailing anthropomorphism led him to sublimated views of the Divine Being, which trenched closely on Pantheism. The heresy latent in his work lay undiscovered until developed by the Amaurians, when the book, after nearly four centuries, was condemned by Honorius III., in 1225.[601]

Nominalism, on the other hand, regarded the individual as the primal substance; universals are only abstractions or mental conceptions of qualities common to individuals, with no more of reality than the sounds which express them. Even as Realism in the hands of daring thinkers led to Pantheism, so, step by step, Nominalism could be brought to recognize the originality of the individual and finally to Atomism.[602]

The two antagonistic schools were first clearly defined in the beginning of the twelfth century, with Roscelin, the teacher of Abelard, as the leader of the Nominalists, and William of Champeaux at the head of the Realists. Discussion continued in the schools with constantly increasing bitterness, though neither side dared to push their own views to their ultimate conclusions. Realism in a modified form achieved a triumph with the immense authority of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Duns Scotus was a Realist, though he differed with Aquinas on the problem of individuation, and the Realists became divided into the opposing factions of Thomists and Scotists. While they were thus weakened with dissension, William of Ockham revived Nominalism, and it became bolder than ever. The perennial hostility between the Dominicans and Franciscans tended to range the two Orders under the opposing banners, while Ockham’s defence of Louis of Bavaria in his quarrel with the papacy served to impress upon the new school of Nominalists his views upon the relations between Church and State.[603]

The schools continued to resound with the clangor of disputation, occasionally growing so hot that blows supplied the deficiency of words, and even murder is said to have not been wanting. Under Peter d’Ailly and John Gerson the University of Paris was Nominalist. With the English domination the Realists triumphed and expelled their adversaries, who were unable to return until the restoration of the French monarchy. In 1465 there arose in the University of Louvain a strife which lasted for ten years over some propositions of Pierre de la Rive on fate and divine foreknowledge, in which the rival sects took sides. The University of Paris was drawn in; the Nominalists triumphed in condemning de la Rive, and the Realists took their revenge by procuring from Louis XI. an edict prohibiting the teaching of Nominalist doctrines in the University and in all the schools of the kingdom; all Nominalist books were boxed up and sealed until 1481, when Louis was persuaded to recall his edict, and the university rejoiced to regain her liberty. One tragic incident in the long quarrel has been already alluded to in the trial of John of Wesel which led to his death in prison, and it illustrates how readily scholastic ardor assumed that in gratifying its vindictiveness it was vindicating the faith. The contemporary reporter of the trial assumes that the persecution was caused by the antagonism of the Dominican Realists to the Nominalism of the victim, and he deplores the rage which led the Thomists to regard every one who denied the existence of universals as though guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost, and as a traitor to God, to the Christian religion, to justice, and to the State.[604]

The annals of the schools are full of cases which show how the recklessness of disputatious logic led to subtleties most perilous in minute details of theology, and also how sensitive were the conservators of the faith as to anything that might be construed by perverse ingenuity as savoring of heresy. Duns Scotus did not escape, nor Thomas Bradwardine; William of Ockham and Buridan were enveloped in a common condemnation by the University of Paris, of which the latter had been rector. The boundaries between philosophy and the theology which sought to define everything in the visible and invisible world were impossible of definition, and it was a standing grievance that the philosophers were perpetually intruding on the domains of the theologians. When their daring speculations were unorthodox they sought to shelter themselves behind the assertion that according to the methods of philosophy the Catholic religion was erroneous and false, but that it was true as a matter of faith, and that they believed it accordingly. This only made matters worse, for, as the authorities pointed out, it assumed that there were two opposite truths, contradicting each other. It was not merely that orthodox sensitiveness was called upon to condemn, as was done in 1447 by the University of Louvain, such vain sophisms as the assertion that it is possible to conceive of a line a foot long which shall yet have neither beginning nor end, and that a whole may be in England while all its parts are in Rome; or those of Jean Fabre, condemned by the University of Paris in 1463, that any part of a man is a man, that one man is infinite men, that no man is ever corrupted, though sometimes a man is corrupted—propositions in which lurked the possibilities of heretical development—or the apparently yet more innocent grammatical obtuseness which recognized no difference between the phrases “the pot boils” and “pot, thou boilest”—an obtuseness which Erasmus tells us was regarded as an infallible sign of infidelity. Philosophers were not satisfied unless they could prove by logic the profoundest and holiest mysteries of theology, and, however zealous they were in the faith, the intrusion of reason into the theological preserves was not only resented as an interference, but was rightfully regarded with alarm at its possible consequences. When the Arab philosophers were disputing as to the nature and operation of the Divine Knowledge, the calm wisdom of Maimonides interposed, saying, “To endeavor to understand the Divine Knowledge is as though we endeavored to be God himself, so that our perception should be as his.... It is absolutely impossible for us to attain this kind of perception. If we could explain it to ourselves we should possess the intelligence which gives this kind of perception.” Ambitious schoolmen, however, as well as orthodox theological doctors, refused to admit that the finite cannot grasp the infinite, and their pride of reason awakened, not unnaturally, the jealousy of those who considered it their exclusive privilege to guard the Holy of Holies and to explain the will of God to men. This feeling finds expression as early as 1201 in the story told of the learned doctor, Simon de Tournay, who proved by ingenious arguments the mystery of the Trinity, and then, elated by the applause of his hearers, boasted that if he were disposed to be malignant, he could disprove it with yet stronger ones, whereupon he was immediately stricken with paralysis and idiocy. The self-restraint of such men was a slender reliance, and yet slenderer was the chance that the interposition of Heaven would always furnish so salutary a warning.[605]

The audacity of these rash intruders upon the sacred precincts increased immeasurably with the introduction of the works of Averrhoes in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, constituting a real danger of the perversion of Christian thought. In the hands of the Arab commentators the theism of Aristotle became a transcendental materialism, carried to its furthest expression by the latest of them, Ibn Roschd or Averrhoes, who died in 1198. In his system matter has existed from the beginning, and the theory of creation is impossible. The universe consists of a hierarchy of principles, eternal, primordial, and autonomous, vaguely connected with a superior unity. One of these is the Active Intellect, manifesting itself incessantly and constituting the permanent consciousness of humanity. This is the only form of immortality. As the soul of man is a fragment of a collective whole, temporarily detached to animate the body, at death it is reabsorbed into the Active Intellect of the universe. Consequently there are no future rewards or punishments, no feelings, memory, sensibility, love, or hatred. The perishable body has the power of reproducing itself and thus enjoys a material immortality in its descendants, but it is only collective humanity that is immortal.[606] To those whose conceptions of paradise and the resurrection were as material as the Swarga of the Brahman or the Kama Loka heavens of the Buddhist, such collective and insensible immortality, like the Moksha and Nirvana, was virtually equivalent to annihilation, and the Averrhoists were universally stigmatized as materialists.

Such theories as these necessarily induced the loftiest indifferentism as to religious formulas, although a wholesome dread of the rising Moslem fanaticism, from which Averrhoes had not escaped scathless, rendered him cautious as to assailing the established faith. “The special religion of philosophers,” he says, “is to study what exists, for the most sublime worship of God is the contemplation of his works, which leads us to a knowledge of him in all his reality. In the eye of God this is the noblest of actions, while the vilest is to accuse of error and presumption him who pays to divinity this worship, nobler than all other worship; who adores God by this religion, the best of all religions.” At the same time the received religions are an excellent instrument of morality. He who inspires among a people doubts as to the national religion is a heretic, to be punished as such by the established penalties. The wise man will utter no word against the national religion, and will especially avoid speaking of God in a manner equivocal to the vulgar. When several religions confront each other, one should select the noblest. Thus all religions are of human origin, and the choice between them is a matter of opinion or policy—but policy, if nothing else, must have prevented Averrhoes from uttering the phrase commonly attributed to him—“The Christian faith is impossible; that of Judaism is a religion of children, that of Islam, a religion of hogs.”[607]

Still less credible is the popular assertion which assigns to him the famous speech referring to Moses, Christ, and Mahomet as the three impostors who had deluded the human race. This saying became a convenient formula with which the Church horrified the faithful by attributing it successively to those whom it desired to discredit. Thomas of Cantimpré fathered it upon Simon de Tournay, whose paralytic stroke in 1201 he ascribed to this impiety. Gregory IX., when in 1239 he arraigned Frederic II. before the face of Europe, did not hesitate to assert that he was the author of this utterance, which Frederic made haste to deny in the most solemn manner. A certain renegade Dominican named Thomas Scot, who was condemned and imprisoned in Portugal, was said to have been guilty of this blasphemy among others, and the phrase drifted through the centuries until there was a current belief that an impious book existed under the title De Tribus Impostoribus, the authorship of which was attributed variously to Petrus de Vineis, Boccaccio, Poggio, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Servetus, Bernardino Ochino, Rabelais, Pietro Aretino, Étienne Dolet, Francesco Pucci, Muret, Vanini, and Milton. Queen Christina of Sweden vainly caused all the libraries of Europe to be searched for it, but it remained invisible until, in the eighteenth century, various scribblers put forth volumes to gratify the popular curiosity.[608]

Yet to Frederic II. may be attributed the introduction of Averrhoism in central Europe. In Spain it was so prevalent that about 1260 Alonso X. describes heresies as consisting of two principal divisions, of which the worst was that which denies the immortality of the soul and future rewards and punishments, and in 1291 we find the Council of Tarragona ordering the punishment of those who disbelieved in a future existence. It was from Toledo that Michael Scot came with translations of Aristotle and Averrhoes, and was warmly welcomed at the court of Frederic, whose insatiable thirst for knowledge and whose slender reverence for formulas led him to grasp eagerly at these unexpected sources of philosophy. It was probably these translations which formed the body of Aristotelism distributed by him to the universities of Italy. Hermannus Alemannus continued Michael’s work at Toledo and brought versions of other books to Manfred, who inherited his father’s tastes, so that by the middle of the century the principal labors of Averrhoes were accessible to scholars.[609]

The infection spread with rapidity almost incredible. Already, in 1243, Guillaume d’Auvergne, Bishop of Paris, and the Masters of the University condemned a series of scholastic errors, not indeed distinctively Averrhoist, but manifesting in their bold independence the influence which the Arab philosophy was beginning to exercise. In 1247 the papal legate Otto, Bishop of Frascati, condemned Jean de Brescain for certain heretical speculations concerning light and matter; he was banished from Paris and forbidden to teach, or dispute, or to live where there was a college. At the same time a certain Master Raymond who had been imprisoned for his erroneous views was found to be contumacious and was ordered back to prison, while, for the future, logicians were forbidden to argue theologically and theologians logically, as they were growing accustomed to do. This accomplished little, and as little was effected by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, who employed their keenest dialectics to check the spread of these dangerous opinions. Bonaventura likewise denounced the audacious philosophy which denied immortality and asserted the unity of intellect and the eternity of matter, showing that Dominicans and Franciscans could co-operate against a common enemy. In 1270, Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, was called upon to condemn a series of thirteen errors, distinctively Averrhoist, which found defenders among the schools, to the effect that the intellect of all men is the same and is one in number; that human will is controlled by necessity; that the world is eternal and there never was a first man; that the soul is corrupted with the corruption of the body and does not suffer from corporeal fire; that God does not know individual things, he knows nothing but himself, and cannot give immortality and incorruptibility to that which is mortal and corruptible.[610]

This availed as little as the previous effort. In 1277 it was deemed necessary to invoke the authority of John XXI., under which Bishop Tempier condemned a list of two hundred and nineteen errors, mostly the same as the previous ones, or deductions drawn from them, tending to systematize materialism and fatalism. The daring progress made by free-thought is shown by the sharply defined antagonism proclaimed between philosophy and theology: The philosopher must deny the creation of the world because he relies upon natural causes alone, but the believer may assert it because he relies upon supernatural causes; the utterances of the theologians are based upon fables, and theology is a study unworthy the pursuing, for philosophers are the only sages and the Christian law impedes the progress of learning: prayer, of course, is unnecessary, and sepulture is not worth consideration by the wise man, but confession may be practised to save appearances. The Averrhoist theory of the universe and the celestial spheres was fully expressed, as well as the controlling influences of the stars upon human will and fortunes, for which, as we have seen, Peter of Abano and Cecco d’Ascoli subsequently suffered. In addition we have the speculation that with every cycle of thirty-six thousand years the celestial bodies returned to the same relative positions, producing a repetition of the same series of events.[611]

About the same time Robert Kilwarby, Archbishop of Canterbury, together with the Masters of Oxford, condemned some errors evidently originating from the same source, but not asserting materialism in a manner so absolute, and this condemnation was confirmed in 1284 by Archbishop Peckham, but the only punishment threatened was deposition for a Master, and for a Bachelor expulsion with disability for promotion. These articles were combined with those of Bishop Tempier, and together the collection had wide currency, as shown by the number of MSS. containing it. That the opinions thus condemned continued to be regarded as a source of real danger to the Church is manifested by the articles being customarily printed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at the end of the fourth book of the Sentences, and also in an edition each of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Bonaventura.[612]

Yet after the death of Bishop Tempier these articles aroused considerable complaint as interfering with freedom of discussion, and they became the object of no little debate. In fact, in so long a list of errors, many of them scarce apprehensible save by the scholastic mind, it was almost impossible to avoid trenching upon positions held to be orthodox in a theology of which the complexity had grown beyond the grasp of finite intelligence and finite memory. Considerable trouble was occasioned by the fact that some of the articles assailed positions held by Thomas Aquinas himself; others were attacked by William of Ockham and Jean de Poilly. How perilous, indeed, was the position of the theological expert in the war of dialectics is seen in the case of the Doctor Fundatissimus, Egidio Colonna, better known as Egidio da Roma. There was no more earnest and active opponent of Averrhoism, and his list of its errors long continued to be the basis of its condemnation. Yet he translated a commentary on Aristotle, and in 1285 he was accused in Paris of entertaining some of the errors condemned in 1277. After considerable discussion the matter was carried before the Holy See, and Honorius IV. referred him back to the University of Paris for sentence. He made his peace so effectually that Philippe le Bel, whose tutor he had been, presented him to the great archbishopric of Bourges.[613]

At the close of the thirteenth and the commencement of the fourteenth century the principal figure in the contest with Averrhoes is Raymond Lully—aptly styled by Renan the hero of the crusade against it—but the career of Lullism was so remarkable that it must be considered independently hereafter. All efforts failed to suppress a philosophy which offered such attractions to the rising energies of the human intellect. An avowed school of Averrhoists arose, whose tenets, introduced in the University of Padua seemingly by Peter of Abano, reigned there supreme until the seventeenth century. The University of Bologna likewise adopted them. Jean de Jandun, the collaborator of Marsilio of Padua, was a modified Averrhoist, as were Walter Burleigh, Buridan, and the Ockhamists. John of Baconthorpe, who died in 1346 as General of the Carmelites, rejoiced in the title of Prince of Averrhoists, and through him the philosophy became traditional in the Order. These men might conceal to themselves the dangerous irreligion which lurked under their cherished theories, but when these spread among the people, divested of the subtle dialectics of the schools, they developed into frank materialism. Dante’s description of the portion of hell where

manifests by its occupants that Averrhoism in its crudest form was openly professed by men high in station; and some proceedings of the Inquisitions of Carcassonne and Pamiers in the first quarter of the fourteenth century indicate that even in the lower strata of society such opinions were not uncommon. The indignation of Petrarch shows us how fashionable and how outspoken by the middle of the century this indifferentism had become in the Venetian provinces, where men did not hesitate to ridicule Christ and to regard Averrhoes as the fountain of wisdom. In Florence the tradition of the same philosophic contempt for dogma is indicated by Boccaccio’s story of the Three Rings, wherein Melchisedech the Jew, by an ingenious parable, conveys to Saladin the conclusion that all three religions are on the same plane, with equal claims for reverence. In Spain, although philosophy was little cultivated, Moorish tradition seems to have kept Averrhoism alive. The revolted nobles who, in 1464, presented their complaints to King Enrique IV., declare him suspect in the faith because he keeps about his person enemies of Catholicism, and others who, while nominally Christians, boast of their disbelief in the immortality of the soul.[614]

Averrhoism had thus fairly conquered a position for itself, and it is one of the inscrutable problems why the Inquisition, so unrelenting in its suppression of minor aberrations, should have conceded impunity to speculations which not only sapped the foundations of Christian faith, but by plain implication denied all the doctrines on which were based the wealth and power of the hierarchy. Even the University of Paris, so vigilant in its guard over orthodoxy, seems during the remainder of the fourteenth century to have abstained from condemning Averrhoism and its deductions, although there were numerous decisions against minute errors of scholastic theology. Yet to Gerson Averrhoes was still the most insolent adversary of the faith; he was the man who had condemned all religions as bad, but that of the Christians as worst of all, for they daily ate their God; and, in the allegorical paintings of Orcagna, Traini, Taddeo Gaddi, and their successors, Averrhoes commonly figures as the impersonation of rebellious unbelief.[615]

It was not till 1512 that Averrhoism had its first recorded victim since Peter of Abano, in the person of Hermann of Ryswick, who, in 1499, had been condemned for teaching its materialistic doctrines—that matter is uncreated and has existed with God from the beginning, that the soul dies with the body, and that angels, whether good or bad, are not created by God. He abjured and was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, but escaped and persisted in propagating his errors. When again apprehended, in 1512, the inquisitor at The Hague had no hesitation in handing him over as a relapsed to the secular arm, and he was duly burned.[616]

In northern Europe, where scholastic theology was engaged in mortal combat with Humanism, rigor like this is to be looked for, but the case was different in Italy. There letters had long before got the better of faith. The infection of culture and philosophy, of elegant paganism, pervaded all the more elevated ranks of society. A succession of cultured popes, who were temporal princes rather than vicars of Christ, and who prided themselves on the patronage of scholars, could turn aside from the affairs of state to stimulate the burning of miserable witches, but not to condemn the errors of the philosophers who adorned their courts. If Rome was to remain the mistress of the world under the New Learning, she could not afford to be relentless in repressing the aspirations and speculations of scholars and philosophers.[617] The battle had been fought and lost over Lorenzo Valla. It is true that his destructive criticism of the Donation of Constantine was written at Naples about 1440, when Alfonso I. was in conflict with Eugenius IV. Yet, as he not only swept away the foundations of the temporal power, but argued that the papacy should be deprived of it, the impunity which he enjoyed is a remarkable proof of the freedom of speech permitted at the period. His troubles arose from a different cause, and even these he would probably have escaped but for the quarrelsome humor of the man, and his unsparing ridicule of the horrible jargon of the schools and even of the earlier Humanists. He made enemies enough to conspire for his ruin at the court of Naples, where Alfonso had studied Latin under his teaching, and he soon gave occasion for their attack. Becoming involved in a contest with an ignorant priest who asserted that the Symbol was the production of the Apostles, the discussion spread to the authenticity of the communications between Christ and King Abgar of Edessa. Valla posted a list of the propositions assailed, and hired a hall in which to defend them against all comers, when his enemies procured from the king a prohibition of disputation. Valla then posted on the hall-door a triumphant distich: