Then the Inquisition interposed, but Alfonso exercised the royal Neapolitan prerogative of putting a stop to the prosecution, Valla being only forced to make a general declaration that he believed as Holy Mother Church believed—the sincerity of which appeared when, attacked on a point of dialectics, he defended himself by saying: “In this, too, I believe as Mother Church believes, though Mother Church knows nothing about it.” When, in 1443, Alfonso and Eugenius were reconciled, Valla sought to go to Rome, but was unable to do so; but when the monkish Eugenius was succeeded by the humanist Nicholas V., the way was opened. Nicholas not only welcomed him, but gave him a position among the papal secretaries and rewarded his translation of Thucydides with a gift of five hundred ducats. Calixtus III. provided him with a prebend in the pope’s own church of St. John Lateran, and here he was honorably buried. So little reverence, indeed, existed at the time for the most sacred subjects that Æneas Sylvius relates with admiration, as an illustration of Alfonso’s keenness, that when he had been wearied with a sermon by Frà Antonio, a Sicilian Dominican, on some questions concerning the Eucharist, he put to the preacher the following puzzle: A man enclosed a consecrated host in a vase of gold; a month later, on opening it, he found only a worm; the worm could not have been formed from the pure gold, nor from the accidents which were there, without the subject; it was therefore produced from the body of Christ; but from the substance of God nothing but God can proceed, therefore the worm was God. In such a spiritual atmosphere it was in vain that Lorenzo’s enemy Poggio, whom he had mercilessly ridiculed and abused, urged that his errors as to the nature of God and the vow of chastity should be reproved by fire rather than by argument. His commentary on the New Testament, in which he corrected the errors of the Vulgate by the aid of the Greek text, although subsequently put in the index by Paul IV. in 1559, was not condemned at the time. Nicholas V. saw it, Bessarion contributed to it, Nicholas of Cusa begged a copy of it, and Erasmus, in 1505, published it with enthusiastic encomiums, under the patronage of Christopher Fischer, papal prothonotary. We have seen from Bacon how hopelessly corrupt the text of the Vulgate had become; Valla’s attempt to purify it was warmly contested, but in his controversy over it with Poggio he won the victory, and the right to do so was thenceforth conceded.[618]

After this, scholarship, however heretical, had little to fear in Italy; and the toleration thus extended to the most daring speculations offers abundant food for thought, when we remember that at this very time the Franciscans and Dominicans were turbulently endeavoring to burn each other over the infinitesimal question as to whether the blood of Christ shed in the Passion remained on earth or not. It is true that in 1459 the Lombard inquisitor, Jacopo da Brescia, condemned to degradation and perpetual imprisonment Doctor Zanino da Solcia, Canon of Bergamo, who entertained some crazy theories that the end of the world was approaching, and that God had created another world populated by human beings, so that Adam was not the first man, together with some Averrhoistic tenets that it was the power of the stars, and not love for humanity that led Christ to the cross, and that Christ, Moses, and Mahomet governed mankind at their pleasure; but Pius II., in confirming the sentence, moderated it with the evident purpose in due time of remedying the over-zeal of the inquisitor. He also interfered when the Inquisition had condemned a high official of Udine for virtually denying immortality by asserting that the blood is the soul: the sentence was set aside, and the offender was offered the easy opportunity of escaping punishment as a heretic by publicly declaring this to be an error. Pius, however, showed his orthodoxy by reproving the laxity of Eugenius IV. in the case of Braccio da Montone, the condottiere lord of Perugia, an avowed infidel, whose body, on his death in 1424 at the siege of Aquila, was brought to Rome and thrust into unconsecrated ground until Eugenius had it translated and honorably buried in the cathedral of Perugia. A more typical case is that of Gismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini. He was a man of high culture, and an ardent adept of the new philosophy, who manifested his zeal by bringing from the Peloponnesus and burying with a laudatory inscription, in the cathedral of Rimini, Gemistus Plethon, the half-pagan founder of a new philosophical religion. All this might have escaped animadversion had not his ambition led him to extend his dominions at the expense of papal territory. In the quarrel which ensued his heterodoxy served as a convenient object of attack, and in 1461 Pius II. condemned him as a heretic who denied the immortality of the soul, and in default of his body burned his effigy before a Roman crowd. So little effect had this that the Venetians maintained their alliance with Gismondo, and the Bishop of Treviso incurred imminent risk of losing his see by reason of publishing the sentence. More efficacious was a crusade, in 1463, under the Cardinal of Theane and Federigo d’ Urbino, when Gismondo was stripped of nearly all his possessions and was forced to sue for peace. His heresy then was so little regarded that he was allowed to abjure by deputy, and was reconciled under the trifling penance of Friday fasting on bread and water.[619]

In fact, as Gregory of Heimburg bitterly declares, it was safer to discuss the power of God than that of the popes. This was very clearly demonstrated in the persecution of the “Academy” by Paul II. Pius II. had formed in the curia a college of sixty “abbreviators” for the expedition of papal briefs, which became for the most part a refuge for needy men of letters. Platina, the papal biographer, who was one of them, tells us that it was customary among both philosophers and theologians to dispute about the soul, the existence of God, the separated essences, and other matters, and he seeks to palliate the evil repute thence arising by saying that people confounded search for the truth with heretical doubt. The people probably had ample cause for scandal in such debates among papal officials, which was not diminished when Pomponio Leto founded in honor of Plato an academy of the leading Humanists, who bestowed on their leader the title of Pontifex Maximus, offered sacrifices on the anniversary of the foundation of Rome, and discarded their baptismal names in favor of classical ones. Pomponio himself would study nothing later than the golden age of Roman literature, thus dismissing with contempt the Scriptures and the Fathers, and he daily knelt before an altar dedicated to Romulus. All this might have passed unrepressed had these classical zealots borne with philosophy the withdrawal of papal patronage. One of the early acts of Paul II., in his effort to reform abuses, was the suppression of the College of Abbreviators in consequence of ugly rumors as to the venality and extortion of its members. The men of letters, many of whom had purchased their positions, were indignant at this deprivation of their means of livelihood. Platina was hardy enough to ask the pope to have their rights decided by the Auditors of the Rota, and was refused with abundant emphasis. He then had the incredible audacity to write to Paul threatening him with an appeal to the princes of Christendom to call a council on the subject. After Constance and Basle, the word council was not one to be safely uttered within earshot of a pope; Platina was promptly arrested on a charge of high-treason and thrown into jail, where he lay in chains, without fire, during four winter months, until released on the intercession of Cardinal Gonzaga. All this was not likely to create harmony between Paul and the Humanists; we can readily imagine that epigrams and satires on the pope were freely circulated and that the breach grew wider, but the men of letters, if allowed to remain hungry, were not molested until, early in 1468, Paul was informed that the members of the Academy were conspiring against him. That a crazy admiration of antiquity should culminate in an effort to restore the liberty of Rome was not improbable, and the situation in Italy was such as to render an effort of the kind abundantly capable of causing trouble. Paul was thoroughly alarmed, and at once imprisoned the suspected conspirators. The unlucky Platina, who was one of them, has given us an account of the relentless tortures to which, for two days, about twenty of them were subjected, while Pomponio, who chanced to be in Venice, was dragged to Rome like another Jugurtha. No criminating evidence of treason was discovered, but they were kept in durance for a year, and, in order to find some justification for the affair, which had excited much comment, they were accused of heresy, of disputing about the immortality of the soul, and of venerating Plato. It proves how leniently such aberrations were regarded that they were finally acquitted of all heresy and discharged; and that although Paul abolished the Academy, prohibiting even the mention of its name, his successor, Sixtus IV., as a patron of letters, permitted its re-establishment and appointed Platina librarian of the Vatican library which he founded.[620]

The tolerance thus extended to the paganism of the enthusiastic votaries of the New Learning produced a curious development of religious sentiment among them as insidiously dangerous to the faith, except in its lack of popular attractiveness, as the dogmas so ruthlessly exterminated by Peter Martyr and François Borel. Marsilio Ficino, the Platonist, evidently regarded himself, and was regarded, as a champion of Christianity and a most deserving son of the Church, and yet he kept a lamp lighted in honor of Plato, whom he repeatedly declared to be a Greek-speaking Moses. He brought all religions upon the same level. The worship of the pagan gods of antiquity was a worship of the true God, and not, as the Church held, an adoration of demons. He found Paradise in the Elysian Fields, and Purgatory in Hades. Zoroaster, Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus, Socrates, Plato, and Virgil were prophets on whose evidence he relies to prove the divinity of Christ. The Crito confirms the Evangel and contains the foundation of religion. Even the Neo-Platonists, Plotinus and Proclus, and Iamblichus, are shown to have been supporters of the faith which they so earnestly combated while alive. For teachings far less dangerous than this hundreds of men had been forced to the alternative of recantation or the stake, but Marsilio was honored as a light of his age. It is true that he avoided the errors of Averrhoism, but as these were likewise tolerated his impunity is not to be ascribed to this. While admitting the importance of astrology, he held that the stars have no power of themselves; they can merely indicate, and their indication of the future by their regular revolutions shows that affairs are not abandoned to chance, but are ruled by Providence. So, while human character is affected by the position of the stars at the hour of birth, it is much more the result of heredity and training. Perhaps the most curious illustration which Marsilio gives us of the confusion and upturning of religious ideas in the Renaissance is a letter addressed to Eberhard, Count of Wirtemberg, in which he seriously proves that the sun is not to be worshipped as God. In one respect he was more orthodox than most of his brethren of the New Learning, for he believed in the immortality of the soul, and maintained it in a laborious treatise, but he could not convince his favorite pupil, Michele Mercato, and made with him a compact that the one dying first should return, if there was a future life, and inform the other. One morning Mercato was awakened by the trampling of a horse and a voice calling to him: on rushing to the window the horseman shouted, “Mercato, it is true!”. Marsilio had that moment died.[621]

An exception to this prevalent tolerance is commonly said to be found in the case of Matteo Palmiere of Pisa, reported to have been burned in 1483 for maintaining in his poem, the Città di Vita, that the souls of men are the angels who stood neutral in the revolt of Satan. In reality, however, although the Inquisition disapproved his book, the author was not persecuted; he was honorably buried in Florence, and his portrait by Sandro Botticelli was placed over the altar of San Pietro Maggiore.[622]

That it was not, however, always safe to presume on this favor shown to humanism is evident by the case of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the wonder of his age, who in 1487, when but twenty-four years old, published a series of nine hundred propositions which he offered to defend in Rome against all comers, paying the expenses of scholars who might travel for the purpose from distant lands. The list was virtually de omni scibili, comprising everything recognized as knowable in theology, philosophy, and science, even including the mysteries of the East. It was doubtless the pretentiousness of the young scholar which provoked enmity leading to animadversion on his orthodoxy, and it was not difficult in so vast an array of conclusions to find some thirteen which savored of heresy. To us it might appear a truism to say that belief is independent of volition; we might hesitate to affirm positively whether Christ descended into hell personally or only effectively; we might even agree with him that mortal sin, limited and finite, is not to be visited with chastisement unlimited and infinite; and we might hesitate to embark with him in investigating too narrowly the mysteries of transubstantiation; but these speculative assumptions of the self-sufficient thinker were condemned as heretical by the theologians appointed for their examination by Innocent VIII., who quietly remarked: “This youth wishes to end badly, and be burned some of these days, and then be infamous forever like many another.” Pico was urged to resist and raise a schism, but nothing was further from his thoughts. His few remaining years were passed in the assiduous study of Scripture; he designed, after completing certain works in hand, to wander barefoot over Europe preaching Christ; then, changing his purpose, he intended to enter the Dominican Order, but his projects were cut short, at the age of thirty-two, by the fever which carried him off, gratified in his last hours with a vision of the Virgin. Such a man was an easy victim; the voluminous apology which he wrote to explain his errors availed him nothing, and he was compelled to make a full submission, which earned from Alexander VI., in 1493, not long before Pico’s death, a bull declaring his orthodoxy and forbidding the Inquisition to trouble him.[623]

In curious contrast to this exceptional rigor was the toleration manifested towards the Averrhoists. It is true that Leo X., in the Council of Lateran, December 21, 1513, procured the confirmation of a bull in which he deplored the spread of the doctrine of the mortality of the soul and of there being but one soul common to mankind. He also condemned the opinions which maintained the eternity of the earth and that the soul has not the form of the body, and in prohibiting their teaching in the schools he especially alluded to the ingenious device adopted by professors of arguing against them so equivocally as to lead to the conviction of their truth. In 1518, moreover, when commissioning Master Leonardo Crivelli as Inquisitor-general of Lombardy, he calls his appointee’s special attention to those who seek to know more than it is well to know, and who think ill of the Holy See; these he is to repress with the free use of torture, incarceration, and other penalties, and to pay over their confiscated property to the papal camera, no matter of what condition or dignity they might be. Yet debates on points of Averrhoistic philosophy were the favorite amusement of the semi-pagan philosophers who gathered in Leo’s court, and who deemed that all that was necessary to preserve them from the Inquisition was to present arguments on both sides, pronounce the questions insoluble to human reason, and conclude with a hypocritical submission to the Church. Such was the device of Pomponazio (1473-1525), under whom Averrhoism became more popular than ever, although he ridiculed Averrhoes and called himself an Alexandrian, from Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Aristotelian commentator, from whom Averrhoes had derived much. Pomponazio invented the dilemma, “If the three religions are false, all men are deceived: if only one is true, the majority of men are deceived.” He argued, “If there is a will superior to mine, why should I be responsible for my acts and deeds? Now a will, a superior order exists, therefore all that happens must be in accordance with a preordained cause: whether I do right or wrong there is neither merit nor sin.” In his treatise De Incantationibus he argued away all miracles. The bones of a dog would effect cures as readily as the relics of a saint if the patient’s imagination entertained the same belief in them. Like Peter of Abano, moreover, he held that everything is according to the order of nature; revolutions of empires and religions follow the course of the stars; thaumaturgists are but skilful physicists who foresee the occult influences at work and profit by the suspension of ordinary laws to found new religions; when the influences cease, miracles cease, religions decay, and incredulity would triumph if renewed conjunctions of the planets did not cause fresh prodigies and new thaumaturgists. All this was far worse than anything for which Cecco d’Ascoli suffered, but Pomponazio escaped his fate by cautiously excepting the Christian faith.[624]

In fact, the only work which gave him serious trouble was his treatise De Immortalitate Animœ, written after the Lateran denunciation, in 1516, which Prierias informs us ought rather to have been entitled “De Mortalitate.” In this it is true that he rejects the Averrhoist theory of a universal intelligence as unworthy of refutation through its monstrous and unintelligible fatuity; but, after stating the various arguments for and against immortality, with an evident bearing towards the latter, he sums up by declaring the problem to be “neutral,” like that of the eternity of the earth; there are no natural reasons proving the soul either to be immortal or mortal, but God and Scripture assert immortality, and therefore reasons proving mortality must be false. He evidently seeks to indicate that immortality is a matter of faith, and not of reason; and he even goes so far as to attribute much of the popular belief in departed spirits and in visions to the frauds of corrupt priests, examples of which he says were not uncommon at the time. The thin veil thus cast over its infidelity did not save the book in Venice, where the patriarch had it publicly burned, and wrote to Cardinal Bembo to have it condemned in Rome. Bembo read it with gusto, pronounced it conformable with the faith, and gave it to the Master of the Sacred Palace, who reached the same opinion. The latter’s successor in office, however, Prierias, was less indulgent. In his treatise on witches (1521) he declares that the example of the Venetians ought to be everywhere followed, while his elaborate argumentation to prove the immortality of the soul, and that the souls of brutes are not the same as those of men, shows how widespread were irreligious opinions, and how freely the questions were debated at the time. This is further illustrated in the confession of Eugenio Tarralba before the Spanish Inquisition in 1528, when he testified that as a youth he had studied in Rome, where his three masters, Mariana, Avanselo, and Maguera, all taught him that the soul was mortal, and he was unable to answer their arguments.[625]

Pomponazio did not remain unanswered. In 1492 Agostino Nifo, professor at Padua, in his work De Intellectu et Dæmonibus, had contended for the Averrhoist theory of the unity of intelligence; a single intellect pervades the universe, and modifies all things at its will. He had already had trouble with the Dominicans, and this gave them the advantage; it would have fared ill with him had not Pietro Barozzi, the enlightened Bishop of Padua, saved him, and induced him to modify his teachings. Despite his philosophy, he was a skilful courtier, and became a favorite with Leo X., who made him count of the palace, and paid him to prove against Pomponazio that Aristotle maintained the immortality of the soul. He became the accepted interpreter of Averrhoes throughout Italy, and his mitigated Averrhoism remained the doctrine taught at Padua during the remainder of the century.[626]

It was impossible that the ministers of the Church should escape the contagion of this fashionable infidelity, however little, in their worldly self-seeking, they might trouble themselves about the theories of Averrhoism. In his sermons on Ezekiel, in the Lent of 1497, Savonarola describes the priests of the period as slaying the souls of their flocks by their wicked example; their worship, he says, is to spend the night with strumpets and the day in singing in the choir; the altar is their shop; they openly assert that the world is not ruled by the providence of God, but that everything is the result of chance, and that Christ is not in the Eucharist.[627] It was no wonder, then, that the more thoughtful of the laity, conscious of the evils of the dominant faith, and yet powerless, under the watchful eye of the Inquisition, to apply a corrective short of indifferentism or practical atheism; striving helplessly for something better than they saw around them, and yet unable to release the primal principles of Christianity from the incrustations of scholastic theology, should find their only refuge in these philosophical speculations which virtually reduced Christianity to nothingness. Had not the Reformation come, the culture of Europe would inevitably have been atheistic, or devoted to sublimated deism, scarce distinguishable from atheism. The Church would permit no dissidence within its pale, and yet was singularly tolerant of these aberrations of the fashionable Humanism. It persecuted the Fraticelli who dared to uphold the poverty of Christ, yet it allowed the paganism of the revived Hellenism to be disseminated almost without interference. Occasionally some zealous Dominican, eager to defend the inspired doctrines of the Angelic Doctor, would threaten trouble, and would burn a too daring book, but the author could readily find protectors high in the Church, some Barozzi or Bembo, who conjured the storm.

The Reformation served a double purpose in checking this tendency to dangerous speculation. It destroyed the hard-and-fast lines of the rigid scholastic theology, and gave to active intellects a wide field for discussion within the limits of the Christian faith. The assaults of Luther and Melanchthon and Calvin were not to be met with the dialectics of the schools, but with a freer and wider scope of reasoning. The worn-out debates over Aristotle and Alexander and Averrhoes, over Nominalism and Realism, were replaced with new systems of Scriptural exegesis and an earnest inquiry into man’s place in the universe and his relations to his fellows and to his God. Then the counter-Reformation aroused a zeal which could no longer tolerate the philosophical quodlibets leading to speculations adverse to the received faith. Servetus and Giordano Bruno belong to a period beyond our present limits, but their fate shows how little either Protestant or Catholic, in the fierce strife which enkindled such uncompromising ardor, were disposed to listen to philosophical discussions upon religious beliefs.

Before leaving this branch of our subject we must recur to the curious episode of the career of Raymond Lully, the Doctor Illuminatus, of whom Padre Feyjoo truly says, “Raymond Lully, looked upon from every side, is a very problematical object. Some make him a saint, others a heretic; some a most learned man, others an ignoramus; some regard him as illuminated, others as hallucinated; some attribute to him a knowledge of the transmutation of metals, others deny it; finally, some applaud his Ars Magna, others depreciate it.”[628]

This enigmatical being was born in Palma, the capital of Majorca, January 25, 1235. Sprung from a noble family, he was bred in the royal court, where he rose to the post of seneschal. He married and had children, but followed a gay and dissolute career until, like Peter Waldo and Jacopone da Todi, he was suddenly converted by an experience of the nothingness of life. He was madly in love with Leonor del Castello, and his reckless temper manifested itself by pursuing her on horseback into the church of Santa Eulalia during a Sunday service, to the great scandal of priest and congregation. To rid herself of such importunate pursuit, Leonor, with consent of her husband, exhibited to him her bosom, which was ravaged by a foul and mortal cancer. The shock brought to him so profound a recognition of the vanity of earthly things that he renounced the world and distributed his wealth in charity, after making provision for his family; and the same indomitable ardor which had rendered him extravagant in his pleasures sustained him to the end in his new vocation. Thenceforth he devoted his life to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, to the conversion of the Jews and Saracens, and to the framing of a system which should demonstrate rationally the truth of the Christian faith, and thus overcome the Averrhoism in which he recognized its most dangerous adversary.[629]

Ten years or more were spent in preparation for this new career. We hear of a pilgrimage to Compostella in 1266, and of his retirement to the Monte de Randa, near Palma, in 1275. He was so ignorant of letters that he was not even acquainted with Latin, the key to all the knowledge of the age. This he studied, and also Arabic, from a Saracen slave purchased for the purpose, and the earnest labors of an indefatigable mind can account for the enormous stores of learning which he subsequently displayed; so wonderful that to his followers they appeared necessarily the result of inspiration. In his retreat on Monte de Randa, where he conceived his Ars Universalis, he is said to have had repeated visions of Christ and the Virgin, which illuminated his mind; and the mastic-tree under which he habitually wrote bore testimony to the miracle, in its leaves inscribed with Latin, Greek, Chaldee, and Arabic characters. It continued to put forth such leaves. In the seventeenth century Vicente Mut vouches for the fact, and says he has some of them, while Wadding tells us that in his time they were carried to Rome, where they excited much wonder. When his work was completed an angel in the guise of a shepherd appeared, who kissed the book many times, and predicted that it would prove an invincible weapon for the faith.[630]

Emerging from his retreat, for forty years he led a wandering life of incessant activity, now stimulating popes and kings to renewed crusades, or to found colleges of the Oriental tongues to aid in missionary labors, now pouring forth volume after volume with incredible fecundity, now disputing and teaching against Averrhoism at Montpellier, Paris, and elsewhere, and now venturing himself among the infidel to spread among them the light of Christianity. In any one of these fields of action his labors would seem enough to exhaust the energies of an ordinary man. While on his way, in 1311, to the Council of Vienne, with projects for founding schools of Oriental tongues, for uniting in one all the military Orders, for a holy war against the infidel, for suppressing Averrhoism, and for teaching his art in all universities, he summed up his life: “I was married and a father, sufficiently rich, worldly, and licentious. For the honor of God, for the public weal, and for the advancement of the faith I abandoned all. I learned Arabic, and I have been repeatedly among the Saracens to preach to them, where I have been beaten and imprisoned. For forty-five years I have labored to excite the rulers of the Church and the princes of Christendom for the public good. Now I am old, I am poor, and I still have the same purpose, which, with the help of God, I will retain till I die.” At Vienne his only success was in obtaining a decree founding schools of Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldee in the papal court and in the Universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca. Thence he went, for the second time, to Algiers, where, at Bugia, he made many converts, until thrown into prison and starved; then he was released and ordered out of the country, but continued proselyting. With wonderful forbearance the Moors contented themselves with placing him on board a ship bound for Genoa, and warning him not to return. Ship-wrecked in sight of land, he saved his life by swimming, but lost his books. Determined to win the palm of martyrdom, in August, 1314, he again embarked at Palma for Bugia. Promptly recognized, he was thrown into jail, beaten, and starved; but in prison he continued to preach to his fellow-captives, until the Moors, finding him unconquerable, took him out, June 30, 1315, and stoned him. Some Genoese merchants about to sail carried his yet breathing body on board their ship and laid their course for Genoa, but to their surprise found themselves at the entrance of the port of Palma. In vain they endeavored to leave the spot till, recognizing the will of Heaven, they carried the body ashore. Immediately it shone in miracles, and the cult of the martyr began. In 1448 a splendid chapel was erected in his honor in the church of the Franciscans, of which Order he was a Tertiary, and another one was dedicated to him in the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1487 his bones were deposited in a richly carved alabaster urn, standing in a niche in the church-wall over an elaborate sepulchral monument, where they still remain.[631]

Slender were the results achieved at the moment by the self-devotion of this noble and indefatigable intellect. Averrhoism continued to gain strength, the Christian princes could not be stimulated to a new crusade, the conversion of Jew and infidel made no progress, and the only reward of labor so strenuous and so prolonged were Oriental schools established in Majorca and Sicily, and the foundation of others commanded by the Council of Vienne. Yet the prodigious literary activity of Lully left behind him a mass of writings destined to exercise no little influence on succeeding generations. He was perhaps the most voluminous author on record. Juan Llobet, who in the middle of the fifteenth century taught the Art of Lully in the University of Palma, had read five hundred of his books; some authors assert that their total number reached a thousand, others three thousand. Many have been lost, many spurious ones have been attributed to him, and the bibliography of his works is hopelessly confused; but Nicolas Antonio, after careful sifting, gives the titles of three hundred and twenty-one which may safely be ascribed to him. Of these there are sixty-one on the art of learning and general subjects, four on grammar and rhetoric, fifteen on logic, twenty-one on philosophy, five on metaphysics, thirteen on various sciences—astrology, geometry, politics, war, the quadrature of the circle, and the art of knowing God through grace—seven on medicine, four on law, sixty-two on spiritual contemplation and other religious subjects, six on homiletics, thirteen on Antichrist, the acquisition of the Holy Land, and other miscellaneous subjects, forty-six controversial works against Saracens, Jews, Greeks, and Averrhoists, and sixty-four on theology, embracing the most abstruse points, and religious poetry. The great collective edition of his works printed in Mainz from 1721 to 1742 forms ten folios. Like all other great scholars of his day, his name was a convenient one to affix to books on alchemy and magic, but all such are supposititious. His reputation as an alchemist is seen in the tradition that in England he made six million gold florins, and gave them to the king to stimulate him to a crusade, but his own opinion of alchemy is expressed in a passage of his Ars Magna: “Each element has its own peculiarities so that one species cannot be transmuted to another, wherefore the alchemists grieve and have occasion to weep,” and in other equally outspoken expressions.[632]

For our purpose we need consider but one phase of his marvellous productiveness. In the solitude of Monte de Randa he conceived the Art which passes by his name—a method in which, by diagrams and symbols, the sublimest truths of theology and philosophy can be deduced and memorized. Of this the Ars Brevis is a compend, while the Ars Magna describes it in greater detail and proceeds to build upon it a system of the universe. As the product of a man untinctured with culture till after the age of thirty it is a wonderful performance, revealing a familiar acquaintance with all the secrets of the material and spiritual worlds, the powers, attributes, motives, and purposes of God and his creatures logically deduced, which the Lullists might well hold to be inspired. This Art he himself taught at Montpellier and Paris, and in 1309 forty members of the latter University joined in a cordial recommendation of it as useful and necessary for the defence of the faith. At home it had great and enduring vogue. Favored by successive monarchs, it was taught in the Universities of Aragon and Valencia. In the middle of the fifteenth century the Estudio Lulliano was founded at Palma, subsquently enlarged into the Universidad Lulliana, where the tradition of his teaching was preserved almost to our own days. Cardinal Ximenes was its great admirer; Angelo Politiano says that to it he owed his ability to dispute on any subject; Jean Lefèvre d’Etaples prized it highly, as likewise did other men of note. On the other hand, it was condemned by Gerson and its use forbidden in the University of Paris; it was ill thought of by Cornelius Agrippa and Jerome Cardan; and Mariana tells us that in his time many considered it useless and even harmful, while others praised it as a gift from heaven to remedy ignorance, and in 1586 its use was prohibited in the University of Valencia.[633]

In this and in many of his other works Lully’s object was to prove by logical processes of thought the truths of Christianity and the positions of theology. We have already seen how the Church recognized the risk involved in this and forbade it, and Lully felt that he was treading on dangerous ground. He therefore lost no opportunity of declaring that faith is superior to reason, and that they were mistaken who held that faith proved by reason lost its merit. Devoting his life to combating Averrhoism and converting the infidel, he had felt that Christianity could only be spread by argument—that to convert men he had to convince them. Without this the work must stop, and he urged that the heathen might logically complain of God if it were impossible to convince their reason of the truth.[634] It was the same effort as that made two centuries later by Savonarola in his Crucis Triumphus, to combat the incredulity of the later Averrhoists and of the Renaissance.

The result showed the danger which lurked in his single-minded efforts. As his reputation spread and his disciples multiplied, Nicholas Eymerich, the Inquisitor of Aragon, to whom I have so often had occasion to refer, undertook to condemn his memory. Perhaps among the Lullists there were men whose zeal outran their discretion. Eymerich speaks of one, named Pedro Rosell, whose errors are a curious echo of the Joachites and Olivists, for he taught that, as the doctrine of the Old Testament was attributable to the Father and that of the New to the Son, so was that of Lully to the Holy Ghost, and that in the time of Antichrist all theologians would apostatize, when the Lullists would convert the world, and all theology but that of their master would disappear. Perhaps also, Eymerich, as a Dominican, was eager to attack one in whom the Franciscans gloried as one of their greatest sons. Doubtless, too, there is truth in the assertion of the Lullists that their defence of the Immaculate Conception rendered Eymerich desirous of suppressing them. Be this as it may, in a mass of writings embracing every conceivable detail of doctrine and faith, set forth with logical precision, it was not difficult for an expert to find points liable to characterization as errors. A royal privilege for the teaching of Lullism, issued by Pedro IV. in 1369, shows that already opposition had been aroused, and in 1371 Eymerich went to Avignon, where he obtained from Gregory XI. an order for the examination of Lully’s writings. On his return the king peremptorily forbade the publication of the papal mandate, but the irrepressible inquisitor in 1374 sent twenty of the inculpated books to Gregory, and in 1376 he had the satisfaction of exhibiting a bull reciting that these works had been carefully investigated by the Cardinal of Ostia and twenty theologians, who had found in them two hundred (or, according to Eymerich, five hundred) errors manifestly heretical. As the rest of Lully’s writings must presumably be erroneous, the Archbishop of Tarragona was ordered to cause all of them to be surrendered and sent to Rome for examination. Then King Pedro again interposed, and asked the pope to have any further proceedings carried on in Barcelona, as Lully’s works were mostly in Catalan, and could best be understood there.[635]

Eymerich triumphed for a time, and in his Directorium Inquisitorum he gives full rein to his hatred. Lully, he says, was taught his doctrine by the devil, but, to avoid prolixity, he enumerates only a hundred of the five hundred errors condemned by Gregory. Some of these trench on mystic illuminism, others are merely extravagant modes of putting ordinary propositions. For the most part they hinge on the assertion, condemned in the ninety-sixth error, “that all points of faith and the sacraments and the power of the pope can be and are proved by reasoning, necessary, demonstrative, and evident;” for they consist of efforts to define logically the mysteries of faith in a manner of which conceptions so subtle are incapable. Two or three, however, are manifestly heretical—that faith can err, but not reason, that it is wrong to slay heretics, and that the mass of mankind will be saved, even Jews and Saracens who are not in mortal sin. The Lullists had not been disposed to submit quietly. Eymerich describes them as numerous and impudent, and guilty of the error of holding that Gregory erred grossly in condemning their master, whose doctrine had been divinely revealed and excelled all other doctrine, even that of St. Augustin; that it is not to be gained by study, but by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, in thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty hours; that modern theologians know nothing of true theology, for, on account of their sins, God has transferred all knowledge to the Lullists, who are to constitute the Church in the times of Antichrist.[636]

There was in all this evidently the material which only needed nursing and provocation to develop into a new and formidable heresy under inquisitorial methods. Fortunately the king and a large part of the population were in sympathy with the Lullists; the Great Schism broke out in 1378, and Don Pedro acknowledged neither Urban VI. nor Clement VII. The kingdom was thus virtually independent; the Lullists boldly claimed that the bull of Gregory XI. had been forged by Eymerich; in 1385 an investigation was held which resulted in driving him from Aragon, when he was succeeded by his enemy, Bernardo Ermengaudi, who was devoted to the king, and who hastened to make a formal declaration that in Lully’s Philosophia Amoris there were not to be found the errors attributed to it by Eymerich. The banishment of the latter, however, did not long continue. He returned and resumed his office, which he exercised with unsparing rigor against the Lullists. This excited considerable commotion. In 1391 the city of Valencia sent to the pope Doctor Jayme de Xiva to complain of Eymerich’s enormous crimes, and to supplicate his removal. The envoy stopped at Barcelona to solicit the co-operation of that powerful community, and the town council, after listening to him, resolved that if the action of Valencia was general and not special, they would make “one arm and one heart” with their sister city; and, moreover, they begged the pope to command some prelate of the kingdom to examine and declare, under papal authority, whether the articles attributed to Lully had been justly or unjustly condemned by Eymerich.[637]

The popular effervescence grew so strong that in 1393 Eymerich was again banished by Juan I. He ended his life in exile, maintaining to the end the enormity of Lully’s heresy and the genuineness of Gregory’s bull. Antonio Riera, a Lullist who was active in the matter, he denounced as a heretic who foretold that before the end of the century all divine service would cease, that churches would be used as stables, and the laws of Christian, Jew, and Saracen would be converted into one; but which of these three it would be he could not tell. Meanwhile, in 1395, the Holy See granted the prayer of the Lullists for an examination, and the Cardinal of San Sesto was sent as special commissioner for the purpose. Gregory’s registers for 1376 were carefully examined, and the archivists testified that no record of the bull in question could be found. Still the question would not remain settled, for the honor of the Dominican Order and the Inquisition was at stake, and again, in 1419, another investigation was held. The papal legate, Cardinal Alamanni, deputed Bernardo, Bishop of Città di Castello, to examine the matter definitely. His sentence pronounced the bull to be evidently false, and all action taken under it to be null and void, but expressed no opinion on the writings of Lully, which he reserved for the decision of the Holy See. From that time forth the genuineness of the bull remained a matter hotly contested. Father Bremond prints it as authentic, and declares that after a dispassionate examination he is convinced that it is so; that the original autograph is preserved in the archives at Gerona, and he quotes Bzovius to the effect that the Lullists themselves admit that it is in the archives of Barcelona, Tarragona, and Valencia, whose bishops would not have admitted it if false; but Bzovius was a Dominican whose bitterness on the subject is seen in his stigmatizing Lully as a vagabond swindler. Certain it is that in the prolonged and ardent contest which raged over the question of Lully’s orthodoxy in the papal court, the Dominicans, with successive popes on their side, were never able to produce the original nor offer any evidence of its authenticity.[638]

In Aragon the decision of 1419 was regarded as settling the question. Royal letters in favor of Lullism were issued by Alonso V. in 1415 and 1449, by Ferdinand the Catholic in 1483 and 1503, by Charles V. in 1526, and by Philip II. in 1597; the latter monarch, indeed, had great relish for Lully’s writings, some of which he habitually carried with him on his journeys to read on the way, and in the library of the Escorial many copies of them were found annotated with his own hand. This royal favor was needed in the curious controversy which followed. Lully’s name had passed into the received catalogues of heretics, and as late as 1608 it was included in the list published by the Doctor of Sorbonne, Gabriel du Préau. Paul IV., in 1559, put it in the first papal Index Expurgatorius. When this came to be published in Spain, Bishop Jayme Cassador and the inquisitors suspended it and referred the matter to the consejo de la suprema, which ordered the entry to be borrado, or expunged. At the Council of Trent, Doctor Juan Villeta, acting for Spain, presented a petition in favor of Lully, which was considered in a special congregation, September 1, 1563, and a unanimous decision was reached, confirming all the condemnations passed on Eymerich for falsehood, and ordering the Index of Paul IV. to be expurgated by striking out all that related to Lully. This was a secret determination of the council, and was not allowed to appear in the published acts. It settled the matter for a time, but the question was revived in 1578, when Francisco Pegna reprinted Eymerich’s book with the special sanction of Gregory XIII., bringing anew before the world the bull of Gregory XI. and the errors condemned in Lully’s writings. Gregory XIII. ordered Pegna to examine the papal registers for the contested bull. Those in Rome were found imperfect, and the missing portions were sent for from Avignon, but the most diligent search failed to find the desired document, though it was alleged that two volumes of the year 1386 could not be found. Battle was now fairly joined between the partisans of Eymerich and those of Lully. In 1583 the Congregation of the Index determined to include Lully among the prohibited writers, but again Spanish influence was strong enough to prevent it. Under Sixtus V. there was another attempt, but Juan Arce de Herrera, in the name of Philip II., presented an Apologia to the Congregation of the Index, and again the danger was conjured. When the Index of Clement VIII. was in preparation the question was again taken up, June 3, 1594, and rejected out of respect for Spain; at the request of the Spanish ambassador the pope was asked to order a complete set of Lully’s works to be sent to Rome for examination, that the matter might be definitely settled; but this was not done, and in March, 1595, it was announced that his name was omitted from the Index. In 1611 Philip III. revived the controversy by applying to Paul V. for the canonization of Lully and the expurgation of Eymerich’s Directorium; a request which was repeated by Philip IV. After a confused controversy, it was determined that certain articles admittedly extracted from his books were dangerous, audacious, and savoring of heresy, and some of them manifestly erroneous and heretical. At a sitting, under the presidency of the pope himself, held August 29, 1619, it was resolved to send this censure to the Spanish nuncio, with instructions to inform the king and the inquisitors that Lully’s books were forbidden. Then came an appeal from the kingdom of Majorca begging that the books might be corrected, to which Paul replied, August 6, 1620, imposing silence; and on August 30 Cardinal Bellarmine drew up for the Inquisition a final report that Lully’s doctrine was forbidden until corrected, adding his belief that correction was impossible, but that the condemnation was thus phrased so as to mitigate its severity. Thus Lully was branded by the Holy See as a heretic, but, out of respect for the Spanish court, the sentence was never published: the matter was supposed by the public to be undecided, and the worship of him as a saint continued uninterruptedly. Raynaldus, in fact, writing in 1658, states that the question is still sub judice. About the same time certain Jesuits took up his cause against the Dominicans, and in 1662 a translation of his “Triumph of Love” appeared in Paris, on the title of which he was qualified as “Saint Raymond Lully, Martyr and Hermit.” The Dominican ire was aroused: appeal was made to the Congregation of Rites, which reported that Lully was included in the Franciscan martyrology under March 29, but that he must not be qualified as a saint, and that a careful examination should be made of his works, to prohibit them if necessary—a recommendation which was never carried out. Yet when, in 1688, Doctor Pedro Bennazar issued at Palma a book in praise of Lully, it was condemned by the Inquisition in 1690; and a compendium of his theology, by Sebastian Krenzer in 1755, was put on the Index, although this was not done with the numerous controversial writings which continued to appear, nor with the great edition of his works published from 1721 to 1742, in the title of which he was qualified as Beatus. Benedict XIV., in his work De Servorum Dei Beatificatione, after carefully weighing the authorities on both sides, says that his claims to sanctity are to be suspended until the decision of the Holy See. That decision was postponed for a century. In 1847 Pius IX. approved an office of “the holy Raymond Lully” for Majorca, where he had been immemorially worshipped; the office reciting that so fully was he imbued with the divine wisdom that he who had previously been uncultured was enabled to discourse most excellently on divine things. In 1858, moreover, Pius permitted the whole Franciscan Order to celebrate his feast on November 27. Yet the Dominicans had not forgotten their old rancor, for in 1857 there appeared in a Roman journal, published under the approbation of the Master of the Sacred Palace, an argument to prove that the alleged bull of Gregory XI. is still in force, and consequently that Lully’s books are forbidden, although they do not appear in the Index. This case and that of Savonarola serve to indicate how dangerously nebulous are the boundaries between heresy and sanctity.[639]

The example of Raymond Lully illustrates the pitfalls which surrounded the footsteps of all who ventured on the dangerous path of theology. That science assumed to know and define all the secrets of the universe, and yet it was constantly growing, as ingenious or daring thinkers would suggest new theories or frame new deductions from data already settled. Hosts of these were condemned; the annals of an intellectual centre like the University of Paris are crowded with sentences pronounced against novel points of faith and their unlucky authors. Occasionally, however, some new dogma would arise, would be vehemently debated, would refuse to be suppressed, and would finally triumph after a more or less prolonged struggle, and would then take its place among the eternal verities which it was heresy to call in question. This curious process of dogmatic evolution in an infallible Church is too instructive not to be illustrated with one or two examples.

It might seem a question beyond the grasp of finite intelligence to determine whether the souls of the blessed are wafted to heaven and at once enjoy the ineffable bliss of beholding the Divine Essence, or whether they have to await the resurrection and the Day of Judgment. This was not a mere theoretical question, however, but had a very practical aspect, for in the existing anthropomorphism of belief, it might well be thought that the efficacy of the intercession of saints depended on their admission to the presence of God, and the guardians of every shrine boasting of a relic relied for their revenues on the popular confidence that its saint was able to make personal appeals for the fulfilment of his worshippers’ prayers. The desired conclusion was only reached by gradual steps. The subject was one which had not escaped the attention of the early Fathers, and St. Augustin assumes that the full fruition of the Vision of God can only be enjoyed by the soul after it has been clothed in the resurrected body. Among the errors condemned in 1243 by Guillaume d’Auvergne and the University of Paris were two, one of which held that the Divine Essence is not and will not be seen by either angels or glorified souls; the other, that while angels dwell in the empyrean heaven, human souls, even including the Virgin, will never advance beyond the aqueous heaven. The decision of the bishop and University was cautious as regards the Divine Vision, which was only asserted in the future and not in the present tense, both as regards angels and human souls, but there was no hesitation in declaring that all occupied the same heaven. Thomas Aquinas argues the question with an elaborateness which shows both its importance and its inherent difficulty, but he ventures no further than to prove that the Blessed will, after the resurrection, enjoy the sight of God, face to face. It must be borne in mind that the prevalent expectation in each successive generation that the coming of Antichrist and the second advent were not far off, rendered of less importance the exact time at which the Beatific Vision would be bestowed, while the development of mystic theology tended to bring into ever more intimate relations the intercourse between the soul and its Creator. Bonaventura does not hesitate to treat as an accepted fact that the souls of the just will see God, and he asserts that some of them are already in heaven, while others wait confidently in their graves for the appointed time. The final step seems to have been taken soon after this by the celebrated Dominican theologian, Master Dietrich of Friburg, who wrote a tract to prove that the Blessed are immediately admitted to the Beatific Vision, a fact revealed to him by one of his penitents who, by order of God to solve his doubts, appeared to him ten days after death and assured him that she was in sight of the Trinity.[640]

Yet the doctrine was not formally accepted by the Church, and the mystical tendencies of the time rendered dangerous a too rapid progress in this direction. The Illuminism of the Brethren of the Free Spirit was a contagious evil, and the Council of Vienne in 1312 refrained from an expression of opinion on the subject, except to condemn the error of the Beghards, that man does not need the light of glory to elevate him to the sight of God—thus only by implication admitting that with the light of glory the soul is fitted to enjoy the Beatific Vision. When and how the dogma spread that the souls of the just are admitted at once to the presence of God does not appear, but it seems to have become generally accepted without any definite expression of approbation by the Holy See. In October, 1326, John XXII. treats as a heresy to be extirpated among the Greeks the belief that the saints will not enter paradise until the Day of Judgment, but not long afterwards he changed his mind, and his pride in his theological skill and learning would not let him rest until he had forced Christendom to change with him. He expressed his doubts as to the truth of the new dogma and indicated an intention of openly condemning it. His temper rendered opposition perilous, and none of the cardinals and doctors of the papal court dared to discuss it with him until, in 1331, an English Dominican, Thomas Walleys, in a sermon preached before him, boldly maintained the popular opinion and invoked the divine malediction on all who asserted the contrary. John’s wrath burst forth. Walleys was seized and tried by the Inquisition, cast into jail and almost starved to death, when Philippe de Valois intervened and procured his liberation. Having thus silenced his opponents, John proceeded to declare his opinions publicly. In the Advent of 1331 he preached several sermons in which he asserted that the saints in heaven will not have distinct vision of the Divine Essence before the Resurrection of the body and the Day of Judgment, until which time they will only see the humanity of Christ. “I know,” he said, “that some persons murmur because we hold this opinion, but I cannot do otherwise.”[641]

It shows the peculiar condition of the human mind engendered by the persecution of heresy that this was a political event of the gravest importance. We have seen how much stress was laid, in the quarrel between the empire and papacy, upon John’s innovation on the accepted belief as to Christ’s poverty, and the manner in which his resolute purpose had carried that dogma against all opposition. On this occasion he was the conservator of the previously received faith of the Church, but the political conjuncture was against him. Not only was Louis of Bavaria consolidating the empire in resistance to the aggressiveness of the papacy, but France, the main support of the Avignonese popes, was indisposed. Philippe de Valois had been offended by the rejection of his excessive demands in compensation of fulfilling his vows of a new crusade, and had been alienated by John’s yielding to the schemes of John of Bohemia, who was endeavoring to secure the imperial territories in Italy. Both monarchs took active steps to turn to the fullest account the papal heresy. It was a received principle that, as a dead man was no longer a man, so a pope detected in heresy was no longer a pope, seeing that he had ipso facto forfeited his office. Nothing better could serve the purpose of Louis of Bavaria and his junto of exiled Franciscans. Under the advice of Michele da Cesena he took steps to call a German national council, for which Bonagrazia drew up a summons based upon the papal heresy, and the plan was approved by Cardinal Orsini and his dissatisfied brethren. This came to nought, however, through the still greater promptness of Philippe de Valois to avail himself of the situation. He made the celebrated William Durand, Bishop of Mende, write a treatise in opposition to the papal views, and protected him when John sought to punish him. He assembled the University of Paris, which, January 3, 1333, pronounced emphatically in favor of the Beatific Vision, and addressed to the pope a letter asserting it without equivocation. Gerard Odo, the time-serving Franciscan General, was despatched, ostensibly to make peace between England and Scotland, but instructed to dally in Paris and endeavor to win over public opinion. He ventured to preach in favor of John’s conservative views, but only succeeded in arousing a storm before which he was forced to bow and humbly to declare that his argument was only controversial and not assertive. Philippe took the boldest and most aggressive position. He wrote to John that to deny the Beatific Vision was not only to destroy belief in the intercession of the Virgin and saints, but to invalidate all the pardons and indulgences granted by the Church, and so firmly was he convinced of its truth that he would take steps to burn all who denied it, including the pope himself. Even Robert of Naples joined in remonstrance. Haughty and obstinate as John had proved himself, he could not resist single-handed the indignation of all Europe, and he yielded. He purchased peace by political concessions, and wrote humbly to Philippe and Robert that he had never positively denied the Beatific Vision, but had treated it simply as an open question, subject to discussion. Even this was not enough. All his ambitious schemes had broken down. In Germany, Louis of Bavaria was posing as the defender of the faith. In France, even the weak Philippe de Valois had resumed his ascendency over Avignon. In Italy, John’s son, Cardinal Bertrand, had been forced to fly, and Lombardy had freed itself. For the wretched old man there was nothing left but to recant and die. He had convoked a consistory for December 2, 1234, to choose a successor to Louis of Bavaria, but before daybreak he was seized with a fatal flux which stretched him hopeless on his bed. Towards evening of the next day he assembled the cardinals and exhorted them to select a worthy successor to the chair of St. Peter, when his kindred urged him to save his soul and the reputation of the Church by withdrawing from his opinions as to the Beatific Vision. The secrets of that awful death-bed have never been revealed, but after he passed away on the 5th, a bull was promulgated over his name in which he professed his belief as to the Divine Vision, and, if he had in that or anything else held opinions in conflict with those of the Church, he revoked all that he might have said or done, and submitted himself to its judgment. Humiliating as was this, Michele da Cesena pronounced it insufficient, as he made no formal confession of error and recantation, whence it was to be inferred that he died a contumacious heretic. Even Paris was not satisfied, although conclusions were not expressed so openly.[642]

Benedict XII., who was elected December 20, was a zealous defender of the faith who had manifested his determination to extirpate all forms of heresy when, as Bishop of Pamiers, he had personally conducted for years a very active episcopal Inquisition in co-operation with the labors of Jean de Beaune and Bernard Gui. Such a man was not likely to underrate the importance of his predecessor’s error, and in fact he lost no time in correcting it. On the 22d a significant threat to Gerard Odo to beware, for he would tolerate no heresy, was a notice to all who had yielded to John’s imperiousness. On February 2, 1335, he preached a sermon on the text, “Behold, the bridegroom cometh,” in which he clearly enunciated the doctrine that the saints have a distinct vision of the Divine Essence. Two days later he summoned before the consistory all who had given in their adhesion to the opinion of John and demanded a statement of their motives, by way, we may presume, of admitting them back into the fold as easily as possible. A twelvemonth later, January 29, 1336, he held a public consistory in which he published decisively that the saints enjoy the Beatific Vision, and decreed that all holding the contrary opinion should be punished as heretics. Benedict had earned the reputation of a ruthless upholder of orthodoxy and persecutor of dissent, and no victims were necessary to enforce the reception of the new article of faith. So thoroughly was it received that it passed into the formulas of the Inquisition as one of the points on which all suspected heretics were interrogated; and when, at the Council of Florence, in 1439, a nominal union was patched up with the Greek Church, one of the articles enunciated for the acceptance of the latter asserts that souls which after baptism incur no sin, or after sinning have been duly purged, are received at once into heaven and enjoy the sight of the Triune God. Thus a new dogma was adopted by the Church in spite of the opposition of one of the most arbitrary and headstrong of the successors of St. Peter.[643]

An even more instructive instance of the development of theological doctrine is to be found in the history of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. Up to the twelfth century it was not questioned that the Virgin was conceived and born in sin, and doctors like St. Anselm found their only difficulty in explaining how Christ could be born sinless from a sinner. With the growth of Mariolatry, however, there came a popular tendency to regard the Virgin as free from all human corruption, and towards the middle of the twelfth century the church of Lyons ventured to place on the calendar a new feast in honor of the Conception of the Virgin, arguing that as the Nativity was feasted as holy, the Conception, which was a condition precedent to the Nativity, was likewise holy and to be celebrated. St. Bernard, the great conservative of his day, at once set himself to suppress the new doctrine. He wrote earnestly to the canons of Lyons, showing them that their argument applied equally to the nativity and conception of all the ancestors of the Virgin by the male and female lines; he begged them to introduce no novelties in the Church, but to hold with the Fathers; he argued that the only immaculate conception was that of Christ, who was conceived of the Holy Ghost, and proved that Mary, who was sprung of the union between man and woman, must necessarily have been conceived in original sin. He admitted that she was born sanctified, whence the Church properly celebrated the Nativity, but this sanctification was operated in the womb of St. Anne, even as the Lord had said to Jeremiah, “Before thou camest out of the womb I sanctified thee” (Jer. I. 5). It illustrates the recklessness of theological controversy to find St. Bernard subsequently quoted as sustaining the Immaculate Conception. Peter Lombard, the great Master of Sentences, was not willing to concede even as much as St. Bernard, and quotes John of Damascus to show that the Virgin was not cleansed of original sin until she accepted the duty of bearing Christ. To this view of the question Innocent III. lent the authority of his great name by asserting it in the most positive manner.[644]

These irresistible authorities settled the question for a while as one of dogma, but the notion had attractiveness to the people, and in the constant development of Mariolatry anything which tended to strengthen her position as a subordinate deity and intercessor found favor with the extensive class to whom her cult was a source of revenue. There is something inexpressibly attractive in the mediæval conception of the Virgin, and the extension of her worship was inevitable. God was a being too infinitely high and awful to be approached; the Holy Ghost was an abstraction not to be grasped by the vulgar mind; Christ, in spite of his infinite love and self-sacrifice, was invoked too often as a judge and persecutor to be regarded as wholly merciful; but the Virgin was the embodiment of unalloyed maternal tenderness, whose sufferings for her divine Son had only rendered her more eagerly beneficent in her desire to aid and save the race for which he had died. She was human, yet divine; in her humanity she shared the feelings of her kind, and whatever exalted her divinity rendered her more helpful, without withdrawing her from the sympathy of men. “The Virgin,” says Peter of Blois, “is the sole mediator between man and Christ. We were sinners and feared to appeal to the Father, for he is terrible, but we have the Virgin, in whom there is nothing terrible, for in her is the plenitude of grace and the purity of human life;” and he goes on to virtually prove her divinity by showing that if the Son is consubstantial with the Father, the Virgin is consubstantial with the Son. In fact, he exclaims, “if Mary were taken from heaven there would be to mankind nothing but the blackness of darkness.” God, says St. Bonaventura, could have made a greater earth and a greater heaven, but he exhausted his power in creating Mary. Yet Bonaventura, as a doctor of the Church, was careful to limit her sinlessness to sin arising with herself, and not to include the absence of inherited sin. She was sanctified, not immaculately conceived.[645]

In spite of St. Bernard’s remonstrance, the celebration of the Feast of the Conception gradually spread. Thomas Aquinas tells us that it was observed in many churches, though not in that of Rome, and that it was not forbidden, but he warns us against the inference that because a feast is holy therefore the conception of Mary was holy. In fact, he denies the possibility of her immaculate conception, though he admits her sanctification at some period which cannot be defined. This settled the question for the Dominicans, whose reverence for their Angelic Doctor rendered it impossible for them to swerve from his teachings. For a while, strange to say, the Franciscans agreed with their rivals. There is a tradition that Duns Scotus, in 1304, defended the new doctrine against the Dominicans in the University of Paris, and that in 1333 the University declared in its favor by a solemn decree, but this story only makes its appearance about 1480 in Bernardinus de Bustis, and there is no trace in the records of any such action, while Duns Scotus only said that it was possible to God, and that God alone knew the truth. There were few more zealous Franciscans than Alvaro Pelayo, penitentiary to John XXII., and he, in refuting the illuminism of the Beghards, makes use of the Virgin’s conception in sin as an admitted fact which he employs as an argument; and he adds that this is the universal opinion of the received authorities, such as Bernard, Aquinas, Bonaventura, and Richard de Saint Victor, although some modern theologians, abandoning the teachings of the Church, have controverted it through a false devotion to the Virgin, whom they thus seek to assimilate to God and Christ. Yet as, about this very time, the Church of Narbonne commenced, in 1327, to celebrate the Feast of the Conception, and in 1328 the Council of London ordered its observance in all the churches of the Province of Canterbury, we see how rapidly the new dogma was spreading.[646]

As it was impossible for the Dominicans to change their position, it was inevitable that in time the Franciscans should range themselves under the opposite banner. The clash between them first came in 1387, when the struggle was carried on with all the ferocity of the odium theologicum. Juan de Monçon, a Dominican professor in the University of Paris, taught that the Virgin was conceived in sin. This aroused great uproar, and he fled to Avignon from impending condemnation. Then, at Rouen, another Dominican preached similar doctrine, and, as we are told, was generally ridiculed. The University sent to Avignon a deputation headed by Pierre d’Ailly, who claimed that they procured the condemnation of Juan, but he escaped to his native Aragon, while the Dominicans of Paris declared that the papal decision had been in their favor. If the chronicler is to be believed, they preached on the conception of the Virgin in the grossest terms and indulged in the most bestial descriptions, till the fury of the University knew no bounds. The Dominicans were expelled from all positions in the Sorbonne, and the Avignonese Clement VII. was too dependent upon France to refuse a bull proclaiming as heretics Juan and all who held with him. Charles VI. was persuaded not only to force the Dominicans of Paris to celebrate every year the Feast of the Conception, but to order the arrest of all within the kingdom who denied the Immaculate Conception, that they might be brought to Paris and obliged to recant before the University. It was not until 1403 that the Dominicans were readmitted to the Sorbonne, to the disgust of the other Mendicants, who had greatly profited by their exile. It was natural that where the Dominicans had authority they should indulge in reprisals. The Lullists were ardent defenders of the Immaculate Conception, which accounts in part for the hostility which they incurred.[647]

The University of Paris was the stronghold of the new doctrine, and as its activity and influence were greatly curtailed by the disturbances which preceded the invasion of Henry V. and by the English domination, we hear little of the question until the restoration of the French monarchy. The belief, however, had continued to spread. In 1438 the clergy and magistrates of Madrid, on the occasion of a pestilence, made a vow thereafter to observe the Feast of the Conception. The next year the Council of Basle, which had long been discussing the matter in a desultory fashion, came to a decision in favor of the Immaculate Conception, forbade all assertions to the contrary, and ordered the feast to be everywhere celebrated on December 8, with due indulgences for attendance. As the council, however, had previously deposed Eugenius IV., its utterances were not received as the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and the doctrine, though strengthened, was not accepted by the Church. In fact, the rival Council of Florence, in 1441, in its decree of union with the Jacobines, although it spoke of Christ assuming his humanity in the immaculate womb of the Virgin, showed that this was but a figure of speech, by declaring as a point of faith that no one born of man and woman has ever escaped the domination of Satan except through the merits of Christ.[648]