The Massacre of the Albigenses
BY modern history we mean a record of past events which is based upon a larger knowledge than the world ever had before and, above all, a critical use of the original documents. It is a science, and it is just as drastically opposed to religion as is the science of evolution. It entirely eliminates the supernatural from the chronicle of man's development; it shows that in the events in which we should most confidently expect the intervention of God, if there were a God -- in human events -- there is not the faintest trace of anything but man's own virtues and frailties: and it completely shatters the version of the human epic which Christianity had imposed upon the world.
But modern history has not excited the rancor and hostility of theologians in the same way as modern science. The reason is simple, and it is not wholly creditable to historians. Those human events which the historian studies are in very large part religious. The scientist may ignore theology when he describes his nebulae or his dinosaurs, his orchids or his diatoms. But religions and churches and all the phenomena of their life for five or six thousand years are a part, and a very important part, of the material of history. And a deadly conflict has been avoided only by the stratagem of distinguishing between sacred and profane history.
Historians do not now, of course, observe this distinction as rigorously as they were compelled to do in the days of Bossuet. Voltaire and Gibbon have not lived in vain. We have, in fact, a special branch of science and history combined -- hierology, or the science of comparative religions -- which seems to ignore the distinction; and the masters of ancient history talk to us about the religions of the Egyptians and Babylonians as freely as they discuss the costumes or customs of the old civilizations.
But observe how cautious, how diplomatic, they become the moment they must state something which contradicts the Old Testament or the current Christian version of history! As to Christ and the cardinal events of European history which depend vitally upon religion, how many historians dare even touch them? They are "sacred history." At the most there is a formal recognition of the convention that Christ was "the most sublime moralist" that ever appeared; that the stream of history somehow changed its color after the "acceptance" (you never read of the compulsory enforcement) of Christianity; and that everything sinister in the ages of faith must be generously interpreted as the very natural conduct of a people quite different from ourselves.
Against these timid conventions of history, wherever religion is concerned, these pages are protesting. They show that the common belief that civilizations were vicious and stupid and brutal before Christ is founded upon a lie. They prove that the enforcement of Christianity was followed by such a clotted and sordid mass of coarseness and brutality as had never been known before in civilized history. It is no less mythical to suppose that Europe clung to Christianity until modern times; even these brutalized ancestors of ours, the moment they settled in more or less orderly civilizations, rebelled against the doctrines of the Church and the usurped authority of its corrupt clergy and had to be bludgeoned into submission.
The year 1000 was a very real turning point in the history of Europe. My friend, Professor Robinson, the very able historian of Columbia University, does not agree with me that there was a widespread expectation of the end of the world in the year 1000, but I once made some research in the chronicles of the time and I found much evidence of that expectation. At all events, the Iron Age, the tenth century, the low-water of civilization was ending. Rome and the Papacy, it is true, continued in their squalid degradation for another fifty years, but no one who knows history regards Rome as the center of light in Europe at any time after it ceased to be pagan. I do not forget its artistic distinction during the Renaissance because it was then pagan once more for a season.
Enlightenment came into Europe along two paths which were very far away from Rome. One was the road leading from the east along the valley of the Danube, The other was a strangely circuitous route, starting in the east, crossing the whole of north Africa and the Straits of Gibraltar, entering Christian Europe by the Pyreness and the south of France.
It must suffice here to say that during the darkest age of Christendom, the tenth century, there was a brilliant and tolerant Mohammedan civilization in Spain, and that rays of its wonderful culture were passing the Pyrenees to enlighten the barbarians of Europe. The one scholar of the tenth century, Pope Silvester II (Gerbert), belonged to the south of France and learned his science in Spain; and he lasted four years as Pope and died in an odor of sulphur. It was, naturally, in the south of France that the Moors had most influence. They even occupied it for a time.
Meantime the second stream was crossing Europe and reaching the south of France and the north of Italy. Heresy -- revolt against the Christian religion -- had taken deep and strong root in the Armenian district of the Greek Empire while the Latin world was too utterly brutalized to think at all. This heresy was Paulicianism, a mixture of Gnostic and Manichaean and primitive Christian ideas. Although one priest-ridden empress of the ninth century had, as all historians admit, slaughtered no less than one hundred thousand of these rebels, an emperor of the tenth century found it necessary to transplant two hundred thousand of them to the desolate frontier of his empire, next to Bulgaria.
The heresy soon reappeared in Bulgaria in the sect of the Bogomiles ("Friends of God"), who would have won the entire nation and spread over Europe if the Church had not used its customary spiritual weapon: bloody persecution. As it was, the Bogomiles, a most earnest and ascetic sect, sent missionaries over Europe, and from the beginning of the eleventh century onward we find various shades of this semi-Manichaean religion -- (the true basis of witchcraft) appearing -- on the scaffold, of course -- in various parts of Europe.
It may be useful to point out the fascination of the Manichaean ideas which reappear in most of the European heresies. The fundamental idea was, as I said, that there were two great creative powers: one who created all that is good and one who was responsible for evil. It is usually said that the Persians believed in two supreme principles," but the evil principle (the creator of matter, darkness, the flesh, sin, etc.). was not actually equal to, though at present in deadly conflict with, Ahura Mazda, the real God; because in the end Ahura Mazda would destroy the material world and judge all men. But it was an enticing explanation of the origin and power of evil, and it removed from God, the pure spirit, the responsibility for matter and flesh. It was more reasonable than Christianity. It rejected the Old Testament and all its moral crudity, regarded Christ as a wonderful spirit (but not God), scorned the priest-created scheme of sacraments and the whole hierarchy, and loathed the consecrated immortality of most of the priests, monks, and nuns of Christendom.
It was, in all its shades, a rival religion to Christianity, and I say confidently that it would in some form have ousted Christianity if it had not been brutally and savagely murdered. You never even heard of it? Well, that gives you the value of the history of these things as it is usually written. A few of the new writers will talk to you very learnedly about the Priscillian heresy (also semi-Manichaean) in Spain, and the Arian (or Unitarian) heresy which was widely adopted by the barbarians. But the Priscillianists had vanished -- murdered, of course -- by the seventh century, and a little astute political bargaining had induced the Teutonic princes to adopt the Trinity (and large slices of Europe with it) and compel their people to do the same.
The story begins in the eleventh century. Christendom at large, or its Popes and bishops, were still, as a rule, too much interested in wine and women to bother about formulae, and too ignorant to understand them. But we pick significant bits out of the chronicles. In 1012 several "Manichaeans" are prosecuted in Germany. In 1017 thirteen canons and priests of the diocese of Orleans are convicted of Manichaeism and burned alive. In 1022 there are cases at Liege. In 1030 they bob up (and down) in Italy and Germany; in 1043 near Chalons in France; in 1052 again in Germany. In the early part of the twelfth century some "Poor Men of Christ" are burned in Germany.
In short, by the middle of the twelfth century Europe was seething and bubbling with heresy. The general name for the more important heretical sects, the Cathari, is the Greek word for "the Pure"; and it indicates the practical features in which all agreed. They regarded the Church as a corrupt human institution, generally scorned its sacraments, ritual, and hierarchy, despised its dissolute monks and nuns, and tried to get back to the pure teaching of Christ: voluntary poverty, strict chastity, brotherly love, and ascetic life.
Such were the Beguines and Beghards who, founded by a Belgian priest in the thirteenth century, spread a network of ascetic communities, more like the ancient Essenes and Therapeutae than the Christian monks all over Europe. They were severely persecuted, though their only heresy was that they did as Christ bade men do. Substantially the same were the Waldensians, the followers of Peter Waldo, of the same thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They called themselves the "Poor in Spirit," and literally obeyed every word of Christ: and so they were branded as heretics and burned in batches, sixty at one time being committed to the flames in Germany in 1211, and some being burned in Spain even earlier. The famous Flagellants of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries fairly come under the same general heading. The modern psychologist wastes his ingenuity upon them. The world and Church were so corrupt that they expected a speedy end of the world and they did penance for their sins and those of others. The Fratricelli, a detachment from the Franciscan Order whom the clerical corruption drove into heresy, belong to the same period, and were fiercely persecuted.
More important were the Lollards, the followers of J. Wyclif in England, and the Hussites of Bohemia. Wyclif's heresy -- he was at first supported by his university and the nobles -- was really a return to primitive Christianity; and it took such root in England that in the middle of the fourteenth century one-tenth of the nation, some historians estimate, were Lollards. It paid the usual penalty of being true to Christ.
Meantime, as the king of Bohemia married an English princess, the Lollard ideas passed to that country, then one of the most enlightened in Europe, and, by the preaching of John Hus, a very large part of the nation embraced and developed them. The Hussites scorned the corrupt priests, monks, and nuns, attacked clerical celibacy, confession, the eucharist, and the ritual -- in short, they were the nearest to Christ of all I have so far mentioned, and therefore the most deadly heretics. It took two hundred years of war and savage persecution to suppress them. At one time most of the nobles of Bohemia were Hussites.
But the name of Cathari, or Puritans, was particularly applied to various sects which united a zeal for primitive Christian morals with a tincture of the Manichaean philosophy. They were known as Patarenes in Italy, as Publicans in France and Belgium, and by other names in other countries. Their numbers were prodigious in the century which is precisely chosen as "the great Catholic century," the thirteenth century. Dante himself tells us how prevalent heresy, even radical skepticism, was in Italy in his day. Europe was in a fair way to desert Roman Christianity, and would probably have done so long ago but for that ghastly weapon of defense now devised by the Church, the Inquisition.
We need merely to glance at the story of the Albigensians to realize this. Albi, from which they take their name, was an important town in one of those lovely southern provinces of France which were to the country what southern California and Florida are to the United States. In these southern provinces the brilliant example of the Spanish Moors was known best, and during the eleventh century the heresy of the Bogomiles was imported into them by missionaries from Bulgaria or Bosnia.
In the Albigeois district the great majority of the population went over to the new religion. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the most famous preacher of the time, made a campaign there in 1147. He found the churches deserted and was unable to make any impression. The heresy spread over France, Belgium, western Germany, Spain, and north Italy, and the Papacy was thoroughly alarmed. One has only to read the reports sent to Rome, as given in the "Annales" of Cardinal Baronius. But the sequel will show that these Cathari numbered at least hundreds of thousands in France alone.
Pope after Pope angrily urged the secular powers to persecute them. Alexander III, in the Lateran Council of 1179, urged the use of force against them. To princes he gave the right to imprison offenders and -- a ghastly appeal to cupidity which Rome was now beginning to use -- to confiscate their property. To all who would "take up arms," as he said, against them he promised two years' remission of penance and even greater privileges. Briefly, the Cathari were burned or imprisoned in many places, but in the south of France the princes and nobles favored them and were proud of their industry and integrity in a corrupt world. In 1167 the head of the Paulician sect (the mother of the Bogomile sect, which was the mother of the Albigensian sect) went to Albi, held a great synod, consecrated five new bishops, and gave the religion a splendid public triumph.
This was the situation when, in 1198, Innocent III, the greatest of the Popes, donned the tiara. Some of my friends gently chide me because I will not, as historians generally do, speak amiably at least of such profoundly religious Popes as Gregory I, Gregory VII, and Innocent III. The Catholic would do well to understand that, when non-Catholic historical writers have a complimentary word for such Popes they strain the evidence in order to conciliate religious readers. For it is just these men who did European civilization, and therefore the American civilization which awaited its development, the most deadly injury.
For nine years Innocent had monk-preachers in the heretical provinces, urging the bishops and princes to persecute, but they were quite ineffective. His chief legate, Pierre de Castelnau, received instructions in 1207 to arrange a warlike campaign of the princes, and most of the smaller nobles agreed. It is necessary for the reader to bear in mind that in the thirteenth century war meant unlimited loot, and the Albigensian towns were amongst the most prosperous in Europe. An acrid spirit was created, and the Legate was murdered. Angyily proclaiming that Raymond, Count of Toulouse, was responsible -- Innocent in later life admitted there was no evidence, and it is in the highest degree improbable -- the "great" Pope sent out a ringing call to arms, and heavily threatened Christian princes and knights who did not obey it.
There was no need of threats. Imagine the president of the United States informing the gunmen of Chicago -- Christian knights in those days had no higher ethic -- that he permitted them to invade and sack Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Pasadena, and you have something of a parallel. It is said by a contemporary poet that twenty thousand knights and two hundred thousand afoot converged upon the Albigensians. They were led by the Abbot of Citeaux -- as bloody a priest as Torquemada -- and a seedy English-French adventurer, Simon de Montfort, whose purse was empty. The King of France was not in it -- at first, only because his terms to the Pope were exorbitant.
The magnitude of the "heresy" can be guessed when we learn that after two years of the most brutal carnage the Albigensians were still so strong that, when the Pope renewed the "crusade" in 1214, a fresh hundred thousand "pilgrims" had to be summoned. Innocent boasts that they took five hundred towns and castles from the heretics, and they generally butchered every man, woman and child in a town when they took it. Noble ladies with their daughters were thrown down wells, and large stones flung upon them. Knights were hanged in batches of eighty. When, at the first large town, soldiers asked how they could distinguish between heretics and orthodox, the Cistercian abbot thundered: "Kill them all, God will know his own," and they put to the sword the forty thousand surviving men, women and children. Modern Catholic writers merely quibble when they dispute these things. It is the Catholics of the time who tell us.
The Pope's behavior during these horrible years was revolting. I have fully described his twists and turns in my "Crises in the History of the Papacy" (based upon the Pope's own letters), and must here be brief. Raymond of Toulouse, to spare his people, submitted before the crusade began, although the Pope expressly told his legates ("Letters," xi, 232) to "deceive him and pass to the extirpation of the other heretics." His brutal treatment of Raymond, without any trial, earned the censure even of the king of France. He stopped the crusade after two years of almost unparalleled butchery, then yielded to the fanaticism of the monks and the greed of the soldiers, and reopened it. He was plainly sickened by the slaughter and the vile passions of his instruments, but he made vast material profit for the Papacy out of the monumental crime, and he left the world, which he soon quitted, a gift as deadly and revolting as his massacre the foundation-stone of the Inquisition.
The Origin of the Inquisition
Before I trace the development of the specific tribunal which we call the Inquisition, it is well to give the reader a word of caution about the literature of these matters. No historian in the world, even Catholic, questions that the Pope summoned this "crusade" and nearly annihilated one of the finest bodies of men and women of the time. But ... Were there really forty thousand killed at Biziers, or was it only ten thousand men, women, and children (especially women and children) who had their throats cut when the fighting was over? And did not the Albigensians hold opinions which were socially very mischievous? And so on.
Anybody who would ask me to respect the Paulists and Jesuits who trim the edges of a great crime in this fashion, and throw dust in the eyes of their followers, asks in vain. But a more serious fact is that these Catholic writers are now worming their way into works to which the general public turns innocently for information, not propaganda (or lies). Let me give two instances. The "New International Encyclopedia" is the most accessible work of general reference in America, and is generally good. But the article on "The Inquisition" has quite obviously been written by a Roman Catholic, who gives neither his name nor his initials. It is unreliable from beginning to end, and is, in spite of its Jesuitical form, largely untruthful.
Oh, you say, people may be confined to that in Dayton, but I consult an authoritative work like the learned "Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics." This is, in fact, one of the most scholarly of recent encyclopedias. But it has no article at all on witchcraft, and its article on the Inquisition is actually written by a well-known Roman Catholic apologist, Canon Vacandard! But he is quite a scholar, you may say. And I reply that there is not a wholly unbiased Catholic scholar in the world, and that Vacandard's article is a disgrace to the Encyclopedia. Let me quote a passage which will serve as text for this section. The canon begins by placidly announcing that the Spanish Inquisition is outside his scope; which is like writing "Hamlet" without the ghost, Hamlet, the King, and Ophelia. The Spanish horror is not treated elsewhere in the Encyclopedia. Then he says:
From the twelfth century onward the repression of heresy was the great business of Church and State. The distress caused, particularly in the north of Italy and the south of France, by the Cathari or Manichaeans, whose doctrine wrought destruction to society as well as to faith, appalled the leaders of Christianity. On several occasions, in various places, people and rulers at first sought justice in summary conviction and execution; culprits were either outlawed or put to death. The Church for a long time opposed these rigorous measures. ... The death-penalty was never included in any system of repressions.
That passage, occurring in one of the most scholarly encyclopedias of recent times, is one of the basest and meanest that ever came from the pen of an apologist. The death-penalty never included! Why it was, at the dictation of Christian bishops, made a part of European law by the Christian emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries, and for many it remained the law. I have just given hundreds of instances in the twelfth century.
Then we are asked to believe that "the people and rulers" did these horrible things, while the gentle Church tried to restrain them. That is an insult to our intelligence. No ruler or people ever moved against heretics without the impulsion of the Church, and at the period we are discussing the Papacy complained every decade that it could not get rulers to apply its own "rigorous measures": exile, infamy, confiscation, and destruction of the heretics home. Innocent III, who, as we shall see in a moment, demanded the death-sentence, launched his ghastly crusade of murder and theft precisely because he could not get "people and rulers" to proceed otherwise.
And the meanest thing of all is that Canon Vacandard, and most of your modern Catholic apologists, raise over the bones of those hundreds of thousands of murdered men, women, and children the smug and lying inscription that they were "dangerous to society." How? You will smile when you hear: like Christ, they advocated voluntary poverty and virginity! We know their ideas only from bitter enemies, and this seems to be the rock of offense.
Yes, but how could society persist if there were no private property, no soldiers (they opposed war), no procreation of children. And the answer again is simple: these counsels of Christ were (exactly as the modern Catholic theologian says) for the elect few, the "perfect," as the Albigensians called them, and the great body of the "believers" could own what property they liked, marry when they liked, and bear arms when necessary. They were, as Professor Bass Mullinger says in an article in the same Encyclopedia, men of "simple blameless life," and were not responsible for the brawls about the churches. Rome murdered a few hundred thousand real followers of Christ because they were not Christians.
In the "Catholic Encyclopedia" we expect anything, and I will notice only one remark of Professor Weber, who writes on the Albigensians. They were, he says, "offended by the excessive outward splendor of Catholic preachers." That is really rich. Let Professor Weber look up the letter (Migne edition, vii, 75) which Pope Innocent wrote in 1204 to his Legate. It is a scorching exposure of the general clerical immorality which Professor Weber regards, apparently, as "outward splendor." Innocent talks of the concubines (he uses a word which the modern police would not let me translate literally) of the priests and the monks everywhere, and says that their bishops can hunt and gamble, but are "dumb dogs that cannot even bark."
Let us return to the facts; though I trust the reader perceives the importance of noting here and there the trickery by which apologists divert the minds of the faithful from the facts.
I have given the early stages of the evolution of the Inquisition. Heresy was a crime in European law. Exactly, say some of the apologists; it was in those days thought to be a crime against the State and was punished accordingly. What miserable juggling with words! The Church made rulers and peoples regard it as a crime; and what was happening in the thirteenth century, the great age of heresy before the Reformation, shows this very clearly.
The Lateran Council of 1139 violently urged the secular powers to proceed against heresy; and they would not, to any extent. The Lateran Council of 1179 repeated the cry, pleading for the use of force and holding out tempting baits to those who murdered heretics. Pope Lucius II in 1184 made a new departure. He laid down the penalties as exile, confiscation, and infamy (loss of civil rights): threatened unwilling secular rulers with excommunication and interdict; and enacted that whereas under current law a bishop was to try a heretic in open court when a man was charged, the bishop must now seek out heretics. In Latin the search for a thing is an Inquisitio. Still very few secular rulers did more than shrug their shoulders. Heresy did not concern them.
Then came Innocent III, who had a perfect arsenal of anathemas, and who, when a prince ducked with a grin at the hurled anathema, set armies in motion and drenched the man's kingdom with blood (as Gregory VII had done). Innocent formulated the new principle of "persuasion" of heretics. There was a Papal seat at Viterbo, and the Pope was horrified to learn that not only the consuls (magistrates) of the town, but the chamberlain of his own were Cathari! He soon altered that, and he laid down this grim principle:
According to civil law criminals convicted of treason are punished with death and their goods are confiscated. With how much more reason then should they who offend Jesus, Son of the Lord God, by deserting their faith, be cut off from the Christian communion and stripped of their goods.
It is Canon Vacandard who gives us that quotation: a perfectly clear demand that heretics shall be put to death! It was, therefore, not "people and rulers," but the great Pope, who, when there seemed to be some doubt amongst the jurists how far the old law against heresy was still in force, demanded death. St. Bloody would not be a bad title for Innocent III, "the greatest of the Popes."
infidels.org
CON'T... |
