were also sometimes known as Luciferans and credited with devil-worship and the perpetration of the most disgusting obscenities at the initiation of novices into the faith. The Brethren of the Free Spirit were never numerous, but in spite of constant persecution they appear to have existed right up to the days of Lutheranism. Their doctrines were not without significance, because together with an exalted claim to impeccability which prescribed the severest tests of sexual purity they combined a mystic belief, which under the term Illuminism, a name they themselves adopted, had a considerable influence on the theological thought of Germany. The most remarkable of these was the distinguished Dominican, Master Eckhart, who appears to have maintained that man shared the divinity of God and that in the eyes of God virtue and sin were alike.61
The existence of such venturesome pantheistic speculations as these broad-cast in Germany reacted very unfavourably on all unrecognized, and particularly on migratory, religious associations, which became involved in the persecutions set on foot in consequence of the undoubted heresies of the pantheists. Such associations tended to increase in the thirteenth century. They were not necessarily connected with the Spiritual Franciscans or Fraticelli; but they certainly owed their origin to the popularity of the mendicant idea as practised by the friars, in particular the Minorites. They are found in France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries; and to such voluntary fellowships there could be no legitimate objection in themselves; they might be the most laudable instruments for the exploitation of religious zeal. Only they called for thorough supervision. Beguinages, therefore—large permanent houses—were established in such towns as Cologne, Ghent, and Paris, such establishments being under careful management, the special protection of the popes and secular princes, and enjoying often the highest reputation for sanctity. But with wanderers it was different. They could not be supervised, and to distinguish between the orthodox and the schismatic mendicant was difficult. Undisciplined vagrancy was in itself an invitation to temptation. The Inquisition in Germany represented to Boniface IX in 1396 that for a hundred years all manner of heresies had lurked under the outward fair-seeming of the Beghards and that their suppression was impeded by certain papal constitutions urged in their protection.62 It is true that at times, owing to the extent to which the innocent were wont to suffer with the guilty, the papacy had ere that come to the rescue of the former, as for example Benedict XIV in 1336 and Gregory XI in 1374. It had in particular been necessary to protect women, large numbers of whom joined themselves not only to the permanent mendicant communities, but to the wandering mendicants. In times that were hard and wild and disordered, when there was no system of poor-relief save through the Church, the lot of widows and of women and girls who had no male protectors was exceedingly hard, and for such the mendicant associations had a clear attraction as a means of asylum and refuge. The war upon the Beghards in many cases led to many respectable women being led into a life of misery and want and sometimes prostitution, until Benedict XIV intervened on their behalf.63 At the Council of Constance certain rules were drawn up for the regulation of beguinages, but beguines did not thereby escape persecution. In 1431 we find Eugenius IV intervening for their protection. Ever in danger of persecution, wanderers over the face of the land, these mendicant communities, whether remaining within the Church’s fold or not, were a source of religious unrest, of dissatisfaction with the hierarchy, of aspiration for new doctrines which would attune with the intense individualism of a mystic illuminism. By such men and women Lutheranism might well be welcomed and its progress materially assisted.64
One of the strangest of the fanatical outbursts of the Middle Ages, especially in Germany, is indirectly connected with the Brethren of the Free Spirit, some of whom joined themselves with the Flagellants. The latter first made their appearance in Europe in 1259 in Italy, whence the movement spread to Bohemia and Germany. A more important outbreak occurred in the middle of the next century, when the appalling ravages of the Black Death had no doubt brought home to many thousands of the survivors the awful fragility and insecurity of human life and the need for repentance and godliness. It was the consciousness of the impotence of man probably that gave popularity to the abasement and self-torture of the scourge. There was a positive luxury of misery in the suggestion of so drastic a means of grace for a polluted people, smitten by the heavy hand of an angry God. Through Hungary, Germany, Flanders, Holland marched these penitents, proclaiming complete regeneration for all who should persevere in flagellation for thirty-three days and a half, chanting weird prayers in which this creed was enshrined.65 Theirs was a new gospel—the all-sufficient efficacy of the voluntary effusion of blood.66
It is no wonder that the authorities became alarmed. Legitimate exception was taken to the enthusiasts’ indecency—men went virtually naked, women insufficiently clad, all were under a temptation to sexual excesses.67 Worse was the doctrinal error involved—the attack upon sacraments and priesthood contained in the preaching of the strange means of grace by these new priests of Baal.68 In 1349 Clement VI, condemning the movement on the ground of the contempt of the Church implied in the formation of such an unlicensed fellowship, ordered the suppression of the Flagellants, who thereafter came under the purview of the Inquisition. The heretical doctrine inherent in the Flagellant mania was enunciated in its most extravagant form by a native of Thuringia, named Conrad Schmidt, who in 1414 was maintaining that all spiritual authority had passed from the Catholic Church to the Flagellants, that not only were the sacraments useless, but they had been proscribed by God and it was mortal sin to partake of them, so that, for example, the ceremony of marriage polluted the union.
The fundamentally anti-sacerdotal character of the Flagellant movement was shared by another contemporary mania in Flanders and the Rhinelands—a dancing mania, under whose impulse fanatics would leap and convulse themselves in the most violent contortions in fierce ecstasies of religious frenzy.69
It is a most curious and remarkable story that is made by these interconnected heresies, more especially of the thirteenth century, and by others like them. In the midst of the Ages of Faith individual emotional outpourings or intellectual speculations would lead to strange results of fanaticism or dogma. There were indeed some that were mainly sensual in origin, but others betokened an earnest desire for a new heaven and a new earth and demanded a moral progression in human affairs not visible in existing human society. Such an aspiration is implicit in all the strange theories connected with ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ and in all the ideas of the Spiritual Franciscans, their offshoots and their companion sects. How much of such aspiration, such opinions could the mediæval Church absorb within herself? It was ever doubtful. It would have been impossible to predict beforehand upon which side would eventually be found many of the remarkable men referred to in this chapter—Francis, John of Parma, Bonaventura, Marsiglio of Padua, William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Amaury, Master Eckhart. The pope who condemned the Spiritual Franciscans might easily have regarded Francis himself as a heretic. Fortunately for herself the Church, while repudiating doctrines which were obviously unchristian, those that were the mere frenzies of the ignorant and the demented, succeeded in absorbing a large measure of the enthusiasm and the thought of the age, incorporated the mendicant orders, produced the scholastic philosophy. Nevertheless there were abroad in the mediæval world moral and intellectual ferments, yearnings for regeneration and guesses at truth which found within her fold no satisfaction.
Note.—In O. Holder-Egger’s (complete) edition of Salimbene (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, vol. xxxii, Hanover and Leipzig, 1905–13) the most important references to Joachitism are on pp. 231–41, 292–4, 455–8.
CHAPTER IV - AVERRHOÏST INFLUENCES
The great intellectual achievement of the Middle Ages was the recovery of the learning of the world that had vanished before the onset of the Hun, the Vandal and the Lombard.70 That learning was in part classical, in part patristic. But as the process of absorption was the achievement of the Church, the emphasis was on theology, and the works of the Fathers bulked very much more largely than the profane literatures of Greece and Rome. There was much in the teaching of Augustine that was Neoplatonic, that was akin to the speculations of Plato himself. But the whole point of view, method and cast of mind of the mediæval thinker were radically different from those of the pagan philosopher. The latter set out upon the search for abstract truth