Arthur Stanley Turberville

“ The fugitive from the insurgent passions of his own being, seeking to overcome the temptations of the flesh by severe macerations and scourgings, has only too often found his voluntary existence of self-discipline intolerable without the relief of an occasional wild debauch or has found that in his savage attempt to subdue the senses he has come to take a sensual delight in self-torture and that he is falling into the lowest depths of bestiality. The very fervour of religious zeal in the Middle Ages is a token of the fierceness of the passionate fires that tortured men’s hearts. ”

“ Nevertheless, the temptation to insincerity was clearly present. ‘Believe in the Catharan creed, venerate the Perfected, receive the Consolamentum before death,’ made a simple and an attractive faith for one who wished to enjoy the pleasures of life to the full, yet to whom the tortures of a material hell were painfully vivid. ‘We are the only true Christians, the Catholic church is but an usurpation, utterly corrupt,’ made a convenient excuse for the feudal lord, by whom only the excuse was wanted, to harry the clergy and make inroads on their property. ”

“ Shall he be banished by the secular authority? To what end? Banishment only means the spread of infection. Shall he, then, be imprisoned by the secular authority? Again, to what end? The Inquisition can imprison as well as the State. It is a strange obtuseness that does not see that the whole attitude of the Inquisition to the heretic points logically, and indeed inevitably, to death as the fate of the obdurate. The tribunal had been created, and it existed, to the end that heresy might be exterminated. ”

“ That epoch which saw the new movement of monastic reform which gave birth to the order of Grammont, of the Carthusians and the Cistercians, is most notable in the history of the universities—of Paris, Oxford, Bologna. From one to another, from the feet of one learned doctor and teacher to another, flocked wandering scholars athirst for pure knowledge which, if it had a theological bias and a religious garb, nevertheless inevitably tended to produce a spirit of rationalism, to substitute freedom for discipline, the individual consciousness for authority. ”

“ In the days of Abelard, and again in those of Thomas Aquinas, Realism had been the orthodox philosophy, and Aquinas in demonstrating that the abstract and general truths of Christianity were acceptable to the reason did the Church of his day a great service. But another realist had come after him, who had most trenchantly attacked St. Thomas, destroying all the reasonableness of the great Doctor’s philosophic structure, and emphatically ousting the reason and substituting the authority of the Church as the only sure guide in the sacred mysteries of religion, the only sure foundation of faith. ”

“ The peculiar civilization of Languedoc was blotted out, its beauty and fragrance being utterly extinguished by the onslaught of the crusaders. With the civilization went the heresy that it had harboured. Catharism indeed continued to exist in the devastated region, but all its vital power of expansion had been destroyed when the conditions that fostered it vanished. The Albigensian wars were the most successful attempt to extirpate heresy known in history. ”

“ Among the interested spectators of the death at the stake of Jerome of Prague was the great Italian humanist, Poggio. Much struck by the martyr’s eloquence and genius, he thought it was a great pity that he should have turned his attention to heretical ideas, and half pityingly, half uncomprehendingly, wondered that a man should be willing to die merely for the sake of an opinion.
This chance connection between Jerome, the ardent scholastic reformer, and Poggio, the cynical forerunner of the New Learning—between the old order and the new, is remarkable and prophetic. ”

“ Why should not the life-imprisonment of the heretic safeguard the faithful as well as his death? Will you answer that this penalty is too trivial to prevent the faithful from falling into heresy? If that be so, why not at once condemn all heretics to death, even when repentant? ”

“ The word ‘penalty’ is not technically exact. Strictly speaking, the Inquisition was concerned not with crimes and punishments, but with spiritual errors and penances.416 Thus, when the tribunal consigned some one to prison, its formula ran that the man in question shall betake himself to prison and there penance himself on a diet of bread and water. No confessor will regard the mere expression of contrition as sufficient in itself; nor will the genuine penitent be satisfied. Penance is the outward and visible sign of sincere repentance, and an earnest of future amendment of life. ”

“ Given the combination of an ignorant and wondering fear of the bewildering riddles of nature and the cold strangeness of the stars with a sincere conviction of the reality of that evil potentate who is at war with God, causing disaster among men and having subtle communion with the human heart, inspiring to wicked deeds and hideous thoughts, it is small wonder that imagination peopled the world with sorcerers, magicians and witches. ”

“ As we have seen, it was an offence for anyone to be so criminally negligent in vitally important matters as to allow his conduct to give rise to the slightest rumour of heresy. It was an excellent characteristic of both Roman and Canon law that the accused was held to be innocent until actually proved to be guilty. This characteristic was not shewn, in actual practice, in dealing with one accused of heresy. The mere fact of defamation tainted a man. It was, therefore, a matter of very great difficulty for the defendant to demonstrate his innocence. ”

“ To the moral judgment of our own day no instrument of persecution seems more odious than the Inquisition. Protestants have persecuted just as whole-heartedly as Catholics, and with far less excuse; but the Inquisition stands by itself, as a regular specialized tribunal for persecution, immensely efficient, with an existence of centuries to its record.496 We have seen the way in which the Inquisition came into being. ”

“ For, if it be true that only through the tragic experience of centuries of religious persecution could mankind attain to the establishment of the principle of liberty of thought and conscience, then every one of us to-day who enjoys the benefits of such liberty owes a debt of gratitude to the men and women who for conscience’ sake braved obloquy, torture-chamber and fire. ”

“ During the tenth and eleventh centuries when Christendom was for the most part wrapped in a barbarous ignorance, Saracen culture, in the caliphates of Baghdad and Cordova, had kept alive the sciences—mathematics, astronomy, medicine—and speculative thinkers had preserved, not indeed uncorrupted, yet always as a vital influence, the ancient philosophy of Greece, when to the Christian world it was lost in oblivion. ”

“ More characteristic of the Inquisition than its sentences of relaxation, with their attendant horrible consequence, in reality more effective and perhaps more terrible, was its whole method of procedure, its use of torture, moral as well as physical, the agony of the rack and the nervous strain of prolonged and tortuous examination, its utilization of the humiliation of the cross-wearing, of the dull and hopeless misery of harsh and lengthy imprisonment, by which the spirit of the victim was broken and the purity of the faith preserved. ”

“ Reason cannot unaided explain the ineffable; the visible world is but the simulacrum of the unseen.71 Once or twice indeed there had been hints of danger. Right back in the ninth century a certain very self-confident Irishman, by name John Scotus Eriugena, had declared the supremacy of reason over authority; for while authority sometimes proceeded from reason, reason never proceeded from authority. In the eleventh century there had been the aberrations of Berengar of Tours and Roscellinus. ”

“ For they perceived in his predictions a clear reference to themselves, found in Francis the forerunner and in themselves, his true followers, the destined preachers of the new era of the Holy Ghost in which the carnal-mindedness of a decadent Church and the corruption and indeed the worldliness of the whole human race were to be known no more. To some extremists Francis figured not as a great saint and servant of Christ seeking to reclaim the world to His truth, but as an equal with Christ—not as the restorer of an existent religion, but as the creator of a new religion. ”

“ In a word, an error in morals is triable only if it is also an error in belief. Otherwise, it is dealt with by the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. As it is arguable that a large number of crimes are indicative of doctrinal error, the Holy Office could put forward a rather sweeping claim to judicature over all manner of wrong-doing; but in practice there was probably not much trouble as a rule, the tribunal being kept sufficiently well occupied with offences in intellectu. Only when the implication of heresy was the significant feature of a crime was the Inquisition likely to be interested. ”

“ The terrible scourge of the Black Death laid all countries low. Social unrest was widespread and alarming. Vagrant, masterless men devoured with avidity any doctrines of a communist saviour, and to such the Wycliffite thesis of dominion founded on grace had an obvious and dangerous attractiveness. Just as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so now in the case of Wycliffitism and Husitism, heresy was regarded not as a purely religious matter, but also as a social danger. ”

“ For the regeneration of the Church Wycliffe turned from the hierarchy to the laity. That which makes a man a member of the Church is his own personal sanctity, and the Church therefore consists of those predestined to salvation, of none others.144 The mere fact of being a pope or a cardinal, for example, is nothing. The Church can dispense with bad popes.145 They are antichrist. Per contra, a layman might be pope, however unlearned, even if unordained, so long as God had chosen him.146 It is not man’s appointment, but God’s choosing—that is to say, spiritual excellence—that matters. ”

“ The common, the accepted, standard of to-day both as regards justice and humanity is, happily, greatly higher than that of the Middle Ages. Much that has been written of the Inquisition has been vitiated by an attempt to read into the mind and conduct of men of mediæval times a humanitarianism which is the peculiar product of the modern world, and which they could not even have understood. Even more vitiated would be any thesis which, not satisfied with justifying the originators of the Inquisition, sought to justify the institution itself. ”

“ The simple fact that perpetual imprisonment is numbered among the penances inflicted by the Inquisition is proof positive that the Inquisition desired and anticipated from the secular arm the death penalty for those relaxed to it. For careless as to the ultimate fate of the impenitent the Church cannot possibly be. She cannot be willing that he should go free to rejoice in the triumph of his obduracy among confederates and to spread contagion among the faithful. ”

“ If we comprehend the oneness of human society in the Middle Ages, as actively believed in by the average thinking man and unquestioningly accepted as a patent fact by the average uneducated man, we can realize what is meant by the phrase ‘ages of faith’ and at the same time avoid some of the pitfalls that lie in the path of any one seeking to study the exceptions to the rule, namely, the heresies of these ages of faith. ”

“ The author or authors of ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ illustrated this very conception by elaborating a thesis really more destructive of the Catholic faith than Catharism itself. The ending of the second era was to be accompanied by great tribulations, but these grievous troubles would usher in the millennium, days of perfect justice, peace and happiness, in which God would be worshipped everywhere and in which the Eucharist and indeed all other sacraments would be needless, mankind being liberated from such burdens, so complete would be the knowledge of God in the heart of the individual man. ”

“ For his outstanding argument is that the clergy have been narrowing that conception by arrogating to themselves a position and powers which belong to the whole community. While perniciously extending the meaning of the word ‘spiritual’ to cover such essentially secular things as property and political power, they have as falsely contracted it to exclude from all control of the Church’s destinies the mass of the laity. ”

“ Only in man’s power of reproducing his species can there be said to be any human immortality. The human race is permanent. In the fullest sense, however, only the active intellect is eternal.
The attitude of Averrhoës to Islam, and indeed to all religion, is important. It may be summed up by saying that he was the friend of religion, the enemy of theology, for which he could see no excuse. There could be no compromise between faith and philosophy. The theologian was at the outset hopelessly hampered in the search for truth, because he had to premise all the articles of his creed. ”