by Will Durant
Prisoners who had refused two opportunities to confess and were later convicted, and those who had relapsed into heresy after recanting, were imprisoned for life, or were put to death. Life imprisonment might be mitigated with certain freedom of movement, visitation, and games; or it might be enhanced with fasting or chains.76 Confiscation of property was an added penalty of conviction after resistance. Usually a part of the confiscated goods went to the secular ruler of the province, part to the Church; in Italy one third was given to the informer; in France the crown took all. These considerations stimulated individuals and the state to join in the hunt, and led to trials of the dead; at any time the possessions of innocent persons might be seized on the charge that the testator had died in heresy; this was one of many abuses that popes vainly denounced.77 The bishop of Rodez boasted that he had made 100,000 sols in a single campaign against the heretics of his diocese.78
Periodically the inquisitors, in a fearful ceremony (sermo generalis), announced convictions and penalties. The penitents were placed on a stage in the center of a church, their confessions were read, and they were asked to confirm them, and to pronounce a formula abjuring heresy. The celebrant inquisitor then absolved the penitents from excommunication, and announced the various sentences. Those who were to be “relaxed,” or abandoned to the secular arm, were allowed another day for conversion; those who confessed and repented, even at the foot of the stake, were given life imprisonment; the obdurate were burned to death in the public square. In Spain this entire procedure of sermo generalis and execution was termed an act of faith, auto-da-fé, for it was intended to strengthen the orthodoxy of the people and to reaffirm the faith of the Church. The Church never pronounced a sentence of death; her old motto was eccelesia abhorret a sanguine—“the Church shrinks from blood”; clerics were forbidden to shed blood. So, in turning over to the secular arm those whom she had condemned, the Church confined herself to asking the state authorities to inflict the “due penalty,” with a caution to avoid “all bloodshed and all danger of death.” After Gregory IX it was agreed by both Church and state that the caution should not be taken literally, but that the condemned were to be put to death without shedding of blood—i.e., by burning at the stake.79
The number of those sentenced to death by the official Inquisition was smaller than historians once believed.80 Bernard de Caux, a zealous inquisitor, left behind him a long register of cases tried by him; not one of these was “relaxed.”81 In seventeen years as an inquisitor Bernard Gui condemned 930 heretics, forty-five of them to death.82 At a sermo generalis in Toulouse in 1310 twenty persons were ordered to go on pilgrimage, sixty-five were condemned to life imprisonment, eighteen to death. In an auto-da-fé of 1312 fifty-one were sent on pilgrimage, eighty-six received various terms of imprisonment, five were turned over to the secular arm.83 The worst tragedies of the Inquisition were concealed in the dungeons rather than brought to light at the stake.
IV. RESULTS
The medieval Inquisition achieved its immediate purposes. It stamped out Catharism in France, reduced the Waldenses to a few scattered zealots, restored south Italy to orthodoxy, and postponed by three centuries the dismemberment of Western Christianity. France lost to Italy the cultural leadership of Europe; but the French monarchy, strengthened by the acquisition of Languedoc, grew powerful enough to subdue the papacy under Boniface VIII, and to imprison it under Clement V.
In Spain the Inquisition played a minor role before 1300. Raymond of Peñafort, Dominican confessor to James I of Aragon, persuaded him to admit the Inquisition in 1232. Perhaps to check inquisitorial zeal a statute of 1233 made the state the chief beneficiary of confiscations for heresy; in later centuries, however, this would prove a heady stimulus to monarchs who found that inquisition and acquisition were near allied.
In northern Italy heretics continued to exist in great number. The orthodox majority were too indifferent to join actively in the hunt; and independent dictators like Ezzelino at Vicenza and Pallavicino at Cremona and Milan clandestinely or openly protected heretics. In Florence the monk Ruggieri organized a military order of orthodox nobles to support the Inquisition; the Patarines fought bloody battles with them in the streets, and were defeated (1245); thereafter Florentine heresy hid its head. In 1252 the inquisitor Fra Piero da Verona was assassinated by heretics at Milan; and his canonization as Peter Martyr did more to check heresy in north Italy than all the rigors of the inquisitors. The papacy organized crusades against Ezzelino and Pallavicino; the one was overthrown in 1259, the other in 1268. The triumph of the Church in Italy was, on the surface, complete.
In England the Inquisition never took hold. Henry II, anxious to prove his orthodoxy amid his controversy with Becket, scourged and branded twenty-nine heretics at Oxford (1166);84 for the rest there was little heresy in England before Wyclif. In Germany the Inquisition flourished with brief madness, and then died away. In 1212 Bishop Henry of Strasbourg burned eighty heretics in one day. Most of them were Waldenses; their leader, Priest John, proclaimed their disbelief in indulgences, purgatory, and sacerdotal celibacy, and held that ecclesiastics should own no property. In 1227 Gregory IX made Conrad, a priest of Marburg, head of the Inquisition in Germany, and commissioned him not only to exterminate heresy but to reform the clergy, whose immorality was denounced by the Pope as the chief cause of waning faith. Conrad approached both tasks with outstanding cruelty. He gave all indicted heretics a simple choice: to confess and be punished, or to deny and be burned at the stake. When he applied like energy to reforming the clergy, orthodox and heretics joined to oppose him; he was killed by the friends of his victims (1233); and the German bishops took over the Inquisition and domesticated it to a juster procedure. Many sects, some heretical, some mystical, survived in Bohemia and Germany, and prepared the way for Huss and Luther.
In judging the Inquisition we must see it against the background of a time accustomed to brutality. Perhaps it can be better understood by our age, which has killed more people in war, and snuffed out more innocent lives without due process of law, than all the wars and persecutions between Caesar and Napoleon. Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. Plato sanctioned intolerance in his Laws; the Reformers sanctioned it in the sixteenth century; and some critics of the Inquisition defend its methods when practiced by modern states. The methods of the inquisitors, including torture, were adopted into the law codes of many governments; and perhaps our contemporary secret torture of suspects finds its model in the Inquisition even more than in Roman law. Compared with the persecution of heresy in Europe from 1227 to 1492, the persecution of Christians by Romans in the first three centuries after Christ was a mild and humane procedure. Making every allowance required of an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.
CHAPTER XXIX
Monks and Friars
1095–1300
I. THE MONASTIC LIFE
IT may be that the Church was saved not by the tortures of the Inquisition but by the rise of new monastic orders that took out of the mouths of heretics the gospel of evangelical poverty, and for a century gave to the older monastic orders, and to the secular clergy, a cleansing example of sincerity.
The monasteries had multiplied during the Dark Ages, reaching a peak in the troubled nadir of the tenth century, and then declining in number as secular order and prosperity grew. In France, about 1100, there were 543; about 1250 there were 287;1 possibly this loss in the number of abbeys was compensated by a rise in their average membership, but very few monasteries had a hundred monks.2 It was still a custom in the thirteenth century for pious or burdened parents to commit children of seven years or older to monasteries as oblates—“offered up” to God; St. Thomas Aquinas began his monastic career so. The Benedictine order considered the vows taken
for an oblate by his parents as irrevocable;3 St. Bernard and the new orders held that the oblate, on reaching maturity, might without reproach return to the world.4 Generally an adult monk required a papal dispensation if he wished, without sin, to renounce his vows.
Before 1098 most Western monasteries followed, with variable fidelity, some form of the Benedictine rule. A year of novitiate was prescribed, during which the candidate might freely withdraw. One knight drew back, says the monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, “on the cowardly plea that he feared the vermin of the [monastic] garment; for our woolen clothing harbors much vermin.”5 Prayer occupied some four hours of the monk’s day; meals were brief, and usually vegetarian; the remainder of the day was given to labor, reading, teaching, hospital work, charity, and rest. Caesarius tells how his monastery, in the famine of 1197, gave as many as 1500 “doles” of food in a day, and “kept alive till harvest time all the poor who came to us.”6 In the same crisis a Cistercian abbey in Westphalia slaughtered all its flocks and herds, and pawned its books and sacred vessels, to feed the poor.7 Through their own labor and that of their serfs, the monks built abbeys, churches, and cathedrals, farmed great manors, subdued marshes and jungles to tillage, practiced a hundred handicrafts, and brewed excellent wines and ales. Though the monastery seemed to take many good and able men from the world to bury them in a selfish sanctity, it trained thousands of them in mental and moral discipline, and then returned them to the world to serve as councilors and administrators to bishops, popes, and kings.*
In the course of time the growing wealth of the communities overflowed into the monasteries, and the generosity of the people financed the occasional luxury of the monks. The abbey of St. Riquier was not among the richest; yet it had 117 vassals, owned 2500 houses in the town where it was placed, and received from its tenants yearly 10,000 chickens, 10,000 capons, 75,000 eggs … and a money rent individually reasonable, cumulatively great.8 Much richer were the monasteries of Monte Cassino, Cluny, Fulda, St. Gall, St. Denis. Abbots like Suger of St. Denis, Peter the Venerable of Cluny, or even Samson of Bury St. Edmund’s, were mighty lords controlling immense material wealth and social or political power. Suger, after feeding his monks and building a majestic cathedral, had enough resources left to half-finance a crusade.9 It was probably of Suger that St. Bernard wrote: “I lie if I have not seen an abbot riding with a train of sixty horses and more”;10 but Suger was prime minister, and had to clothe himself in pomp to impress the populace; he himself lived with austere simplicity in a humble cell, observing all the rules of his order so far as his public duties would allow. Peter the Venerable was a good man, but he failed, despite repeated efforts, to check the progress of the Cluniac monasteries—once the leaders of reform—toward a corporate wealth that enabled the monks, while owning nothing, to live in a degenerative idleness.
Morals fall as riches rise, and nature will out according to men’s means. In any large group certain individuals will be found whose instincts are stronger than their vows. While the majority of monks remained reasonably loyal to their rule, a minority took an easier view toward the world and the flesh. In many cases the abbot had been appointed by some lord or king, usually from a rank accustomed to comfort; such abbots were above monastic rules; they enjoyed hunting, hawking, tournaments, and politics; and their example infected the monks. Giraldus Cambrensis paints a merry picture of the abbot of Evesham: “None was safe from his lust”; the neighborhood reckoned his offspring at eighteen; finally he had to be deposed.11 Worldly abbots, fat and rich and powerful, became a target of public humor and literary diatribe. The most merciless and incredible satire in medieval literature is a description of an abbot by Walter Map.12 Some cloisters were known for their fine food and wines. We should not grudge the monks a little good cheer, and we can understand how weary they were of vegetables, how they longed for meat; we can sympathize with their occasional gossiping, quarreling, and sleeping at Mass.13
The monks, in vowing celibacy, had underestimated the power of a sexual instinct repeatedly stirred by secular example and sights. Caesarius of Heisterbach tells a story, often repeated in the Middle Ages, of an abbot and a young monk riding out together. The youth saw women for the first time. “What are they?” he asked. “They be demons,” said the abbot. “I thought,” said the monk, “that they were the fairest things that ever I saw.”14 Said the ascetic Peter Damian, nearing the end of a saintly but acerbic life:
I, who am now an old man, may safely look upon the seared and wrinkled visage of a blear-eyed crone. Yet from sight of the more comely and adorned I guard my eyes like boys from fire. Alas, my wretched heart!—which cannot hold scriptural mysteries read through a hundred times, and will not lose the memory of a form seen but once.15
To some monks virtue seemed a contest for their souls between woman and Christ; their denunciation of woman was an effort to deaden themselves to her charms; their pious dreams were sometimes softened with the dews of desire; and their saintly visions often borrowed the terms of human love.16 Ovid was a welcome friend in some monasteries, and not least thumbed were his manuals of the amorous art.17 The sculptures of certain cathedrals, the carvings of their furniture, even the paintings in some missals, portrayed riotous monks and nuns—pigs dressed as monks, monastic robes bulging over erect phalli, nuns sporting with devils.18 A relief on the Portal of the Judgment at Reims shows a devil dragging condemned men to hell; among them is a mitered bishop. Medieval ecclesiastics—perhaps seculars envying regulars —allowed such caricatures to remain in place; modern churchmen thought it better to have most of them removed. The Church herself was the severest critic of her sinning members; a noble succession of ecclesiastical reformers labored to bring monks and abbots back to the ideals of Christ.
II. ST. BERNARD
At the end of the eleventh century, simultaneously with the purification of the papacy and the fervor of the First Crusade, a movement of self-reform swept through Christendom, immensely improved the secular clergy, and founded new monastic orders dedicated to the full rigor of the Augustinian or Benedictine rule. At an unknown date before 1039 St. John Gualbertus19 established the order of Vallombrosa in the “shady valley” of that name in Italy, and inaugurated in it the institution of lay brothers later developed by the mendicant orders. The Roman Synod of 1059 exhorted canons—clergymen sharing the labors and revenues of a cathedral—to live in community and hold all their property in common, like the apostles. Some were reluctant, and remained “secular canons”; many responded, adopted a monastic rule that they ascribed to St. Augustine, and formed semimonastic communities collectively known as Augustinian or Austin Canons.* In 1084 St. Bruno of Cologne, having declined the archbishopric of Reims, founded the Carthusian order by establishing a monastery at a desolate spot named Chartreuse, in the Alps near Grenoble; other pious men, sick of worldly strife and clerical laxity, formed similar Carthusian units in secluded places. Each monk worked, ate, and slept in his own separate cell, lived on bread and milk, wore garments of horsehair, and practiced almost perpetual silence. Three times a week they came together for Mass, vespers, and midnight prayers; and on Sundays and holydays they indulged themselves in conversation and a common meal. Of all the monastic orders this was the most austere, and has kept most faithfully, through eight centuries, to its original rule.
In 1098 Robert of Molesmes, tired of trying to reform the various Benedictine monasteries of which he had been prior, built a new monastic house at a wild point called Cîteaux near Dijon; and as Chartreuse named the Carthusians, so Cîteaux named the Cistercian monks. The third abbot of Cîteaux, Stephen Harding of Dorsetshire, reorganized and expanded the monastery, opened branches of it, and drew up the Carta caritatis, or Charter of Love, to insure the peaceful federal co-operation of the Cistercian houses with Cîteaux. The Benedictine rule was restored in full severity: absolute poverty was essential, all flesh food was to be avoided, learning was to be discouraged, verse-making was forbidden, and all splendor of religious vestment
, vessel, or building was to be shunned. Every physically able monk was to join in manual labor in gardens and workshops that would make the monastery independent of the outside world, and give no excuse for any monk to leave the grounds. The Cistercians outshone all other groups, monastic or secular, in agricultural energy and skill; they set up new centers of their order in unsettled regions, subdued marshes, jungles, and forests to cultivation, and played a leading part in colonizing eastern Germany, and in repairing the damage that William the Conqueror had done in northern England. In this magnificent labor of civilization the Cistercian monks were aided by lay brothers—conversi—vowed to celibacy, silence, and illiteracy,20 and working as farmers or servants in return for shelter, clothing, and food.21
These austerities frightened potential novices; the little band grew slowly, and the new order might have died in infancy had not fresh ardor come to it in the person of St. Bernard. Born near Dijon (1091) of a knightly family, he became a shy and pious youth, loving solitude. Finding the secular world an uncomfortable place, he determined to enter a monastery. But, as if desiring companionship in solitude, he made effective propaganda among his relatives and friends to enter Cîteaux with him; mothers and nubile girls, we are told, trembled at his approach, fearing that he would lure their sons or lovers into chastity. Despite their tears and charms he succeeded; and when he was admitted to Cîteaux (1113) he brought with him a band of twenty-nine candidates, including brothers, an uncle, and friends. Later he persuaded his mother and sister to become nuns, and his father a monk, on the promise that “unless thou do penance thou shalt burn forever … and send forth smoke and stench.”22