Six hundred years elapsed between Jerome and Aelfric. Many paintings and mosaics of Moses have been discovered which date from within that interval. None of them depict Moses with horns. But shortly after Aelfric’s Old English version described Moses’ face as gehyrned, or horned, an illuminated copy of his manuscript appeared. It included various images of Moses with horns. Ruth Mellinkoff suggests that the creativity of eleventh-century, Anglo-Saxon art was such that it offered ‘favourable conditions for the introduction of a novelty such as the horned Moses’.6
Aelfric had done nothing more than render Jerome’s cornuta into its Anglo-Saxon equivalent. But the illustrations which accompanied his Old Testament paraphrase helped to launch the motif in Western art of Moses having horns. Over the coming centuries the horned Moses cropped up in church art and Bible illustrations across Europe, very often even in biblical scenes that precede the one in which his face became ‘gehyrned’. The most famous of all depictions is Michelangelo’s 1513 statue of Moses.7
The real damage attributed to Aelfric’s horns had very little to do with the character of Moses, and much to do with medieval superstitions about the Jews. If Moses was gehyrned, it followed, to the medieval mind, that all Jews had horns. In 1267 an ecclesiastical synod in Vienna ordered Jews to wear a horned hat. In the same period, Jews in France were required to wear a yellow wheel with a horn in the middle. The idea of the horned Jew became rooted in the popular imagination, it even survives in our time; Amy-Jill Levine, one of the foremost scholars of the Jewish origins of Christianity recounts that she has ‘twice been asked where she had her horns removed’.8
From an ancient symbol of power and majesty, the horn became one of the most virulent symbols of anti-Semitism. And it all started because a twelfth-century Bible illustrator took Aelfric’s translation too literally.
The Cathar Bible
There are very few periods in the history of religion more shameful and disastrous than that of the Crusades. The wars that Christian Europe launched against the Muslim East, the consequences of which are still felt today, and the slaughter of Jews that accompanied the Crusaders’ knightly rampages, had little to do with the fact that the Bible could now be read in many languages. But the vernacular did become caught up in one crusading campaign, indeed it was made to share part of the blame. It was perhaps the most bizarre of all crusades, the only ‘holy war’ which the Church waged against its own people. A crusade which took place, not in the Holy Land, but in the Languedoc region of southern France.
The unfortunate victims of the twenty-year Crusade instigated in 1209 by Pope Innocent III were the sect known as Cathars. According to the Church, the Cathars were guilty of the Albigensian heresy, so named because of its origins in the town of Albi, near Toulouse. The Cathars were Christians, but; far from orthodox in their doctrines, they subscribed to a dualist theology in which two deities, one good and one evil, competed for control. Evil dominated the world as we know it but Good stood invisible behind it, waiting to redeem those whose deeds and virtues allowed them to complete a successful cycle of reincarnations. The Cathars believed that Jesus’s teachings were those of the benevolent deity, but that the Church, with its predilection for material wealth and splendour, had fallen into the clutches of the malevolent spirit, the creator of this evil world. As a result the rituals of the church were to be eschewed and there was certainly no reason to pay its tithes and taxes. Small wonder that the Cathars incensed Rome.
The popularity of the Cathar movement, which may have attracted up to four million followers in its heyday, owed much to the yawning chasm between the impoverished lives that ordinary people lived and the pampered privileges of the clergy. The peasants, who endured hardship and poverty, saw priests and bishops living lavish lifestyles, wearing fine clothes and living in splendid dwellings, some even inhabiting castles. Much of their wealth came from taxes and tithes levied upon the poor. The peasants resented this, and considered Catharism to be a noble and virtuous alternative. It became a social movement fuelled by the exploitation of the disadvantaged, just as much as it was a belief system. Cathars called the Catholic Church a harlot and the Pope the antichrist. The Church called the Cathars vermin, serpents and demons.9
At first the Church and Cathars tried to resolve their differences in public disputations, held in the courtyards and banqueting halls of great castles and noble homes. These were big, dramatic gatherings; peasants and landowners flocked from miles around to hear the Catholic priests take on the Cathar Perfects, as their spiritual leaders were called.
The main point at issue in the disputations was Jesus’s message. The Cathars quoted exclusively from the New Testament, basing their arguments on the literal meaning of the text. They drew their quotations both from the Vulgate and its translation into their own Occitan language (a copy of the Cathar Bible survives in the Municipal Library of Lyon).10 The Church cited both Old and New Testaments, but, in a tacit admission that they had little confidence in their own position, they refused to admit extracts from the Occitan translation into the debate. Stephen O’Shea, in his highly readable and entertaining history of the Cathars, notes that they prohibited quotes from the vernacular Bible to avoid ‘twisted interpretations of revealed truth’.11 The old canard, that a Bible which people understood would cause nothing but trouble, was alive and well.
It was inevitable of course that the public disputations would fail to produce a reconciliation. Tiring of futile debate, Rome resolved to adopt a more assertive policy. The Pope declared that Toulouse, the main city in Languedoc, was a centre of heretical corruption. He accused the senior baron in the langue d’oc, Count Raymond VI, of failing to defend the Church against the heresies taking root in his land. His legate, Peter of Castelnau, was sent to raise an army against Raymond. Peter excommunicated Raymond and tried to confiscate his land. When Peter was assassinated, the enraged Pope called for a Crusade.
The Crusade raged for twenty years. Eventually, following hundreds of thousands of deaths12 and no prospect of an end in sight, a peace treaty was agreed. The once prosperous Languedoc region was destitute, its population annihilated. In 1229 a Council in Toulouse proclaimed that henceforth people were forbidden from reading the Old or New Testaments, even in their original languages, other than the Book of Psalms. They were expressly prohibited from having translations of the Bible. Even before the decree was issued, translations had been burned in Metz and Challis.13 As Malcolm Lambert puts it, ‘repression of translations as well as of heretical preachers was the simple disciplinary solution, especially when local prelates had narrow horizons’.14 It was the first act in what was to become an endemic, medieval persecution of the translated Bible.
Banning the translated Bible was not enough for the Church. Pope Gregory IX determined to make absolutely sure that any future heresies were nipped in the bud; the hegemony of Rome must never again come under threat. In 1233 the Dominican Order was instructed to root out and destroy heresy. Its techniques were to be enquiry, investigation and interrogation. The institution became known as the Inquisition. It was to develop a fearsome reputation over the coming centuries.
Although the Crusade formally came to an end with the agreement of a peace treaty, the slaughter continued for a further fifteen years. In 1243 Royal forces laid siege to the hill-top fortress of Montségur where two hundred of the leading Cathars were holed up. Unable to survive the winter, the fortress’s inhabitants surrendered. They were herded together into the snow and burned alive.15
Beguines and Beghards
Throughout the medieval period the translated Bible was buffeted by the politics of religion. Marguerite Porete’s story is just one such case. Marguerite was not a Bible translator, but she was able to understand enough Latin to recite passages from the Bible in her own language. She wasn’t unusual in her ability to do this. By the time she lived, in the thirteenth century, not all translations of the Bible were formal or scholarly. Informal translations were becoming quite common, as Mar
guerite’s example shows.
Marguerite was a beguine. The beguines, and their male counterparts, beghards, were pious, wandering mendicants who preached religion to the masses and lived on alms. They were similar to nuns and monks, except they were not members of any of the religious orders licensed by the Church. Operating beyond the purview of the Church, they occasionally espoused beliefs that conflicted with orthodox Christian theology. The Church’s attitude towards them fluctuated; at times they were tolerated, equally they could find themselves condemned as heretics.
Marguerite Porete had written a mystical treatise, The Mirror of Simple Souls. In her book she discussed, among other things, the annihilation of the soul, a process through which, so she believed, the human spirit could potentially be elevated to such a high level that it fused with the divine. Marguerite seemed to suggest that souls in this state were not bound by the ordinary laws of morality and could suffer no pangs of conscience. The book was condemned as heretical and Marguerite was instructed not to disseminate it. When she refused, she was condemned to a lingering and painful death, burned at the stake in Paris on 1 June 1310.16
Marguerite’s alleged heresy was by no means clear-cut. Long before it was condemned her treatise had been read and approved by three well-known, orthodox theologians, and even after her death it remained popular and continued to circulate. In 1530 it passed an inspection by the archbishop of Tours. There seemed to be nothing fundamentally wrong with The Mirror of Simple Souls, and it has influenced Christian mystics and mysticism for centuries.
Marguerite was allegedly burned for the esoteric views that she expressed in her book, particularly for her understanding of the autonomy of the mystically annihilated soul. But her prosecutors took her statements out of context17 and it seems likely that she was condemned primarily for political reasons, rather than for any theological offence. It appears she was executed to prove the orthodox credentials of the French king, Philip the Fair. He was in the middle of a campaign to ostracize the Knights Templar, a powerful monastic order to whom he was deeply in debt. His campaign, against such a wealthy and mighty faction, caused great concern among the highest echelons of the church. Executing the alleged heretic Marguerite was one of the strategies Philip adopted to demonstrate his orthodoxy, his unswerving loyalty to the tenets of the Church, his passion for rooting out all taints of heresy, acting solely to preserve correct belief with no ulterior motive.18
But if that was so, why choose Marguerite? There were many other ways Philip could have demonstrated his theological conformity. The answer is that the alleged heresy in Marguerite’s mystical tract was only an excuse for her execution. The real reason was her ‘crime’ of translating the Bible. A quarter-century earlier, in 1274, the Council of Lyons had placed the beguines and beghards under a ban. Prominent among the charges against them was one of ‘cultivating novelties in their vernacular exegeses of Scripture’.19 As everyone knew, this offence of the ‘vernacular exegesis of Scripture’ contravened the prohibition enacted against the Cathars by the Council of Toulouse in 1229, forbidding the translation of the Bible. The beguines and beghards had offended against the pronouncements of Toulouse and Lyons by daring to read from the Bible using the Gallic language in ‘conventicles, street corners, and public squares’.20
The beguines and beghards were placed under a ban due to their informal translation of the Bible into old French. Marguerite’s execution was politically motivated – both in demonstrating Philip the Fair’s loyalty to Rome and, just as importantly, as a warning to those who dared commit the offence of translating the Bible. After 1229, the popular Bible was under threat as never before. But it was in England that it would face its severest challenge.
The Morning Star of the Reformation
The fourteenth century was not a happy time in England. The plague of Black Death was rampant, killing nearly half the people in the country. The nation was perpetually at war, first with the Welsh, then the Scots and finally the French. The conflict with France, which ran for well over a century, was dubbed the Hundred Years War.
There were tensions too within English society. The old nobility were contending with the rise of a new merchant class. The poor had to suffer them both. Trumping all three factions were the friars and clerics, whose power transcended even that of the king. His authority was only in this world; even royal decrees meant nothing thereafter. The churchmen, however, could grant either salvation or damnation for all eternity. They could even countermand the severest heavenly judgement. Everything depended on the willingness of the sinner to open his purse.
As the century wore on the nobles and merchants increasingly grew to resent the power, wealth and corruption of the Church. As for the peasants, blighted by poor harvests, land shortages and an ever-growing burden of taxes, they railed and eventually rebelled against both the ruling classes and the clerics.
Religion of course was the sole bastion of relief in those days and it was to contemplative matters that traumatized peasants naturally turned in order to find solace. But the priests and friars had lost touch with their calling. Tormented souls and seekers after truth rarely turned to them for comfort or enlightenment; the churchmen had shown themselves to be self-absorbed, dry and uninspiring. Instead, new and unorthodox devotional approaches to religion became the fashion, inspired by activists like the Lollard evangelists and the Yorkshireman Richard Rolle, an Oxford-educated hermit, whose theological treatises were hugely popular.
The Lollards, also known as the Mumblers, were a loosely defined and poorly organized movement of itinerant preachers who shunned the formal structures of the Roman Church. They followed the teachings of John Wycliffe, a leading theologian and by far the most interesting churchman of his age. It was John Wycliffe, two centuries ahead of his time, who set out to produce the first full translation of the Bible into English.
Wycliffe was born during the 1320s, somewhere near the town in Yorkshire whose name he bore. His early career was very conventional. He studied theology, mathematics and natural science and developed a reputation as a thinker and writer. In 1360 Wycliffe became Master of Balliol College in Oxford. He was acknowledged as a preacher of note, a rising, if somewhat dissident, star within the Church. When he left Balliol, he was granted various clerical positions around the country.
But Wycliffe was too independent a mind for his chosen career. He began to depart from the well-trodden, conventional path expected of fourteenth-century churchmen. His defection began when the English Parliament refused to pay the Pope a tribute to which they had been committed long ago, by the late King John. The current instalment was already thirty-three years overdue and the Pope was pressing hard, but Parliament was resolute that they would not pay. The legislators were adamant that King John never had the power to commit the nation to send money overseas, not even to the Roman Church.
It was a seminal moment in England’s relation with the papacy. It was also Wycliffe’s first serious foray into politics. He was called in, as a theologian, to advise Parliament on the matter.
As he drew closer to the seats of power, Wycliffe was disturbed by what he saw. He was a fervent advocate of justice and humility, yet wherever he looked he saw corruption and self-interest. Nor was he alone in feeling that the Church was blind to, even complicit in, the nation’s malaise; his concerns were shared by some in the Royal Household. Eight years after he was first summoned to advise Parliament, King Edward sent him across the English Channel, to Bruges, to negotiate a peace with France. While he was there he met the king’s son, John of Gaunt, who had recently been ennobled as the Duke of Lancaster. The two men became close friends and Wycliffe, conscious that he could now rely on the protection of a powerful ally, felt more able to speak his mind. He came back to England a resolute man.
Wycliffe was determined to face down the corruption which pervaded the church. He dreamed of a religious establishment that shunned wealth and power, one which had the interests of the poor at heart. He began to agitat
e in books and sermons against the authority of the Pope in England, arguing that the supreme ruler of any land should be its king, not a far-distant church leader. In one of his tracts he borrowed from the Cathar phrase book, describing the Pope as ‘the anti-Christ, the proud, worldly priest of Rome, and the most cursed of clippers and cut-purses’.21
Wycliffe’s attitude did not go down well in ecclesiastical circles. In 1377, when he was fifty-three years old, Wycliffe received a summons from the bishop of London to attend his court and explain the ‘wonderful things which had streamed forth from his mouth’.22 The bishop had finally lost patience; he had been coming under pressure from Rome for some time to do something about Wycliffe, and he could put off the day no longer.
John Wycliffe appeared before the bishop, accompanied by his friend the Duke of Lancaster, the son of the king. The hearing began with a violent row over whether or not Wycliffe should sit down. The Lord Marshal of England and the Duke of Lancaster insisted that Wycliffe’s status allowed him to remain seated, the bishop demanded that he stand; to sit before his court would be an indignity. The Duke threatened to bring down the pride of the bishop and all the prelates in England. ‘Do your best, Sir,’23 responded the bishop, himself the son of a duke.
The hearing was a farce. The bishop was unable to tame Wycliffe and his circle of powerful allies. When the news reached Rome the Pope himself felt obliged to take to the fight. He issued a bull in which he accused Wycliffe of ‘vomiting out of the filthy dungeon of his heart most wicked and damnable heresies’.24 He demanded Wycliffe’s arrest and eventually managed to have him declared a heretic and dismissed from Oxford University.
The Murderous History of Bible Translations Page 9