Chapter IV — The Intellectual Life
§ 1 Superstition and Intolerance
In judging of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, account must always be taken of the fact that their earlier literature is mainly religious and ecclesiastical, and that such literature often gives a very faint idea of the higher mental life of the educated laity. In our own time, and still more in the last two centuries, the literature of devotion and of the Church seldom suggests the play of intelligence that actually goes on in the world: taken by itself, indeed, it would often imply intellectual decline. As we have seen and shall see, the Middle Ages had an intellectual life apart from the Church; and in the period we term the Renaissance that life was far-reaching; there is reason therefore to question whether at a time when authors were mostly clerics there was not some sane thinking of which we read little or nothing. But even if such allowance be made, the fact remains that the period of clerical supremacy in literature is a period of enormous superstition.
Under that term even religious people now include a habitual belief in diabolical agency, a constant affirmation of miracles, portents, divine and fiendish apparitions; and the Protestant adds to the definition saint-worship, belief in the supernatural virtue of relics, and the acceptance of the daily miracle of transubstantiation. But even if questions of doctrine be put aside, we may sum up that the average Christian in the Middle Ages was more credulous as to daily prodigies, saintly and fiendish, than even the average Catholic peasant of to-day in the more backward European countries. Doubters and unbelievers there must always have been; but in the medieval period it was dangerous to utter doubt, unless by way of attack on priests and monks in circles where they were not popular. Ribald doubt, besides, came off best; grave disbelief incurred suspicion; and where men cannot speak their thought they are hindered in their thinking. The most unseemly debates, such as that as to whether the eucharist when eaten passed through the normal process of digestion (“stercoranism” was the name given to the heresy that it did), and that set up by Ratramnus as to how the impregnation of the Virgin actually took place—such discussions could go on freely; but more decent controversy could not. Beyond question, the influence of clerical literature was mainly for gross credulity. The lives of the saints in general, from Gregory I onwards, tell constantly of a puerility of judgment which to a Periclean Greek would have been inconceivable, and which was incompatible not only with rational thought but with tolerable veracity. Language and the art of writing had become means of destroying common sense. In the hands of the hagiographers, the use of miracle so far outgoes the older tradition that it must have finally failed to suggest anything divine—even to a believer. To a skeptic it suggests burlesque.
On the other hand, medieval life was in the main as much ridden by fear of evil spirits as that of any savages of our own time; for every people had kept the notion of their hostile sprites, and the Christian devil was simply made the God of that kingdom. Life, too, was shorter than moderns can well realize; so high was the normal death-rate, so frequent was pestilence, so little understood was disease; and the nearness of death made men either reckless or afraid. Where ignorance and fear go hand in hand, is the realm of superstition. Average religion was summed up in a perfectly superstitious use of the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist; a devout hope in the intercession and protection of the saints; an ever-present fear of the activity of the fiend; a singularly mechanical use of formularies; an intense anxiety to possess or benefit by holy relics, the easy manufacture of which must have enriched myriads; a chronic fear of sorcery; and a conception of hell and purgatory so literal that its general failure to amend or control conduct is a revelation of the inconsequence of average morality. It is often hard to distinguish in medieval religion between devotional and criminal motives. In the life of the Italian St. Romuald (tenth century) it is told that when he insisted on leaving the retreat in Catalonia where he had won a saintly repute, the Catalans proposed to kill him in order to possess his relics. He in turn cudgelled his father nearly to death to make him adhere to his profession of the religious life. Such ethical ideas expressed themselves in the monastic caste not only in austerities but in systematic self-flagellation; and in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the principle evolved the chronic movements of the Flagellants, specially so-called, whose wild and public self-tortures neither Church nor State could put down while the mania lasted.
In such a world, primed by a great caste of priests, intolerance had its ideal habitat. Aversion to innovating thought is as natural to man as egoism; and an innovating religion is no sooner established than it finds equilibrium in denouncing innovation. Thus, even apart from clerical action, and apart too from the ethnic animosity to Mohammedanism, the medieval laity, knowing nothing of the long intellectual and sectarian struggles which have forced tolerance on modern polity, were spontaneous persecutors of heresy save where it appealed primarily to their anti-clerical economic interests, or carried them away by mere contagion of physical excitement. The Flagellants, for instance, seem positively to have hypnotized many by their procedure, as did the partly kindred and partly contrary sect of Dancers, who flourished in Flanders and Germany late in the fourteenth century. It is thus credible that some were cured by incantations, which were hypnotic with a difference. But all such eccentrics were normally liable to cruel ill-treatment from their conforming fellows; and it is clear that in the fourteenth century the mystical and communistic heresies of Beghards and Beguins, male and female, were promptly persecuted by the general laity. The religion which categorically taught men to love their enemies never seems to have prepared them to endure in their neighbours a difference of doctrine.
It is probable, too, that during the Dark Ages thousands of helpless souls were put to death as sorcerers by mobs without process of law, apart from those executed under the old laws against magic or divination, and the Teutonic codes of the same order. In a similar spirit, Christian mobs in all countries and ages had chronically wreaked a half-religious, half-economic hatred on the Jews, of whom enormous numbers died by massacre. Here the motive was not wholly religious, since their unfortunate specialization in usury—albeit forced upon them by Christian exclusiveness—had set up ill-will against the Jews in the period of the pagan empire, and even among the Moors, who had given them religious toleration. But Christian animus certainly counted for much, and carried the passion to lengths rarely reached in antiquity. Thus the common run of Christian life was grossly intolerant. It was left to the Church as such, however, to frame for the suppression of free thought in religion a machinery never paralleled in human history.