Mediæval Heresy & the InquisitionTurberville, Arthur Stanley
History
Mediæval Heresy & the Inquisition
Turberville, Arthur Stanley
Heresy; Inquisition; Sects, Medieval
It is most important to remember that the scholastic philosophers were
in all cases clerics, representative of, and not antagonistic to,
Catholic theology; that even the Averrhoïsts were also clerics, having
no desire to break with the Church. On the other hand, the freedom of
thought which the universities stood for and dialectic fostered, and
which the Church not only did not repress, but even encouraged, had
a tendency to produce heresy. Realism evolved pantheism; nominalism
unitarianism. The intellectual influences of university life brought
forth Gerson, D’Ailly and the other whole-hearted reformers who made
the great effort at revival of the Church from within which failed
at Constance and Basel; but it also brought forth Wycliffe and Hus,
whom those Councils condemned. It was never absolutely clear where
the dividing line between orthodoxy and heresy would rest. However
much they might be reconciled or confused, the ideals and methods of
theology and philosophy cannot be the same. The postulates of the one
are not those of the other; and the more the scientific spirit is
developed, the fewer the postulates of any sort that it is ready to
accept. The Averrhoïsts at least saw this, only saving their position
by the equivocation of the double truth.
Which was really the more dangerous to Catholic doctrine—the organized
heresies, as a rule ignorant, perverted, having the seeds of their
own destruction in their very rottenness, which the Church did
systematically persecute; or the philosophical speculations of the
universities, with their temptations to rationalism which the Church in
the main tolerated?[478] Each produced a force not wholly transient—a
force operative in the breaking up of the mediæval system. The first
was anti-sacerdotalism; the second a habit of independent thought and
criticism. It is true that the anti-sacerdotalism of Luther and the
secular spirit of Renaissance humanism, with its entire indifference
to religion, were the decisive factors in breaking up the fabric of
mediævalism, and the movements of Lutheranism and humanism were largely
new creations. Yet Luther owed much to Hus, and Hus everything to
Wycliffe, the scholastic, and the detached attitude of the Italian
humanist was only one step in advance of that of the Latin Averrhoïst.
Neither the wandering sectaries, in part suggesting, in part merely
articulating, an antisacerdotal sentiment, nor the philosophers with
their speculations concerning universals and the ultimate cause of
being, were without influence in bringing about the collapse of the
mediæval structure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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