CHAPTER IX

THE MONASTIC MOVEMENT AND THE TWELFTH CENTURY RENASCENCE[11]

Aspects of the Hildebrandine Movement—The new Religious Orders—Bruno and the Carthusians—The Beginnings of the Cistercians and Robert of Molême—The Charter of Charity—The Canons Regular—Norbert and Prémontré—The Military Orders—Influence of St. Bernard—The Speculative Revival—Beginnings of Scholasticism—Abelard and his influence—Abelard and Bernard—Popular Heresies—Peter de Bruys—The Poor Men of Lyons—The Albigenses—The Legal Revival—Irnerius and the Civil Law—Gratian and the Canon Law.

[Sidenote: Various aspects of the Hildebrandine movement.]

With all their importance, the Crusades were only one aspect of the great religious and intellectual movement that heralded the twelfth century throughout the length and breadth of Western Europe, and was as directly a result of the triumph of the Hildebrandine ideal as the new theories themselves were an emanation from the Cluniac revival. Beginning with the strenuous careers of Gregory VII. and Urban II., this new spirit at once began to work powerfully on Europe, and reached its height in the days of peace that succeeded the end of the Investiture Contest.

[Sidenote: The monastic revival.]

A monastic revival succeeded, as it preceded, the reformation of the Papacy. At first the movement was on the old lines, and Cluny still maintained its reputation, and increased its number of offshoots. But the ‘Congregation of Cluny’ was too unelastic to be capable of indefinite expansion, and its influence was perhaps widest felt in those houses which adopted its ideal without giving up their ancient Benedictine independence. [Sidenote: Hirschau.] Conspicuous among such was Hirschau, a convent situated on the north-eastern slopes of the Black Forest, in Swabia, where Abbot William introduced the rule of Cluny in 1077, and which immediately became a centre of monastic reformation in southern Germany, though the congregation of Hirschau never attained the organisation or permanence of that of Cluny.

[Sidenote: Cluny.]

The weak point of the Cluniac system was that everything depended upon the abbot. Under the unworthy Pontius (1109–1125), whom kinship to Paschal II. had brought to the headship of Cluny at an exceedingly early age, discipline declined, the old simplicity disappeared, and the abbot, whose virtues were those of a feudal noble rather than a true monk, wasted his energies in conflicts with the Bishop of Macon, who, in spite of papal exemptions, strove to reform the declining house as diocesan. But under the famous abbot, Peter the Venerable, Cluny again became a power in Europe, though its old influence was never restored. Younger houses, organised on newer lines, divided among themselves the reverence once felt for it, and even Peter of Cluny was overshadowed by Bernard of Clairvaux.

The times were still so stormy, and secular life so rough, that the impulse which drove pious minds into the cloister was as strong as ever. The feudal anarchy that still prevailed in France, perhaps continued to give that country the leading part, both in spreading hierarchical ideas and in bringing about further monastic revivals. [Sidenote: Further development of the congregational idea.] The great question for the new race of monastic reformers was how to keep up the spirit of the older rule while avoiding its dangers. Cluny had not quite solved the problem, though the congregational idea, the more disciplined austerity, and the admission of _conversi_ or lay brothers, were steps capable of wider development. How to avoid the wealth, pride, and idleness that came from success was a still harder problem. The importance of the new orders that arose in the end of the eleventh and the early years of the twelfth century depended upon the skill with which the founders answered these fundamental questions.

[Sidenote: Order of Grammont.]

The first new order was the order of Grammont. Its founder, St. Stephen, an Auvergnat noble, settled in 1076 with a few companions at Muret, north of Limoges, though after his death the house was removed to the bleak granitic plateau of the neighbouring Grammont. A large number of daughter houses grew up in Aquitaine, Anjou, and Normandy, all of which, after the Cluniac fashion, were subject to the prior of Grammont. St. Stephen’s wish was to follow no fixed definite system, but to be content with the Gospel rules of poverty, humility, and long-suffering, and his successors embodied this aspiration in a form of life which forbade the order to possess land, cattle, or churches, to exclude seculars from its services, and allowed it, if no alms came, to beg for sustenance. This was a remarkable anticipation of the chief characteristic of the mendicant orders of the thirteenth century, but it did not prevent the early decay of these disorderly idealists. A stern fixed rule was necessary to a mediæval monastery.

A happier fate attended St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians. A German from Cologne, Bruno, became scholasticus of the famous chapter school at Reims, where he numbered Urban II. among his disciples. [Sidenote: The Carthusian Order and St. Bruno.] Driven with disgust from Reims by the violence of Archbishop Manasses, he hid himself in a wild mountain valley near Grenoble in Dauphiny, the site of the still famous Grande Chartreuse, where he gathered round him a band of hermits living in separate cells. Bruno was called to Rome by his old pupil Urban II.; but the love of retirement soon took him to Calabria, where he founded another Charterhouse, and died in 1101. Charterhouses now grew up, though not very rapidly, all over Europe, and the order took its final shape in the statutes of 1258. The possession of land, forbidden by Bruno, was strictly limited, as were all other sources of wealth. Ruled by a general chapter, the order followed up still further the idea of the congregation. But the special characteristic of the Carthusians was the union of the hitherto separated cœnobitic and eremitic ideals. The Carthusian belonged to an order and convent, with its common church and other buildings; but instead of living without privacy in common dormitory and refectory, he lived in a separate cell a life of meditation, study, and silence, while the _conversi_ practised agriculture. The Carthusian life was novel; but the magnificent churches and buildings of the order show that it took a deep root. Better than many of the purely cœnobitic orders, the Carthusians maintained their purity with few traces of the inevitable decay that beset most monastic types when the enthusiasm of the founders had abated. Another order, that of Fontevrault, founded by the Breton, Robert of Arbrissel (1100), was distinguished by combining monasteries for men and women in one establishment after the primitive plan, and by making the abbess superior of the whole community, since Robert reverenced in her the representative of the Virgin. Outside France this order had no great importance.

The most important influence among the new orders undoubtedly fell to the Cistercians, who rose rapidly from humble beginnings to a unique position. In 1075 a monk named Robert founded a small convent at Molême in northern Burgundy, where he strove to carry out with absolute literalness and fidelity the rule of St. Benedict. [Sidenote: The Cistercian Order and Robert of Molême.] The monks found the austerities of their abbot so painful that they rebelled, and in 1098 Robert left Molême in despair, accompanied by the few zealots, conspicuous among whom was the Englishman Stephen or Harding. The little band settled down at Cîteaux, between Dijon and Châlon, a desolate spot which derived its name from the surrounding pools of standing water. There was founded the famous abbey, which was to give its name to a new departure in monastic history. At first the brethren lived in excessive poverty and isolation. But the fame of their holiness gradually brought them adherents, and from 1113, when the young Burgundian nobleman, Bernard of Fontaines, applied for admission with thirty of his kinsmen, the growth of Cîteaux was rapid. The monastery overflowed, and swarm after swarm of monks established daughter houses elsewhere. In 1115 Bernard himself, whose strong will and saintly character had won for him in two years a leading position, led one of these migrations to Clairvaux, of which house he became abbot. Stephen the Englishman was now abbot of Cîteaux, and showed a capacity for organisation which soon made the single poor monastery that he ruled the mother of a great order. In 1119 he obtained Calixtus II.’s approval for the famous ‘Charter of Charity,’ the constitution which he had devised for Cîteaux and its daughter houses. [Sidenote: Carta Caritatis, 1119.] The movement soon spread like wildfire, and hundreds of Cistercian monasteries were founded throughout Christendom.

The leading characteristics of the Cistercians marked the new order clearly off from its fellows. Starting from their first principle of absolute asceticism, they pushed the doctrine of self-renunciation as far as human capacity allowed. They rejected soft and costly garments, lived on the plainest and simplest food, and would not tolerate splendour even in their churches, where, instead of gold and silver crosses, they contented themselves with painted wood. The very vestments of their priests were of coarse stuff without gold, or silver, or costly embroidery. Their churches and monasteries were built as simply as was possible. Towers and belfries were rejected as useless luxuries. Choosing for their abode remote valleys and wildernesses far from the haunts of men, they carefully avoided the proximity to town-life, which was a stumbling-block in the way of the older orders. Even the cure of souls was prohibited as likely to lead the monks into the world and its sins, and to celebrate Masses for money was denounced as simony. Thus the old Benedictine rule was upheld, and the monk reminded that he was no clerk but a pious recluse, whose business was to save his own soul. For the occupation of the brethren labour was enjoined; and a large number of _conversi_ carried on the hard agricultural work that soon made the wilderness blossom like a garden, and filled with sheep the downs and deserts. It thus resulted that the Cistercians, despite their principles, had considerable influence in promoting the civilisation of the regions in which they settled. The interconnection of their houses made it easy for them to spread a tendency or an idea from land to land, as when they transmitted the first rudiments of Gothic architecture from its north French home to Italy.[12] While wealth and idleness were thus kept at bay, elaborate efforts were made to keep watch over backsliders. While the example of Cluny had led all the great monasteries to strive to get from the Pope exemption from episcopal authority, Cîteaux ostentatiously professed canonical obedience to the Bishop of Châlon, and every daughter house was founded with the consent of the diocesan, to whom its abbot submitted himself as a subject. Moreover, the constitution sketched in the ‘Carta Caritatis’ provided within the order itself means for perpetual visitation and reproof of weaker brethren, that was far more effective than episcopal control. Like the Cluniacs, the Cistercians formed a congregation over which the Abbot of Cîteaux exercised the powers of a king. But an elaborate series of checks on the abbot’s power imparted an aristocratic or popular element to the government of the new order. The abbots of the four first daughters of Cîteaux [La Ferté (founded 1113), Pontigny (1114), Clairvaux (1115), and Morimond (1115)], and the General Chapter of the abbots of the order, while liable to be visited and corrected by their superior, had the power of correcting, administering, and depriving the head of the order himself. The monasteries were to be visited yearly. Each new house was affiliated to the earlier one from which it had sprung, and the motherhouse exercised a special watchfulness over it. So different did the Cistercians feel themselves from other regulars that they significantly discarded the black garment of the Benedictines in favour of a coarse white dress, from which they got the name of the white monks. Their elaborate organisation gave them a corporate feeling and unity of purpose to which few other orders could aspire. They represent the last and most complete effort to give real effect to the ideal of St. Benedict, by enjoining an austerity even beyond that of Benedict, and by an elaborate organisation to which his rule for a single house was quite a stranger.

Other new orders started on a different purpose. Various hospital orders, which laid special stress on the care of the sick and suffering, were set up for those who sought salvation in good works for the world, rather than in isolation from human intercourse. But the great contribution of the twelfth century towards bridging over the great gulf between clerk and monk was the institution of the so-called Austin Canons, or Canons Regular. [Sidenote: The Canons Regular.] It was agreed that the higher life was the monastic life, and that the secular priest, possessing private property, living in his own house and immersed in worldly affairs, stood on a lower plane than the regular, but the cure of souls was left to the secular clergy, and it was no part of the Hildebrandine ideal to neglect the pastoral work of the Church. Hence came a movement for reforming the secular clergy by making them live the life of a monk, while they carried on the duties of a clerk. It was impossible to enforce monastic life on the isolated and ignorant parish clergy, among whom it was hard work enough to enforce the new obligation of celibacy. The great colleges and cathedrals, served by many priests, offered an easier and more fruitful field for reform.

In the fifth century St. Augustine of Hippo had sought to establish a ‘monastery of clerks in the bishop’s household.’ In the days of the Carolingian reformation, Bishop Chrodegang of Metz had, in the spirit of the great African father, set up a rule of life, by which canons of a cathedral should live in common along with their bishops. In Hildebrand’s days Peter Damiani appealed to the example of St. Augustine as the ideal pattern for the cathedral clergy. Many chapters were reformed, and from the twelfth century onwards a sharp distinction was drawn between ‘regular canons,’ subject to a rule of life, and ‘secular canons’ of the old-fashioned sort. The great property and the political influence of the cathedral chapters made it hard to keep out of them members of the great territorial families, who looked on their prebends as sources of income, and who soon found a regular life too austere, so that few cathedrals became permanently served by them. But new churches of Regular Canons, where there were no secular traditions to interfere with the strictness of their rule, began to rise up all over Christendom. The general name of ‘Austin Canons’ suggested that the whole of the class strove to realise the old ideal of St. Augustine.

Various congregations of Regular Canons were now set up, conspicuous among which was that of the Victorines, whose abbey of St. Victor in Paris became, as we shall see, a prominent centre of conservative theology. But it was the establishment of the Premonstratensian congregation by Norbert of Xanten which gave the Austin Canons so great a position in Christendom that they almost rivalled the Cistercians in popularity. [Sidenote: Norbert and the Premonstratensians.] Norbert was a man of high family, who, after having held canonries of the old-fashioned sort at his native town and at Cologne, gave up the world and wandered as a preacher of penitence throughout Gaul, carefully avoiding intercourse with clerks or monks. In 1120 he settled in a desert place in the forest of Coucy, not far from Laon, where the bishop was his friend, and established there a house of Canons Regular, calling the spot Prémontré [Pratum Monstratum], in the belief that the site had been pointed out to him by an angel. The rule of Prémontré soon became famous, and its canons, clad in the white garment of the Cistercians, showed, by their energy and zeal, that clerks bound by a rule could live lives as holy as monks and do as much pastoral work as seculars. As an ‘order of clerks’ they exercised cure of souls, preached, taught, and heard confessions, and where possible made their churches parochial. In 1126 Norbert became Archbishop of Magdeburg. Finding the secular chapter utterly opposed to his policy, he planted a new colony of Premonstratensians hard by in the collegiate church of St. Mary (1129). Through his influence the Premonstratensians took the leading share in the civilising and Christianising of the Slavonic lands beyond the Elbe. In a later chapter we shall see how Norbert soon became the Emperor Lothair’s chief adviser and helper. Before his death his order had spread throughout Western Christendom. While Cîteaux had for its ambition the perfection of an ancient system, Prémontré made a new departure in religious history. Later regular orders have in nearly all cases striven to carry out the ideal of Norbert, of combining the religious life with that pastoral care, which to the older type of monasticism was but a subtle and attractive form of that worldliness which they were pledged to avoid. Within Norbert’s own lifetime the rule of the Austin Canons received a very great accession to its strength. [Sidenote: The Military Orders.] The military orders of the Latin East all lived when at peace the life, and took the vows of Austin Canons, while the older military orders of Spain [Calatrava, 1158, Alcantara, 1152] stood in close connection with the Cistercians. [See chapter xx.]

[Sidenote: Influence of the new orders on the life of the twelfth century.]

The great development of new orders had a many-sided influence on the character of the twelfth century. The monks and the Regular Canons were everywhere the best servants of the Papacy, while their international organisation was a new link between the national churches. The local jealousy of Roman influence, the aspirations of the bishops to an independent position, were energetically withstood by the enthusiasm of the young orders. Their asceticism and zeal for good works won for them the passionate attachment of the laity, and stimulated the sluggish seculars to greater activity and holiness. Their influence over public opinion was enormous. Not Louis of France or Conrad of Germany, but Norbert of Magdeburg and Bernard of Clairvaux, were the real leaders of European thought towards the middle of the twelfth century.

[Sidenote: St. Bernard.]

The practical authority of Norbert was mainly limited to Germany, but the influence of Bernard, confined to no class or country, proved something almost unique in the whole of Christian history. While Bernard lived the simple and self-denying life of a Cistercian in his Burgundian monastery, his activity took in the whole of Christendom. His correspondence was enormous, his works numerous and varied, and his authority hardly questioned. Through his influence the white robe of the Cistercians became familiar in the remotest valleys of Christendom, and the simple and struggling order, which he had joined but a few years before, attained a world-wide celebrity. Every sort of dispute and difference was brought before his tribunal. The rulers of Church and State flocked to the rude huts of Clairvaux as to an oracle. In his frequent journeys throughout France, the Rhineland and Italy, he was welcomed as Pope or Emperor was never welcomed. It was Bernard who drew up the rule for the Knights Templars, who ended the papal schism of 1130, and procured the recognition of Innocent II. as Pope. Innocent II. set the example of deference to his authority which subsequent Popes obsequiously continued, till at last a simple Cistercian became Pope Eugenius III., merely because he was the friend of Bernard. Bernard joined with Norbert in reprobating the rationalism that sprang from the teaching of an Abelard or Gilbert de la Porrée or Arnold of Brescia, and strove with sublime unreasonableness to put down the new questioning spirit. More open heresy, like that of Peter de Bruys, found in him an equally implacable foe. He upheld every doctrine of hierarchical power, and scrupled not to rebuke kings and emperors if they gainsaid him. He rekindled the crusading spirit when it seemed growing cool, and persuaded the two greatest princes of Christendom to set forth on the ill-fated Second Crusade. Stern, unyielding, rigid, dogmatic, blind to all things which in his view did not immediately promote the kingdom of God, Bernard represents the very triumph of the older monastic spirit with its completeness of self-renunciation, its terrible asceticism, its strange and almost inhuman virtues. Even in his own day, his spirit was not that of the whole Church, and bold voices were found to lament his obstinacy, his narrowness, his obscurantist hatred of secular learning. But with all his faults he is a great and noble figure, and as the supreme representative of a dying type, his career marks a transition to a newer, brighter and more progressive world, than the gloomy realm over which he had reigned so long as unquestioned sovereign. Yet it shows that the days of brute force were over, when a simple monk, whose singleness of purpose and zeal for righteousness were never so much as questioned, could rule with such astounding power over the minds of men. Even more than the authority of the great Popes, the power of Bernard supplies a striking justification of the universal monarchy of the Church of the twelfth century.

[Sidenote: The literary and speculative revival.]

From the religious revival there sprang a revived interest in literature and speculation. Monastic life was strictly conservative, and the old doctrine of Gregory the Great, that secular literature was unworthy the attention of a good Christian, was the position of St. Bernard himself. But the monks were at least interested in theology; and not even Bernard’s influence could prevent pious souls from seeking in nature and literature the justification of the ways of God to man. As the necessary preliminary of theological study, the ‘seven arts’ of the old-fashioned ‘Trivium’ and ‘Quadrivium’ had again to be cultivated. [Sidenote: Its relation to the monastic movement.] Monastic schools once more stimulated the intellectual interest of Europe. Many of the greater houses became centres of education. So far back as the tenth century monks like St. Bruno of Cologne and Gerbert of Aurillac had restored the Carolingian educational discipline, which had fallen into ruin in the dark days of barbarian invasion and internal anarchy. German cloisters, like St. Gallen and Reichenau, became famous for their learning. Cluny forged the theories that Hildebrand wielded. Lanfranc of Bec made the Norman monastery one of the great centres of dialectical and theological study in northern Europe. Side by side with the cloister schools were the schools of the great cathedrals, such as that of Reims, where Gerbert taught. In these the teachers were partly seculars, and there was perhaps more freedom and breadth of interests than in the purely monastic academies. When the revival of speculation brought out differences of opinion, Berengar, the scholasticus of the cathedral school of Tours, used the weapon of logic to attack the newly formulated doctrine of transubstantiation. It was Lanfranc, the monk of Bec, that employed all the resources of his skill to demolish the arguments of the hardy heretic. But though Berengar was first condemned by Leo IX. in 1050, it was not until 1078 that Gregory VII. practically settled the controversy by insisting upon his complete retractation. So slow were the methods against heresy in times when its danger was hardly realised.

[Sidenote: The transition to the scholastic philosophy.]

In the next generation two distinct tendencies present themselves. Anselm of Aosta, Lanfranc’s successor alike at Bec and Canterbury, defended the traditional position of the Church with a wider learning and deeper insight than his predecessor. Anselm has been called both the last of the fathers and the first of the schoolmen. But while his motive was the same as that of the later schoolmen, his methods were somewhat different, and his enduring fame is not for the acuteness of his dialectic, so much as for his broad insight into the deeper problems of philosophy and his anticipation of positions that were not fully taken up until the reign of scholasticism was over. [Sidenote: Anselm and Roscelin.] The Realism of which he was the upholder was part of the earlier tradition of the ecclesiastical schools. Much more epoch-making, though not in itself altogether original, was the Nominalism of Roscelin, the true parent of scholastic philosophy. While Anselm only saw in philosophy the way of justifying the Church’s teaching, Roscelin’s logical nominalism led him to deny the possibility of the Trinity in Unity and teach undisguised Tritheism. But he argued as a logician and not as a divine, and in 1092 acquiesced in the recantation which was presented to him by a council at Soissons. From the controversies of Anselm and Roscelin all the later intellectual activity sprang.

Early in the twelfth century there were many schools and masters scattered through central Europe and particularly in northern Gaul. [Sidenote: Activity of the schools.] Of one of the least of these schools and scholars it could be said that ‘clerks flocked from divers countries to hear him daily; so that if thou shouldst walk about the public places of the city and behold the crowds of disputants, thou wouldst say that the citizens had left off their other labours and given themselves to philosophy.’[13] There was no order or method in study. Any one could teach who had learnt under an accredited master and had received the Church’s licence. The students followed the masters, and the centres of study fluctuated as reputations were made and destroyed. But at this period there were three chief schools in northern France, all closely connected with the cathedrals of the respective towns. The teaching of Anselm of Laon (a scholar of St. Anselm) made that city a great centre of theological lore. The dialectical renown of William of Champeaux brought crowds of students to the cathedral schools of Paris. The literary enthusiasm of the Breton Platonist, Bernard Sylvester, and of his successor, William of Conches, made the cathedral school of Chartres ‘the most abundant spring of letters in Gaul.’[14]

Peter Abelard (1079–1142), a Breton from Palais, near Nantes, was the most striking manifestation of the new spirit. He was the eldest son of a gentleman of good estate, but he early renounced his inheritance, and devoted himself with extraordinary enthusiasm to study. He first learnt dialectic under Roscelin at Loches, near Tours, and afterwards under William of Champeaux at Paris. [Sidenote: Abelard and his influence.] But his sublime self-confidence and acute sceptical intellect speedily brought him into conflict, both with the novel Nominalism of Roscelin and with the old-fashioned extreme Realism of William of Champeaux. He soon despised and strove to supplant his masters. While William of Champeaux taught with declining authority at the cathedral school, and afterwards in the Abbey of St. Victor, his audacious disciple gathered an opposition band of pupils round him in neighbouring towns, and finally on the hill of Ste. Geneviève, where he became so famous, that William retired in disgust to his bishopric of Châlons. Abelard’s acuteness, rhetorical skill, and attractive personality, soon drew to Paris crowds of students, who gave the city a unique position among the schools of Europe. The Conceptualism, which he perhaps learnt from Aristotle, seemed more scientific than Realism, and less revolutionary than Nominalism. But it is not so much what he taught, as the spirit in which he taught, that gave Abelard his position in history. His method was essentially rationalistic. He based his orthodoxy on its reasonableness. ‘A doctrine is not to be believed,’ he is reported to have said, ‘because God has said it, but because we are convinced by reason that it is so.’ Moved by religious zeal as well as greed for applause, he went to Laon to study theology under Anselm, but very soon came to despise his teacher, whom he denounced as a phrase-monger. ‘Anselm kindled a fire,’ he said, ‘not to give light but to fill the house with smoke.’ He forsook the pretender’s school, and at once proceeded to prove the audacious thesis that a man could learn theology without a master. He was soon back at Paris, where his teaching attracted greater crowds than ever, until the tragic conclusion of his relations with Heloisa drove him to take the monastic vows at Saint-Denis. Even in the cloister he was restless and insubordinate. He published a treatise on the Trinity, which was denounced by the aged Roscelin as savouring of Sabellianism, and burnt at a Council at Soissons in 1121. He left Saint-Denis after rousing the fury of his fellow-monks by demonstrating the unhistorical character of the accredited legend of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, their imaginary founder. After some years spent in his new monastery of the Paraclete in Champagne, Abelard sought absolute retirement as abbot of St. Gildas de Rhuys, in the wildest part of his native Brittany. [Sidenote: Abelard and St. Bernard.] But he fled at last from the savage monks of St. Gildas, and again appeared as a teacher in Paris. As the incarnation of the new critical spirit, he had long been obnoxious to the stout upholders of ecclesiastical tradition like Norbert and Bernard. Bernard now denounced him, and induced the bishops, who registered his will, to assemble in council at Sens to condemn his heresies (1141). Despairing of justice from such a body, Abelard appealed to the Pope. But Innocent II. was as much under Bernard’s influence as the French bishops, and condemned him to lifelong confinement in a monastery. Abelard fell sick at Cluny while on his way to Rome, and obtained from Peter the Venerable a sympathy and kindness that stood in strong contrast to Bernard’s inveterate hostility. He was received into the Cluniac fold, and made some sort of recantation of his heresies. In 1142 he died at Châlon. The spirit of his teaching did not die with him. [Sidenote: The Schools of Paris.] The schools of Paris retained the fame with which he had first invested them. While the Regular Canons of St. Victor made their abbey the home of traditional theology tempered by mysticism, the secular school of the cathedral retained the spirit of inquiry and criticism which secured for it a permanence of influence that not even the patronage of St. Bernard could give to the school of St. Victor. If the stigma of heresy was attached to some of Abelard’s disciples, others became lights of orthodoxy without any great departure from Abelard’s doctrines. Arnold of Brescia, denounced by St. Bernard as the armour-bearer of the Goliath of misbelief his master, incurred by his rash entrance into politics the fate of a heretic who was also a rebel [pages 239–243 and 250]. [Sidenote: Change in the character of Scholasticism after Abelard.] But Peter the Lombard (died 1160), was not only Abelard’s pupil, but a pillar of orthodoxy, bishop of Paris, and author of that _Book of Sentences_ which was the accredited text-book of all later scholasticism. Gilbert de la Porrée (died 1154), a disciple of the humanistic school of Chartres, and bishop of Poitiers, was denounced by St. Bernard as a heretic. In 1148 Pope Eugenius, a creature of Bernard’s, presided at a council at Reims to deal with Gilbert’s errors. But the very cardinals refused any longer to follow Bernard’s leading. When Gilbert escaped uncondemned, the new theology had won its way to a recognised position in the Church. With its wider diffusion, the new learning lost the character of revolt which in Abelard’s time was associated with it. It became more systematic, more specialised, less original. The discovery of the whole of Aristotle’s _Organon_, in the latter part of the century, crushed the critical spirit by the weight of its authority. The conflict of studies drove out the liberal pursuit of literature in favour of specialised dialectic and theology, while the majority showed most favour to bread-winning studies like the canon and civil laws. The dialectic of Paris prevailed over the humanism of Chartres. But if some of the first freshness of the new birth was thus lost, the end of the century saw the scholar class a recognised element in the European commonwealth. So numerous were the ‘masters’ who taught in the Paris schools that they formed themselves into guilds or corporations, from which the germ of the University of Paris and of all other transalpine universities grew.

Monasticism and philosophy combined to strengthen the Church, but the spirit of revolt that had been conquered in the schools now took more popular shapes. All through the eleventh century there were found wandering teachers of strange doctrines. From the beginning of the twelfth century definitively heretical sects were crystallising round different principles of innovation. [Sidenote: Popular heresies.] For more than twenty years an unfrocked priest, Peter de Bruys, taught with powerful effect in Dauphiny and Provence. [Sidenote: Peter de Bruys.] He was an enthusiast like the old Montanists, rejecting all forms, discipline, and tradition, in favour of the living spirit, and denouncing the sacerdotal system and many of the most treasured dogmas of the Church. In 1137 or 1138, Peter was burnt alive at Saint-Gilles by the mob, whose fury he had excited by making a bonfire of crosses and pious emblems. But his followers kept together after his death, under the guidance of Henry, an outcast monk of Cluny. Peter the Venerable wrote against the Petrobrusians, and St. Bernard saw in the popularity of the young sect the malign influence of the spirit of Abelard. ‘The Catholic faith,’ he lamented, ‘is discussed in the streets and marketplaces. We have fallen upon evil times.’ His energy secured the conversion of many of the Petrobrusians. The remnant joined themselves to the new sect of the Waldenses or Vaudois.

[Sidenote: Peter Valdez and the ‘Poor Men of Lyons.’]

Peter Valdez, a rich merchant of Lyons, gave up all his property, and began about 1177 to wander about the country preaching repentance and the imitation of the Apostles. He procured the translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue, and soon began to gather followers. After a few years of toleration he was excommunicated in 1184 by Pope Lucius III. Thus cut off from the orthodox, Peter joined the Petrobrusians and became more frankly heretical. Before his death in 1197, his followers were to be found in Bohemia, in Lorraine, in southern France, in Aragon, and in northern Italy. These ‘Poor Men of Lyons,’ as they were called, rejected all priestly ministration, and included in one sweeping denunciation prayer for the dead, six of the seven sacraments, military service, and property. But grave differences soon broke them up into hostile sects. The Lombards sought to organise themselves separately from the Church, while the French were content to remain a school within the Church. The wise policy of later Popes allowed the more moderate to combine their own way of thinking with acceptance of the Church’s authority, and they remained for the most part humble-minded quietists, whose highest aspiration was to live in peace.

Other sects assumed a more dangerous complexion than the Poor Men of Lyons. From the eleventh century onwards, obscure bodies of heretics appear under the names of Manicheans, Paulicians, Cathari, Bulgarians, Patarini, and Publicani. Their strength was at first in the Rhineland, whence they infected the north of France. Finally they found a more sympathetic field in southern France, where heresy had long flourished in various forms. The origin of these sects is obscure. [Sidenote: The Manichean sect.] The ancient opinion that they were direct descendants of the ancient Gnostics and Manichees cannot be upheld, and it is difficult even to prove their affiliation with the Paulicians and Bogomili of the Balkan peninsula, whose heresy had troubled the Eastern Empire in the days of the Macedonian and Comnenian dynasties. Their doctrines are as hard to define as their origin, and we have for the most part to rely upon the statements of their enemies. But it is clear that they represent neither a definite sect nor an organised body of heretical doctrine. Like the early Gnostics, they indicate a vague general tendency rather than any precise teaching, and differed widely among each other. The more thoroughgoing of them were dualists like the Manichees, believing that there existed two equal and co-eternal deities, the one evil and the other good. The rest seem to have held the modified dualism of the Bogomili, admitting the good principle to be the only God, and the author of the New Testament, and regarding the evil principle as a fallen spirit, the creator of the world, the source of the Old Testament revelation, essentially the Demiurgus of the Gnostics. The practical teaching of these heretics was as various as their doctrine. They utterly despised all things of the flesh, and from this contempt flowed moral doctrines both ascetic and antinomian. They distinguished sharply between the elect and the reprobate. They rejected the authority both of the Church and of the State. Instead of the ordinary offices of the Church, they had a sort of spiritual baptism called _Consolamentum_, which was reserved to the perfect believers. Apart from their religious heresies, they were frankly hostile to the whole order of society.

[Sidenote: The Albigenses.]

The south of France soon swarmed with these innovators, who took the name of Albigenses, Albigeois, from one of their strongholds, the town of Albi on the Tarn. Besides the avowed heresies, a general spirit of revolt against the Church seized alike upon lords and people. Before the end of the century, the Albigenses had obtained a firm hold over the county of Toulouse and its dependencies, and defied the efforts of the Church to root them out. Elsewhere the speculations of the twelfth century had no very prolonged vitality. A few burnings of leaders, a crusade of energetic preaching, and a dexterous effort to turn the undisciplined zeal of the heretic into more orthodox channels, were generally enough to prevent their further progress. The offspring of vague discontent, twelfth century heresy took as a rule such vague and fantastic shapes that it almost condemned itself. After all, the spirit of Henry of Cluny or Peter Valdez was not very different from that of Norbert or Robert of Arbrissel. But however ill-regulated, it was another sign that the human mind had awakened from the sleep of the Dark Ages. If the popular heretics could not reason, they could at least feel.

[Sidenote: The revival of the study of law.]

We have still to deal with one of the great intellectual forces of the twelfth century. The revival of the scientific study of law, which grew up alongside the new birth of dialectic and philosophy, had almost as powerful an influence as these studies in stimulating intellectual interests, and had practical results of an even more direct and palpable kind. The study of Roman Law had never been quite forgotten, especially in Italy. The revival of the Roman Empire by the Ottos, the development of the power of the secular state all over Europe, the growth of ordered municipal government in southern Europe, and particularly in Italy, all contributed to make this study more popular, more necessary, and more universal. But side by side with the development of the civil power the even greater growth of the ecclesiastical authority set up a law of the Church in rivalry with the law of the State. The legal revival was thus two-sided. There was a fresh interest in both the Civil Law, which Rome had handed down, and in the Canon Law, which had slowly grown up in the ecclesiastical courts The same age that witnessed the work of Irnerius saw the publication of the _Decretum_ of Gratian.

[Sidenote: Irnerius and the revival of Civil Law.]

The early Middle Ages had an almost superstitious reverence for the written law of Rome. Its decisions were still looked upon as eternal and universally binding, even when practically it had been superseded by a mass of fluctuating feudal custom. In Italy the elementary texts of the Roman Law had always been studied, and its principles always upheld in the courts. The eleventh century battle of Papacy and Empire became before long a conflict of political principles and theories. Both sides sought weapons in the legal treasures of ancient Rome. Accordingly the eleventh century saw flourishing schools of law at Pavia, at Ravenna, and perhaps at Rome. Early in the twelfth century the fame of Irnerius led to the establishment of a still greater school of law at Bologna, already the seat of flourishing schools of dialectic and literature, and where the teaching of law had already been begun by Pepo. Irnerius was a jurist in the service of the Countess Matilda, who, at her request, lectured on the laws of Justinian, and particularly the Pandects, at Bologna. The fact that he was afterwards in the service of Henry V. shows that both the papal and imperial powers agreed in welcoming his work. But with the appearance of Irnerius upholding the election of a schismatic Pope in 1118, the new school of Civil Lawyers became frankly imperialist, looking upon the law as furnishing an armoury of texts, from which the divine rights and universal claims of the Roman Emperor could be deduced, though also treating it as an intellectual discipline, and almost as a literary exercise. Wealth, honour, and political importance were showered on men, who possessed at once the key to theoretical knowledge and to success in practical life. Even earlier than at Paris, the law schools of Bologna became organised and permanent. Before the end of the century, the crowds of mature foreign students who flocked to hear the famous successors of Irnerius had set up the student-university of Bologna, whose establishment is as much of an epoch in the history of European thought as that of the university of masters at Paris.

[Sidenote: The ‘Decretum’ of Gratian, and the growth of Canon Law.]

The Church had long had its own courts and its own law; but the victory of the Hildebrandine system gave a new importance to the Courts Christian and to the Canon Law which they upheld. It was the aim of the Church reformers to draw a hard and fast line between Church and State, and to bind together the scattered and often antagonistic corporations, out of which the Church was constituted, into a single self-governing, self-sufficing, independent body, of which the Pope was the absolute monarch. All through the eleventh century efforts were made by leading ecclesiastical lawyers to do for the law of the Church what was already being done for the law of the State. Italy witnessed most of these attempts, but the canonists of Germany and Gaul were not behindhand, and the most famous of the early compilations, which appeared in 1115, was the work of a north-French churchman, Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, a pupil of Lanfranc of Bec. But these preliminary efforts were superseded by the _Decretum_, or more accurately the _Concordantia discordantium Canonum_, of Gratian, which probably appeared in 1142. Gratian was a monk of the new order of Camaldoli, living in a convent at Bologna. The book which he published was a text-book, the effort of a private student, with no other authority than what it could command from its own merits. But its merits were such that it swept all its predecessors out of the field, and soon won something of the authority that belonged to a definite codification of previous ecclesiastical jurisprudence. It appeared at the right place and at the right moment. From that time onwards the study of Canon Law stood side by side with that of the Civil Law at Bologna, and the town of Irnerius and Gratian became the intellectual centre of the great controversies of Church and State, which then distracted Europe. Before long the Canon Law became as elaborate and comprehensive a system as that Civil Law, which it copied, developed and sometimes reacted against. The canonists became a band of specialists, separated from the civilians on the one hand and the theologians on the other. Just as the practical advantages of the study of Civil Law called away the votaries of the unprofitable secular study of literature, so did the practical uses of Canon Law divert active and ambitious churchmen from the academic study of theology. Law became the attractive science as well for ardent ecclesiastics as for men of the world. If it involved less speculative activity than the studies it superseded, it had the advantage of helping to bridge over the gulf between the little world of isolated students and the broad world of everyday life. As the revival of dialectic renewed men’s interests in abstract science, so did the revival of law broaden men’s practical interests. If in the long-run it gave weapons to Empire as well as to Papacy, the first result was to complete the equipment of the hierarchy for the business of ruling the world. While the civilian’s Empire was a theory, the canonist’s Papacy was a fact. As living head of a living system, the Pope became a constant fountain of new legislation for the Canon Law, while the Civil Law remained as it had been in Justinian’s time, with little power of adaptation to the needs of a changing state of society. [Sidenote: The new movements strengthen the Church.] Stimulated by the religious revival and the monastic movement, victorious over nascent heresy, yet invigorated by the new activity of human thought, protected by the enthusiasm which had brought about the Crusades, a state within the state, with her own law, her own officers, and her own wonderful organisation, the Church of the twelfth century stood at the very height of her power, and drew fresh strength, even from the sources that might well have brought about her ruin.