by Emmet Scott
Medieval Christianity, beginning in the late twelfth/early thirteenth century, adopted the same attitude. Christians now had their own Inquisition for rooting out heretics, and the death penalty was now prescribed for such miscreants. The judicial use of torture too, “a novelty in Europe” at the time, became accepted practice.[5] All of these practices were in fact novel in Europe: There is no evidence of the lethal intolerance which marked the foundation of the Inquisition before Innocent III’s time. It is true, of course, that in the early centuries, the church was involved in a series of prolonged and bitter disputes over the correct interpretation of Christ’s words. Those who disagreed with the mainstream dogmas, as laid down by various councils, were decreed to be heretics, and fairly severe condemnation of these people and groups was common: indeed, it was almost endemic. Yet it has to be repeated that, intemperate as was the language used in these disputes, they rarely turned violent; and even when they did, the violence was on a comparatively small scale and invariably perpetrated by those with no official sanction or approval. Actually, the use of force to enforce orthodoxy was condemned by all the Church Fathers. Thus Lactantius declared that “religion cannot be imposed by force; the matter must be carried on by words rather than by blows, that the will may be affected.” He wrote,
Oh with what an honorable inclination the wretched men go astray! For they are aware that there is nothing among men more excellent than religion, and that this ought to be defended with the whole of our power; but as they are deceived in the matter of religion itself, so also are they in the manner of its defense. For religion is to be defended, not by putting to death, but by dying; not by cruelty, but by patient endurance; not by guilt, but by good faith. … For if you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, and by tortures, and by guilt, it will no longer be defended, but will be polluted and profaned. For nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion; in which, if the mind of the worshipper is disinclined to it, religion is at once taken away, and ceases to exist.[6]
Later, St. John Chrysostom wrote that “it is not right to put a heretic to death, since an implacable war would be brought into the world.”[7] Likewise, St. Augustine was to write of heretics that “it is not their death, but their deliverance from error, that we seek.”[8] In spite of these and many other such admonitions, incidents of violence against heretics did occur; but they were isolated and it was never sanctioned by Church authorities. Such, for example, was the case with the suppression of the so-called Priscillian Heresy in Spain in the latter years of the fourth and early years of the fifth century. Several followers of Priscillian were put to death, and the sect was persecuted in other ways. Yet the killing of Priscillian and his immediate associates (six in all) had no church sanction, and was thoroughly condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities.
The same was true of another, and more famous, case – the murder of Hypatia. This incident, in the early fifth century, has achieved, in some quarters, almost legendary status, and is seen as the example par excellence of Christian bigotry and obscurantism. From what little we know of this incident, it is clear that, like the killing of the Priscillians, the murder had no official sanction, and was carried out by a group of lawless fanatics. From the few sources we have, it is evident that Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, was a major figure in Alexandria during the latter years of the fourth and early years of the fifth centuries. She famously refused to embrace Christianity and remained a pagan, a Neoplatonist. She freely discussed her ideas with many, including not a few Christian theologians, with whom she was on friendly terms.
But being such a prominent figure, she attracted enemies. Rumor spread that she was a factor in the strained relationship between Bishop Cyril and the Prefect Orestes, and this attracted the ire of some elements in the Christian population, eager to see the two reconciled. One day in March 415, during the season of Lent, her chariot was waylaid on her route home by a Christian mob, possibly Nitrian monks led by a man identified only as “Peter.” She was stripped naked and dragged through the streets to the newly christianised Caesareum church and killed. Some reports suggest she was flayed with ostrakois (literally, “oyster shells,” though also used to refer to roof tiles or broken pottery) and set ablaze while still alive, though other accounts suggest those actions happened after her death.
In view of the differing and contradictory accounts of this incident, we should perhaps quote the earliest, that closest to the event, which stands the best chance of accuracy. In the words of Socrates Scholasticus (5th century):
Yet even she [Hypatia] fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her by scraping her skin off with tiles and bits of shell. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.
Although this was a horrific manifestation of religious bigotry, it was not sanctioned by church leaders. Furthermore, it occurred in Egypt, a land with a long tradition of religious fanaticism. During the time of Julius Caesar, for example, an Egyptian mob lynched a Roman centurion (an act which could have brought upon them a terrible retribution) for having the temerity to kill a cat. Such isolated acts of fanaticism have occurred in all faiths at all periods of history. Even that most pacifist and tolerant of religious ideologies, Buddhism, is not entirely free of it. So, in itself, the murder of Hypatia cannot tell us much. That the Christian writer Socrates Scholasticus, in the fifth century, regarded it as a deplorable act of bigoted zeal, is very significant. Remember however what John of Nikiu, another Christian commentator, this time of the eighth century (about a century after the Muslim conquest), says. He described Hypatia as “a pagan” who was “devoted to magic” and who had “beguiled many people through Satanic wiles.” And whilst Socrates Scholasticus condemned her killing, John of Nikiu approved it, speaking of “A multitude of believers in God” who, “under the guidance of Peter the magistrate … proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the prefect through her enchantments.”[9]
John of Nikiu’s attitude is clearly that of a medieval bigot and obscurantist, who regards all dissension from orthodox Christianity as the work of Satan. His thinking would not have been far removed from that of Innocent III, yet it was a world away from that of Socrates Scholasticus, his fellow-countryman. And whilst we might plausibly blame the medieval outlook on the general poverty and illiteracy of Europe after the termination of the Mediterranean trade in the late seventh and eighth centuries, we cannot attribute John of Nikiu’s attitudes to the same cause. He, after all, lived in a land that was not cut off from the great centers of learning of the Orient. He came from a land which, supposedly, remained wealthy and prosperous, and which was moreover ruled by caliphs friendly towards science and learning. The supply of papyrus was never cut off from Egypt! Whence, then, came John of Nikiu’s dark and unenlightened view? And if his attitude had been confined to him alone, it would hardly be significant. Yet, the fact is, by the beginning of the eighth century, shortly after the Muslim conquest, all writers in Egypt and throughout the Near East, both Christian and Muslim, took the same view. This is a crucial point: If the medieval outlook were simply the product of the illiteracy and poverty that prevailed in Europe after the closing of the Mediterranean (as one interpretation of Pirenne’s ideas might have it), then we should not expect to find it in Muslim-controlled lands. Yet find it we do – and it occurs here even before it appears in Europe.
The view of the world we call “medieval” was one in which the reason and humanism
of the classical world is said to have all but disappeared. Dark fantasies and superstitions took its place. Belief in the power of magicians and sorcerers, a belief associated with the most primitive type of mind-set, made a comeback. In the most backward of modern societies we still find perfectly innocent people accused of “witchcraft” and brutally put to death for a crime which they never committed and which does not even exist. By the end of the Middle Ages this mentality had returned to Europe; and in 1487 a papal Bull named malleus maleficarum (“hammer of the witches”) pronounced the death of witches and Satanists.
Yet Europe, as she emerged from the so-called Dark Age in the tenth century, was still bathed in the light of reason and humanitarianism. Thus a tenth century canon of Church Law criticized and condemned the belief among country folk that “certain women” were in the habit of riding out on beasts in the dead of night and crossing great distances before daybreak. According to the canon, anyone who believed this was “beyond doubt an infidel and a pagan.” Somewhat earlier, Saint Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, declared it was not true that witches could call up storms and destroy harvests. Nor could they devour people from within nor kill them with the “evil eye.”[10] “In reality, the church vigorously opposed belief in witchcraft and sorecery throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, such beliefs being rightly identified as a surviving relic of paganism; and it was only with the decline of the Middle Ages, in the fifteenth century, that church authorities began the persecution of supposed witches and sorcerers. In short, the witch-hunting mania was a manifestation not of medieval Christendom but of the weakening of medieval Christendom.”[11]
What happened in the intervening years to change the church’s attitude?
In answer to that question, let us recall the comments of Louis Bertrand, who noted how, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries inquisitive young men from northern Europe flocked to Islamic Spain to study their knowledge and learning. But it was not so much the “science” of the Moors that attracted them as the pseudo-science: the alchemy, the astrology and the sorcery. Largely deprived of books and the urban society which fostered them, Islamic Spain and Islamic North Africa became the teachers of Medieval Europe. But what these regions taught was a far cry from the learning now so widely praised in the politically-correct textbooks that fill our libraries and bookshops.
Sorcery and alchemy were not the only things learned by the Europeans from the Muslims. We know, and this is admitted by all, that European theology was profoundly influenced at this time by Islamic. But it was not just Avicenna and Averroes that the Christians took from their Muslim teachers. They took also ideas directly from the Qur’an and the Hadith; ideas about how heretics, apostates and sorcerers should be treated. And it is by no means impossible that in establishing his own Inquisition Innocent III was directly imitating the example of the Almohads in Spain, who had set up their own commission for investigating heretics and apostates fifty years earlier.
Innocent III is viewed by the enemies of Christianity as the bête noir, the living embodiment of everything that was and is wrong with Christianity. Yet the fact that his attitudes were fairly identical to those found in Islam at an earlier date is never mentioned. Furthermore, whilst we do not seek to minimize the enormity of Innocent’s actions, we must remember that his crusade against the Cathars was only launched after they had become a widespread movement, with their own bishops, churches and cathedrals, throughout southern France and into Italy and Spain. Until the time of Innocent III tolerance had been the order of the day – for centuries. Such a situation would of course never have arisen in the Islamic world, at any time in its history. There religious dissent and apostasy was crushed immediately as it occurred in the individual: such persons were (and sometimes still are) put to death without mercy. The few heresies which arose and survived in Islam did so only with the most powerful political support. The Druze sect, for example, arose under the patronage of the Caliph Al-Hakim, who actively fostered it. It survived after his time largely under the protection of the Crusaders.
And whilst we consider Innocent’s war against freedom of conscience we must never forget that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Muslim threat had by no means disappeared: it remained as potent and dangerous as ever. In such circumstances – indeed, in any war situation – internal dissent (such as the Cathars represented) is liable to be viewed as representing a fifth column working for the enemy. And it is well-known fact that all wartime dissent is suppressed with a thoroughness and ruthlessness much more severe than would normally be the case. The later Spanish Inquisition, which implemented draconian measures against dissenters in the Iberian Peninsula, must be seen in the same light. The threat of Islam was ever present, and we can be reasonably certain that the severe repression of Muslims at this time was directly attributable to the fear of a renewed Muslim invasion of the Peninsula (by the Ottomans) and the possibility that the native Muslims would form a fifth column in support of the invaders.
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So much for religious freedom. The other accusation thrown against the church during the Middle Ages is that it stifled the free exploration of the natural world and generally inhibited scientific progress. This is now such a widespread belief that it is accepted unquestioningly in the popular media and even in academia. Consider for example the comments of Sidney Painter just over sixty years ago:
“The early Middle Ages was inevitably a dark age in respect to the physical and natural sciences. As they were only remotely related to salvation, they aroused little interest. When they were discussed, the primary motive was to draw from them religious inspiration.”[12] It should be almost superfluous to note here that some of the greatest scientists of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, such as Galileo and Isaac Newton, also explored the physical universe with a view to draw from it religious inspiration. Apart from its obsession with theology, the main problem with medieval science, according to Painter, was that it embraced the theological concept known as “Realism.” This idea, based ultimately upon Plato’s work, “taught that reality was a world of ideal models. The real man was an ideal man; reality lay in the species rather than in the individual. The Patristic Fathers, especially St. Augustine, fully accepted this point of view. Our senses supply us with knowledge about individuals, and our minds comprehend the ideal. The ideal is reality, and the characteristics of individuals are but ‘accidents.’ To the extreme Realist only the ideal, the species, was of importance and the individual was of no significance.”[13] Devotees of extreme realism, says Painter, “were unlikely to carry observation [of nature] very far. What was observed by the senses was the accidents that marked individuals and hence was of little importance.”[14] Having said all that, Painter concedes that,
“... by the middle of the thirteenth century the scientific works of the Greeks and Arabs had been thoroughly absorbed, and the knowledge they contained had become an integral port of the culture of Western Europe. Scholars began to take an interest in the possibilities of observation and experiment. Aristotle had realized the importance of these methods of obtaining knowledge, and they were emphasized by the great commentator on Aristotle, Albertus Magnus. Although science as such was of little interest to Thomas Aquinas, he too pointed out the value of observation and experiment. But the chief figure of thirteenth-century scientific thought was the English Franciscan, Roger Bacon, who was a contemporary of St. Thomas. Bacon’s basic point of view was thoroughly traditional. He accepted without question the divine inspiration of the Bible and the works of the Church Fathers. He insisted that knowledge was of value only in so far as it contributed to man’s struggle for salvation. At the same time he had an eager, inquiring mind that was completely devoted to the enlargement of his knowledge. He attempted to extend the fields in which reason should have full play by limiting that of theology. He argued that many subjects covered by the great summa of the theologians were properly the concern of philosophy rather t
han theology. He also believed that new techniques, especially the study of languages, would be of great aid to both philosophy and theology. … Finally, he advocated the confirmation of knowledge by means of observation and experiment.”[15]
None of this sounds like a man or a society under the yoke of a stifling theocratic dictatorship. However, Painter qualifies his statement about Bacon with the following:
“Bacon’s independence of mind endeared him neither to other scholars nor to his superiors in the Franciscan order. If he had not received the special protection of the pope, he might never have been able to write his learned works. … He did little toward making use of the methods of inquiry that he advocated so vigorously, and even if he had done so his conventional basic point of view would have seriously limited the usefulness of his observations and experiments.”
Fig. 7. Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon was one of many natural philosophers involved in scientific research during the Middle Ages. The work of such men transformed Europe from a rural backwater in the tenth century to the most advanced society in the world by the fifteenth.