Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (68 page)

Nor in the 'Age of the Cathedrals' were Benedictine monasteries any longer at the heart of Europe's cultural activity. They had first been displaced by the rapid development during the eleventh century of schools of higher education attached to certain notable cathedrals. It was in such settings that the systematic study of Christian teaching was first undertaken, generating an increasingly diverse literature that explored the problems and questions which the propositions of Christianity generated, particularly in the form of commentary on that endlessly fascinating and diverse library of texts, the Bible. This organized exploration was christened 'theology', a concept essentially an invention of the Western Church: the word was first given currency in the 1120s by the Paris theologian Peter Abelard when he used it as title of a controversial discussion of Christian thought, his
Theologia Christiana
.
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At least such cathedral schools were part of the clerical institutions of the Church; in Italy, however, there were cities greater in size and wealth than anything in northern Europe and during the eleventh century they developed and financed their own schools. Their models were from outside the Christian world: they copied in a remarkably detailed fashion the institutions of higher education which Muslims had created for their own universal culture of intellectual enquiry, especially the great school of Al-Azhar in Cairo - now-familiar institutions like lectures, professors, qualifications called degrees.
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These were the first Christian universities - Christian, but not under the control of the Church authorities. With the exception of one or two ecclesiastical foundations, the Italian universities resolutely kept their lay-dominated character for centuries to come, even when the pope came to license new foundations. In the case of such institutions as Bologna, following Islamic precedent, law rather than theology was the emphasis of study. Alongside them, some northern European cathedral schools also developed into universities: the University in Paris became the leading centre of theological exploration in twelfth-century Europe, and its Theology Faculty (later often known as the Sorbonne, after one of the university's leading colleges) continued to be much used by popes when they needed specialist expertise to pronounce on a disputed question. This advisory role was a completely new development in Christianity, and again it represented a borrowing from the way in which scholars of Islamic religious law advised rulers in the Muslim world.
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All these institutions fostered a new intellectual life: a new stage in the ancient dialogue between Plato and Aristotle; now Aristotle came to excite and inform those whose business was ideas. Previously Plato had dominated Christian thinking, albeit at one remove through Augustine of Hippo; only Boethius had dealt much with Aristotle's intellectual systems, but in any case Boethius had otherwise himself been soaked in the world view derived from Plato, and had been one of the major forces embedding it in Western Christianity (see pp. 309-10 and 321-2). Otherwise the West had known little of Aristotle's work. By contrast, scholars in the Islamic world and the Jewish communities whom the Muslims sheltered had direct knowledge of Aristotle, whose writings had been preserved largely by scholars of the Church of the East (see pp. 245-6 and 266). Gradually, Aristotle's texts reached the West. The first influx came through the Spanish Christian capture of Muslim Toledo and its libraries in 1085, and then much more through contacts established during the Crusades (one of their more positive results). Once they were translated into Latin, the effect was profound: Western thought, enriched afresh by manuscripts containing Classical learning, experienced another movement of renewal, which has been called the twelfth-century Renaissance. Despite much initial official hostility, Aristotle and his analytical approach to the world, his mastery of logical thought, confronted the Platonism of Christian theologians. A debate opened up, in dialogue also with Arab and Jewish commentators on ancient thought, discussing the old problem of how to relate the work of reason to the revealed truths of Christian faith.

All three religions of revelation confronted the same problem. Aristotle's categorizations might suggest that the world could be understood without that special divine grace of knowledge otherwise closed to human intelligence. Although the participants in this debate often bitterly disagreed with each other, to the extent that on occasion they would secure their opponents' condemnation as heretics, the movement can be summed up in the term 'scholasticism': that is, the thought and educational method of the
schola
e, the new university schools. In essence it was a way of building up knowledge through discussion: a method of
quaestiones
, assertion, denial, counter-assertion, and a final effort to harmonize the debate. It respected authorities, but this was an alarmingly and unpredictably expanding body of authorities who themselves might not agree. Scholasticism was disputatious, sceptical, analytical, and that remained the characteristic of Western intellectual exploration long after most Western intellectuals had parted company with scholasticism itself. And it had its precedent in the method used in Islamic higher education. It is a happy irony that one of the great expressions of the cultural unity of the Latin West, evolved in the age of the Crusades, had its roots in the culture which the West was trying to destroy.

By the end of the twelfth century, the Western Church was thus facing challenges both from heresy and from the potentially uncontrollable nature of scholastic thought, bred in new institutions, the universities. None of its existing structures seemed well adapted to the purpose, and its first reaction to the growth of heresy was to redouble repression, evidenced at its worst in the Albigensian Crusade (see pp. 387-8). Western Christianity exhibited an urge to punish itself which should not simply be attributed to the lurid imaginations of clergy. For instance, in the city of Perugia in central Italy, a startling new movement began in the troubled year of 1260: flagellants, crowds of the laity who indulged in communal ritual beatings as acts of penitence for the sins of the world and of themselves. They walked in their bloodstained processions from Italy over the Alps in midwinter, right through central Europe northwards until they reached the furthest bounds of Poland. On the way they inspired reversals of local quarrels and miseries in festivals of forgiveness. One Italian chronicler enthused that 'almost all those in disagreement were returned to concord; usurers and thieves hastened to restore what they had taken away . . . captives were released and exiles were given permission to return to their homes'.
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Whatever the reality of his vision of 1260, later episodes of mass flagellation were certainly not so benevolent, for, like the earlier campaigns to gather crusader armies, they were often associated with crowds turning in violence on Jewish communities. Yet the spontaneous character remained: these were outbreaks of religious fervour which the Church authorities had done nothing to inspire and which they often found frightening and sought to suppress. Such religious energies could as readily turn against the Church as be absorbed by it.

Punishment was thus directed to outsiders as well as to sinful Christians. One of the characteristics of Western Christianity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries is its identification of various groups within the Western world as distinct, marginal and a constant potential threat to good order: principal among such groups were Jews, heretics, lepers and (curiously belatedly) homosexuals.
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In 1321 there was panic all over France, ranging from poor folk to King Philip V himself, that lepers and Jews had combined together with the great external enemy, Islam, to overthrow all good order in Christendom by poisoning wells. Lepers (as if they had not enough misfortune) were victimized, tortured into confessions and burned at the stake, and the pogroms against Jews were no less horrific. Muslims were lucky enough to be out of reach on that occasion.
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From the mid-twelfth century, a particularly persistent and pernicious community response to the occasional abuse and murder of children was to deflect guilt from Christians by blaming Jews for abducting the children for use in rituals. This so-called 'blood libel' frequently resulted in vicious attacks on Jewish communities. Sometimes higher clergy did their best to calm the community hysteria in such cases; sometimes they allowed shrine-cults of the murdered victims to develop. Recurrences of the blood libel persisted into the twentieth century as a blemish on Christian attitudes to Jews, spreading from the West into Orthodoxy in later centuries.
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A PASTORAL REVOLUTION, FRIARS AND THE FOURTH LATERAN COUNCIL (1200-1260)

A more complex and positive response to dynamic popular movements emerged at the end of the twelfth century, although in the end it allied itself and indeed helped to structure this 'formation of a persecuting society'. It produced two great religious leaders, Dominic and Francis. They were utterly different personalities, but they founded in parallel the first two orders of friars (an English version of the word
fratres
, Latin for 'brothers'). In 1194 Dominic became a priest in a community in Osma in northern Spain, living under Augustine's Rule; he was drawn into campaigns across the Pyrenees to win back southern France from the Cathar heresy. The effort was having little success, and Dominic realized why: it was being led by churchmen who conducted their task like the great prelates they were, surrounded by attendants and all the magnificence of their rank. Nothing was less calculated to impress those familiar with Cathar expressions of contempt for Catholic corruption.

To this situation, Dominic brought the practicality and closeness to ordinary life of his Augustinian background. In 1215 he got official permission from one of the bishops in the area affected by the Cathars to start a new effort: a campaign of preaching in which he and his helpers would lead a life so simple and apostolic in poverty as to outdo the Cathars, and convince people that the official Church was a worthy vehicle for a message of love and forgiveness. Not only that, but his preachers would have the best education that he could devise to make even their simplest message intellectually tough. Though his efforts in southern France had little immediate success amid the ferocity of the Albigensian Crusade, his idea blossomed; unlike some of the other leaders of new movements in his age, he was intent on emphasizing his close loyalty to the pope, and Pope Honorius III took a personal interest in drafting the document which in 1217 named Dominic's new organization as an Order of Preachers - the only order, one contemporary noted, to take its name from its function.
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The new friars also quickly gained the nickname Dominicans, and otherwise Blackfriars, from the black hood which they wore with their white robe. They avoided holding property so that they would not build up wealth like the monastic orders; instead, they lived by begging from people in ordinary society (hence the alternative name of friars, 'mendicants', from the Latin verb for begging). This mobility in the world was a significant addition to the West's armoury of spiritual resources, recreating a form of monastic wandering which always remained common in the Eastern Churches, but which centuries before had been firmly discouraged for Western monks by no less a figure than St Benedict himself (see pp. 317-18). Yet significantly the Westerners still did not allow their holy men to wander at random, as did the Churches of Orthodoxy and further east. To avoid unseemly competition between different communities of friars, they came to work within agreed set boundaries or limits, which gained them yet another nickname, 'limiters'.

Their life of begging made the friars very vulnerable to their public. They would have to be in constant contact with the people to whom they ministered, always needing to justify their existence by service. Their task was to bring a message of good news and comfort to the whole Church. They were evangelists, showmen in church or market square, but they could also quietly hear confessions and so enter the individual fears and miseries of those who heard their message from the pulpit. They developed a special mission to the universities too, and gained a brilliant reputation as defenders of orthodoxy yet often as restlessly original thinkers. These talents earned them another specialization which has not done any favours to their later reputation. In the mopping-up operations which ended the Albigensian Crusade, Dominicans found employment as investigators in the tribunals known as inquisitions, and soon dominated inquisitions as they became the chief weapon against religious dissidence wherever it appeared in Europe. In a rueful division of their Latin name, some came to call them
Domini canes
, 'hounds of the Lord'.

It could not have been predicted that the fascinating and maddening eccentric Francis would end up creating a very similar organization to that of Dominic. He was brought up in Assisi, a hill town of central Italy which typified the new wealth of late-twelfth-century Europe, and his father was a well-to-do cloth merchant. It was the same sort of background as that of Valdes in Lyons, and Francis had the same reaction to it. In his twenties, he reached an emotional and spiritual crisis: he took it as his divine mission to turn upside down the central obsession of his father's world, the creation of wealth. The trigger was his attitude to lepers. His revulsion against them had been as intense as that which later caused their scapegoating in the 1321 persecution. Then he realized that the blessed biblical figures of Job and Lazarus had been lepers - it was he and not they who needed healing. He rushed up to a leper and folded the outcast in his arms. Now he would gather together people who would strip themselves of all possessions and would be outcasts for Christ.

So this playboy son of an Italian millionaire threw away his money, shouted the Christian message at birds in a graveyard, and threw the Church into a turmoil by saying that Christ was a down-and-out with no possessions. He might have been burned as a heretic. Luckily for his future, alongside his almost pathological nonconformity, Francis was deeply loyal to the Western Catholic tradition. Against the Cathars, who said that the world was evil, he passionately affirmed that all created things - Brother Sun, Sister Moon - were good, sharing the goodness of God's human incarnation in Christ. In his own body, Francis is the first person known to have suffered
stigmata
, fleshly wounds which followed the patterns of the wounds of the crucified Christ (see Plate 25). This echo of Paul's mysterious remark in Galatians 6.17, 'I bear on my body the marks of Jesus', has since been a recurrent phenomenon among ascetics of the Western Church. At the time, it may have been a response to the Cathars, who claimed purity and said that flesh was part of the world of evil. What greater symbol could there be than Francis's
stigmata
that the divine suffering condescended to descend into flesh?