Volume 2, Chapter 8

THE CRISIS OF THE MIDDLE AGES, 1181-1198

Section 1: THE IMPERIAL MENACE TO THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION: (2) THE EMPEROR HENRY VI

Section 2: THE DISASTERS IN THE LATIN EAST, 1150-1197

Section 3: CATHOLIC THOUGHT: THE MENACE OF ARISTOTLE AND AVERROES

Section 4: ANTI-CLERICALISM, HERESY AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM: WALDENSES, JOACHIM OF FLORA, ALBIGENSES

THE IMPERIAL MENACE TO THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION: (2) THE EMPEROR HENRY VI

THE quite exceptional longevity of Alexander III [244] had been an undoubted factor in the recent failure of the emperor to reduce the papacy. With that pope's death the phenomenon, more usual in medieval times, of short reigns returned: Lucius III reigned for four years, Urban III for less than two, Gregory VIII for a matter of weeks only, Clement III for three years, then Celestine III for all but seven. Five conclaves in the ten years that followed Alexander s death! It was all the more unfortunate for the Church in that these were the years of a new imperial aggression; and this time the means employed -- and successfully -- were those of diplomacy.

Lucius III, elected at Velletri (September 1, 1181) in accordance with the new electoral law -- for death had found Alexander III once more an exile -- was one of the late pope's most intimate counsellors. He had been, years before, a disciple of St. Bernard, who had given him the Cistercian habit. Innocent II, as far back as 1141, had made him a cardinal, and it was as Cardinal Bishop of Ostia that, in 1159, he had crowned Alexander III. He had been the chief factor in the speedy recognition of Alexander as pope in 1160 and had played a great part in the negotiations of 1177. He was of a more supple disposition than Alexander, and, at the price of concessions to the commune, he managed to regain possession of Rome within a few weeks of his election. By the following February (1182), however, he was once more driven out, and, desperate before his inability to protect the other cities of his States from the raids and violence of the Romans, he turned for help to the emperor.

It was not the new pope's first contact with Frederick. Already the emperor had sought to settle the question of the Matildine lands, left dormant in 1177, offering in exchange for them an annual percentage of his Italian revenues. Lucius had, however, refused to discuss the matter while the other question left out at the Peace of Venice remained unsettled, namely the relation of the emperor to the Lombard Communes. In 1183, however, the six years' truce expired, and Frederick and the communes came to an agreement, in the Treaty of Constance. The emperor thereby abandoned his claim to name the rulers of the Lombard cities; he acknowledged the Lombards' right to fortify their towns and to conclude alliances and leagues; and, in return, the cities pledged themselves to allow the emperor free passage through northern Italy, and to give him the means to provide for his armies.

This was in June, 1183. The Lombards had won all they had fought for. The emperor had renounced the claims that would have made Lombardy a permanent Italian base of operations. But now, by another stroke of diplomacy, he acquired a much more certain base in the south. The means of this was the marriage of his heir, the future Henry VI, to the heiress of the King of Sicily. A matrimonial alliance with Sicily had been one of Frederick's schemes in 1173, but Alexander III had been too much for him. Now, with the Lombard question settled and the aged Lucius III isolated and helpless, the emperor had his way. The betrothal took place at Augsburg, October 29, 1184, and the marriage at Milan, fifteen months later. It was the gravest check for a hundred and fifty years to the papal policy of political independence. Future popes would have to meet the permanent menace of an emperor who was not only lord of Germany, but master of Sicily and Naples and with extensive rights in Lombardy, too.

Lucius III, for all his extreme old age and the political misfortunes which brought him to the emperor as to a protector, was by no means unmindful of the danger. Nor was he afraid to protest. Despite the emperor's insistence -- in order to secure the empire for his heir -- that Henry should now be crowned emperor with himself, Lucius steadfastly refused. Barbarossa began to prepare an offensive alliance with the Lombard towns. It left the pope, if tremulous, still firm in his refusal. Before the matter could go further Lucius died (November 25, 1185), leaving to his successor an almost impossible task.

It was at Verona that the pope had made his stand, where through the summer of 1184 a long series of discussions with the emperor had taken place, in circumstances that made their meeting almost as important as a council of the Church. One of the questions then discussed concerned a heritage from the days of the schism. The Lateran Council of 1179 had declared null the ordinations of the anti-popes and of those who acknowledged them. The emperor asked for a revocation of this, and while the pope was willing to consider the matter, the cardinals urged that only a General Council had competence for it. The pope, thereupon, promised to call such a council to meet at Lyons. A further question discussed was the growth of heresy, and the outcome of this discussion was the famous joint decree of pope and emperor Ad abolendam. [245]

Lucius III died the next year (1185). The Archbishop of Milan who succeeded, as Urban III, was unable to hinder the Sicilian marriage, already arranged, but he took what opportunities came his way of limiting Frederick's success. He supported strongly the candidature of the anti-imperialist, Folmar, for the electoral see of Treves, and when Frederick volunteered to help Milan in its attack on Cremona, the pope forbade the Italian cities to join in the war. Urban was soon an exile at Verona, undecided whether to seek a refuge in Venice; and now, while Frederick marched against his German allies, the young Henry VI invaded the Papal States.

Suddenly the news arrived that Jerusalem had fallen to the Saracens. [246] Consternation fell upon Christendom. The emperor himself took the cross and departed for the East. He left Henry as his regent. In this young sovereign the popes were to meet the most capable foe that had so far risen against them. Henry VI's Italian career divides itself easily enough. There is a period of preparation, and a first attack that ends in failure; then a period of intense activity in Germany in which several strokes of good fortune assist him, a second Italian expedition, and the most complete success; then, in the hour of his triumph, sudden death at the age of thirty-six.

Henry was a master politician, and he had already systematically placed men he could trust in all the strong places of the Matildine lands and the March of Ancona, thus isolating the pope from Lombardy, when, on November 18, 1189, the death of the King of Sicily renewed the crisis terminated two years before by the crusade. Henry's wife, Constance, was now Queen of Sicily, [247] but the kingdom which Henry proposed to occupy in her name was by no means unanimously agreed in her favour. There existed a powerful anti-imperialist party, and soon it had organised a new government with Tancred -- an illegitimate descendant of the Norman kings -- as king. The pope, now Clement III, secretly favoured this competitor to Henry, and by the end of 1190 Tancred was master of the situation. Henry then took the field in person, and as he marched through Italy the same good fortune fell to him as had befallen his father in 1159 -- the death of the pope (March 20, 1191). Better still, from the king's point of view, the cardinals elected an old man of eighty-five -- Celestine III. He was not at all willing to confer on Henry the imperial crown, [248] but he had no means to prevent his occupation of Rome and no choice but to recognise him as emperor.

The new emperor next invested Naples, where Tancred and the best part of his forces lay. Here disaster followed upon disaster. The Neapolitan fleet destroyed the Pisan fleet that was in the emperor s service, and the July heats were too much for Henry's northern troops. Two of his chief lieutenants died, he himself fell gravely ill and, to crown all, his wife was captured, to become Tancred's prisoner. Henry had no choice but to return to Germany and reorganise. Southern Italy, for the moment, was free of him and the pope had a breathing space, in which to prevent new dangers -- if possible -- by diplomacy.

With the emperor, however, no understanding was possible so long as he refused to evacuate the papal territories he still held. I or Celestine's legates he had indeed nothing but new threats. The pope proceeded to develop the other policy, of alliance with Tancred. He acknowledged him as King of Sicily and gave him investiture, Tancred conceding to the pope as suzerain the right to decide appeals and the right to send a legate to the kingdom every five years. Further, in a vain hope of conciliating the emperor, the pope persuaded Tancred to release his valuable hostage, the Empress Constance.

In Germany meanwhile (1192-1193) the emperor was faced with a powerful coalition, the centre of which was Henry of Brunswick. But the capture of Henry's uncle, the English king Richard Coeur de Lion, who also was an ally of Tancred, did much to break up this league of German princes, and his enormous ransom largely solved for the emperor the question how to finance the new Italian expedition. Henry of Brunswick's marriage with the emperor's niece completed the pacification of Germany. Then, just as the emperor was ready to deal with Sicily, Tancred died, on February 28, 1194, leaving only a child to succeed him. Henry's task had lost all its difficulty. The papacy was truly at his mercy.

He set out in May, 1194. His diplomacy won him the fleets of both Genoa and Pisa, and while he was still at Pisa the Neapolitans came to proffer their homage. Henry was finally master of central and southern Italy.

He left Constance to rule his new acquisition, and returned to Germany to organise his next expedition: a crusade which should avenge the failure of that of 1190-1192, and should also make him master of Constantinople. The pope, who had not dared to protest at Henry's arrest of Richard Coeur de Lion, a crusader returning from the Holy Land, could only send a message of thanks and congratulation. Along with the grandiose plan to conquer the East and so make himself really another Constantine, there went the determination to transform the elective empire into a dignity hereditary in his own family. The emperor opened his campaign at the Diet of Wurzburg in 1196, persuading many of the bishops and nobles to give him signed promises of support. Next, to further the scheme, he sought to win from the pope the coronation of his baby son, Frederick Roger, then just two years old. With this in view he once again came into Italy. The pope was utterly helpless, but his ninety years gave him one advantage -- he could simply be deaf to the emperor's suggestion. He began by presenting Henry with a list of grievances: oppression of the Church in Sicily, the continued occupation of the papal territory by imperial garrisons; and then, when Henry became dangerously urgent, he promised to give a definite answer by the feast of the Epiphany, 1197.

That date found the emperor in his kingdom of Sicily, busy with the suppression of a widespread insurrection, long plotted under the oppression of Henry's German subordinates, and for whose explosion his own arrival was the signal. There were plots against his life, in which an alleged paramour of his wife was concerned: Henry had him tortured to death in her presence. And there were savage reprisals throughout the kingdom: plotters burnt at the stake, sawn in two, buried alive. Finally the terror triumphed. By August, 1197, Henry was once more master. A month later fever had carried him off, with just the time before he died to leave his son and heir in the wardship of the one person he could trust in a treacherous world -- the ninety-year-old pope!

Celestine III lived only a few months longer, and with the election of his successor the wheel of fortune turned indeed its full. While, in place of Henry VI, there was the baby three years old, and while in Germany rival princes fought for the imperial crown, the cardinals, instead of electing yet another octogenarian, set in place of Celestine a man of thirty-seven, the Cardinal Lothario of Segni. He took the name of Innocent III (January 8, 1198).

THE DISASTERS IN THE LATIN EAST, 1150-1197

After the tragic fiasco, in 1148, of the Second Crusade, the Mohammedan offensive went from one success to another. Nureddin conquered what remained of the country of Edessa; he took some of the towns in the principality of Antioch; and the King of Jerusalem found his only hope of salvation to be an alliance with Constantinople.

In 1153 the king took from the Egyptians Ascalon, which had held out since the days of the First Crusade; but, as against this success, Nureddin, in the following year, took Damascus. There, for the moment, his direct attack halted: for the next fifteen years he and the King of Jerusalem fought each other indirectly, in the faction struggle which divided Egypt. By 1169 the faction which Nureddin supported had triumphed. Its leader was a man of genius, Saladin, and in 1171 he was sole ruler in Egypt. His accession to power meant the end of the religious schism which had for so long rent the Mohammedans; Egypt, to the south, was now as strong as Nureddin to the north. The Latins were yearly weaker, and more divided, while in Europe the papal energies were now wholly occupied in beating off Frederick Barbarossa's great bid for the control of the Church. It could only be a matter of time before the Latins lost their hold on Jerusalem. Only so long as rival Mohammedans faced each other in equal strength would Latins enjoy any security. Once either Saladin or Nureddin achieved a supremacy in the Mohammedan world, the remnant of Latin power would be swept away without much difficulty.

In 1174 Nureddin died; and Saladin began little by little to make himself master of Syria too. By 1183 Aleppo was his, and Damascus also. The circle was almost complete around the doomed Latin kingdom.

Its kings, of course, had not been careless of the approaching danger. From 1164 they called repeatedly on the West for help, and their appeal in 1184 had produced in France and England the new institution of a fixed tax levied for the support of the Holy Land. One very grave internal disaster was the extinction of the dynasty when, in 1186, Baldwin the Leper died without heirs. His mother Sybilla had, six years earlier, married as her second husband a French adventurer, Guy de Lusignan, highly unpopular with the barons; now, since Sybilla was herself heiress to the throne, Guy became king.

It was at this critical moment, when the internal dissensions of the kingdom were at their height, that Raynald of Chatillon, lord of the impregnable fortress of Krak, half brigand, half pirate-for he had a fleet on the Red Sea, and lived largely on the pillage of caravans -- captured a caravan in which Saladin's sister was travelling, and this during a time of truce (1186).

Saladin proclaimed the Holy War to drive the Christians out, once and for all. A Mohammedan army, fired with all the enthusiasm that had once been the crusaders', swept down on the Western disorganisation. At Tiberias, in May, 1187, a joint army of Hospitallers and Templars was defeated and on July 4, at Hattin, the army of the kingdom was cut to pieces. Nothing lay between Saladin and his prey. One by one he occupied all the towns of the kingdom, except Tyre and Jerusalem. On October 2 he entered Jerusalem, too. Tyre, Tripoli and Antioch were all that remained of the fruits of 1095. After eighty-eight years of occupation there was need of another Urban II.

The reigning pope to whom the news of the battle of Hattin came was Urban III. Before he learnt of the fall of Jerusalem he was dead; and the shock of this news, when it arrived, killed his successor, Gregory VIII (October 21-December 17, 1187). It was to the aged Clement III that the task fell of once more rousing the Catholic world, or rather of organising the new enthusiasm which, immediately, began to show itself. If Jerusalem had fallen, it was said, this was because Christendom had sinned; and in a fervour of contrition for past apathy the scenes of 1095 began to be renewed. Everywhere, under the encouraging diplomacy of the papal legates, princes long at war came to terms: Henry II of England and Philip II of France, Pisa and Genoa, Venice and Hungary, the King of Sicily and the Byzantine emperor. All took the cross, and none more eagerly than the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, one of the few survivors of the disastrous crusade of 1147. Under his leadership all Germany prepared to send into the East the largest single army yet formed. The Sicilian Fleet set out immediately and saved Tripoli for the cross, and in May, 1189, the Germans marched out of Ratisbon, 100,000 strong.

Barbarossa's host made its way through Hungary easily enough but when it reached the Byzantine frontiers it came into contact with a power, not merely suspicious, as in previous years, but so alarmed at this revival that it had already come to terms with Saladin, and was prepared to act as his ally. In the last stages of the march to Constantinople the Germans had to fight more than one pitched battle with the Greeks. In the capital itself the emperor threw the German ambassadors into prison, and the patriarch lavished indulgences on whoever would kill the Latin dogs. Frederick began to think of destroying Byzantium. He wrote home to enlist the sympathies of the pope, to beseech that the crusade might be directed against these traitors, and to his son, Henry VI, to assemble the necessary fleets. Finally the Greek emperor -- Isaac Angelus -- yielded, promising a safe passage for the Germans and opportunity to provision their forces. On March 30, 1190, they crossed the Bosphorus and began the march through Asia Minor. Despite terrible hardships they made their way successfully, taking Iconium by storm and then, on June 10, the greatest of disasters befell them. The old emperor, as he crossed the river Salef, was thrown from his horse and drowned. Consternation seized on the princes. Many turned for home; others got as far as Antioch; only a small part survived to join the main operation of the crusade, the siege of St. Jean d'Acre, the strongly defended gate to the Holy Land.

Here, as the siege continued (June, 1189-July, 1191) all the forces from all over Europe gathered, under a brilliant band of leaders, the most distinguished of whom were Philip II of France and the new King of England, Richard Coeur de Lion. As always, there were as many rivals as princes, and the jealousy of the two kings split the crusade from the beginning. But finally, thanks in great part to Richard's skill, the town surrendered. Before the month was out Philip returned to France leaving Richard supreme.

It was now decided to take Jerusalem, and through August and September the armies marched along the coast, occupying Cesarea and Jaffa. And now a wholly new feature appeared in the crusade. The long siege of Acre had done as much to familiarise the newly- arrived crusaders with their opponents as the permanent life in the East had long since familiarised the various kings of Jerusalem and their nobles. A sort of military camaraderie had begun to grow, and out of it there now came a move to end the struggle by diplomacy. But Saladin, furious at Richard's massacre of two thousand Saracen hostages, refused to treat, as he refused also the extraordinary proposal that his brother should marry Richard's sister and rule Palestine. The negotiations gave Saladin time to bring reinforcements to Jerusalem, and when Richard prepared to attack, the more experienced chiefs of the military orders could only warn him of his foolhardiness. In the end Richard and Saladin came to terms. There was to be a truce for three years, the coast towns were to be shared, and small parties of crusaders were to be allowed in Jerusalem as pilgrims. This was on September 2, 1192. The crusade was over, and five weeks later Richard set sail for Europe. Once more years of effort, tens of thousands of lives lost, an immense treasure spent, and nothing achieved.

The next year Saladin died. He left to succeed him a brother, and seventeen sons. Soon Palestine and Syria were their much-disputed prize. The crusade had a new opportunity. This time it was left to the emperor Henry VI, Barbarossa's son and successor, to make the most of it. He was perhaps the greatest man the empire had known since Charlemagne, and, apparently, about to realise that dream of universal dominion which had haunted so many of Charlemagne's German successors. A stroke of luck had brought even the King of England within the range of his policies. He was ruler of Sicily and southern Italy as well as of Germany, and now, from Sicily, he plotted the conquest of the Eastern empire too. The first object of crusading zeal threatened now to be Constantinople. Henry took the cross in a solemn assembly at Bari on May 31, 1195, and six months later, at the German diet called to organise the details of the crusade, the changes in its political objective were admirably prefigured when the kings of Cyprus and Armenia gave over their realms to Henry and received them from him as their suzerain.

Meanwhile the task of recruiting new armies was pressed forward, Henry himself taking part in it. Through the spring of 1197 the new German forces began to gather in the harbours of southern Italy -- to the dismay of the inhabitants upon whom they lived, and to whom they were " less pilgrims than thieving wolves." In September 1197 the first departures took place. The objective set them was Jerusalem, and the Holy City taken they were to join the emperor before Constantinople.

These forces came to Acre, took Sidon, defeated the most capable of their opponents, Saladin's brother, Malek, and by the capture of Beyrouth (October 23, 1197) reopened the way from Tripoli -- still in Latin hands -- to Jerusalem. They were then held up by the stronghold of Tiberias, and at the moment when they had decided to raise the siege the news reached them that Henry VI was dead -- had been dead, indeed, since three weeks after their departure. This was the end of all order in the crusade. A truce was patched up with Malek and the army dispersed under its various leaders.

In the tragic fiasco of these first attempts to regain Jerusalem, the beginnings are discernible of new secular encroachments in what was, in essence and in origin, a spiritual institution. It is the lay prince alone who now really counts in it. The crusade tends to be a thing controlled by him alone, directed to his ends, and along what lines he chooses. It ceases, at times, to be crusade at all; Catholics and Mohammedans fraternise, negotiate, and even plan marriage alliances. The old aim of expelling the unbeliever from the sacred soil of Palestine has lost its place as the absolute determining factor of the movement. And at this moment, when the papally-created institution is definitely slipping from the grasp of the papacy, the Eastern empire whose capital is Constantinople is beginning to seem to the crusader as great a foe as Islam. When next the zeal of Christendom is roused, these new tendencies will mature with unpleasant rapidity.

CATHOLIC THOUGHT: THE MENACE OF ARISTOTLE AND AVERROES

When in 1161 Peter Lombard died, and Roland Bandinelli, now Pope Alexander III, began to b wholly absorbed in the defence of the papacy's independence against Frederick Barbarossa, the Catholic intellectual world lost the last of the really great personalities who had led it for now a hundred years. The next generation was not to produce any successor who could be compared to them. Yet it saw the emergence of a new intellectual force none the less, and one so far reaching in its effects that, by comparison with the thought that followed, the work of the century that closed with Peter Lombard is of hardly more than archaeological importance. This new force was the mind of Aristotle. From the middle of the twelfth century the invasion of Christendom by the philosophy of Aristotle, and the slow victory of his ideas in an unending series of fiercely fought battles, is, after the duel with the Hohenstaufen, the chief feature of the Church's history.

A philosophy strongly Aristotelian in sympathy has been now for so long the officially accredited means by which, in the Catholic Church, revelation is explained and its reasonableness defended, that it requires an effort to conceive that matters were once very different indeed. The history of the century between the death of Alexander III and that of St. Thomas Aquinas (1181-1274) shows that it was only after Homeric fighting, and three generations of hard thinking that the possibilities which Aristotle held for the rational exposition of Catholicism were understood and developed. To the majority of the theologians to whom Aristotle was offered as anything more than the logician -- as the physicist, that is to say, the psychologist, the metaphysician -- this founder of what, "on the face of it is the least religious of all the great philosophies" [249] could only seem the most dangerous of foes. This was partly due to the shortcomings and incompleteness of Aristotle himself, but it was due still more to the company with whom, and through whom, he made his appearance. Aristotle came to the Catholic West in its first century of freedom from the necessities of a struggle for life, and he came to it as part of that superior Mohammedan culture which, dominant for centuries from India to the Atlantic, had only lately ceased to menace Catholicism's very existence.

Aristotle had ceased to be studied in the lands that were once the Roman Empire since, in 529, Justinian closed the schools of Athens. The cult, so to call it, found a refuge with the Monophysites of Egypt and Syria, and in Persia too. When the Arabs conquered these lands in the first half of the sixth century, Aristotle, with much other cultural riches, passed to the new empire of Islam. How Greek philosophy developed in that empire, of the inevitable strife between its devotees and the Mohammedan theologians, of the alternations of protection and persecution from the different caliphs that were its lot throughout the next three centuries, must be read elsewhere. As the philosophy was driven from the Eastern caliphate, it began to flourish in Moslem Spain. From Spain, through translations made under the direction of the Archbishop Raymond of Toledo (1126-1150), this Greco-Arab philosophical and scientific culture began, in the last half of the twelfth century, to be known to the Catholic intellectual world which Abelard and his fellows had recently restored to life.

The translations were, to begin with, inevitably unsatisfactory, made as they were from the Spanish translation of an Arabic translation of a Syrian translation of the Greek original. But, apart altogether from translating Aristotle's text, these clerics of Toledo did something destined to fire every intelligence in France and Italy, and to give the whole Catholic world matter for thought eternally, when they translated the great Arabs and the great Jews whom in the past three centuries the study of Aristotle -- and no less importantly the study of Neoplatonic writings that passed for Aristotle -- had inspired. Finally, the translators were also authors, Catholics philosophising in the spirit of the writings they had translated. With these translations, philosophical ideas, true and false -- and often subtly akin, in their spiritual promise, to the highest aspirations of Catholic life -- entered into the very heart of the Catholic life of the next hundred years, and side by side with the fight to compel recognition of the real Aristotle's real value, another fight was waged to cast out the new, more insidious, pseudo-mystical elements of Neoplatonism.

That fight was the affair of the next century. The years which this chapter covers merely saw the Aristotelian problem stated. Was Aristotle essentially anti-Christian and his philosophy necessarily destructive of Christianity, or did it offer, rather, the best means of rationally explaining Christianity to itself and to the world? The scholastic world was bitterly divided about this, as, a hundred years earlier, it had been divided on the question of using logic to study Revelation; the positions of the parties that were to fight the question to a finish began to be defined; and finally the arena was prepared that was to be the scene of the fights, the University of Paris, founded at the end of the twelfth century under Innocent III.

That the nature of the later, thirteenth century, crisis may be understood, something must be said of the chief exponents of this Greco-Saracen thought that the twelfth century saw making its way across Christendom from Spain. There are three Mohammedans, two Jews and the chief of their translators to consider: Avicenna, Al Ghazel, Averroes, Avicebron, Maimonides and Dominic Gondisalvi.

Avicenna, (Ibn Sina), born in Turkestan in 980, is one of the greatest figures in the history of philosophy. He was a man with a truly universal mind, who possessed an extraordinary knowledge of the natural sciences, of law, of theology and -- what gave him great fame through all the Middle Ages of medicine too. He was a passionate student of Aristotle, but the Metaphysics proved an insurmountable barrier, for all that he had read them so often that he knew them by heart, until he fell in with the commentary of Al Farabi. [250] With the mastery of Aristotle thence gained, Avicenna's formation was complete. Much of his original work in philosophy has perished, but a kind of Summa of Aristotelianism as he conceived it, in eighteen books, survives to show the scale of his achievement and to explain the fact of his enormous prestige. His work, however, like that of all these Islamic philosophers, suffers inevitably from the twin defects that he worked on a text that was a translation at second-hand, and that his Aristotle included two famous treatises which we now know are of Neoplatonic authorship. Avicenna, for all his vast Aristotelian scholarship, is really a Neoplatonist. His aim is mystical, namely to achieve union with the Divine even in this life. He is not primarily a physicist, as assuredly was Aristotle, but his interest is psychological. Here, too, thought interests him -- and he builds from an examination of thought processes -- simply as a means of arriving at his religious end. He shares the Platonist idea of the opposition between spirit and matter, the insistence of that philosophy on the immortality of the soul and its theory of Providence. Through a gradual ascent of knowledge man comes finally to the moment when in all things he sees God, and nothing but God; the knowledge of self disappears, and the mystic is rapt in contemplation.

As a system of practical mysticism related to philosophy, [251] and in which, apparently, a place was found for all three Persons of the Blessed Trinity, Avicenna had, of himself, much to interest the Catholics who first studied him. In spirit, through his use of psychological analysis, he was something akin to St. Augustine, something very far removed from the impersonal metaphysics of Aristotle. A further point to be noted, is his attitude towards one of the major problems of Aristotelian interpretation, the theory, namely, by which Aristotle explains the spiritual character of the essential intellectual operation. For Avicenna the true first intellect of all mankind is the Demiurge-Logos, the agent of the Divinity's dealings with man. It is through this Logos, by participation in him, that is to say, that the individual mind understands.

The Spanish Jew, Avicebron (Salomon Ibn Gabirol, 1020-1058), it is convenient to consider with Avicenna, for they were later studied in combination by the school of Catholic scholastics to whom their ideas appealed. Avicebron, poet as well as philosopher, author of the Fons Vitae, had in view the same practical mystical end, namely to satisfy, even in this life, the religious man's aspiration to union with God. His Fons Vitae is remarkable for its special theory that all things are composed of matter and form -- he is possibly, here, a source of Gilbert of la Porree -- that God is the form of the universe considered as a whole, and that form is united to matter through the intellect. Avicebron supplies a common ground where mystics and natural scientists meet. He makes physics serve the needs of mystical aspiration. [252]

Al Ghazel (1059-1111) comes to his place in this story in a very curious way, for he was one of the leaders of the Mohammedan reaction which, after Avicenna's death in 1037, destroyed the philosophical movement in the Eastern caliphate. To ruin beyond all hope of repair the hold of the philosopher on the thinking mind Al Ghazel first set out Avicenna's doctrine systematically. His summary was so clear, and so concise, that, in another country, a generation later, it did more than any other work to make Avicenna understandable and to popularise his thought. Avicenna's teaching on the soul now stood out in particular relief: that the soul is not merely the form of the body, that it is a substance, and that it is immortal precisely because it is a substance.

To translate into Latin these three related thinkers was part of the great work of Dominic Gondisalvi, Archdeacon of Toledo. Of Gondisalvi himself -- Gundissalinus, as he was to those who used him -- we know almost nothing; nor did he, in his own writings, show himself more than a mediocre compiler. But the materials which made up the compilation were new; and it was in such works as his De Immortalitate Animae and De Divisione Philosophiae that thousands into whose hands the more valuable translations never came, made their first acquaintance with the metaphysics and the ethics of Aristotle. Nor was Gundissalinus content merely to translate the greater writers. In one important particular he re- adjusted Avicenna himself. Sure as that mystic's system was of a hearing, in a generation when theology's chief importance still lay, for many, in its being a road to immediate union with God, and surer still for the undoubted half-Christian ideas it already contained, this correction made by Gundissalinus put the system's success beyond all doubt. Where Avicenna had placed the source of the intellect's illumination in the DemiurgeLogos -- a being really distinct from God -- that illumination, with Gundissalinus, was the direct act of God Himself. That in this theory -- Gundissalinus-Avicenna -- man's intelligence was almost effaced before the activity of God is true; but the prima facie resemblance of Avicenna's thought to the traditional Augustinian theory of knowledge is greatly heightened by the theory. It is, in fact, a revival of Augustinianism strengthened by the support of Avicenna. Gundissalinus, also, is practical in his aim -- he makes much use of St. Bernard's De Adherendo Deo -- and it was its writer's mystical objective, writ large all over his work, that secured the new system its first welcome, without that primary hostile scrutiny which might otherwise have been its lot.

There was, however, still more in the system thus smuggled into the heart of Catholicism than a doctrine of knowledge sufficiently resembling Augustinianism to be swallowed whole by the Augustinians. In Al Ghazel-Avicenna, Gundissalinus found a system which taught that the soul's supreme happiness consists in its union with the one, semi-divine, active Intellect; and that, even in this life, the union is possible, momentarily at least, for souls which are specially pure and detached from the body. This suggested to him an analogous Catholic theory whose summit is a mystical doctrine of ecstasy by direct union of the soul with God. Finally, this rough and ready adapter of Saracenic Neoplatonism left to the next generation a formidable problem, nothing less in fact than how really to co-ordinate this corpus of thought -- which he believed was Aristotelian, but which was in fact Neoplatonic -- with the teaching, traditional among Catholic mystics, of God as the soul's illuminator.

This Avicennian, or Gundissalinian, Aristotle was fortunate in the time of his appearance, for in the last years of the twelfth century it was the mystical theologians who dominated the scene at Paris, while at Chartres the Platonic tradition was still strong. But the intellect of the twelfth century was by no means entirely given up to the thought of the Divine, and of the surest means of earthly communion with It. Side by side with this, there ran a strong current of scientific materialism, of fatalistic astrology and, in the darker places, of atheism too. While to this side of contemporary life -- a very real side, that must never be lost sight of in the study of what have been called "the Ages of Faith"-Aristotle, as expressed in the spiritual idealism of Avicenna, made little appeal, there came from it a welcome at least as great to the Spanish Moor who seemed to those of this day, and to very many thinkers of the next century too, Aristotle born again. This was Averroes, born at Cordova in 1126, no ancient figure, for this end of the twelfth century, revived by the research of the scholarly, but, with all his superb understanding of the great master, still very much alive in the flesh. [253] Averroes was perhaps the greatest of all who have worshipped at the shrine of Aristotle. The one aim of his life was to make Aristotle intelligible to his time, and the degree of his achievement is declared by the title the Middle Ages gave him. In a time when to comment Aristotle, or some part of him, was almost the first foundation of any intellectual fame, Averroes was, simply, "The Commentator." "Averrois," said Dante, "che il gran commento feo."

Like a true disciple of Aristotle, Averroes is first of all a physicist, and it is this fundamental interest in physics which links him immediately with those contemporary speculations, partly astrological, partly atheistical, which derived, and not merely through the Arabs, from a very distant antiquity. For Averroes, then, the First Source of all movement has an astral, cosmic character. The heavens of Averroes are a living reality, and the hierarchy of the heavenly intelligences is the chain linking man with the Primum Movens. Here Averroes shows himself, not merely Aristotelian, but as the perfection of a long Arabian and Neoplatonic tradition, the perfection because the most influenced by Aristotle. His Aristotle is none the less Neoplatonist, as witnesses this introduction of a theory of intermediary intelligences, emanated gradually through the hierarchy of the spheres. [254]

No commentator, however, was less influenced than Averroes by the spiritual elements of Neoplatonism. So much of a physicist is he that, for him, things are absolutely one. There is no distinction between their essence and existence, no possibility of movement from non-being to being, no possibility of creation. It is a physicism so absolute that it leaves no place for freedom, freedom for example of the will. All is necessary, determined, in an eternal evolution. Form, soul therefore, for the soul is the form of the body, is part of the material cosmos. Yet the soul can think, and thought is non-material. How explain this production of an effect higher in nature than the soul that produces it? Here Averroes, like Avicenna and like all who have striven to follow Aristotle, is brought up against one of the problems to which Aristotle gives no clear solution. We have seen Avicenna's solution already. Another tradition, dating from Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd century A.D.), which persisted down to Avempace (1138), Averroes' own contemporary, solved it by developing, from doctrines implicit in the Aristotelian corpus, the theory of an operation between the passive intellect existent in each individual and a single active intelligence of the whole cosmos. For Averroes this was a wholly unacceptable compromise. He indignantly rejected it, and showed himself here the most radical of all the commentators by postulating the unity of the passive intelligence too. What then of the soul's immortality? For Averroes the soul is only immortal in the sense that the one active intelligence is immortal. Finally the First Mover is inseparable from the whole of that which he moves.

Clearly the philosophy of Averroes -- of Aristotle too, if Averroes truly represents the essential Aristotle -- is not compatible with the revealed religion enshrined in the traditional teaching of the Church. What of his immediate effect? and what was it in Aristotle which, despite his formidable appearance of irrefutable, scientifically established materialism, was to urge the keenest and most orthodox minds of the next hundred years to attempt a new reading of his Metaphysics?

There IS one unmistakable feature of the thought of the old classical culture, and that is the common ground which it offers, both to philosophers and to scientists, in the facts of astronomy- a kind of syncretism where the observed periodicity of stellar movements served as a scientific basis for a theory of universal determinism. This syncretism passed, with much else of the GrecoRoman culture, into the rich amalgam of the Arab empire in the East. For Al-Kindi (d. 860), the first of the great translators of Aristotle, astrology was the mistress of the sciences, and his successor and disciple, Albumasar (d. 886), showed a like reverence for it. Thenceforward the cult of the stars shared the varying fortunes of the old philosophy. Even the greatest of these thinkers, Avicenna, had a place for the stars as real determining influences upon human choice.

This cult of the stars had, on the other hand, been sympathetic, at least, throughout all its history, to a very radical materialistic atheism, as well as to pantheism. To this astral determinism Aristotle's thought had given a certain support and, although atheism played a part in Greek philosophy long before Aristotle, the new philosophies that came from among the continuators of Plato and Aristotle were more favourable to atheism than the earlier philosophies.

For more than one reason astrology -- with its implicit denial of moral responsibility -- was popular. People and princes alike, in all the last centuries of the antique world, fell before the temptation to use the astrologer, and to direct their lives by his erudite calculations. With the gradual Christian conquest of that culture the astrologer lost his hold, but from the ninth century, thanks in great part to the Arabs, who were now to be found in every city of Italy and southern France, the old practices slowly revived. Works on astrology began to be translated before those of the philosophers, and they were more readily assimilated, more eagerly sought out. By the twelfth century astrology was, in a sense, omnipresent in Christendom; and the new spirit, if congenial to the school of Chartres, found its first great scientific opponent in Abelard. After Abelard's death it regained at Paris what ground it had lost, and then, as the influence of Averroes began slowly to seep through, new life came from his strongly organised thought to the allied astrological and atheistic speculations. Thanks to the new vigour thus infused, things that had slept for centuries began slowly to reawaken. Once more, the enormous prestige of Aristotle himself aided the movement.

By the end of the twelfth century there was then, undoubtedly, in the intellectual centres of the Catholic world, a strong current of ideas at once astrological and atheistic, and it was threatening to gain the chief seat of Catholic culture, the schools of Paris, in the very moment when the new organisation was forming that was to make them, with the papacy and the empire, the third great feature of Catholic life.

"Very early in the twelfth century it began to be rumoured everywhere that long before Christianity was heard of Aristotle had solved all the problems of human society." [255] By the end of the century it was much more than rumour; and here we touch on the core of the new revolution in travail -- the genius of Aristotle himself. When the Catholic West began to read for the first time his Physics, the De Coelo et Mundo, the De Anima, the De Generatione et Corruptione, and the Metaphysics, it reeled before the sudden discovery of a new world. Here was a systematic study of the universe, in its own right and for its own sake, of things, plants, animals, man, the stars, and the Power that moulds the whole. [256] A whole encyclopaedia of the natural sciences, a whole corpus of new facts, and a philosophy that explained them-it was a kind of sudden revelation in the natural order. And, over all, there presided the genius of the inventor of Logic. It was the key to the universe in the study of the universe, in the study of Nature for Nature's own sake, and in the light of the natural reason. There has, probably. never been anything, in the intellectual order, to equal this sudden restoration -- to a culture already possessed of one important part of the ancient culture-of all that it most lacked and most needed, namely the vast body of the natural science of that ancient culture and the best of its philosophy. Not in one single generation could the gift be truly estimated, possessed, assimilated. The first effect, inevitably, was a confusion of sudden conclusions and half-truths, the inevitable fruit of half-understood principles. For the ruling authorities in the Church it presented an anxious problem, this vast corpus of knowledge, impossible to ignore, impossible not to use, and yet a knowledge shot through with Materialism, Pantheism and all that was least compatible with the traditional Faith. [257]

It was amid this swirl and turbulence of the new thought that in 1205, the pope, Innocent III, called into existence a new insti- tution whose special purpose was the promotion of higher studies and the safeguarding of the traditional Faith, alike among those who studied and among those who taught. This institution was the University of Paris. It was the forerunner of scores of similar institutions, set up in the next two centuries by the same papal authority and, to some extent, it was the model on which all of them were fashioned; but in one important respect it was from the beginning a thing apart. What made this university at Paris unique was the extraordinary number of its students, the fact that these students (and the masters, too) came from all over Christendom, and the prestige in its schools of theological studies and of the study of the newly-revealed Aristotelian books. Already, for nearly a hundred years continuously, before the decisive act of Innocent III, this group of schools that centred around the school of the Bishop of Paris had been the universally recognised capital of the theological intelligence of the Church. Innocent III himself was a product of these schools.

To the town of Paris the schools were, by the end of the century, an immense asset -- and a grave responsibility in more than one way. And the prosperity of the schools was no less a matter of concern to the French king. Already it was beginning to be seen that, if the Italian nation had the papal capital itself as its glory, and the Germans the Empire, the French could boast in the schools of Paris a third institution no whit less effective than either of these throughout the whole of Christendom. Whatever made for the better organisation and greater contentment of these thousands of foreign scholars who were now a permanent element of life in the French capital, and a rich source of French prestige and influence, must interest the monarchs who were welding France into a single country. The decisive act was the constitution of the whole body of these students and masters as a self-governing corporation, free at once from the jurisdiction of the local bishop and the local civil authorities; and this was what Innocent III did in 1205.

But in doing this it was far from the pope's intention to create within the Church such an unheard of novelty as an institution that was perfectly autonomous. The new universitas was the creation of the papacy; the popes would endow it liberally with privileges, they would lavish praises on it, [258] fight its battles, defend its rights: but they would also control it -- control at least the main lines of its development -- during the first formative hundred years. For as a school to which all Christendom came in search of theological learning the university could be, inevitably, a most

powerful source of general error as well as a general benefit. [259] This was not a national institution -- and it was more than what we would call international: the schools of Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were Christendom itself, hard at work upon the Bible, St. Augustine and Aristotle, upon divine Revelation, traditional theology, the new natural sciences and philosophy. Facing such a phenomenon, unprecedented in its kind as well as in its scale, the chief of Christendom could not be a mere spectator or patron. Here, too, he must rule.

And this papal control of the schools, in these years that were so critical, both for the faith and for the whole future of Western civilisation, [260] was a model of practical wisdom and of truly Roman tact: -- the first, early prohibition of lectures on the Physics of Aristotle, and the Metaphysics, while these were yet such novelties that, inevitably, like men filled with new wine, students and masters fell with passionate enthusiasm into one error after another, into errors about the new doctrines as surely as into errors about their relation to the traditional faith; then, the strong insistence on the primacy of Theology among the sciences; and the gradual relaxation of the ban on Aristotle, until, finally, the great pagan is given droit de cite, and the study of his works becomes an obligatory part of the theologian's training.

As the first years of the new century went by, the translations began to multiply -- and to improve. There was now, side by side with the early work of Gundissalinus, a second series of translations, made on the Greek text itself. And presently the opposition began to harden, and to fix itself: opposition, first of all, to Aristotle, and then, more usefully, to Averroes. Averroes, "who knew all there was to be known, understood all, explained all," seemed at first to point to the happy mean between the Neoplatonism of the Augustinians, the Aristotelianism of the last generation of Abelard's influence, and the Positivism of the physicists and astrologers. It was only slowly, and by degrees, that Paris began to realise that Averroes himself was the enemy. William of Auvergne, for example, master in the schools until 1228, and from thence on Bishop of Paris until his death (1249), strenuously opposes the special doctrines of Averroes, and at the same time attacks no less strenuously those who hold them -- for their slanderous imputation of them to Averroes!

Not until the next generation, apparently, to the last few years of William of Auvergne's episcopate, was Averroes seen to be what he is. By that time the man had arrived who was equal to the new situation -- St. Albert the Great.

ANTI-CLERICALISM, HERESY AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM: WALDENSES, JOACHIM OF FLORA, ALBIGENSES

Between the accession of St. Leo IX, when the papacy began effectively to lead the reform movement within the Church, and that of Innocent III, lies a period of a hundred and fifty years, a period divided evenly by the Concordat of Worms and the first General Council of the Lateran. The movement which St. Leo inaugurated, and whose greatest figure is St. Gregory VII, had been, essentially, directed to the reform of abuses and to the restoration of Christian life throughout the Church. The leaders were men of holy life, monks for the most part, shocked to see the general neglect of the most elementary precepts of the Gospel, their hearts lacerated at the spiritual peril that endangered souls. Whence the bitterness of the struggle these pastors of souls waged, first against the unworthy clergy, then against the system which made their appointment possible, and finally against that lay control of clerical nominations which underlay the whole gigantic betrayal of the designs of Christ Our Lord.

It was seventy-five years before the struggle against the emperor ended, and although the fight against simony and clerical immorality, as well as the effort to restore the ancient ascetic habit of clerical celibacy, never slackened, it was inevitable that the major contest should absorb the greater part of the energies of the various popes. Despite the canons of councils, and the efforts of popes as active as they were intelligent and capable, despite the work of innumerable saints as shown in the new religious orders, in preachers like St. Peter Damian in the eleventh century and St. Bernard in the twelfth, political events, only too often, sterilised the best endeavours of all this good will. Much, very much indeed, remained to be done before every bishop was to himself and his people mainly a shepherd of souls, before every priest was competent intellectually and fit, morally, to explain the Gospel to his people and lead them to live in union with Jesus Christ.

The general condition of religion, as the storms of the ninth and tenth centuries left it, was such that even saints despaired. That even when the usurping lay power had been reduced, many of the evils still persisted is not surprising. Clerical ignorance, lay brutality and superstition were still, in the time of St. Bernard and Alexander III, only too common. Tournaments, private wars, the organised brigandage, and the laxity of the great in matters of sex, usury and new abuses which grew out of the new freedom of the clergy from the lay control, a new clerical arrogance and a new clerical greed, and a new clerical ambition to control even the non-religious aspects of lay life -- there is a wealth of evidence to show the mighty task, which, eighty years after St. Gregory VII, still lay before a reforming papacy.

Even had the popes of the last half of the twelfth century been the single-minded religious of a hundred years before, much time would have been needed before their efforts could tell. Even the strongest of moral reformers depends naturally on the goodwill of those he would reform; and, in the nature of things, the will to be reformed is not a prominent characteristic of fashionable, and successful, sinners. Under the best of popes there would have been, here and there, a certain amount of anti-clerical complaint at the slowness of the pontifical will to correct and chasten those whose lives were the causes of scandal. As it was, with the new alliance between the papacy and the political needs of the Italian States, and with the beginnings of the papacy's new financial needs, and the means devised to satisfy these, anticlericalism began to show itself on a very large scale. Impatience with the half-reformed and increasingly wealthy clergy; impatience with the opposition of the higher clergy to the movement whence came the communes; disgust with the faults of the lower clergy; lack of instruction; and a craving for the better life to which the clergy should have led them; disappointment at the collapse of the Crusade as a spiritual thing, and disgust with those held responsible for the failure -- such causes as these gradually led, in many places, as the twelfth century drew to its close, to autonomous, lay-inspired movements that aimed at the moral regeneration of their members and the conversion of others to their ideals.

With this striving for a new, simpler, higher, moral life, conceived very often as that of primitive Catholicism and as the life designed by Christ Our Lord, a religious life independent of clerical direction, there went, too, a curious expectation of coming apocalyptic change. The day was approaching when, once again, God would visit His people and another saving prophet would appear. Throughout Christendom, and especially in the south of France and in Italy, such ideas, from the middle of the twelfth century, began to spread increasingly.

The earlier part of the century had already seen the appearance of zealous Levitical preachers. Besides Tanchelin and Arnold of Brescia there had been, for example, Peter of Bruys and Henry of Lausanne. The first of these, an unfrocked priest, had been well known as an itinerant propagandist in the south of France. Organised religion, with its churches, its sacraments and its clergy, he declared to be a mockery. The Mass was a mere show, good works done on behalf of the dead a waste of time, since the living cannot in any way assist the dead. Another subject of his violent denunciation was clerical concubinage. This early pioneer of naturalistic Christianity met with a violent death at the hands of the mob in 1137. Apparently he made no effort to form a body of disciples; his mission was a personal matter, and the same is true of the ex-monk of Cluny, Henry, who followed with a similar gospel a few years later.

The most celebrated of the anti-clerical movements of the century, however, and the one with which it closed, differed from those inspired by Peter and Henry in two important respects. It definitely aimed at the permanent organisation of those who accepted it, and it made no attack on the traditional faith. This movement derived from a wealthy banker of Lyons, Peter Waldo. About the year 1176 -- whether through reading the story in the gospel of the rich young man to whom Our Lord said, "If thou wilt be perfect sell all thou hast. . ." or from hearing the story of St. Alexis, is uncertain -- he divided his wealth between his wife and the poor, and determined to devote his life to preaching to others the poverty to which he now had vowed himself. To live without owning was the one really good work, the one way of perfection, and therefore Peter Waldo, a man whose determination knew no limits, must preach it. His enthusiasm and sincerity quickly won him a following, and soon there was formed the nucleus of a kind of penitential brotherhood vowed to practise poverty and to preach it. The Archbishop of Lyons forbade them to preach, and when they persisted, expelled them from his territory. In 1179 they appeared in Rome, to appeal to Alexander III against their archbishop. The pope blessed their scheme of living a life of consecrated poverty, but he would not allow them to preach where the bishops were opposed to it.

This papal prohibition was the turning point of the movement. Against submission they urged the example of the Apostles themselves, and quoting their words to the Sanhedrin, " We must obey God rather than men," set the prohibition at defiance. Whence, in 1184, a stern condemnation of the movement from Lucius III, who, by then, had succeeded Alexander. It was now only a matter of time before these insubordinate apostles of poverty, critics already of evident abuses, would absorb some of the heretical notions in general currency everywhere since the days of Peter of Bruys. At first, however, their orthodoxy remained unspotted. Their disobedience to the prohibition of preaching is the most serious thing alleged against them by their earliest Catholic critic. Then they allowed women to preach, and they began to criticise, as useless and unavailing, good works and masse's offered for the souls of the dead.

With the beginning of the next century -- about 1202 -- their wanderings brought them into contact with other anti-clerical groups, definitely heretical and hardened by years of conflict with the bishops. Especially important in this respect were the Lombard associations of those who called themselves "The Humble" (Humiliati). This movement, too, had passed through a crisis like to that which had tested the Poor Men of Lyons. Those of the Humiliati who had refused submission had gradually come more and more under the influence of anti-sacramentarian teaching; and through contact with them the followers of Peter Waldo moved still further away from their first position as a kind of religious order within the Church vowed to heroic poverty. They began to oppose the personal merit of the individual to his sacramental status as the source whence he had power to bless or consecrate, to bind or loose in the sacrament of penance. Bad priests have lost all claim to be obeyed, they urged; to obey them is in fact sin. Confession to a layman is as good as, is even better than confession to a priest. The one source of power over souls, power, for example, to forgive sins, is to live as the Apostles lived, in absolute poverty, dependent on alms, and shod with sandals -- this last detail had a great importance. Sacramental acts were null if the priest were in mortal sin, and, since even the smallest lie was in their eyes a mortal sin, this must happen frequently. Prayers for the dead were useless. Oaths were always unlawful and so, too, it was unlawful to take human life. Any layman, in case of necessity, could, without any ordination, say mass, provided he wore sandals, that is led the apostolic life of poverty.

But although, in the early years of the thirteenth century, Waldenses and Humiliati fraternised to the extent that through the Humiliati many of the old teachings of Arnold of Brescia passed into the Waldensian movement, the two sects never fused. The Congress of Bergamo (1218) that should have united them marks definitely their final division. The Italian group had never made celibacy a condition of perfection. Its members continued to live a family life in their own families. Again, although vowed to poverty, they by no means refused to work. Indeed by making manual work a virtue they became a power in the social life of the time, playing a great part in the early history of the textile industries in Lombardy. The Italians, also, could never bring themselves to that cult of Peter Waldo which for the Poor Men he founded was of the first importance. Nevertheless the failure to amalgamate the two bodies did not result in any lessening of the power of either. Their criticism and propaganda continued to be, as they had already been for forty years, a permanent feature of the problem that every bishop had to face in southern France, in Italy, in Switzerland and even in Germany.

Contemporary with the Lyonese Peter Waldo, and the pioneer of doctrines destined also to be an embarrassment for official Catholicism was the Calabrian abbot Joachim. Not indeed that Joachim failed to accept the traditional discipline, or made a frontal attack on any of the traditional doctrines. But the sanctity of his life gave a wholly unmerited importance to the apocalyptic fantasies which ran riot through all he wrote, fantasies destined in later years to bring to nought the heroic lives of thousands, and seriously to weaken in its first years the greatest organised movement of popular spirituality the Church had yet known -- the order of the Friars Minor.

Unlike Peter Waldo and the leaders of the Humiliati, Joachim was a man of education, who had spent much of his time at the most cultured courts of Europe -- Naples and Constantinople-and had travelled extensively. He entered the order of Citeaux and in 1177 was elected Abbot of Corazzo in Sicily. In 1184 he sought, and received, permission from Lucius III to write a commentary on the Bible, and then, at fifty years of age, he began his real momentous career. For the remainder of his life, seventeen years, the commentary was to be his main occupation, and the successive popes were, all of them, interested in it. In 1191 Joachim left Corazzo for Flora, where he founded the first house of a new order of solitaries. The new departure took place without any consultation of Citeaux, and four years of trouble between Joachim and the order followed, until, in 1196, the pope authorised the change and the new order.

Joachim was not a missionary, not a popular preacher, but essentially a contemplative, a solitary, and, above all, a seer. Nor, despite his strong denunciation of the corruption of the clergy, and criticisms which did not spare the Roman curia itself, was he ever rewarded with anything but veneration during his life. He made a formal submission of all he had written -- one work only was published in his lifetime -- and long after discredit had fallen on his books owing to the part they had played in later heretical movements, the prestige of his sanctity was sufficient for the pope to authorise the traditional cultus given him in the houses of the order he had founded.

The two chief features of Joachim's own teaching are a theory of the Trinity and, related to it, a theory of human history which not only explained the present and the past but also foretold the future.

The Trinitarian doctrine, directed against Peter Lombard, derived partly from that of Gilbert of la Porree. It treated as distinct realities the divine essence and the three Persons in whom it was manifested. The unity of the Trinity was no more than the collective unity which every group possesses.

For Joachim, as for all preceding Catholic students of the Scriptures, the Old Testament was the figure of the New. His new revolutionary contribution to biblical science was that he saw in the New Testament the figure of a third age yet to come. The Old Testament had been the age of the Father; the New Testament that of the Son; in the coming age the Holy Ghost would rule. Of this new age Joachim was the herald and prophet, fitted for the work by a special divine gift which enabled him to read beneath the known meaning of the Bible its final meaning, hitherto undiscovered. As the age of law and fear, in which men obeyed God as His slaves, had given place to that of grace, of faith and the obedience of sons, so in the new age faith would give place to charity, filial obedience to liberty. Again, each age had its characteristic social type in which the ideal of Christian life was realised. In the first age it was the married; in the second age the clerics; in the age to come it would be contemplative religious, and here Joachim made the prophecy of the rise of a new order, vowed to poverty and work, which, to many of his contemporaries, seemed, in the Friars Minor, fulfilled to the letter on the very morrow of his death.

The three ages grew each from the other, and yet the end of each would be marked by immense catastrophes. The rites and sacraments of each age pass away with the age; they are but types of the better things to come. The Mass then will disappear as the Paschal Lamb had done. Even the redemption of mankind has not yet been perfectly accomplished; the Christ who appeared and lived in Palestine was Himself no more than a figure of the Christ who would appear. Nor, in the coming new dispensation, would the Church exist in its present state. The visible Church would be absorbed in the invisible, the new contemplatives would be everything and the clergy, necessarily, would lose their importance, lose their very reason for existence.

This new age was at hand. Joachim was precise, even to the year in which it would begin, 1260. Persecutions, a general religious catastrophe, would precede the final period of peace in which Jews and Greeks would return to religious unity and the revelation be made of the Gospel that was to endure for ever. This " Eternal Gospel " would not be a new gospel, but the spiritual interpretation of the existing written gospel.

Abbot Joachim, for all his pessimistic criticism of every aspect of Christian life, was no friend to either of the great movements with which he was contemporary, the anti-clerical Waldenses and the anti-Christian Cathari. His own theories were, however, no less mischievous. And yet, for long enough -- with the exception of his exposition on the Trinity -- they escaped condemnation. Partly because of his saintly life Joachim was generally, though by no means universally, accepted at his own valuation. Again, it is often the fortune of visionaries of his kind that while one type of mind mocks at their revelations as manifest lunacy, pious, or rather superstitious, fear, with another type, sterilises the power of criticism. The fact remains that from now on a new and powerful influence is discernible in Catholic life, to persist as a source of trouble for another hundred and fifty years. Vague, obscure, full of contradictions, still more involved and anarchical as interested forgers began to interpolate the authentic Joachim, and to put into circulation under his name apocrypha that he would himself assuredly never have owned, it provided the critical and dissentient elements of the Church of the later Middle Ages with an inexhaustible fount of ideas and arguments, and with material for successful popular propaganda.

When the student turns from the idealism of Peter Waldo, or the reveries of Abbot Joachim, to the history of the Catharists who were their contemporaries he has the sensation of entering a new world altogether. Here are no Catholics whom disgust with the present condition of the Church drives into opposition, but the passionately enthusiastic pioneers of a new anti-Christian social order. They were the heirs to those Manichee doctrines which had provoked the repression of Diocletian, and enslaved St. Augustine centuries before, doctrines which had troubled the Rome of St. Leo and which, in later centuries, found a continuity of disciples in Asia Minor and the Balkans. Manicheans, Paulicians, Bogomiles, Catharists and Albigenses, [261] whatever be the truth that all are corporally related, these various sects were, at different times, all of them inspired by a common body of doctrine, and a similarity of moral practice.

In place of the one supreme God whom the Church believed to be the creator and ruler of all, the Albigenses set two gods, one supremely good, one supremely evil. God and the devil shared responsibility for the universe and power over it.

The material element in the universe, and of course in man, is the work of the devil and it is wholly evil. Man, creation partly of God and partly of the devil, stands in need of salvation. The source of this is not, however, the Incarnation and redeeming death of Christ Our Lord. Christ, for the Albigenses, is not God nor is He truly man. He is an angel who found a temporary lodging in an apparent human body; His humanity was an appearance merely; His passion and death were illusions. His mission is to teach the truth that God exists and that in every man, by reason of his soul, there is something of the divine through which he can ultimately escape the power. of the supreme evil. The Catholic Church is the enemy of Christ's Church, for it is the continuation in time of the synagogue. Hence on the part of the Albigenses an active hatred for the Catholic Church, and a never-ceasing effort to destroy its influence.

Salvation comes through the soul's emancipation from the body. So long as the soul is united to the body it is in danger of being lost to the devil, unless the person concerned has broken this power of the devil by receiving the Consolamentum -- a simple rite of sacramental character administered by the leaders of the sect. But whoever received the Consolamentum took upon himself thereby lifelong obligations of a most serious character, the momentary neglect of which annulled the rite received and involved him once again in the danger he had escaped. He was bound, for example, by accepting the rite to perpetual continency, to fasts which lasted the best part of the year, and in which little more than bread and water was allowed. He must never eat meat nor eggs nor milk nor butter nor cheese. He must never take an oath, nor take any part in a lawsuit which involved punishment. And with the rest of the Perfect -- for such he became when he received the Consolamentum - - he must live a common life. To receive the Consolamentum was then to enter an extremely severe kind of religious order.

From such an obligation the vast majority shrank. They accepted the Albigensian doctrine, they accomplished their duty of reverencing the Perfect, and they pledged themselves to receive the Consolamentum. But of those who received the Consolamentum many preferred to die, rather than face the horror that life was for the Perfect. This they achieved by a slow starvation, consecrated by the name of Endura. Suicide was the perfect act of the true Albigensian, and in the case of those whose ability to lead the life of the Perfect was doubtful, and who had yet accepted the Consolamentum under the fear of dying suddenly without it, the Endura was forced upon them. The Perfect surrounded the bed in which they lay and saw that no food came to them, and so in agonies that sometimes lasted for weeks they passed from life.

The Albigenses met for worship regularly. The service consisted of readings from the Bible -- especially from the New Testament, which they venerated highly, of which they prepared a translation into the vernacular -- and from commentaries of a militantly anti- Catholic kind.

The body, they held, was wholly evil. This pessimistic principle was the basis of all the asceticism of the Perfect. It was the foundation of all their moral teaching. Life, since it involved the imprisonment of a soul within a body, was the greatest of evils. To communicate life the greatest of crimes. And the unnatural theory nowhere showed itself so unpleasantly as in the Albigensian condemnation of marriage. Nothing was to be so shunned as pregnancy. A woman with child they regarded, and treated, as possessed by the devil. Yet while they condemned marriage so strongly the Perfect -- for all that their own lives were ordered strictly according to their vows -- looked with tolerance on the extra-matrimonial sex-relations of the Believers. So long as the man and his companion were not married there was always the hope of their ultimate separation. An affection for fornication was a less serious obstacle than marriage to the transition from Believer to Perfect.

How did such a religion of despair and self-destruction ever come to take real hold of a people? To begin with, the devotion of the Perfect to their life must be realised. They preached their doctrine everywhere, and at the root of it all was a clear and simple explanation of the problem of evil. On the other hand the average Catholic priest never preached at all. The heresy was heard by thousands who never knew why they were Catholics, nor, in very many cases, what Catholicism was, beyond a system of religious duties. Again, the Perfect lived in great poverty and austerity, while she Catholic clergy took only too readily whatever chance of wealth and luxurious living came their way. The Perfect moreover had at their disposition a great deal of money, and they used it in generous almsgiving -- often perhaps with a view to proselytes -- and used it also to subsidise industries for the employment of the Believers. The heresy thus became rooted in the country's economic prosperity, and the very name Catharist became a synonym for weaver. The Perfect were also, very often, physicians, and in their convents they organised free schools for the Believers and their children. Finally, although the system liberated the convert from the difficult struggle between himself and his own desires which is the lot of fallen humanity, even in the dispensation of grace, it did not impose on him any new set of commandments. Until he received the Consolamentum the Believer was bound by nothing but his own tastes, or the limits of his opportunity. And should he die without the saving rite he was not "lost" in the Catholic sense. There was no hell, no purgatory in the Albigensian scheme of things; but the crimes and shortcomings of life were expiated in a future life, or in a state of future trial. It was from the prospect of an endless series of possibly difficult lives -- St. Paul, they taught, had had to endure thirty-two in all -- that the Consolamentum delivered the Perfect. Nor, at the end of all, was there any resurrection of the body, for the body was essentially evil.

The distinction between the obligations of Believer and Perfect was, it may be believed, the decisive factor in the development which ultimately gave the whole of southern France and much of northern Italy to the new religion, the prospect of a life free from all external control, where "self-expression" had no sanctions to fear.

The earliest recorded appearance in western Europe of this heresy is the trial of thirteen of the clergy, charged with it at the Council of Orleans in 1022. About the same time there is evidence of it in Germany, and in northern Italy, and in the south of France too. Wherever it appeared it was universally execrated; and the mob showed no mercy to those suspected of sharing in it. Then, for years, there is little mention of it, until the second quarter of the twelfth century, when it is revealed as strongly established with Champagne, Languedoc and Milan as its chief centres. From Champagne it spread into Burgundy, Picardy, Flanders and the centre of France. From Milan the rest of Lombardy was infected, Tuscany too -- especially Florence, where by 1265 a third of the best families were Catharists -- and the March of Ancona. Rome itself did not escape, and Catharists were to be found throughout southern Italy, in Sicily and in Sardinia too. By a confusion with the groups who, at Milan, in the time of St. Gregory VII had fought clerical marriage, these opponents of all marriage were called in Italy Patarini.

The chief centre of all was Languedoc, the most cultured province of Christendom, the land where something still remained of the traditions of the Moors who once had conquered so much of it, an outpost of Saracen culture close to the very heart of Catholic Europe. It was in this wealthy, refined, orientalised civilisation, where Moors still abounded, and for which the "aggressive prosperity" of the Jews had won the name of Judaea Secunda, that heresy first began to find influential patrons. This was in the early years of the twelfth century, and from that time on, the Albigenses, under one name or another, are condemned and denounced in a whole series of councils, at Toulouse in 1119, the Second Lateran in 1139, at Rheims in 1148 and Tours in 1163 and in the Third Lateran of 1179. St. Bernard had been sent to preach against the movement but neither his sanctity nor his eloquence had availed much. From about 1160 the heretics began to have the upper hand, and from Languedoc the movement spread into Spain, to Navarre and Leon and especially into Aragon and Catalonia.

Everywhere in the south of France, St. Bernard testifies, churches were deserted, feasts no longer kept, the sacraments neglected. Thirty years later the Count of Toulouse, the chief ruler in the affected provinces, bears a like witness. Catholicism by now is quite definitely in the background. The heretics have won over many of the leading nobles, and the count declares that he dare not, and cannot, check the evil. At Toulouse itself the heresy was become the official religion of the town and the legates sent by Alexander III in 1178 were driven out with ignominy. Nor did the solemn condemnation of 1179 produce any greater effect. A mission was organised under the Abbot of Clairvaux, but though it deposed the Archbishop of Narbonne it effected little else. By the time of accession of Innocent III (1198) almost the whole population had, in greater degree or less, drifted from the Church and while the heretics preached unhindered in the streets of every city the Catholic clergy, when they did not openly go over to the sect -- as even bishops and abbots are known to have done -- sometimes secretly sympathised, and far from making any effort to organise resistance, made friends often enough with the now dominant party as the obvious means of securing favour and privilege. The Cistercians still kept to the severity of their rule, so far as their personal way of living was concerned, but the order was already collectively wealthy. Other monasteries were relaxed, abuses of luxurious living, of worldliness in dress, of simony and concubinage were rampant among the clergy. Money, it began to seem, was all-powerful in the matter of dispensations, and could even secure for the Catharists toleration, and the non-execution of the new laws enacted against them. Finally, the new count, Raymond VI, the son of the count who in 1177 had lamented his powerlessness to improve matters, himself secretly went over to the sect. The Church, he declared in 1196, had no right to own. The man who despoiled it was thereby eminently pleasing to God.

A whole important province of Christendom was drifting into aggressive anti-Catholicism, while octogenarian popes could only look on and lament -- a key province which, by its geographical situation, lay between the capital of the new centralised papal leadership and the capital of the new Catholic scholarship, between the Roman Church and its traditional protector the King of France. As with the relations between pope and emperor, so in this other urgent problem of the new Manicheeism, the election of Innocent III was to mean a revolutionary change in the papal policy.

Endnotes

244: One pope only had reigned so long since the days of St. Leo the Great (440-461): this was Adrian 1 (772-795). Nor was another pope to reign for so long as twenty years until Urban VIII in the seventeenth century. [back]

245: cf. infra, p. 408. [back]

246: cf. infra, p. 320 [back]

247: The kingdom included, besides the island of Sicily, all Italy to the south Or the papal States [back]

248: Frederick Barbarossa had died en route for the Holy Land, drowned indeed while crossing the river Salef in Asia Minor, June 10, 1190. [back]

249: A. E. TAYLOR, 'St. Thomas Aquinas as a Philosopher' in Aquinas Sexcentenary Lectures, Oxford, 1924. [back]

250: For Al Farabi, who died in 950, cf. GILSON, op. cit., 347-349 [back]

251: To Avicenna, says Gilson, we must allow the credit " of having realised a happy fusion of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism a l'usage de la pensee arabe, while safeguarding the principle of their accord with religion ". La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 356; for Avicenna cf especially pp. 350-356 of this work. [back]

252: "The framework of the [Fons Vitae] is decidedly Neoplatonic, but the doctrine itself is deeply penetrated by a spirit that is Jewish, and it was through this that in later years, it won to itself so many Catholic thinkers. . . . [In this teaching about the world and its origin Avicebron] describes a world intelligible to the philosopher that depends upon a supreme Will analogous to the God of Holy Scripture in a word a Neoplatonic universe existing by the will of God " GILSON La Phiiosophie au Moyen Age, 360, 371. "Avicebron" has another title to fame as a principal source of the later popularity of the philosophical doctrine of the plurality of forms. [back]

253: Averroes (Ibn Rochd) died in 1198. [back]

254: "The thought of Averroes offers itself as a deliberate effort to restore, in all its purity, the teaching of Aristotle corrupted by the Platonism which Averroes' predecessors had introduced into it". GILSON, La Philosophie au Moyen Age 360. ". . . There still remains a certain amount of Neoplatonism even in Averroes; and the Commentator, whether he realised this or not, produced a work more original than he himself has declared to us". ibid., 361. For an outline of the teaching of Averroes and of its implications, cf. pp. 358-368 of Gilson, op. cit. [back]

255: J. B. REEVES, O.P., The Dominicans, p. 30. [back]

256: "The point where the men of this twelfth century differ from us most of all is in their almost total ignorance of what the knowledge of nature the natural sciences could be. There are many to sing the praises of Nature, but few who ever think of observing it. The reality proper to the different things and creatures disappears once the writers of this time begin the task of explaining them. TO know and to explain a thing always means showing that the thing is not really what it seems to be, that it is the symbol and the sign of a still deeper reality, that the thing 'declares' or 'signifies' some other thing." Whatever the fruitfulness of all this. for the poet and the artist, it is a barrier to the philosopher and in science. . weakness. . . What the twelfth century lacked. . . was the conception; of natures as having a structure in themselves. an intelligibility for their own sake however feeble this might be." The next century will have such a conception, "and it is to Aristotelian physics that the thirteenth century will owe this". GILSON, La Philosophie au Moyen Age 343 in which work cf. L'Univers au XIIe siecle, pp. 318-28, and Le Bilan du XIIe siecle, pp. 337-43. [back]

257: "Would this Catholic Scholasticism, [facing the riches now revealed] have sufficient vitality to assimilate what they offered, or was it, on the contrary, crushed beneath their weight, swamped in their mass, about to surrender to absorption by them?. . . The historical importance [of this conflict] is such that, even today its repercussions have not ceased to make themselves felt." ibid. 375. [back]

258: Alexander IV in 1255, for example, writing that " The learning of the schools of Paris is for Holy Church what the tree of life was in the earthly paradise it is a shining light in the house of the Lord. . . It is at Paris, that the human race, deformed by blind ignorance, recovers its sight and beauty. . ." [back]

259: " From the point of view of Innocent III or Gregory IX, the University of Paris could not but be the most powerful engine the Church disposed of for the spread of religious truth throughout the world or an inexhaustible source of error whence the whole of Christendom could be poisoned." GILSON, op. cit., p. 394. [back]

260: GILSON, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Hertz Lecture for 1935. (Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. XXI Humphrey Milford.) [back]

260: -492: there is an English translation, London, 1924. This is perhaps the place to note a specialist's remark about " la connexion des problemes dans l'etude trop incomplete de la mystique aux XIV et XV siecles." VIGNAUX, op. cit., p. 183 (italics mine). [back]

261: From the accident that Albi in southern France was one of the strongholds of the movement, its twelfth- and thirteenth-century adherents are commonly called Albigenses. [back]