A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume ILea, Henry Charles
History
A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume I
Lea, Henry Charles
Inquisition -- History
It is a noteworthy fact, presaging the new form which modern
civilization and enlightenment were to assume, that the heresies which
were to shake the Church to its foundations were no longer, as of old,
mere speculative subtleties propounded by learned theologians and
prelates in the gradual evolution of Christian doctrine. We have not to
deal with men like Arius or Priscillian, or Nestorius or Eutyches,
scholars and prelates who filled the Church with the disputatious
wrangles of their learning. Hierarchical organization was too perfect,
and theological dogma too thoroughly petrified, to admit of this; and
the occasional deviations, real or assumed, of the schoolmen from
orthodoxy, as in the case of Berenger of Tours, of Abelard, of Gilbert
de la Porée, of Peter Lombard, of Folkmar von Trieffenstein, were
readily suppressed by the machinery of the establishment. Nor have we,
for the most part, to deal with the governing classes, for the alliance
between Church and State to keep the people in subjection had been
handed down from the Roman Empire, and however much monarchs like John
of England or Frederic II. had to complain of ecclesiastical
pretensions, they never dared to loosen the foundations on which rested
their own prerogatives. As a rule, heresy had to be thoroughly
disseminated among the people before those of gentle blood would meddle
with it, as we shall see in Languedoc and Lombardy. The blows which
brought real danger to the hierarchy came from obscure men, laboring
among the poor and oppressed, who, in their misery and degradation, felt
that the Church had failed in its mission, whether through the
worldliness of its ministers or through defects in its doctrine. Among
these lost sheep of Israel, like the Goim, whom, neglected and despised
by the rabbis, it was Christ's mission to bring into the fold, they
found ready and eager listeners, and the heresies which they taught
divide themselves naturally into two classes. On the one hand we have
sectaries holding fast to all the essentials of Christianity, with
antisacerdotalism as their mainspring, and on the other hand we have
Manichæans.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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