good effort to untangle herself from feudalism were so extravagant that they suggested a downright theocracy, actual government by the ministers of religion, which has always been hateful to men of our European stock. Further, the twelfth century man, in so much fighting against the infidel, had learned that his enemy was no such bad fellow after all. We find at least one ruler, Henry Plantagenet in the heat of his quarrel with Becket, crying out that he would rather turn Mohammedan than yield to the Church! And the outburst does not seem to have weakened his position. Evidently the world was moving fast in his day. The noble, so far surpassing his fathers in riches, luxury, and refinement, often failed to see eye to eye with the churchman. The story of the time is full of despoilments of the Church and consequent excommunications. Now and then a commune, at the height of political struggle with its bishop, would physically maltreat him (or even kill him) and go off into a short spasm of blank irreligion.
Moreover, the Church had foes, or at least very lukewarm servitors, of her own household. We have seen that the student was usually still in minor orders. But now he was no longer shut up under strict control in a monastery, but free to wander at will. Under no constraint, and full of his classic learning with its glorification of every passion and appetite, he carelessly kicked clear over the monkish interpretation of the Christian ethic, and as often as not went wild altogether from any sort of check on his desires. John Addington Symonds has collected, and translated into English out of the original Latin, a number of these students’ songs, under the title of “Wine, Woman and Song.” They are often charming, but I cannot imagine literature better calculated to enrage a monk, or indeed anyone of a puritanic cast of mind.
Even the student’s professor, and the student himself in his serious moments, were not altogether Christians. The Arabian versions of Aristotle taught an imaginative pantheism, full of ideas about “the soul of the world” that were inconsistent with belief in any definite god. The recoil from such fantasies sometimes brought on an easy-going general scepticism. It was whispered about that the world had known three great impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The pride of the new logic equalled, in some men, our modern pride in physical science. Michelet tells the story of a learned professor of the University of Paris who delighted his hearers with a complete demonstration of our Lord’s divinity and then turned around and said that, had he chosen, his logic could have put down “little Jesus” as low as it had just raised him high. The common people would make up coarse “fabliaux,” tales and rhymes about the priest and his women parishioners, that sound harshly upon the ear even of a sceptic of to-day.
Finally, from top to bottom of society, there was an under-current of feeling that the wealth and power of the Church were over-tempting her officials into that pride which they were bound to oppose as the first of sins. Writing to magnify the work of the mendicant orders, Dante goes so far as to say that, just before their coming (that is, in the time we are considering), “The Army of Christ” . . . was . . .” laggard, fearsome, and thin-ranked.”1
Michelet speaks of the Pope in the year 1200 lifted indeed to a dizzy height upon the topmost pinnacle of the great structure of the Church, but seeing therefrom armies marching from all sides to the attack. Dante and Michelet may exaggerate; nevertheless the situation was strained.
Still the Church won through. Tossed hither and thither by the swift new currents, she escaped shipwreck and kept her course. And that course was shaped by her determination to remain central in society and to unite all men under her. It was the strength of her position that, of all the forces we have so far seen to have been working against her, not one directly denied her teaching and substituted for it a different, hostile body of doctrine.
In one spot only was there organized, fundamental opposition. That spot was in the district of Southern France which was later to form the province of Languedoc. That opposition was a body of doctrine which has usually been called Albigenseanism (inasmuch as one of its chief centres was the town of Albi). What the nature of the crisis was, and what precedent that Church had for meeting it, the next chapter shall consider.
1 “Heretics,” by G. K. Chesterton, chap. xi, “Science and the Savages.” Copyright, John Lane and Co., London, 1905.
1 By “fire-power” I mean, of course, archery, not firearms.
1 “Forests and Human Progress” by Raphael Zon, published in New York, Geographical Review, September 1920: “In Central Europe the period of the greatest clearing of forest land for settlement was practically completed by the end of the thirteenth century.”
1 “. . . tardo, suspiccioso, e raro.”—“Paradiso,” canto xii, line 39.
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