Chapter XII: Part 12

Christian Rome, bedewed with the martyrs’ blood and enriched with their relics, has since the first ages of Christianity been the central object of the great majority of pilgrimages. Her three hundred churches have one after another been visited by a host of believers drawn thither by pious recollections, by all kinds of effectual acts of grace or indulgences, by an abundant hospitality, by a pompous ceremonial, and, above all, by the ardour of their faith. On great anniversaries, at jubilees and at the _Inventions_ of the bodies of saints, the number of pilgrims multiplied indefinitely. As many as twelve hundred thousand have been known to have arrived in the course of a single day, from different parts of the world--pious bands which encamped around the walls of the Eternal City, their ranks being constantly added to by fresh arrivals during several consecutive months. Besides the basilica of St. Peter, Rome possessed several privileged sanctuaries which were at all periods the chief haunts of the pilgrims: these were the Church of Sta. Maria Maggiore, where the manger in which our Lord was born was seen; San Praxeas, the basilica which contained two thousand five hundred martyrs; San Giovanni Laterano, in which are the _scala santa_, the same steps blessed by the blood of Jesus Christ when He was wearing the crown of thorns, and which are only ascended by people upon their knees; San Pietro-in-Montorio, the crypt of which stands upon the spot where that apostle was crucified; San Sebastiano-fuor-gli-Muri, famous for its catacombs; San Paolo da Tre Fontane--miraculous springs which gushed from the ground with three leaps, just as St. Paul’s head rebounded three times from the ground when he was executed; San Paolo-fuori-le-Muri, where is preserved the crucifix which spoke to St. Bridget; San Lorenzo-fuori-le-Muri, where are interred the bodies of St. Stephen and St. Lawrence; Santa Croce di Gerusalemme (Fig. 293), a basilica founded by the august mother of St. Constantine on her return from a pilgrimage to Palestine; St. Cecilia, a church built upon the site of the house in which that saint lived, and containing the bath-room in which she suffered martyrdom; as well as twenty other churches which have been the cradles of the Christian religion, and which, by their origin, tradition, and relics, command the pious respect of those who visit them. No matter by what road the pilgrims travelled, they passed on their way to Rome a vast number of sanctuaries and stations which were dedicated either to the Virgin Mary or to illustrious saints (Fig. 294). Upon the sea-coast, the church of Our Guardian Lady and of Our Lady of Genesta, the tutelary guardians of the Gulf of Lyons and the Gulf of Genoa; and with them St. Martha and St. Magdalene; St. George, the legend of whose warlike exploit is reproduced in so many pictures; at Lucca, Our Lady of the Rose; in the Neapolitan States, Our Lady of the Commencement, Our Lady of the Conception, Our Lady of the Assumption, Our Lady of Naples, Our Lady of Mount St. Januarius; in Sicily, Our Lady of the Crown, St. Restituta, St. Agatha, but particularly St. Rosalie; towards the eastern shores of the Ionian Sea, several virgins of Byzantine origin, who were worshipped conjointly with St. Nicholas and St. Spiridion; along the Adriatic other Madonnas and other saints, conspicuous among whom, like a precious pearl, shines the celebrated image known as Our Lady of Victory. It was in her honour that an Eastern emperor caused a triumphal car to be constructed, in order that she might be drawn through the streets of Constantinople whenever the empire was threatened with danger. Brought to Venice and deposited in the Church of St. Mark, she was looked upon as the safe-guard of the republic, and, in place of the triumphal car, a magnificent gondola was specially reserved for this image. From the days of Godfroy de Bouillon, who, with a part of the Crusaders, made a pilgrimage to Bari, on the “soil of Monseigneur St. Nicholas,” before pursuing his journey to Jerusalem, this august sanctuary became the scene of continuous devotions. Joinville, Froissart, Philippe Giraud de Vigneulles, and other chroniclers speak of the number of pilgrims who visited Bari to do honour to the relics of St. Nicholas. The miracles accomplished there through the intercession of the blessed Bishop of Myra, form a rich volume of legends dating from the eleventh century, when forty burghers of the town of Bari went into Asia Minor to rescue his precious body from the violence of the Saracens.

We must not be astonished at the profanities committed by the Mahometans at the places of pilgrimage in Palestine, since the cessation of the Crusades left these venerable sanctuaries at their mercy. It was to preserve the chapel of Nazareth from these outrages that God commanded his angels to carry it into a Christian country. According to a tradition confirmed by several papal bulls, the angels who carried off this chapel deposited it, on May 10th, 1291, at Rauneza, between Fiume and Tersatz, in Dalmatia. On the same night the Virgin Mary appeared in a dream to a dying priest named Alexander, and told him of the miracle. The chapel transported to Rauneza was no other than the house in which the divine mother of God had been born and had conceived the Redeemer. After her death the apostles had converted it into a chapel; St. Peter had erected an altar in it, and St. Luke had with his own hands carved in cedar a statue of the Virgin for it. The priest who had had the vision rose from his bed cured of his disease, and went to prostrate himself before the holy image previous to making a public announcement of the apparition of the Virgin. The house of Nazareth was there standing to confirm the truth of his story. Then began the pilgrimages to Tersatz. The Emperor Rudolph, on being informed of this marvellous occurrence, sent several persons of distinction into Palestine to see whether the chapel of Nazareth had really been removed. Their report was of the most satisfactory character, and very soon the worship of Our Lady of Tersatz had become very general throughout the Danubian provinces. In order to preserve the treasure with which Providence had endowed this spot, the _santa casa_ was surrounded by a wooden framework while the church of which it was to form the sanctuary was being built. But after standing for three years in Dalmatia, this holy house disappeared. Contemporary chroniclers relate that, on the 10th of December, 1291, it was carried up into the air by angels and borne across the Adriatic.

It appears that the _santa casa_, before taking up its definite position, halted near Recanati, upon a property belonging to two brothers who for eight months disputed its possession. In order to bring about a reconciliation between them, and chiefly, no doubt, because they were unwilling to leave this sanctuary at the mercy of these two jealous rivals, the angels bore it off once more, and finally deposited it in a field belonging to a poor widow of the name of Loreta--whence the denomination Our Lady of Loreta. Here may still be seen the _santa casa_, just as it came from Nazareth, but not as it was decorated, endowed, and enriched by the sumptuous devotion of the Middle Ages. Its treasures, valued at several million francs, already much diminished by the religious wars brought about by the great Western schism, ceased to accumulate in the sixteenth century during the struggle of the Church against Protestantism, and they were almost all carried off in 1796 by the pillaging armies of the French Republic. Nevertheless the fervour of the pilgrims was not in the least abated, and the splendid church in which the _santa casa_ was as it were enshrined, was too small to contain all the votive offerings brought thither from every part of the world. The popes had granted numerous indulgences to those who made this pilgrimage, which was the most celebrated as well as the most frequented of any outside Rome.

The legend of the pilgrimages, as marvellous in Spain as it was in Italy, always associated the worship of St. James with that of the Holy Virgin. After the ascension of our Lord and the descent of the Holy Ghost, Santiago the Iberian--St. James, as we call him--bid adieu to his elder brother St. John the Evangelist, and afterwards went to ask the Virgin for her blessing. She said to him, “Dear son, since thou hast chosen Spain, the country which I love best of all European lands, to preach the Gospel, take care to found there a church dedicated to me, in the town where you convert the greatest number of heathen.” Santiago then left Jerusalem, and crossing the Mediterranean, arrived at Tarragona, where, despite all his efforts, he only succeeded in converting eight persons.

But in the night of February 4th, A.D. 36, whilst he and his eight neophytes were sound asleep in the plain upon which Saragossa now stands, they were awaked by celestial music, and this music was the voice of angels celebrating the praises of the Virgin. Santiago prostrated himself with his face to the ground, and before him he saw the august mother of Christ, standing on a pillar of jasper, surrounded with angels, and with the same smile of ineffable sweetness which he had seen on her features when he left Jerusalem. “James, my son,” she said to him, “you must build me a church upon this very spot. Take the pillar upon which I am standing, place it, with my image upon its summit, in the midst of a sanctuary dedicated to me, and to the end of time it shall never cease to work miracles.” The apostle at once commenced the work, aided by his disciples, and the church was soon constructed. Such, according to the legend, was the origin of the cathedral and the pilgrimage of Our Lady of the Pillar (_Nuestra señora del Pilar_).

The Virgin of the Pillar (_Virgo del Pilar_) was not the only one held in profound veneration by the Spaniards during the Middle Ages; every petty kingdom, every principality, every important town of the Iberian peninsula had its Madonna, its _Señora_, which attracted numerous pilgrims. Amongst them may be mentioned Our Lady of Mountserrat, in Catalonia (Fig. 295), Our Lady of France (_la Rena di Francia_), half-way between Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo, and Our Lady of the Dice (_Señora del Dado_), in the kingdom of Leon--sanctuaries which stood in the midst of mountainous ranges, and which could only be reached on foot or with mules.

In a small town called El Padron--the Monument--which is but the ancient _Iria_, where Santiago, called James the Elder, taught (Fig. 296), and which was for a long time the guardian of his earthly remains, there flowed beneath the high altar of the church, which was dedicated to him, a stream of spring water, the ripple of which, like heavenly music, mingled with the prayers of the pilgrims, who were so numerous that their knees have worn holes in the stone slabs of the sanctuary. The body of the illustrious martyr, when brought from Compostella to Santiago, was laid upon a granite block which was miraculously fashioned into a tomb, and it never emerged therefrom save as a phantom either to appear in vision before kings, prelates, and other pious persons who had invoked it, or to seize a lance and combat the enemies of Christianity. Thus, the legend tells us, he was seen in 946, riding a white horse, holding in his hand a banner emblazoned with a red cross (such as the knights of Santiago wear on the left side of their mantles), and marching at the head of the Christian barons against the Moors or Saracens.

The pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella was famous as early as the ninth century; people came with votive offerings from all parts of the Christian world. The road leading to this sanctuary was perpetually crowded with an army of pilgrims, and such continued to be the case throughout the Middle Ages. On returning to their own country, the pilgrims of “Monseigneur St. James” formed a regular order of Catholic chivalry; they kept up the pious devotions in which they had engaged during their pilgrimage, and maintained till their lives’ end the spirit of religious fellowship which had united them under the same banner.

France, notwithstanding her warlike spirit, did not pay so much honour to the warlike saints as did Italy and Spain to St. George and St. James, but she seems to have held in highest esteem the _healing_ saints, as we may term them, such as St. Martin of Tours, St. Roch, St. Christopher, St. Blaze, St. Lazarus, &c., whose venerated relics have been the object of so many celebrated pilgrimages (Fig. 297). She has also rendered touching homage to certain specially holy women, the worship of whom has become almost national, such as St. Mary Magdalene and St. Martha, St. Barbara, St. Geneviève, &c. But in no country has the worship of the Virgin Mary been more general or more sublime than in France, where the mother of God had so many venerable sanctuaries; such as that of Our Lady of Puy, Our Lady of Liesse, Our Lady of Chartres, Our Lady of Rocamadour, Our Lady of the Thorn, Our Lady of Auray, and Our Lady of Victory, amongst others.

One of the first altars erected in France to the Virgin Mary was that upon the summit of Mount Anicium, a volcanic rock near Velay, called Le Puy (from the Italian _poggio_, high mountain). St. George, bishop of the diocese, came to baptize a lady of the district, who became seriously ill, upon which an unknown voice bid her repair to Mount Anicium. Having obeyed this command, she fell into a quiet sleep, during which she saw a celestial female figure, wearing a crown of precious stones. “Who is this queen, so beautiful, so noble, and so gracious?” she inquired, addressing herself to one of the angelic host that surrounded her. The answer came: “This is the mother of the Son of God. She has selected this mountain for you to come and make your invocation; she bids you acquaint her faithful servant, Bishop George, of what has taken place. And now awake; you are cured of your illness.” The lady, filled with gratitude and faith, went to the bishop, who, when he had heard her story, prostrated himself to the ground, as if it were the Virgin herself who was speaking. Followed by his clergy, he then repaired to the miraculous rock. It was in the month of July; the sun was very hot, but the snow lay deep upon the table-land of the mountain. Suddenly a stag bounded forward and traced with his feet the plan of the sanctuary which was to be built upon that very spot, and then disappeared. The bishop at once saw that a fresh miracle had been wrought in confirmation of the first; he had the spot enclosed, and made a vow to erect a church there. This vow was executed by St. Evodius, seventh Bishop of Puy, in 223.

The statue of Our Lady of Puy, in cedar wood, blackened with age, was the work of the first Christians of Libanus, who executed it after the image of the Egyptian goddess Isis, sitting upright upon a stool, and holding upon her knee the Infant Jesus, swathed in fine linen as if he were a little mummy. This image was brought from the East by St. Louis in 1254.

The origin of the statue of Our Lady of Liesse also dates from the Crusades, which inundated France and the rest of Europe with so many images of the Holy Virgin. Thus, in 1131, Foulques d’Anjou, King of Jerusalem, entrusted the guard of the city of Beersheba to the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, amongst the most distinguished of whom were the three brothers of the house of Eppes, near Laon. These knights having been taken prisoners, the Sultan determined to make them become Mahometans, and imprudently selected his daughter Ismeria to effect the work of conversion. But she forgot the object of her mission, and allowed herself to be converted to Christianity by the arguments of the three knights. She asked them to carve for her an image of the Holy Virgin, and though they were utterly ignorant of the art, they began an image which angels came down from heaven to complete. The Virgin appeared to the Sultan’s daughter, encouraged her in her project to set the three captives at liberty, and advised her to follow them in her flight. At about midnight she went to the prison, the doors of which opened before her, as did those of the city. Ismeria bore in her arms the image of the Virgin, and the sovereign virtue of this talisman overcame all obstacles. The fugitives, who had gone to sleep upon Egyptian soil, woke up to find themselves in front of the Château d’Eppes, and the statuette, sparkling with light, selected the place which it wished to occupy in the middle of a wood. Ismeria caused to be erected upon this very spot a plain chapel, whilst in the town of Laon a cathedral was built, dedicated to Our Lady of Liesse. Since that period the great basilica and the tiny chapel have shared between them the worship of the crowd of pilgrims which the startling miracles have attracted thither. Both structures suffered from the fury of the Huguenots in the sixteenth century, but the miraculous image of the Virgin has always escaped from sacrilegious outrage.

There is much analogy between the worship of the patronal Virgin of the country round Chartres and that of the Virgin of the Pillar at Saragossa. The two statues are alike in regard to posture, costume, and general character, and moreover they date back to the same epoch--namely, the fourth or fifth century. The Chartres cathedral, though ancient--for it was in existence during the seventh century--was nevertheless posterior to the first pilgrimages established in honour of “the Virgin who has borne a child,” according to the denomination given to this Notre-Dame by the first apostles who preached Christianity in this district, which was the centre of the Druidical religion. During the whole of the Middle Ages, and down even to our own day, there have been daily arrivals of pilgrims at Chartres, and their number always increases upon the fête days of the Virgin.

The worship of Our Lady of Rocamadour is very possibly contemporaneous with that of Our Lady of Chartres--dating back to the first age of Christianity in Gaul. Nothing is known as to the origin of this devotion, which is supposed to have replaced that of some local divinity. The Virgin of Rocamadour was famous as early as the eighth century, for, if tradition is to be believed, Charlemagne and his brave followers came to pay it homage on their return from an expedition against the Gascons; and the sword of Roland, deposited as an offering upon the altar of the chapel of St. Michael, is still to be seen. Around this sanctuary, dedicated to the Virgin, were seventeen chapels hewn in the rock; they were dedicated to Jesus Christ, to the Twelve Apostles, to St. John the Baptist, to St. Anne, to St. Michael, and to St. Amadour, whose hermitage was here, and who had no doubt brought from the East the black Virgin who has been venerated there for twelve or fifteen centuries.

The pilgrimage of St. Baume, near Maximin, in Provence, was not in honour of the Virgin Mary, but of the saintly women Mary Magdalene (Fig. 299) and her sister Martha, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, who were witnesses of our Saviour’s life, of his miracles, and of his resurrection. Whatever may be the truth of the alleged mission of St. Lazarus and his two sisters Mary Magdalene and Martha, in southern Gaul, the devotion paid to them amongst a people who believed in the legend was almost as marked as the worship which was rendered to the Virgin. The pilgrims never left St. Baume without making a pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Lazarus at Autun, after having visited the relics of the Marys in the Island of Camargue, at St. Maximin, Arles, and at Tarascon. The grotto of St. Baume, in which Mary Magdalene lived for thirty years in fellowship with the angels who raised her into the air during her periods of ecstasy, who brought her food and took every care of her, was, from the fifth or sixth century, a rendezvous for the faithful who came to visit the dread abode which had been sanctified by the long penitence of the Magdalene. Popes, emperors, kings, and the most illustrious personages considered it an honour to be numbered amongst these pilgrims, and those whose age or infirmities prevented them from being personally present deputed others to bear thither their vows and their offerings.

The mere list of the pilgrimages of Our Lady in France, in that kingdom of the lilies which has always been under the immediate protection of the Virgin Mary, would fill several pages, and it would take whole volumes to relate their origin and history. We will therefore only mention the most famous and the most ancient: Our Lady of Alet, near Toulouse (Fig. 300); Our Lady of the Fountain of the Ardilliers, near Saumur; Our Lady of the Virtues, at Aubervilliers, near Paris; Our Lady of the Haven, at Clermont, in Auvergne; Our Lady of Fourvières, at Lyons; Our Lady of the Osier, near Grenoble; Our Lady of Bonne-Garde, at Longpont; Our Lady of Bethlehem, at Ferrières, Gâtinais; Our Lady of Good Hope, at Valenciennes; Our Lady of Grace, at Cambrai (Fig. 301); Our Lady of Boulogne-sur-Mer (Fig. 302), &c. Most of these are represented by painted images--some brought from the East at the time of the Crusades; others, the origin of which is only spoken to by the miracles which marked them out for the veneration of the faithful. There are also statuettes in wood and stone, nearly all of which belong to the Coptic group of black Virgins, which throughout Europe are associated with miracles of an early age.

It would take volumes also to describe the numerous pilgrimages in Germany, Poland, Russia, and, above all, in Belgium (Fig. 304). There, as everywhere else, the mother of our Lord always attracted to herself the most profound homage, and bestowed the greatest amount of favours upon the zealous host of her worshippers. But it is worthy of remark that these acts of devotion, so renowned and venerated in the country itself, scarcely ever extended into neighbouring countries. Belgians alone went to worship the image of the Virgin known as Notre-Dame-sous-la-Tour, in the Church of St. Peter, at Louvain, the image of Our Lady of Alzemberg, and the statue of Our Lady of Verviers; and yet the crowd of pilgrims was none the less to Our Lady of Affighem, Our Lady of Chèvremont, Our Lady of Faith, near Dinan, Our Lady of Wavre, Our Lady of Belle-Fontaine, &c.

But for the most frequented pilgrimages we must look to Hungary, where a statue of the Virgin, in limewood, found during the twelfth century on the trunk of an oak, became the famous Our Lady of Maria-Zell, which worked so many miracles throughout the Middle Ages; to Cologne, where the three Magi, beatified by the Church, were venerated; and to Trèves, where, since the fourth century, the jubilee of the Holy Robe of our Lord has been celebrated--a jubilee in which as many as a hundred thousand pilgrims a day formerly took part; and, lastly, we must mention the most renowned of those sanctuaries of Notre-Dame des Neiges (Our Lady of the Snow) which are to be met with on many mountains whose summits are covered with snow--namely, the magnificent Monastery of Einsiedeln, in Switzerland (Canton of Schwitz), which was only an unpretending oratory when Meinrad, prince of the great house of Hohenzollern, founded there the worship of Our Lady of the Hermits.

HERESIES.

The real meaning of the word _Heresy_.--The Heretics of
the Apostolic Days.--Simon the Magician.--Cerinthus.--The
Nicolaitans.--The Gnostics.--The Schools of Philosophy of
Byzantium, Antioch, and Alexandria.--Julian the Apostate.--The
Pelagians and the semi-Pelagians.--Nestorius.--Eutyches.--The
Iconoclasts.--Amaury.--Gilbert de la Porrée.--Abelard.--Arnold
of Brescia.--The Albigenses.--The Waldenses.--The
Flagellants.--Wickliff.--John Huss.--Jerome of
Prague.--Luther.--Henry VIII. and the Anglican Church.--Calvin.

Probably few persons are aware that the real meaning of the word _heresy_, after its Greek origin (_hairesis_), means only _opinion_. Heresy consists in the pretensions to explain Holy Scripture after one’s own private judgment or personal opinion instead of receiving the interpretation given to the sacred text by the authority of the Church. Heretics have existed from the time of the apostles. St. Paul, speaking in reference to them, recommends a course which, unfortunately, has not always been followed. “If,” he says, “any man obey not our word, ... have no company with him; ... nevertheless, count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.” St. Peter, with his zealous ardour, exhorts the faithful, in language full of imagery, to be on their guard against the errors of the Gnostics (that is, the _savants_ or the _érudits_): he calls them “wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest.” He then sums up the foundation of their doctrine in a few energetic sentences:--“For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error.” We know that the Gnostics believed perfection to consist in science; they held that faith and virtuous living were only meant for the common people. Infatuated by their own learning, they even rejected the authority of Christ, whom they refused to recognise as their Lord and their God; for the doctrine concerning the angels they substituted a theory of divine emanations, and they recognised the ancient doctrine of the eternal antagonism between the good and the evil principle.

The Acts of the Apostles, in speaking of the success which attended the preaching of Philip the deacon to the inhabitants of Samaria, relate that there was in that city a magician named Simon, who exercised so great an influence over the people that they all took heed of what he said and called him “the great power of God.” But the miracles worked by Philip had greater influence than the sorceries of Simon, and the people came in crowds to be baptized, Simon himself becoming a disciple of Philip.

The remainder of the story told us in the Acts of the Apostles reveals the origin of a word which appears too often in the religious history of the Middle Ages for us to let slip the opportunity of here explaining it by a fact which, moreover, helps to show how it happened that Simon fell from sincere Christianity into heresy. The apostles at that time residing in Jerusalem, having heard of the conversion of Samaria, they came to lay hands upon--that is to say confirm--the newly baptized; and the latter, when they received the Holy Ghost, were visible partakers of His marvellous gifts, which were general in the primitive Church. The Scripture says, “And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, saying, Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost. But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.... Repent, therefore, of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.... Then answered Simon, and said, Pray ye to the Lord for me, that none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me.” It is because _Simon_ was the first who attempted to buy for money a spiritual power that his crime was called _simony_, and that the epithet of _simonist_ was applied to all who purchased ecclesiastical cures.

The repentance of Simon the heretic did not last long, for an author of the third century, whose account is confirmed by a passage in Suetonius, tells us that this neophyte having returned to his practice of magic, and being jealous of the influence which the apostles had acquired by their miracles, boasted that he would raise himself into the air in the presence of the emperor and the people. In order to humiliate St. Peter, who was in Rome at that time, he insisted that the apostle should be present to witness this triumph of his magical art. At first his endeavours seemed as if about to succeed--he was lifted high into the air amidst the applause of the crowd; but Peter invoked the aid of his Divine Master to confound the spirit of evil, and at his prayer the magician, suddenly abandoned by the demon who had been lending him his aid, fell to the ground and broke his leg so near to the spot where Nero was sitting, that, to quote Suetonius, the blood spurted on to the emperor’s mantle.

Amongst the heresiarchs of the first century must also be mentioned Cerinthus the Jew, who had become a Christian, but who was looked upon by the apostles as the corrupter of the religion of Jesus Christ. He taught, in fact, that Jesus was not the Son of God, and that Christ, coming down from heaven in the form of a dove, was only incorporated in him after his baptism in the waters of Jordan. Ebion, a disciple of Cerinthus, also denied the divinity of Christ, and was the founder of the sect of the Ebionites. Nicholas the deacon, in his attempt to make the law of the Gospel fit in with heathen customs, gave birth to the heresy of the Nicolaitans, who were afterwards merged in the Gnostics. This latter sect, to which we have already alluded, developed enormously in the second century; and its doctrine, as well as that of Manichæus, the originator of Manichæism--that redoubtable heresy which sprung from the admixture of the ancient religions of India with Christianity--constituted the basis of nearly all the heresies of the Middle Ages.

The schools of philosophy of Byzantium, Antioch, and Alexandria pursued their career of scepticism and sacrilegious discussion concerning the divinity of Jesus Christ during the second and third centuries. After throwing doubt upon the divine essence of the three persons of the Trinity, others still more daring, such as Sabellius and Praxeas, attempted to show that these three persons in God were but three symbolic names given to the same substance. The Council of Alexandria (261) punished these culpable errors. Soon after, an Egyptian priest named Arius took them up and propagated them very widely, maintaining that Jesus Christ was a created being, perfect no doubt and almost like unto God, but not himself God. His doctrine also contained secret heresies which were condemned by the Œcumenical Council of Nice (325). Nevertheless this doctrine, known as Arianism, made great progress; it was adopted and supported by several emperors, it spread throughout Europe, and, in spite of the authority of councils, and the efforts of popes and bishops, it seemed destined to lay the foundation of a new Christianity in which the divinity of Christ was to find no place. But the most radical attack upon Christianity was undoubtedly the conspiracy of divergent sects under the leadership of the Emperor Julian (331–362), surnamed the Apostate because he abjured the Christian faith with the view of re-establishing paganism. His plan for arriving at this result was very skilfully conceived. Perceiving that it would be necessary to combine all the forces directed against the Church, he showed favour to the heresies and the schools of philosophy which, after obtaining a certain notoriety under Plotinus and Porphyrius, had lapsed into the ridiculous fancies of evocations and of demonology. But, under the protection of the emperor, matters assumed a different aspect, as is pointed out by M. Jules Simon in his “Histoire de l’Ecole d’Alexandrie.” This school, “humiliated by the triumphs of Christianity, reduced to silence and obscurity, without any fixed purpose, devoid of credit and influence, all at once took up a fresh attitude at the accession of Julian, and attempted to employ the sovereign power, with which one of its followers was clothed, for extinguishing Christianity.” The struggle was a terrible one, and the Church seemed to have lost all human means of defence. Her children implored for help from on high, and the premature death of Julian was attributed to the divine intervention. Ecclesiastical writers relate that St. Basilius the Great, while praying God to protect his Church against the persecutor, was transported in a dream: he saw Christ in heaven and heard him say to St. Mercurius (the martyr of Cesarea, in Cappadocia), “Go and smite the enemy of those who believe in me.” The holy martyr at once sped on his mission, and, returning in a short space of time, said to his Divine Master, “Your orders are executed, Julian is no more.” St. Basilius had this vision on the night of the emperor’s death. Several writers assert that the emperor, knowing whence came the blow which was to prove fatal to him, collected in the palm of his hand the blood which issued from the wound, and scattering it towards the heavens, exclaimed, “Thou hast vanquished, Galilean.” These stories, popularised by the Byzantine art (Fig. 308), testify to the importance attached by the Christians to the struggle in which they were engaged with Julian.

The fathers of the Church endeavoured to oppose to the schools of philosophy, which had done so much harm to religion, purely ecclesiastical schools, for the teaching of the faithful and in order to protect them from the seductions of heretical learning. The school of Edessa was the most flourishing of these Eastern schools during the third and fourth centuries.

The part taken by the emperors themselves in the dogmatic disputes of the Christians, and the notoriety acquired by the rhetoricians who attacked or defended the truth, had made a number of vain nonentities rival each other in extravagance and recklessness in their endeavours to become celebrated: they tried to attract public notice by an excess of zeal against the heretics, by the austerity of their habits, by some eccentric practice, or by the rashness of their attacks against the discipline of the Church, notably against the worship paid to the Virgin. Such were Coluthus, Aetius, Bonosus, Helvidius, Jovinian, the Barefooted Friars, the Messalians, the Priscillianists, &c. Civil dissensions broke out and blood was shed, and the Court of Byzantium felt, through the great officers of the empire--and especially through the women, who took a passionate interest in these abstractions of dogma--the effect of every religious collision.

During the fourth century Arianism, which only saw in the Word a superior being created to intervene between God and man, was the prevailing heresy. The fifth century was agitated by the Pelagians, disciples of Pelagius, a native of Great Britain. This man, who was wanting neither in talent nor in ability, endeavoured to promulgate his doctrine, based upon the negation of original sin; he maintained that _man_ could observe the commandments of God and work out his own salvation without the supernatural aid of divine grace--this was a virtual denial of Christ’s word, “Without me ye can do nothing.” Celestius, one of his followers, promulgated this heresy in Africa, where it was eloquently combated by St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippona. The council of Carthage (415) condemned it, and, upon the demand of the Fathers there present, Pope Innocent I. issued his anathema against Pelagius and his adherents. It was then that St. Augustine pronounced the celebrated sentence, “Rome has spoken, the judgment of the African bishops is confirmed by letters from the pope, the cause is at an end--pray God that the error may be also!” (_Roma locuta est, causa finita est_). But the leader of the sect wrote to Zosimus, Innocent’s successor, a respectful letter of justification, and, his envoy Celestius having presented to the new pope an insidious profession of faith, by which he undertook to condemn anything which should be reprobated by the Holy See, Zosimus intervened with the African bishops on behalf of Pelagius, whom he sincerely believed to be attached to the true faith. Those bishops represented to the pontiff that his credulity had been imposed upon, and that the heretic, before receiving absolution, ought to be made to abjure his errors formally and explicitly. The pope then saw the trickery which had been attempted, and again condemned Pelagius and his followers. The latter appealed to the Council, but St. Augustine proved that the heresy imputed to them had been fully inquired into by the African bishops and irrevocably condemned by the Holy See, and that all that remained to be done was to put it down. The Emperor Honorius, considering the political troubles which were engendered, in the East more especially, by religious dissensions, decreed that whoever should persist in upholding the errors of Pelagianism should be punished with exile.

The heresy did not, however, altogether disappear, but underwent a modification of form, and the semi-Pelagians, whose doctrine was formally expounded by Cassianus the monk, while admitting original sin, maintained that God had given to man the innate and natural power of walking in the way of salvation, of believing and of freeing himself from the fetters of sin without the help of divine grace. This was appropriating the religious to the philosophical notion of free-will. These abstract questions may to us seem very subtle, but in these early centuries they were the great questions which occupied the attention of society. A new heretic, Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, created a vast sensation throughout Christianity by maintaining that Jesus Christ embodied two distinct persons. Hitherto all Christians had believed as the Church taught them, that the divine and the human nature of Jesus Christ belonged to one person--the Word, the second person of the Trinity. Nestorius attacked this fundamental dogma indirectly, declaring that the Virgin should be called the _Mother of Christ_, but not the _Mother of God_. This doctrine, implying that in Christ there were two distinct persons, was so repulsive to the faithful that, when the bishop expounded it to them for the first time, they immediately left the church for fear of seeming to approve this new heresy. The Emperor Theodosius the younger, seeing what disturbance the preaching of Nestorius was giving rise to in Constantinople, assembled a council at Ephesus, which was presided over by St. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, on behalf of the pope. The heresiarch refused to appear, and his doctrine was examined, discussed, and condemned.

The people of Ephesus gave marked evidence of their satisfaction when they found that the title of Mother of God was confirmed to the Virgin. But the ambassador of Theodosius, a devoted ally of Nestorius, intercepted the despatch of the proceedings of the Council, and sent to Constantinople a garbled account. The approaches to the imperial palace were so well guarded, that there seemed to be little hope of acquainting the emperor with what had really taken place, until a deputy of the council resorted to the ruse of disguising himself as a beggar and conveying the true written report in the hollow of his staff. Theodosius then shut up Nestorius in a monastery at Antioch, and, as he continued to promulgate his dogma, exiled him to Egypt.

A zealous monk, Eutyches, superior of a monastery near Constantinople, while combating the heresy of Nestorius, fell into the opposite error, alike contrary to orthodox teaching. Instead of respecting the letter of the dogma, he in his turn became a schismatic, as he maintained that there was only one nature in Jesus Christ--the divine; that this had absorbed the human nature as the ocean absorbs a drop of water. Condemned at Constantinople, he appealed from the sentence to another council assembled at Ephesus, the decrees of which were confirmed by Theodosius II. At the accession of Justinian, the orthodox religion regained all its authority; Eutychianism no longer dared to attack it, but Arianism extended even into Gaul in the track of the victorious armies of Theodoric, Egidius, Odoacer, Totila, and the long-haired kings.

The reign of Leo the Isaurian opened up fresh opportunities for error. The sacred images, which had been held in veneration from the earliest ages, became a cause of dispute in the East, where they were disapproved of by Mahomet and forbidden by the Koran. It was alleged that the figurative representation of human beings was subjected to certain astral and diabolical influences, and that it was contrary to religion, not to say sacrilegious, thus to disturb the quiet repose of their souls. Leo the Isaurian, who had imbibed this idea, which was, moreover, taught in oriental magic, issued against all kinds of images the celebrated edict which was excommunicated by the pope, and which convulsed the whole Eastern world. Luitprand, King of the Lombards, the Venetians, Charles Martel and his Franks, were summoned to the aid of the Eternal City, menaced by the forces of the empire, which was determined to impose the condemnation of images upon the Western Church. Charles Martel, by his overthrow of the victorious Saracens on the plains of Poitiers (732), rendered a service of inestimable value to the Christian religion as well as to France, for Islamism was upon the point of subjugating all Christian Europe.

During the reign of the Empress Irene, the second Council of Nice had re-established the worship of images (787), but, until the accession of the Empress Theodora, who enforced the decisions of the Council, the Iconoclasts upon the one side, and the Manicheans upon the other, continued to disturb the East as well as the various provinces of Western and Southern Europe. In this great civil war a hundred thousand persons perished; and those who succeeded in escaping took refuge in the solitude of remote valleys and inaccessible mountains, where they entrenched themselves and incessantly made inroads upon and ravaged the territory of the empire. The separation of the Greek and the Latin Churches, prepared if not actually affected under the Emperor Bardas (854-866), served to further the spread of heresy. No new sect arose in the eleventh century, but schisms broke out in the Church, some due to individual pride and ambition, others emanating from the dialectics of Aristotle, from the strange abuse of syllogism, and the substitution of reasoning for faith. The mysteries were radically changed by the endeavours to reconcile them with ordinary ideas, to interpret and accommodate them to the vulgar understanding. Bérenger (tenth century), in endeavouring to explain the dogma of the eucharist, himself fell into heresy, and Roscelin, the chief of the Nominalists (eleventh century), in his efforts to clear up the mystery of the Trinity, was led to assert that it was but a name which did not correspond with any actual fact. The Manicheans had made their way into Europe; they affected a love of poverty and humble conduct which predisposed people in their favour and won them adherents. Many of them were burnt at the stake, but the sect was not crushed out, often reappearing in different cities of Europe under various names, now in one shape and now in another.

The civil tribunals also condemned to be burnt the disciples of a theologian named Amaury of Paris, who promulgated his dogma during the reign of Philip Augustus (Fig. 309). He taught that God is the first cause, and that the law of Jesus Christ was to terminate in the year 1200, and to make way for the law of the Holy Ghost, which would sanctify men without any external act; by his denial of the resurrection of the dead and of hell, he destroyed the essential basis of morality. This doctrine, as convenient as it was dangerous, found many warm partisans.

Abelard, the most talented dialectician of his day, gifted with wonderful learning, and armed with a rational theology which he made intelligible, assigned a different origin and a different mode of action to each of the three persons of the Trinity. The divines at once prepared to combat his views, and St. Bernard constituted himself their champion. Abelard, when condemned, repented, and, on his knees before his judges, burnt the books which contained his heretical theories; he showed himself, indeed, even a greater man by this expiatory act than he had ever done by the brilliancy of his teaching. Bishop Gilbert de la Porrée, a scholastic heresiarch like Abelard, also met a terrible antagonist in the gifted Abbot of Clairvaux, and, bowing his head, he confessed his guilt, leaving his disciples to maintain that the attributes of God ought to be considered as distinct from his essence. Arnold of Brescia attacked the temporal power, upon the ground that the Church should be stripped of her property, that the wallet of St. Peter should be given back to the pope, and the ancient Roman Republic proclaimed in the pontifical city. Valdo went still further; he advised the Christians to renounce all kinds of property, in order to render their lives more spiritual. The Albigenses (Figs. 310 and 311) and the Waldenses, who were Manicheans under another name, eventually embodied in themselves all the heresies which, towards the close of the twelfth century, had spread over Europe and chiefly throughout the south of France. In the following chapter (“The Inquisition”), the account of the crusade preached against them is related at length. From every quarter of Christendom, but chiefly from Germany, Flanders, and France, crusaders were enlisted beneath the banner of the faith.

This campaign was begun in 1196. The council which condemned the new Manichean heresy met at Montpellier in December of that year, and the first effect of the repressive measures which it very promptly employed was to drive back into the Cevennes, the Alps, and the Vosges, and towards the Rhône, the Moselle, and the Rhine, a host of heretics who endeavoured to teach publicly in the free towns of Germany.

An excess of devotion, which had its origin in the wish to avert the wrath of God, gave birth in Italy quite spontaneously to the sect known as the Flagellants. This strange infatuation for scourging began at Perugia, whence it passed to Rome and afterwards to Germany and Poland. The nobles, the elders, the people of all classes, the poor and even the children, traversed the streets of the towns and the country districts with bare shoulders, scourging themselves mercilessly with whips having leathern thongs (Fig. 312). These fanatics who travelled through all Europe, firmly believed that an angel had brought a missive from Jesus Christ, which declared that there was only one way for a Christian to obtain pardon for his sins, viz. to leave his native country and scourge himself for thirty-three consecutive days, in commemoration of the thirty-three years which Christ had passed upon earth. The Apostolicals, the Dulcinists, the Beghards, the Flagellants, the Spiritual Brothers, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Turlupins, &c., adopted these superstitious ideas, and constituted distinct sects which were condemned by the Church as heretical. The sectaries appealed from the sentence: the civil tribunals backed up the ecclesiastical ones; the faggots were kindled and a vast number of heretics perished; many, however, escaped, and, joining the Albigenses, they formed the sect of the Lollards. The Englishman Wickliff, whose heresy had pervaded all Britain (1368–1384), openly attacked the Court of Rome, the upper clergy, the liturgy, and the sacraments, with an audacity all the greater because he felt that he had the support of the people at large and of several sovereigns. The University of Oxford made a critical examination of Wickliff’s books, and found them to contain two hundred and seventy-eight reprehensible propositions, which it submitted for censure to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. After he had declaimed against the Church, its customs and its institutions, Wickliff attacked the very foundations of civil society, by his doctrine that, to possess any right or authority upon earth, it was necessary to be in a state of grace. Consequently kings, nobles, and the landowners were to lose their political and domanial rights, since they were in a state of mortal sin, just as the pope, the bishops, and the priests through sin were to lose their spiritual powers. He moreover denied the existence of free-will; and his allegation that everything which man did he was necessarily obliged to do, implied that all punishment was unjust, for no one is guilty who acts under compulsion. Lastly, he only recognised the existence of God to make Him responsible for evil, maintaining that God also is moved by an invincible necessity, that He looks with approval on those who sin, that He even constrains men to commit sin; “so that,” as Bossuet remarks, “the religion of this so-called Reformer was worse than atheism.” It is true that with Wickliff God counted for little, for, according to his system, “every creature is God, everything is God.” It is easy to understand the effect of such doctrines as these upon the masses; the religious dispute was transformed into a social question. The followers of Wickliff, when condemned, refused to bow to the decisions of the ecclesiastical authority. Their books were burnt, their apostles were sent to the stake, while others were imprisoned or exiled. But, in spite of this rigorous treatment, Wickliff’s doctrines made a deep impression in England, obtained shortly afterwards the protection of the House of Commons, and disposed men’s minds to bend beneath the despotic will of Henry VIII.

The staunchest Catholic writers admit that the clergy are themselves responsible for the triumph of the heretics. Moeller says--“The relaxation of ecclesiastical discipline amongst the clergy and that in a great many religious communities, from which the pontifical court itself was not always exempt, gave the sectaries of the sixteenth century a pretext for their rebellion against the Church, its doctrines, its hierarchy, and its institutions. To this moral decadence of a great part of the clergy must further be added the profound ignorance of the upper clergy; and even those who cultivated literature and science confined themselves almost exclusively to the study of Greek and Latin literature, which directed the whole course of scientific research from the fifteenth century downwards. Many pagan ideas had pervaded men’s minds, and had contributed to create a feeling of contempt both for Christianity and for that beautiful Christian literature which had shed a lustre on the Church from the very earliest times. This condition of the clergy had a baneful influence upon the mass of the people, who lived in utter ignorance of religion, and who had lost their attachment to the Church and all respect for its pastors.”

This religious indifference of the clergy and of the people explains the success, not only of the heresiarchs who presented themselves as reformers of manners and discipline, but even of the sects held in the lowest esteem, the sorcerers, for instance. The facts are too numerous and too well-authenticated to admit of any doubt upon this head. There existed throughout all Europe, in the Middle Ages, numerous sects of sorcerers and witches who in all seriousness professed to give themselves over to the devil in exchange for the gift of magic power. The Spanish Inquisition was not the only body which sent them to the stake, after having submitted them to trial and received the confession of their misdeeds; the French tribunals pronounced sentence of death in similar cases when the accused, after long and minute interrogatories, but without being put to the torture, made a confession of their satanic orgies known by the name of _sabbat_ (Fig. 314). This kind of heresy eluded all the steps taken by the civil and the religious powers to put it down. The “Histoire des Procès de Sorcellerie,” by Soldam, tells us that, even at the close of the sixteenth century, from 1590 to 1594, thirty-five witches were condemned to be burnt, out of a total population of six thousand, in the small Protestant town of Nordling, in Germany. The enormities of the sect of sorcerers attest, no doubt, a profound depravation of morals, but they contained no germ of social revolution; such, however, was not the case with the theories expounded by the great heresiarchs.