and church were, amongst the mass of the population, but little or not at all assailed; heretics, when any appeared, obtained support neither from princes nor people; they were proceeded against, condemned, and burned, without their exciting public sympathy by their presence, or public commiseration by their punishment. It was in the very midst of the clergy themselves, amongst literates and teachers, that, in Northern France, the intellectual and innovating movement of the period was manifested and concentrated. The movement was vigorous and earnest, and it was a really studious host which thronged to the lessons of Abelard at Paris, on Mount St. Genevieve, at Melun, at Corbeil, and at the Paraclete; but this host contained but few of the people; the greater part of those who formed it were either already in the church, or soon, in various capacities, about to be. And the discussions raised at the meetings corresponded with the persons attending them; there was the disputation of the schools; there was no founding of sects; the lessons of Abelard and the questions he handled were scientifico-religious; it was to expound and propagate what they regarded as the philosophy of Christianity, that masters and pupils made bold use of the freedom of thought; they made but slight war upon the existing practical abuses of the church; they differed from her in the interpretation and comments contained in some of her dogmas; and they considered themselves in a position to explain and confirm faith by reason. The chiefs of the church, with St. Bernard at their head, were not slow to descry, in these interpretations and comments based upon science, danger to the simple and pure faith of the Christian; they saw the apparition of dawning rationalism confronting orthodoxy. They were, as all their contemporaries were, wholly strangers to the bare notion of freedom of thought and conscience, and they began a zealous struggle against the new teachers; but they did not push it to the last cruel extremities. They had many a handle against Abelard: his private life, the scandal of his connection with Heloise, the restless and haughty fickleness of his character, laid him open to severe strictures; but his stern adversaries did not take so much advantage of them as they might have taken. They had his doctrines condemned at the councils of Soissons and Sens; they prohibited him from public lecturing; and they imposed upon him the seclusion of the cloister; but they did not even harbor the notion of having him burned as a heretic, and science and glory were respected in his person, even when his ideas were proscribed. Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluni, one of the most highly considered and honored prelates of the church, received him amongst his own monks, and treated him with paternal kindness, taking care of his health, as well as of his eternal welfare; and he who was the adversary of St. Bernard and the teacher condemned by the councils of Soissons and Sens, died peacefully, on the 21st of April, 1142, in the abbey of St. Marcellus, near Chalon-sur-Saone, after having received the sacraments with much piety, and in presence of all the brethren of the monastery. “Thus,” wrote Peter the Venerable to Heloise, abbess for eleven years past of the Paraclete, “the man who, by his singular authority in science, was known to nearly all the world, and was illustrious wherever he was known, learned, in the school of Him who said, ‘Know that I am meek and lowly of heart,’ to remain meek and lowly; and, as it is but right to believe, he has thus returned to Him.”
The struggle of Abelard with the Church of Northern France and the crusade against the Albigensians in Southern France are divided by much more than diversity and contrast; there is an abyss between them. In their religious condition, and in the nature as well as degree of their civilization, the populations of the two regions were radically different. In the north-east, between the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Loire, Christianity had been obliged to deal with little more than the barbarism and ignorance of the German conquerors. In the south, on the two banks of the Rhone and the Garonne, along the Mediterranean, and by the Pyrenees, it had encountered all manner of institutions, traditions, religions, and disbeliefs, Greek, Roman, African, Oriental, Pagan, and Mussulman; the frequent invasions and long stay of the Saracens in those countries had mingled Arab blood with the Gallic, Roman, Asiatic, and Visigothic, and this mixture of so many different races, tongues, creeds, and ideas had resulted in a civilization more developed, more elegant, more humane, and more liberal, but far less coherent, simple, and strong, morally as well as politically, than the warlike, feudal civilization of Germanic France. In the religious order especially, the dissimilarity was profound. In Northern France, in spite of internal disorder, and through the influence of its bishops, missionaries, and monastic reformers, the orthodox Church had obtained a decided superiority and full dominion; but in Southern France, on the contrary, all the controversies, all the sects, and all the mystical or philosophical heresies which had disturbed Christendom from the second century to the ninth, had crept in and spread abroad. In it there were Arians, Manicheans, Gnostics, Paulicians, Cathars (the pure), and other sects of more local or more recent origin and name, Albigensians, Vaudians, Good People and Poor of Lyons, some piously possessed with the desire of returning to the pure faith and fraternal organization of the primitive evangelical Church, others given over to the extravagances of imagination or asceticism. The princes and the great laic lords of the country, the Counts of Toulouse, Foix, and Comminges, the Viscount of Beziers, and many others had not remained unaffected by this condition of the people: the majority were accused of tolerating and even protecting the heretics; and some were suspected of allowing their ideas to penetrate within their own households. The bold sallies of the critical and jeering spirit, and the abandonment of established creeds and discipline, bring about, before long, a relaxation of morals; and liberty requires long time and many trials before it learns to disavow and rise superior to license. In many of the feudal courts and castles of Languedoc, Provence, and Aquitaine, imaginations, words, and lives were licentious; and the charming poetry of the troubadours and the gallant adventures of knights caused it to be too easily forgotten that morality was but little more regarded than the faith. Dating from the latter half of the eleventh century, not only the popes, but the whole orthodox Church of France and its spiritual heads, were seriously disquieted at the state of mind of Southern France, and the dangers it threatened to the whole of Christendom. In 1145 St. Bernard, in all the lustre of his name and influence, undertook, in concert with Cardinal Alberic, legate of the Pope Eugenius III., to go and preach against the heretics in the countship of Toulouse. “We see here,” he wrote to Alphonse Jourdain, Count of Toulouse, “churches without flocks, flocks without priests, priests without the respect which is their due, and Christians without Christ; men die in their sins without being reconciled by penance or admitted to the holy communion; souls are sent pell-mell before the awful tribunal of God; the grace of baptism is refused to little children; those to whom the Lord said, ‘Suffer little children to come unto Me,’ do not obtain the means of coming to salvation. Is it because of a belief that these little children have no need of the Saviour, inasmuch as they are little? Is it then for nought that our Lord from being great became little? What say I? Is it then for nought that He was scourged and spat upon, crucified and dead?” St. Bernard preached with great success in Toulouse itself, but he was not satisfied with easy successes. He had come to fight the heretics; and he went to look for them where he was told he would find them numerous and powerful. “He repaired,” says a contemporary chronicler, “to the castle of Vertfeuil (or Verfeil, in the district of Toulouse), where flourished at that time the scions of a numerous nobility and of a multitude of people, thinking that, if he could extinguish heretical perversity in this place where it was so very much spread, it would be easy for him to make head against it elsewhere. When he had begun preaching, in the church, against those who were of most consideration in the place, they went out, and the people followed them; but the holy man, going out after them, gave utterance to the word of God in the public streets. The nobles then hid themselves on all sides in their houses; and as for him, he continued to preach to the common people who came about him. Whereupon, the others making uproar and knocking upon the doors, so that the crowd could not hear his voice, he then, having shaken off the dust from his feet as a testimony against them, departed from their midst, and, looking on the town, cursed it, saying, ‘Vertfeuil, God wither thee!’ Now there were, at that time, in the castle, a hundred knights abiding, having arms, banners, and horses, and keeping themselves at their own expense, not at the expense of other.”
After the not very effectual mission of St. Bernard, who died in 1153, and for half a century, the orthodox Church was several times occupied with the heretics of Southern France, who were before long called Albigensians, either because they were numerous in the diocese of Albi, or because the council of Lombers, one of the first at which their condemnation was expressly pronounced (in 1165), was
