IF we are to define faith as we define no other virtue, and measure it by its outward manifestation rather than by the inward working of the heart; if we esteem more highly the assent to certain dogmas imposed from without than the soul’s own sincere effort to climb to the highest realities within its ken, then no doubt the 13th century was an age of faith compared with ours. But such a definition of faith, which would have made St. Paul’s conversion impossible, and left him at best a staunch though tolerant Pharisee, is becoming daily more discredited. It seems strange that it should even have grown up under the name of Christ, who valued the widow’s mite not at its market price but at the rate of the inward effort which had prompted the gift. Measured by its living faith, the 13th century can claim no advantage, to say the least, over the 20th. Again, it is only a superficial view of history which would represent our ancestors as the merely passive recipients of a creed formulated by the Fathers of the Church, and made binding on the consciences of the faithful by the decrees of Popes and Councils. On the contrary, many of the most distinctive tenets of Romanism grew up from below, and were only accepted later on by Priests, Bishops, Doctors of the Church and Popes. In many matters, of course, Dante’s ideas are far in advance of the current religion of his age; and in no matter more definitely than in his conception of purgatory as a place where the soul is conscious of its own happy growth in peace of mind as in fitness to appear before God. But many other elements of that religion which Dante learned first at his mother’s knee, and could never seriously question in after life, had been born among the ignorant. Thence they had risen and spread slowly from generation to generation, until at last they had been brought into some sort of harmony with scripture and reason by Schoolmen who themselves also had sucked these doctrines in with their mother’s milk. Since the times when Christianity first became a great world-creed, the mass of the faithful had never been really imbued with a knowledge 306 of the New Testament: and they had retained, with or without sacerdotal permission, much of their old heathenism. Origen, writing about 230 [A.D.] to rebut the arguments of the philosopher Celsus, laughs at the learned pagan for contending that he can raise his mind to the Unseen by gazing at or praying to a statue; he shames him by explaining how “a Christian, however unlearned, is persuaded that every corner of the world is a part of God’s whole temple; so that he prays everywhere with his bodily eyes closed, and, raising his spiritual eyes, soars in contemplation above the whole universe.”1 Little by little, however, the practice of image-worship crept in; it was definitely legalized in 787, after a long struggle, by the 2nd Council of Nicaea; and in the later Middle Ages Christians were burned for maintaining a doctrine which one of the greatest of the Fathers had described as notorious even among the most unlearned. We see the same process, to the very end of the 13th century, in the canonization of saints, in spite of a Bull of 1181 which claimed the right exclusively for Popes.2 John of Parma is only one of hundreds who were worshipped without leave from the Pope — often without any leave at all. In each case it is the same story. The cult began among the people and lower clergy: the Bishops were gradually forced to take notice of it: by this time it was already an ineradicable part of popular religion, and the Pope had little choice but to sanction it. Or, as in many cases of very respectable cults which still survive, there was no papal sanction of any kind, until the Bull of 1675 granted a prescriptive right of existence to all worships, however little proof of authority they could show, which had enjoyed a continuous existence of 200 years. The feast of Corpus Christi, one of the most solemn and stirring of all in the modern Roman Church, grew up entirely from below. It was first suggested by a visionary girl: the Office was composed by a young unlearned priest: but the worship caught like wild-fire among the people, and at last forced itself through all obstacles into recognition by Prelates and Popes.3 The dogma of the Immaculate Conception was reprobated by St. Bernard, and formed no part of Dante’s theology. It was consistently opposed throughout the Middle Ages by the Dominicans, the most learned Order in the Church: but the Franciscans, strong in the popular support, at last carried the day. Practically all the differences between Dante’s creed and St. Paul’s had originated thus in the popular imagination: and Salimbene better than most men shows us that imagination at work. He gives more than one admirable example of popular canonization: and his descriptions are corroborated by other contemporaries. 307 (501) “In this same year 1279 appeared the cozening miracles of a certain Alberto who dwelt at Cremona. This man was a wine-porter, loving the wine-pot, and living in sin;* after whose death, as men said, God wrought many miracles in Cremona, Parma, and Reggio. In Reggio He wrought them in the church of St. George and of the Blessed John the Baptist, in Parma in the church of St. Peter, which is by the Piazza Nuova, where all the wine-porters of the city were gathered together; and blessed was the man or woman who could touch [his relics,] or give anything of his own. And they made gilds in divers quarters of the town, and went out into the streets and squares to gather together in pairs and walk in procession to the church of St. Peter, where the relics of that Alberto were kept. They bore crosses and banners, and chanted as they went, and gave purple and samite and brocade of Bagdad, and much money; all which the wine-porters divided among themselves, and kept to their own use. So the parish priests, seeing this, caused this Alberto to be portrayed in their own churches, that they might the easier obtain the offerings from the people. And not only in the churches was his likeness painted in those days, but even on many walls and porticoes of the cities and villages or country towns. Yet this is known to be directly against the statutes of the Church, for no man’s relics may be held in reverence except they be first approved by the Church of Rome, and written in the catalogue of the Saints. Nor may any man be portrayed anywhere as a Saint except his canonization be first published by the Church. Wherefore the Bishops who suffered such abuses to be done in their dioceses or under their rule would deserve to be removed from their bishoprics, and wholly deprived of their dignity. Yet he who was absent from this solemnity was held for an heretic, and envious; and the seculars would say loudly and audibly to the Friars Minor and Preachers ‘Ye think that none can do miracles except your own Saints: but ye are much deceived, as may be seen now in this man.’ But God swiftly purged this reproach from His servants and friends by showing forth the lying men who had espoused them, and punishing those from Cremona claiming to have brought relics of this Saint Alberto, namely, the little toe of his right foot; so that all the men of Parma were gathered together, from the least even unto the greatest; men and women, young men and maidens, old men and youths, clerks and laymen, and all the men of Religion: and in solemn procession, 308 with many chants, they bore that toe to the cathedral church, which is dedicated to the glorious Virgin. When therefore the aforesaid toe had been laid on the high altar, there came the Lord Anselmo di Sanvitale, canon of the cathedral church and at one time vicar to the Bishop, and kissed the relic. Whereupon becoming aware of a savour (or rather, a stench) of garlic, he made it known to the other clergy, who themselves also saw that they were both deceived and confounded; for they found therein nought but a clove of garlic. And so the men of Parma were despised and mocked, for that they had walked ‘after vanity, and become vain.’ Wherefore the sinner or the sick man errs greatly who leaves famous Saints and turns to call on one who cannot be heard. Note now and diligently consider that, as the men of Cremona and Parma and Reggio wrought folly of late with their brentadore Alberto, even so do the Paduans work folly with one Antonio a pilgrim, and the men of Ferrara with a certain Armanno Punzilovo: but the Lord came also truly in the blessed Francis and the blessed Anthony and St. Dominic and in their sons, in whom sinners should believe. Now this devotion to the false Saint had its origin in many reasons: among the sick, because they sought to be healed; among the curious, because they desired to see new things; among the clergy, on account of the envy which they have to modern men of Religion [i.e. the new Orders of Friars]; among the Bishops and Canons on account of the gains thereby accruing to them, as is plain in the matter of the Bishop of Ferrara and his canons, who gained much by occasion of Armanno Punzilovo. Also [the devotion] grew among those who, having been driven from their cities for their adherence to the Emperor’s party, hoped through these miracles of new saints to make peace with their fellow-citizens, whereby they might be brought back into possession of their earthly goods, and no longer wander homeless through the world.” The contemporary author of the Chronicon Parmense gives Alberto a better character, and seems rather more inclined to believe in his miracles. He describes the Piazza outside the church of St. Peter as encumbered with booths, in which the sick lay; and tells how a great part of the offerings to the new saint were devoted to the building of a hospital. Of Armanno Punzilovo we only know that, after he had been worshipped for thirty years, the inquisitors found him to have been a seducer and a heretic: whereupon his corpse was torn from its shrine and burned.4 A still stranger case of the same sort happened in these days at Milan, though Salimbene does not mention it. A woman named Guglielma passed during 309 her lifetime for an Incarnation of the Holy Ghost. She was worshipped for some years specially by people of the wealthy class, under the direct patronage of the Cistercian monks and without opposition from the Archbishop, until the matter was taken up by the Inquisition. The reader may have been struck by the serious failings which Salimbene attributes to these objects of popular worship in his time; but moral excellence, though undoubtedly an advantage, was by no means a sine qua non in these cases. One of the scandalous cases quoted by Guibert of Nogent is that of an abbot whose claims to sanctity, under investigation, reduced themselves to this: that he had fallen down a well in a state of intoxication and so perished. Canonization, again, was one of the regular forms of popular protest in purely political quarrels: there was a constant stream of pilgrims to the tombs of Simon de Montfort, of King Henry VI, and even of the selfish and despicable Thomas of Lancaster, who worked far more miracles than many of his betters. While the soul of Martin IV was expiating in Dante’s purgatory those surfeits of Bolsena eels and Vernaccia wine, his body was busily working miracles on earth. So also did the body of Gregory IX, a far more remarkable Pope, though he was believed by many to have had an illegitimate son, and certainly did more than any other Pope of the 13th century to degrade the first Franciscan ideal.
The wine-bibbing wine-porter at Parma, and the Incarnation of the Holy Ghost at Milan, were in the fresh bloom of their saintship on the day on which Dante first spoke to Beatrice: and Sacchetti shows us a similar picture after the poet’s death. There was a strong popular movement to canonize Urban V, whose life contrasted favourably with that of most XIV Century Popes.5 Sacchetti, writing to a friend in 1365, does not stick at calling it sheer idolatry. He complains that, in the great Baptistery of Florence — Dante’s bel San Giovanni — the brand-new image of this unauthorized saintling “had before it a lighted wax torch of two pounds’ weight, while the Crucifix hard by had but a mean penny taper. . . . If a man were new come into the world, without knowledge of divine things, and if we told him ‘One of these two is the King of Everlasting Life;’ then, considering the painting and the light, he must needs have believed that Pope Urban was He. . . . The cause of this is in the clergy, who consent to these things in their avarice, to make men draw to them. . . . You tell me how Marquis Ghino Cittadella once said that these new-fangled saints made him lose faith in the old. Are not this nobleman’s words indeed true? 310 and who is to assure us that there are not many (assai) who surmise that other saints began in this fashion, first with mere rays round their head and ‘Beato’ on the label under their feet; until in process of time the rays have become a halo, and the Beato a Saint? How can we believe in our priests, when they raise on high the bodies of these Beati, setting lights and waxen images round them, while our Lord and the Virgin Mother are portrayed in the gloom, almost on the level ground, and without a single light? . . . . The Friars Minor of Florence have the bodies of St. Bartolommeo Pucci and St. Gerard of Villamagna and Santa Umiliana de’ Cerchi, who have passed from Beati to Saints; and are all honoured with many tapers, while our Lord and the Apostles, and even St. Francis, have none. And the Friars Preachers have the blessed Giovanna . . . . and the blessed Villana, a girl who dwelt in Florence, hard by mine own house, and who went about clothed like other folk; and now they make much of her, and St. Dominic stands aside.” So also with the other friars; brand-new saints have almost driven St. Augustine and St. Benedict out of mind. As to the Santo Volto of Lucca, no man knows its history, and the most miraculous thing about it is its hideousness: two holy friars have preached openly against its worship.6 Nor are the miracles less doubtful: a blind friend of Sacchetti’s pressed into the crowd to touch one of these new saints, and came out as blind as he went, but with his nose cleft almost in half: a peasant returning from the same saint found that he had only lost his purse. “I have no space to tell how wide this error is spread in our days, solely because it brings grist to some men’s mills. And the Pope pays no attention: he has greater things to do. . . . How many changes have there been, in my city of Florence alone, in the figure of our Lady! There was a time when all flocked to Santa Maria da Cigoli: then it was Santa Maria della Selva: then grew up the fame of Santa Maria in Pruneta: then Santa Maria Primeriana at Fiesole: then our Lady of Or San Michele: then all these were left in the lurch, all flock now after La Nunziata de’ Serri, round whom so many images have been hung, one way or another, that if the walls had not been bound with chains of late, they bade fair to fall flat to the ground, roof and all. . . . And so our folk are clear of sin, God knows how, as though our Lady had more might to work graces in one place than in another!”
This ten was what men of learning and ability said to each other in 14th century Florence. But in Salimbene’s Lombardy of a century earlier it was easier to keep some belief in these new 311 Saints — at any rate, in those of one’s own Order or party. Salimbene seems as naïvely delighted as Charles of Anjou at the discovery of a fresh body of “the Magdalene, whole save for one leg” near Aix in Provence (520) “where I dwelt in the year when the King of France went on his Crusade, for I was of the convent there. When this body was found, her epitaph could scarce be read with a crystal glass, for the antiquity of the writing. And it pleased King Charles that the body should be displayed abroad and exalted and honoured, and that a solemn feast should be made in her honour. And so it was: wherefore the contentions and contradictions and cavils and abuses and falsehoods which were of old concerning her body are henceforth ended. For the men of Sinigaglia had formerly claimed to possess it, and the men of Vézelay had it likewise, as they said, and had even a legend thereof: but it is manifest that the body of the same woman cannot be in three places. (For this same cause there is a bitter quarrel at Ravenna concerning the body of St. Apollinare, for the men of Chiassi, which was once a city, say that they possess it: and the citizens of Ravenna claim to possess it too.) Now the Magdalene’s cave, wherein she did penitence thirty years,7 is five miles distant from Marseilles, and I slept there one night immediately after her feast. It is in a high rocky mountain, and great enough, if I remember well, to contain a thousand men. There are three altars and a dropping well of water like unto the well of Siloa, and a most fair road to it, and without is a church hard by the cave, where dwells a priest; and above the cave the mountain is as high again as the height of the Baptistery of Parma, and the cave itself is so far raised above the level ground that three towers like that of the Asinelli of Bologna could not reach it, if I remember aright: so that great trees which grow below show like nettles or bushes of sage; and since the region is utterly uninhabited and desolate, therefore the women and noble ladies of Marseilles when they come thither for devotion’s sake bring with them asses laden with bread and wine, and pasties and fish, and such other meats as they desire. Here then is a miracle for the confirmation of the Invention of the Magdalene’s body; which miracle the Lord showed through her to prove that it is hers indeed. In those days a young butcher was going upon the road, and an acquaintance asked him whence he came. He answered, ‘From the town of St. Maximin, where the body of the blessed Mary Magdalene has been newly found; and I kissed her leg.’ The other answered, ‘Thou has kissed no leg of hers, but rather the leg of an ass or a mare, which the clergy show to the simple for lucre’s sake.’ When therefore 312 a great contention had arisen between these two concerning this matter, the undevout man who believed not in the Magdalene smote the devout man with many blows of his sword, yet he with the Magdalene’s help took no hurt. Then he who was devoted to the Magdalene smote the undevout man but once, and there needed no more; for he straightway lost his life and found his death. So the champion of the Magdalene, grieving that he had slain a man, even in self-defence, and fearing to be taken by the kinsfolk of the deceased, fled to the city of Arles and thence to St.-Gilles, that he might be safe there, and give place unto wrath. But the father of the slain man, by a bribe to a traitor, caused the slayer of his son to be cast into prison, for he was already condemned to be hanged. Yet in the night before his execution, as he lay awake in his cell, the Magdalene appeared to him and said, ‘Fear not, my servant, defender and champion of mine honour, for thou shalt not die: I will help thee in due time, that all men who see may marvel and give thanks to God our Creator, Who worketh marvels, and to me, His servant. But when thou shalt be free, remember this kindness that I have done thee, and give the reward of this good fortune to God thy liberator, to the benefit of thine own soul.’ With these words the Magdalene disappeared, and left the man comforted. Next day, when he was hanged on the gallows, yet his body felt neither harm nor pain; and suddenly, in the sight of all who had come to see, there flew swiftly down from heaven a dove, dazzling white as snow, and alighted on the gallows, and loosed the knot round the neck of the hanged man, its own devotee, and laid him on the earth wholly unhurt. But when the officials and men of justice, at the instigation of the dead man’s relatives, would have hanged him again, he escaped by the goodwill of the butchers, of whom a very great band was there, ready armed with swords and staves; for he had been their comrade and friend, and they had also seen this stupendous miracle. Therefore when he had told all men how he had slain the man unwillingly to defend his own life and the Magdalene’s honour, and how the Saint had promised him in his dungeon that she would free him when the time came, then they held themselves satisfied, and praised God and the blessed Magdalene who had freed him. And the Count of Provence, hearing these things, desired to see the man and to hear it from his own lips, and to keep him about his own person at the court all the days of his life. Yet he answered that if any should offer him the lordship of the whole world he would not end his life anywhere but in the service of the Magdalene, in the town of St. Maximin, in the place wherein her body was newly found in this year 1283.”
313While entirely agreeing with Salimbene that the Magdalene’s body could hardly be in three places at once, we may well decline to accept the butcher’s evidence as conclusive. This saint is indeed one of the most ubiquitous and elusive of the whole calendar. Vincent of Beauvais describes her translation from Aix to Vézelay in A.D. 746: though even then some men claimed that she was at Ephesus. In 898 her body was at Constantinople: in 1146 it was at Vézelay. In 1254 St. Louis went and worshipped it at Ste-Baume, which is the first hint we get of her ever having been in Provence. In 1267, again, the saintly king showed his impartiality by assisting in state at the solemn translation of the rival corpse of Vézelay, and dividing some fragments of the relics with the Papal Legate. In 1281, that Legate, now Pope Martin IV, gave to the Cathedral of Sens a rib from the Vézelay corpse, and declared in his accompanying Bull that this was the genuine body. Rome had spoken, and the dispute was for the moment nominally settled: yet here, only two years later, we find the Pope’s particular friend Charles of Anjou ostentatiously patronizing the rival corpse; and Salimbene, writing a year later again, imagines that the claims of Vézelay and Sinigaglia are dead for ever! No doubt the perplexed faithful consoled themselves as Sir John Maundeville did for the similar multiplication of St. John’s head: “I know not which is true, but God knows; but however men worship it, the blessed John is satisfied.”8
This is not the place to treat fully of 13th century infidelity: but its prevalence may be established by details as manifold and as startling as those which I have briefly summarized to indicate the prevailing ignorance and irreverence. Apart from noble ruffians like Alberigo and Nero da Leccaterra, who had apparently just enough belief in God’s existence to lend point to their obscene blasphemies, four definite kinds of unbelief may be traced. There was the learned scepticism of the universities and of Frederick’s court, well described in Renan’s Averroës: and the scoffing scepticism of the rich and self-indulgent, conspicuous in Piers Plowman and in Sacchetti’s Sermons. Again, a certain fatalism and semi-Mahomedanism was brought home from the Crusades: and the failure of these holy wars provoked, as we have seen, an explosion of popular infidelity throughout Europe. Lastly, there was the involuntary scepticism of the pious and faithful soul: a state of mind which is often ignorantly spoken of as purely modern. Joinville has recorded a stock instance of this: Franciscan and Dominican writers are full of similar indications, from St. Bonaventura downwards. Female saints were especially tortured with such doubts. Gerson wrote a long 314 treatise on the subject: but perhaps the most interesting confession comes from his younger contemporary, Johann Busch.9 “What temptations I suffered as a novice,” (he writes) “and especially concerning the Catholic faith, God alone knoweth, from whom nothing is hid. . . . But God Almighty suffered me to be thus tried, because in later years, taught by experience, I liberated many who were buffeted with the same temptation.” Indeed the 13th century, which from our modern distance seems at first sight to swim in one haze of Fra Angelico blue, shows to the telescope its full share of barren sand and pestilent marsh. Sensitive souls struggled then too for their faith, with an agony that was often bitterest before the very altar and in the presences of what should have been to them the bodily flesh and blood of the Redeemer. The duties to temporal and spiritual powers were generally in hopeless conflict: or, within the strictly religious domain, a man had often no alternative but to disobey flatly either his Bishop or his Pope. His parish priest might well be one with whom no honest woman dared be seen to whisper; if he wished to call in the friars instead, that right was frequently denied him; nor could he be certain that the friar himself was such as we expect all clergy to be in the present century. He risked worshipping a villain as a saint, and saw the saints themselves often receiving less hearty recognition than in these days of open unorthodoxy.
For an age must be judged not only by the few remarkable men it produces, but still more by the attitude of the rest of the world towards these men. It is of course far easier to ticket a period with just a dozen names — for even a great age produces no great number of first-rate men — and to judge it accordingly. But we do not stop at the fact that St. Paul and the other apostles were Jews of a certain generation: we ask further, “How did their own generation accept their persons or their teaching?” Why then should we be asked to stop at the fact that a certain century produced Innocent II and St. Francis, Dante and Aquinas? Innocent was believed by some of his time to have barely escaped damnation, and was often criticized with the greatest freedom in his own Church. St. Francis and his early missionaries were treated by many who misunderstood them with a brutality from which modern England impartially protects expelled monks from France and Jews from Russia. Florence was a true Nazareth to Dante; she would have burned him alive if she could have taken him: and his De Monarchia was indeed burned as heretical by the Papal Legate eight years after his death. Aquinas’s family tried to prevent his becoming a Dominican and a Saint by foul and 315 barbarous means scarcely credible to us. He was finally poisoned (so at least Dante believed) by the King who had been the special creation and particular champion of the Church; and within a few years of his death some of his doctrines were solemnly condemned at Paris and at Oxford. A greater intellect than Aquinas, Roger Bacon, was all but quenched in prison, and it is only by a miracle that we possess his writings. There was widespread disbelief in the Stigmata of St. Francis even towards the end of his own century. Bernard of Quintavalle, his first disciple, was hunted from forest to forest like a wild beast by the ‘relaxed’ Franciscans: Cæsarius of Spires, another of his truest disciples, was murdered by his conventual gaoler. St. Bonaventura is one of the most heartily abused men in the Fioretti. The greatest perhaps of the Franciscan Generals, John, of Parma, narrowly escaped imprisonment for life; while Raymond Gaufridi, his only successor who dared to take the side of the Spirituals, was poisoned.† So was Henry of Luxemburg, the one Emperor of the age whom Dante thought not unworthy of the throne; so also was Kilwardby, one of the most efficient Archbishops of Canterbury. The great English prelates of the century were indeed peculiarly unfortunate. St. Edmund Rich died in exile, equally unable to tolerate or to reform that Henry III who, of all our English kings, was most after the Pope’s own heart. St. Richard of Chichester, when first elected Bishop, was ignominiously rejected. St. Thomas Cantilupe was excommunicated by the no less saintly Peckham, who himself was on such bad terms with our great Edward I, that he retained his canonry at Lyons as a refuge in case of exile. Grosseteste’s whole life was one long struggle with the powers of evil in high or low places; and he died in bitterness of heart. Prominent in the lives of 13th and 14th century saints are the persecutions they endured at home, and the continued distrust even of their spiritual advisers. St. Louis, who was a great king as well as a real saint, could not escape even in his own chamber from the lords who cured and called him nicknames in the antechamber.10 It is far safer and more comfortable to be a good Roman Catholic in modern England than it was in Dante’s Italy. Of most generations it may be said that they build the tombs of their prophets; but when we are inclined to doubt of our own age, let us remember that few centuries have been more ungrateful to their best men than the Thirteenth.
* Vini portator simul et potator nec non et peccator.
† Accusations of poison are so common in the Middle Ages that one can never in any particular case assert more than a probable suspicion: but the extreme frequency of these suspicions is in itself most significant.
THERE is one side of Franciscan life which comes out less clearly in Salimbene’s story than in other documents: for his was a naturally happy disposition. Many men and women of our own times whose backs are bowed under the burden of spiritual self-reliance, with its possible contingencies of doubt and mental agony — to whom God seems too distant and unapproachable without constant help from visible mediators — many such are attracted to a Church which promises an end of struggles and uncertainties. This promise may be more or less true in the case of modern Romanism, with its definite limitations, its mechanical completeness on the surface, and the ever-watchful discipline with which it represses attempts to pierce below the surface. Under the present free competition, a religion like this tends more and more to attract a certain type of mind in proportion as it repels other types: so that the Church which promises certainty without the pain of enquiry becomes more and more the Church of those who do not even wish to enquire. But in the 13th century the Church included all minds, except that small minority which was ready to risk the loss of friends, fortune, and life for the sake of an unpopular idea. It was therefore a living and growing Church in a sense very different to that of modern Romanism: — a Church in which Dante could write without misgiving “In religion, God cares for nought of us but the heart.” And the individual soul, like the Church of which it was a part, had its own growing-pains, far more nearly resembling those of our own century than most men imagine. Even among laymen, sensitive minds were distracted by constant conflicts among their spiritual teachers. Dante had no doubt (though here he was probably wrong) that Pope Anastasius was a heretic. The heresy of Pope Honorius was openly proclaimed in the Breviary itself. St. James of the Mark, as we have seen, could only congratulate himself that at any rate no two consecutive Pontiffs have ever been heretical, and that God will never impute the 318 guilt of such papal heresies to the flocks who follow them in ignorance. Men’s faith was perplexed on all sides by visions and miracles often proved to be false; and the friar in his cell, so far from escaping these spiritual trials, was frequently tortured tenfold: the early legends show us glimpses of a veritable religions Inferno. The greatest saints had often the bitterest struggles: first with their own family and the World: then with religious doubts; then with unsympathetic superiors and companions even in religion; lastly with devils on their deathbed. For we need to realise that, if the 13th century looked far oftener than ours for the visible and tangible presence of God, yet it also realized with even disproportionate vividness the omnipresence of the Devil. Flashes of blinding spiritual light alternated with a horror of great darkness. Much of what is most harsh and repulsive in early Protestantism is a direct legacy of this medieval Satanology. Many of the best minds of the Middle Ages suffered Bunyan’s own agonies of mind on the subject of Predestination. The Fioretti tells us how this despair tortured Ruffino, one of the Three Companions, in the very presence of St. Francis. Giles, a greater name still in the annals of the Order, was so buffeted of Satan that “he was wont to say with a sign as he returned to his cell in the evening, ‘Now I await my martyrdom.’ ” It was the penalty of the constant preponderance of sentiment over reason in the religion of the time, just as numb and weary doubts are the nemesis now of a reason which tyrannizes over sentiment. The early friars encouraged even the most hysterical manifestations. The gift of tears in prayers was especially coveted; and the blessed Umiliana, lacking these for a time, nearly blinded herself by trying to recall them artificially with quicklime. Visions and ecstasies were infectious; sensual enjoyments of taste, of smell, of touch were eagerly sought and highly prized in religion. Words of prayer would leave a literal taste of honey in the mouth or a smell of incense in the nostrils: again, the ecstasy of devotion would take more violent forms which seemed perilous even to the enthusiastic David of Augsburg, and are altogether horrible to the modern mind, whether Catholic or Protestant.1 Indeed, the crazy conceits and vain self-torturings recorded in the century from St. Francis to Dante have never been exceeded, and seldom equalled, in other Christian ages. So long as these inventions were not too antisacerdotal or too contrary to the then popular currents of religious thought, there was no extravagance that did not find its admirers and its imitators.
Devils, then, were everywhere plain to the eye of faith in the 318 most ordinary and innocent operations of nature. To St. Edmund Rich, they rode on the thunderstorm and filled the winter twilight like rooks cawing their way home to roost. To St. Dominic, the fiend was incarnate in a wretched sparrow which interrupted his studies and which he therefore plucked alive, exulting in its shrieks. Thousands of devils would besiege one tiny Franciscan hermitage: friars would be seen brandishing their sticks in the air and driving them away like flies. But the fear of the visible devil was not the worst: there was always the horrible suspicion that he might be lurking under the disguise of an angel of light, of the Virgin Mary, of our Lord Himself. Long hours of tender spiritual talk, off rapturous visions, of graces begged and vouchsafed, of ecstasies faint with sweetness, would suddenly reveal themselves as a mere film of bright deceptions concealing the unspeakable abominations of Hell. Salimbene gives us a glimpse of this, though his stories are far less painful than others which might be quoted. He tells (569) of a friar to whom the Devil came habitually in the form of Saints Francis, Anthony, Clare, Agnes, the Virgin Mary, or Christ Himself. These visions promised that he should become Pope; and he was delighted to think how much good he could then do. He refused, however, to follow certain “devilish and unhonest” suggestions of the Demon, who therefore told him that he had now lost the papacy by his disobedience. This leads Salimbene to tell a string of similar devilish deceptions, by way of warning readers how difficult it was to distinguish between false and true visions. To another Franciscan the Devil appeared in our Lord’s shape; a third was haunted on is deathbed by a demon assuring him that he was damned, and that his daily adoration of the Host of the Mass had been sheer idolatry.2 Again, Brother Richard of England told Salimbene a strange incident which had happened in his own convent. “A simple and upright friar, fearing God and avoiding evil,” dwelt in a hermitage near Naples: and the other Brethren esteemed him so highly that they made no scruple of leaving him at home alone when they went abroad on business. The Devil therefore, in the likeness of an angel, came and told him “thy life is most pleasing in God’s sight: so that thou wouldst be altogether like unto His Son (in so far as human frailty permitteth) if thou hadst yet one thing, for lack whereof thou canst not be saved.” The one thing lacking was, that he should literally crucify himself: and one day the brethren found him half-dead, with one hand and both feet nailed to a cross. Salimbene does not tell us the last end of this friar: in the parallel incident, the visionary held impenitently to his own 319 belief, till the discussion was ended by the Devil carrying him off. We might be tempted to dismiss such stories with a laugh, but for their significance as the frequency of homicidal and suicidal delusions in the cloister: for the monastic records teem with such stories. As Salimbene puts it, “some by the guile of these devils are persuaded to hang themselves; others they drive to despair; others they drown in the waters or dash to pieces from a precipice; others they cast into the fire, whence they shall pass to where their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched.”3
Sometimes indeed the tragedy turns to comedy: for instance, (571) “there as a certain Friar Minor of Provence who had eaten a partridge for his supper, and who then went to sleep. Wherefore that night in his sleep the Devil came and smote him with his fist, so that the brother awoke in fear, and fell asleep again. Then came the Devil and smote him as before; and again the Brother fell asleep. Lo then a third time the Devil came and smote him mercilessly with his fist, so that the Brother awaked and cried in fear, ‘Ah God! must I be slain for that I ate a partridge last night?’ To whom the Devil replied, ‘Ye murmur, ye are ungrateful and discontented; I have taken from you the fruit of your prayers.’ And with these words he departed from the friar, who now changed his life for the better: for perchance he had been faulty in those things whereof he was accused by the Devil. Hence we read that the blessed Francis said to his companion, one night when he was smitten of demons at the palace of a certain cardinal: “The demons are our Lord’s bailiffs, whom He hath set apart to exercise men. For I believe that God hath suffered His bailiffs to fall upon us because our sojourn at the court of great folk is no good ensample to others.’ ” There is another charming story of a evil who entered into a peasant and made him talk Latin. “But he tripped in his Latin, whereat our Lector mocked him by his faults of grammar. To whom the demon said, ‘I myself can speak Latin as well as thou, but the tongue of this boor is so gross and unhandy of speech, that for very uncouthness I can scarce wield it.’ ” Our chronicler presently goes on to relate another long and amusing, but very rambling, story about a demoniac peasant who also talked Latin: Miss Macdonell, who has evidently somehow misunderstood it, goes out of her way to found upon it a very unjust accusation of unfriendliness against Salimbene himself.4
But it was not always the Devil who got the best of these discussions. A friar of the Mark Tapley type, who was crying 320 aloud the praises of God at a time when such utterances were discouraged as undignified by monastic moralists, “ was rebuked by the Devil, who said that this place was neither fitting nor honest for the praise of God. To whom the friar answered and said, ‘I am so wont to praise God that I cannot cease therefrom; for I have learned in the Scriptures that He is everywhere, and should therefore everywhere be praised by His own, even as the Apostle saith “I will therefore that men pray in every place,” wherefore even in his base place will I praise God with my mouth. For God abhorreth no uncleanness but the uncleanness of iniquity. But thou, wretch, who wert created to praise God in heaven, hast now lost it by thy pride. Prithee tell me now, wert thou of those who prayed the Lord to send them into the herd of swine?’ To whom the demon said, ‘Why askest thou this?’ ‘Because,’ said the friar, ‘like cleaveth to like. Thou art a swine, unclean by nature and by name; for thou lovest uncleanness and seekest uncleanness; for thou wert created to dwell in heaven, and now thou goest from dunghill to dunghill, and spiest out the cess-pools.’ At which words the devil was ashamed, and departed from him in confusion. For all demons are utterly confounded and put to shame by whatsoover recalleth their lost glory and the present misery which they have brought upon themselves.”
Another friar, a friend of Salimbene’s, who “made 300 genuflections every night, and fasted daily his whole life long,” put a devil to the blush by ridiculing the contrast between his former high place in heaven and his present lurking-place in the body of a miserable harlot. (570) Nor did this discomfited demon mend matters by attempting a diversion. “He paused and listened to a certain young friar who went singing through the convent: then said he to the Brethren who stood by, ‘Hear ye that friar who sings as he goes through the house? He is wholly mine.’ So when that friar had come to the place where the demoniac was, the Brethren said unto him, ‘This demon saith thou art wholly his.’ Then was the Brother ashamed, being conscious within himself of certain faults: and, turning aside from him, he found a priest, to whom he confessed those sins whereof he had greatest remorse of conscience. Then he returned and said again to the demon, ‘Tell me, wretch, what have I done that I should be wholly thine?’ To whom the demon answered, ‘A little while ago I knew well; but now I have forgotten. Yet know thou beforehand, that I have bound such a chain to thy feet as, before forty days are past, shall draw thee out from this Order, and thou shalt go thy way and return to thy vomit.’ And it came to pass as the Devil had said. See now the virtues of confession, 321 whereby sins are hidden; for at first the Devil knew, yet after Confession he could know nothing.” This anecdote is a very mild specimen of a type which even highly accredited medieval moralists frequently repeat with great gusto. The point is that confession not only annuls the guilt of sin before God, but also justifies the criminal in denying it altogether to his fellow-men; as we are told that, even in modern Ireland, a priest who has confessed and absolved a penitent of political murder will speak of him henceforth in public as “the innocent man.”5
On the other hand, this casting out of demons had its dangerous side. (572) “A certain clerk named Guglielmo, who dwelt in Parma, was a comely man, strong and of great stature, evil-minded, and a conjuror of demons. So one day when the wife of one Ghidino, a blacksmith, was possessed by a demon, this aforesaid clerk came and began to conjure the demon to depart from her. To whom the demon said, ‘I will indeed depart from her, but for thee I will weave such a web that thou shalt nevermore molest me nor drive me forth from my abodes; for know well that I will shortly cause thee to be slain, and thou shalt slay another.’ And it came to pass even as he had said; for a few months afterwards, in that same city of Parma, the clerk fell out in a certain courtyard with Ardoino da Chiavari, and they so rushed upon each other that, the strong stumbling against the strong, both fell together.” Our chronicler presently goes on to enumerate “the eight perils whereof the Apostle speaketh” (2 Cor. viii, 11, 26), and adds “as Brother Bonaventura the Minister-General said, in his sermons to the Brethren at Bologna whereat I was always present, ‘to consent to the temptations and suggestions of demons is as though a man should throw himself from the summit of a most lofty tower, and, when he is fallen half-way, should seek to catch some pole or stake to arrest his fall.’ ”
These abbreviated quotations give but a faint idea of the place held by the Devil in even a well-balanced imagination of the Middle Ages. Difficulties and temptations change their forms as time goes on: yet then, as now, Christ brought to many souls not peace but a sword. In spite of the elaborate organization of the hierarchy and the theory of the sacraments, every man has still to work his own salvation with fear and trembling: and desperate pangs of conscience were a sign not of reprobation but of grace.
Moreover, as a vigorous soul is never without its struggles, so a vigorous Church has always its sects. Those who are curious to learn how Italy was distracted during this period should consult Dr. Lea’s great History of the Inquisition. I have no room 322 here but for those religious aberrations which came under Salimbene’s own eyes. These all throw — unjust as it would be to press the comparison too closely — very interesting side-lights on the beginnings of the Franciscans themselves.
One sect originated indirectly with Salimbene’s dear friend and master, Hugues de Digne. (254) Two laymen, touched by his preaching, came and begged admission to the Order: but he refused and put them off with Joachitic parables which they very naturally misunderstood. “Go into the woods,” said Hugh, “and learn to eat roots, for the Tribulations are at hand. They took him literally, and formed an order of wild hermits whom the Franciscans called derisively Bushmen (Boscarioli), but who called themselves Friars of the Sack. “They made themselves striped garments of black and white . . . . then in process of time they made themselves a frock of sackcloth — not sackcloth of hair [as in the Apocalypse] but almost of fine linen: and beneath this they had excellent tunics, and at their neck a mantle of sackcloth, whence they are called Friars of the Sack. And they caused sandals to be made for them, such as the Friars Minor have: for all who wish to make some new Rule always beg somewhat from our Order — either our sandals or our cord or even our frock. But now we have a papal privilege that no man shall wear such a habit as might cause him to be taken for a Friar Minor: for the so-called Britti Friars of the Mark of Ancona were wont to wear just such an habit; but Pope Alexander IV brought them into one congregation with the Austin Friars.” Meanwhile these friars waxed in numbers and became indefatigable beggars, to the disgust of the older Mendicants. “One day the Lady Giuletta degli Adhelardi, a devotee of ours, seeing these Friars of the Sack begging their bread from door to door in Modena, said to the Franciscans, ‘I tell you truly, Brethren, we had already so many bags and wallets to empty our granaries, that this Order of the Sack was not needed.’ ” Salimbene, therefore, is convinced that Gregory X was divinely inspired in abolishing the Order, as tending “to weary and burden Christian folk with the multitude of beggars.” He goes on to explain how the Austin Friars were organized by Alexander IV, who compelled half-a-dozen sects of begging Hermits to coalesce into that single Order. Among these were the Giambonitani, founded by one Giovanni Bono, who lived in the days of St. Francis; his body was buried in my days at Mantua, and his son I have seen and known, Brother Matthew of Modena, a fat man.” Yet he remarks complacently that these Austin Friars existed even now only on sufferance, and in 323 daily peril of disruption. An Austin Friar might possibly have retorted the criticism on the Franciscan Third Order, which was already getting so seriously out of hand that St. Bonaventura seemed to look upon it as a hindrance rather than a help.6
The strangest story of all, however, is told on p. 255 ff., with even more than Salimbene’s usual superfluity of repetitions and abusive epithets. In or about 1260 — the year foretold for Joachim’s Reign of the Holy Ghost, and actually marked by the rise of the Flagellants — a new Order arose. It grew up, as usual, among the common people. Salimbene was living in the convent of his native Parma, when one Gerardino Segarello applied for admission and was refused, being “of vile parentage, illiterate and a layman, unlearned and foolish.”7 Nothing daunted, he lingered in their own churches, studying how to found a religion of his own. This was of course contrary to the definite decree of the Lateran Council (1215): but we have seen already how little the decrees of that great Council were regarded. Segarello hit at last upon the idea of imitating our Lord’s outward actions even more literally, and with even more scenic effect, than the Franciscans. His first suggestion came from a lamp-cover in their church, embossed with figures of the Apostles “wearing sandals on their feet, and mantles wrapped round their shoulders, according to the ancient traditions among painters.” He conformed himself carefully to this model, letting his hair and beard grow, making a mantle of coarse woollen stuff which he threw over his shoulders, and “taking the Franciscan sandals and cord: for whosoever would make a new congregation must needs steal from our Order.” Then, selling his house, he took the money and cast it “not to the poor, but to the rabble at play in the piazza, who departed to continue their dicing and blasphemed the living God in the giver’s very ears. He thought to fulfil Christ’s counsel: yet Christ said not ‘Give to the rabble’ but ‘Give to the poor:’ give to those who praise God, and not to those who blaspheme Him and the virgin mother of Christ, who made the Son of God our brother. Again, wishing to make himself like to the Son of God, he caused himself to be circumcised, which is contrary to the worlds of the Apostle, (Gal. vi. 15). Moreover, he lay in a cradle wrapped in swaddling-clothes, and sucked milk from the breast of a certain ignorant woman. After that he went to a certain village called Collechio; and standing in the midst of the road, in his simple folly he cried aloud to the passers-by ‘Go ye into my Vineyard.’ Such as knew him held him for a madman, knowing that he had there no vineyard: but the hill-folk, who knew him not, entered the vineyard 324 that lay towards his outstretched hand, and ate other men’s grapes, thinking themselves bidden thereto by the proper lord. Moreover he spake to none and saluted none, thinking thereby to fulfil that word of Christ’s ‘Salute no man by the way.’ And often would he say the Lord’s word ‘Penitenz-agite,’ (for he was too rude and unlearned to say Pœnitentiam agite:’*) and thus in process of time said his followers for many years, being rustics and unlearned men. If ever he were bidden to dine or to sup or to lodge, he ever answered in doubtful phrase, saying ‘I will come or I will not come:’ which was against that word of the Lord ‘Let your speech be Yea, yea, No, no.’ So when he came to the house of the Brethren Minor, and asked whether this Brother or that were in the house, the porter would answer him scoffingly and derisively, saying ‘Either he is in the house, or he is not.’ This is a grammarians teach us, ‘In whatever case the question is asked, in that same the answer should be made.’ ” Salimbene further accuses him of practising an ordeal not infrequent among ignorant enthusiasts in the earlier days of Christianity, but already repugnant to the moral sense of the 13th century.
Gerardino soon had about thirty followers. He called his Order the Apostles: Salimbene can never bring himself to write the name without some scornful addition; often he parodies the Apocalypse: “They who say that they are Apostles and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan — a congregation of fools and lewd folk, and forerunners of the disciples of Antichrist.” The first proselyte had been “a certain servant of the Friars Minor of Parma, Robert by name, who was a disobedient and wayward youth, of whom the Wise Man writeth in Prov. xxix, 19, 21: whereof a certain tyrant said well ‘the race of menials cannot be corrected but by torture.’ Gerardino persuaded this servant to leave us and cleave to him: and this was to our great profit, for we got an excellent servant in his place, as it is written in Esias ‘instead of the shrub shall come up the fir-tree, and instead of the nettle shall come up the myrtle-tree.’ ” He was “like unto Judas Iscariot,” not only because “he took away with him the Brethren’s knife and cup and napkin, as though they had been his own,” but also because he bare the bag of these false Apostles, to his own private profit. For, sad to say, “men and women gave to them more willingly than to us and the Dominicans.” Yet this new Order could neither pray for men, nor preach, nor sing masses or other offices: they were merely “a congregation 325 of rascals and swineherds and false and lewd folk; of fools and of beastly ribalds, — ignorant as brute beasts — boorish and beastly men,” who, like the Gibeonites, had crept in under false pretences among the Lord’s chosen people, and deserved to be made mere hewers of wood and drawers of water — Nay “quibus magis incomberet purgare latrios aut alia vila opera exercere.”
They were indeed mere religious tramps, spending their days in idle gossip, and coming back to their common doss-house only to eat and sleep. Salimbene complains bitterly that they actually carried money about with them: — for the Franciscan, though ready to accept any sum whatever through a third person, still carefully abstained from touching it with his own fingers, for Lady Poverty’s sake.8 He is also shocked at their going about singly, unlike other Religious, who were bound to go about two and two for the avoidance of scandal. Moreover, they talked and went about freely with women — as indeed St. Francis and the very earliest Brethren had done with St. Clare and her sisters. But “the malice of the times” had long rendered such ideal relations impossible to the Friars; and Salimbene is all the more angry at the licence of the Apostles: “they run about the city all day beholding women.” Worse still, “ they are not in a state of salvation, since some of them keep not the rule of chastity to which all the religious Orders are bound: . . . . moreover, trusting to St. Paul’s words (1 Cor. ix, 5), these, who believe themselves to be Apostles, lead about with them the lady Tripia, sister to Brother Guido Putagio, who was many years their head: and likewise many other women also, who were an occasion of ruin to them. So that, in literal truth, ribalds and seducers enter in among these Apostles; and deceivers and robbers and fornicators, committing much folly with women and also with boys, and returning afterwards to their ribaldry.” On another point also the Apostles pushed Franciscan ideas to a dangerous extreme. “They would fain be content with one single tunic, believing this to be commanded them of God. Yet therein they err; for when the Lord said, ‘nor two coats,’ He did not understand these words literally, to forbid more than one to such as might be in need, both for the washing away of dirt, and for avoiding harm from cold. It is plain therefore that the Apostles of Gerardino Segarello are most foolish to be contented with a single tunic, Moreover, they expose themselves to danger of cold and of grievous illness, or even of death: or again to much wretchedness, both of vermin, which they cannot shake off, and also of sweat and dust and filth. For they can neither shake nor wash their tunic, unless 326 they would be naked meanwhile. Whence one day a certain woman said scoffingly to two Friars Minor ‘Know that an Apostle lieth in my bed at home, where he will remain until his tunic is dry, which I have washed.’ The Brethren Minor, hearing this, began to laugh at the woman’s folly, and that of the unwise Apostle.” Nothing is apt to be more irritating than the exaggerated imitation of our own mannerisms; and though it was counted saintly in one Franciscan that he wore the same garment for thirty years, the same feat seemed merely sordid to an “Apostle.” It is interesting, again, that our chronicler should apply to these Apostles the very text which was oftenest quoted against the Friars themselves by their adversaries: “they who creep into houses, and lead captive silly women loaden with sins, who are led away with divers desires: ever learning, and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth.”
Salimbene is specially disgusted at these men’s ignorance: “These fellows, who say that they are Apostles and are not, have neither book-learning nor mother-wit; and when they would fain preach without scriptures they busy themselves with goat’s wool and the fifth wheel of a waggon,9 for they speak buffooneries and sow heresies abroad, ‘understanding neither the things they say, nor whereof they affirm.’ Of whom one may say with the prophet Micah: ‘thou shalt sow, but shalt not reap; thou shalt tread the olives but not be anointed with the oil; and the new wine, but shalt not drink the wine:’ which is to say that these ribalds of Brother Gerardino Segarello, who call themselves Apostles, shall have no reward of their preaching, for they know not what they say: nay, in the words of the Scripture ‘they shall sow wind, and reap a whirlwind.’ ” The reference here to Salimbene’s own aureole laid up for him in heaven is unmistakable: and he goes on to reckon up with pardonable complacency his own opportunities of learning, and the use he has made of them. “Forty and six years I have studied unceasingly: and even yet I have not attained to the wisdom of my forefathers. But these so-called Apostles are mere rustics, who ought rather to take the hoe and labour the earth, which crieth far and wide for tillage. In their congregation such men preached as, in our Order would scarce be suffered to wait at our tables, or wash our dishes, or go from door to door for bread.” Of this he gives two very amusing instances. “A certain Friar Minor, who had a nephew not yet 15 years old, was causing him to be taught, that he might enter later on into the Order of Friars Minor. This nephew would write out sermons for the Friar his uncle, whereof he learnt four or five by heart: and since we received him not so 327 quickly as he wished, he caused himself to be taken into the Congregation — nay, rather, into the Dispersion — of those who say they are Apostles and are not; and these also let him preach in Cathedral churches those sermons which he had learnt. Many of these fellows would command silence; and then would the boy speak to the assembled people. So one day when Brother Bonaventura da Iseo† was preaching at Ferrara in the church of the Friars Minor, he saw some of his hearers rise suddenly and run hastily forth. And he marvelled greatly; for he was a famous and gracious preacher, whom men were wont to hear gladly, so that none would withdraw from his preaching until it was ended. So he asked why they had left the church in such haste, and he congregation told him ‘A little boy of these Apostles is ready to preach in the Cathedral church, where the people is gathered together; wherefore all are in haste to run and get themselves places.’ To whom Brother Bonaventura answered ‘I see that your heart is busied and troubled with other things; wherefore I will dismiss you forthwith, for I should labour in vain if I preached longer. In truth we need not that Antichrist should come with his forerunners; for he would find many followers among Christian folk. Go therefore to your child whom ye desire to hear, and let him confess you of your sins; for to-day is that day wherein the Lord’s words shall be fulfilled, saying “Behold, the hour cometh, and it is now come, that ye shall be scattered each one to his own, and shall leave Me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.” ’ Therewith he dismissed them; and all made such haste to depart that none waited for the other. Another time, when I dwelt at Ravenna, those Apostles caused the aforesaid boy to preach in the archiepiscopal cathedral of the city of Ravenna; and in so great haste did folk of both sexes run together that scarce would one await the other. Wherefore a certain great and noble lady of that land, who was a devotee of the Friars Minor, — the lady Giullietta, wife of the Lord Guido, Son of Rizola da Polenta, — complained to the Brethren that she could scarce find a friend to go with her. And the Cathedral was already so full when she came thither that she was fain to stand without by the door; yet that Cathedral church is so great that it has four aisles, beside the great nave, which contains half the space. Moreover, those fellows who call themselves Apostles were wont to lead round this boy of theirs from city to city, and made him preach in Cathedral churches; 328 and folk flocked thick together, and there was a vast congregation, and much gaping both of men and of women; for the men of our days delight in new things.10 Wherefore it is strange that the Church should suffer boys to elect one of their fellows to sit in the Bishop’s seat on the Feast of the Innocents.”11 Salimbene heads the whole of this paragraph “Of the folly of Christian folk.” In short, he could see only two good points in these Apostles; first, the picturesqueness of their dress, which he admits not without a little natural envy; and secondly that they did really begin in or about the year 1260, the Great Year of Joachism. But this latter advantage was neutralized by the fact that there was no word of them in Joachim’s prophecies, (or rather in the pseudo-Joachim,) which, as all the world knew, had foretold exactly the coming of the Franciscans and Dominicans.
All this, however, did not hinder the Apostles from growing rapidly. Among the ignorant folk Segarello’s pious folly passed for a good imitation of the Friar’s life. Nor was it popular among the ignorant only: for the Apostles had at least three powerful patrons in the Church — the Bishop Obizzo, the Notary Apostolic Albert of Parma, and the Abbot of the great Cistercian monastery of Fontanaviva. It was this latter who advised them not to build convents, but to tramp the country and live on alms. Segarello soon found himself an object of fervent worship, and his house a resort of pilgrims from all quarters. The devotees would “flock around him in a certain house, never opening their mouths but to cry with a loud voce a hundred times or more, ‘Pater, Pater, Pater!’ Then after a brief space they would begin again, and chant ‘Pater, Pater, Pater!’ after the wont of boys in grammar-schools, when they repeat in chorus at intervals the words which have been spoken by their master. But he honoured them in return by stripping himself and them so stark naked as to uncover their shame; and they stood round in array leaning against the wall; yet in no orderly or honest or good array. For he would fain strip them of all their worldly goods, that, naked, they might henceforth follow the naked Christ. For each of them at the master’s bidding had bound up his garments and laid them in the midst of that building. Then, at the master’s bidding, as they stood in this unhonest guise, was brought in (as Origen saith) ‘woman, the fountain-head of sin, the devil’s weapon, expulsion from paradise, mother of guilt, corruption of the old law.’ To her Gerardino commanded that she should give back the clothes as she pleased to these poor folk thus stripped and denuded of 329 their worldly goods: and they, when they were clothed again, cried out as before, ‘Pater, Pater, Pater!’ Such then was the reward and guerdon they had for this honour done to their master, that he played the fool in their presence and made them to play the fool: therefore the Wise Man saith in Proverbs ‘as he that casteth stone into the heap of mercury, so is he that giveth honour to a fool.’ After this he sent them to show themselves to the world: so some went to the court of Rome, others to Compostella, others to St. Michael’s mount,12 and others even to the Holy Land.” Salimbene saw such a troop in 1284, when “seventy-two of those who call themselves Apostles but are not, came by the high road through Modena and Reggio, old men and children together, on their way to Parma to see their founder Segarello, that they might give all their goods into his hand and receive his blessing, and wander by his leave through the world. So he brought them into a certain church in Parma; and, stripping them all naked, he reclothed them and received them into his Order and blessed them, and then sent them to go whithersoever they would. Yet Pope Gregory X in full Council at Lyons [A.D. 1274] had forbidden their further multiplication; but they cease not on that account to take the habit of that Religion, and to wander in their folly throughout the world, neither fearing God nor honouring man, (that is, the Supreme Vicar of Jesus Christ:) and yet they dream that they are in a state of salvation, though they obey not the Church of Rome! Moreover, in that same year, a few days later, there came along the same highway twelve girls, with mantles wrapped round their shoulders, calling themselves the Sisters of the aforesaid Apostles, and seeking Brother Gerardino on the same errand. These men, who call themselves Apostles and are not — nay rather, they are ribalds, boorish and beastly men, leading with them women of this kind — yet they believed themselves to be doing what the Apostle saith ‘Have we not power to carry about a woman, a sister, as well as the rest of the Apostles, and the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas?’ ” The indignation which plays such havoc with Salimbene’s grammar was felt in other quarters also. In 1287, the Council of Würzburg stigmatized the Apostles as disorderly tramps, and forbade the faithful to support them. Meanwhile Segarello himself “remained at Parma, where he was born, and wrought much folly; for he cast off his mantle wherein he had been wrapped, and made him a white over-mantle of coarse stuff without sleeves, wherein he seemed rather a buffoon than a man of religion. Moreover, he wore pointed shoes, and gloves on his hands; his words were 330 ribald, foul, vain, and unhonest, and empty and ridiculous, rather from his folly and stupidity than from the malice of his heart.” The decree of Pope and Council against the reception of new members was easily evaded, in the then state of ecclesiastical discipline. “Instead of obeying, they make the garments of their Order, and lay them apart in the sight of those who would fain join them, saying ‘We dare not receive you, for that is forbidden us: but to you it is not forbidden: wherefore do ye as seemeth good in your eyes.’ Thus have they grown and multiplied beyond all count; nor will they rest or cease from their folly until some Pope, in his indignation, shall blot out the very memory of them from beneath the sky.” Meanwhile “by the miserliness and sloth of the Bishops they are suffered to wander unprofitably about the world.”
This multiplication had already brought its natural consequence — a schism in the Order. Gerard was no organizer, and had never cared to assume the formal headship. “They have no instruction, which is great folly: for, whereas beasts and birds and other creatures have all that they need from nature at their very birth, yet man’s soul is created by God like a blank tablet, and they need a teacher. Therefore to these Apostles (not Christ’s but Segarello’s) who are teacherless, we may apply that saying in the Book of Judges ‘in those days there was no king in Israel, but everyone did that which seemed right to himself.’ (Now that clause is written four times in the Book of Judges, once in the 17th chapter, and twice in the next, that is in the first and last verse, and again at the end of the book.) Therefore in a certain town of Apulia, where the country-folk said ‘we are all captains and good folk,’ they were put to flight by a certain baron from France on his way to the Emperor: for they demanded toll of him, which also he would have paid if he had found a captain.” From Robert, again, little was to be expected in the way of leadership: for “in process of time, while I dwelt at Faenza, he dwelt there also in the house of a certain Tertiary called brother Ghiotto [glutton]; and on Good Friday, at the our at which the Son of God was crucified, he became apostate, and cut his hair, and shaved his beard, and took to wife a certain female Hermit. I had heard all this, but I was loth to believe it until I had asked him; whereupon he confessed and denied not that he had in truth done all these things. Then I rebuked him sharply, but he made excuse, saying that he had never bound himself to obedience nor to chastity; wherefore he might well take a wife. But I said to him that he had worn publicly for many years the habit of religion, and ought therefore in no wise to have taken to wife a 331 Hermitess dedicated to God; and I added many authorities and examples to show him his folly and wickedness . . . sixthly and lastly, I showed him how all who fall away from God and become apostate come to an evil end, which I have proved not by experience only, (for I have seen it with mine own eyes and heard it from others) but also from holy Scripture. For either they are beheaded or burnt or slain with the sword or hanged on gallows, or surely they die by some other most evil and shameful and cruel death.” Robert, however, only “began to scoff.”
In default of Robert, Segarello found his Frate Elia in one Guido Putagio, a man of noble family and a personal friend of Salimbene’s. Guido “manfully took the government to himself, and held it may years. But he went abroad too pompously with many horsemen, and made such lavish expenses and banquets as the Legates and Cardinals of the Roman Court are wont to make, wherefore his followers took it ill, an chose themselves another head, one Brother Matteo of the Mark of Ancona; so that a division was made among them. They came to blows with one another — that is, the Apostles of Brother Matteo with the Apostles of Brother Guido Putagio — and gave an evil example to the laity of Faenza. For I dwelt there in those days, and can bear witness thereof. Brother Guido dwelt at Faenza in a little church which was in the orchard of the families of Alberghetti and Accherisi; with whom were but few Brethren of his own party, and Brother Gerardino. It seemed therefore to the Apostles of the Mark that if they could have Brother Gerardino, who was their founder, they would obtain the victory; so they would fain have carried him off by main force into the Mark: but this they might by no means do, so that either party fought against the other.” The scandal of these conflicts was heightened by a worse incident. “In the year 1286, a certain rich young man, whose father and mother were still living, married a wife; and on the day of his wedding he gave hospitality to three ribalds of the Order of those who call themselves Apostles and are not; and these ribalds deceived him shamefully and horribly. So when the young man saw that he had been deceived, he caused them to be taken before the Podesta, and they were led to the gallows. When therefore this had come to the ears of the Lord Obizzo di Sanvitale, Bishop of Parma, (who had long protected this Order by reason of Gerardino their founder) he expelled them from Parma and from his whole Bishopric. This same Gerardino is now come to such a pitch of madness as to walk abroad clad like a buffoon; and like a strolling actor or clown he trails his folly through the streets and squares of the city.” Some years earlier, moreover, 33 Segarello had been in the Bishop’s prison: for Salimbene wrote in 1284 that “on account of his follies, and his foul, carnal, and foolish words that he was wont to say, and the scandal that he gave with his unseemly ordeal of chastity, therefore the Lord Obizzo, Bishop of Parma, took and cast him bound into prison: but in process of time he brought him thence and kept him in his palace. So when the Bishop ate, he ate also in the hall of the palace, at a lower table with others. And he loved to drink choice wines and eat delicate meats; so when the Bishop drank some choice wine, then Segarello would cry in all men’s hearing, desiring to drink of that same wine; and forthwith the Bishop would send him thereof. So when he was fulfilled of delicate meats and choice wine, he would speak folly, and the Bishop, being a merry man, would laugh at the words and deeds of that fool, whom he took not for a man of Religion, but for a silly and senseless buffoon.”
Segarello disappears here from Salimbene’s pages, but not from the stage of history. Honorius IV had issued a special Bull against the Apostles about the year 1286; but it was evidently not obeyed, for Nicholas IV reissued it five years later. The order was now proscribed; and in 1294 four Apostles were burned as heretics at Parma. Segarello abjured, and was condemned to imprisonment for life. He relapsed, however, and was burned in 1300, the year of Dante’s vision.
We must, of course, allow for Salimbene’s jealousy; but his accounts tally with those from other sources. Almost incredible as it seems that these Apostles should have enjoyed distinguished ecclesiastical patronage, their story is less strange than that of their contemporaries the Guglielmites at Milan and the Neminians in France, of whom only once chance record has survived.13 After all, why should not Segarello have passed so long for a saint, in an age which was accustomed to still more startling manifestations on the part of good Franciscans? There is nothing in his outward conduct more eccentric than what we read of Fra Ginepro and Jacopone da Todi; of Thomas the Irishman cutting off his right thumb to avoid the priesthood; of St. Francis and Fra Ruffino climbing the pulpit “naked as they were born, save in their drawers only.” Segarello, like these, had not only powerful protectors, but also distinguished disciples. The most eminent of these, Dante’s Fra Dolcino, came forward publicly for the first time within a month or two of Segarello’s death, and a dozen years of Salimbene’s. A factitious importance was given to such enthusiasts by the widespread religious unrest of the age: an unrest which seemed as strong, after nearly a century of the 333 Friar’s influence, as in those days when Francis first gained the world’s ear by words of authority which contrasted strangely with those of the Scribes and Pharisees of his time. As in the year 1200, so also in 1300, thousands were sick at heart, doubting gravely of the official doctors, and therefore ready to follow any blatant quack who caught their fancy. A deep despair of the present world lay at the root of Dolcino’s revolt. The Good Pope, to whom Roger Bacon and so many others had looked forward, seemed farther off than ever. Any man therefore could command a following by condemning the vices of the clergy and offering to lead others through blood and flame along the shortest path to heaven. On this idea, at least, Dolcino did stake his own life and happiness, and persuaded others to stake theirs. Few are recorded to have fought and suffered as those 1400 who followed him into the mountains; fewer still have ever matched the constancy with which he himself bore the tortures of the Inquisition, and Margaret insisted on sharing them with him.
* A. V. “Repent!” Douay version “Do penance!”
[Elf-Note. Bill Thayer states that:We know this from the rules of Latin prosody, in which an apparent syllable ending in ‘-m’ is not counted at all.
The interesting question to me would be whether Segalelli was the heir to a bona fide tradition of pronunciation, or whether he had eruditely restored the ancient pronunciation based on his knowledge of prosody or maybe some passage in an ancient grammarian (that I don’t know about). Unfortunately, we’re deprived of this interesting information by the bias of the writer: a reminder to me that when once I give way to a prejudice, I can no longer see things for what they are. The Segalelli fellow may well have been a crook and an impostor, but his Latin was better than the writer’s.
† Not the Saint, but a contemporary of some note in the Order.
THE reader has now seen how Salimbene and his contemporaries regarded the faith, the education, and the morals of a generation which is generally allowed to stand at the high-water mark of medieval life. Things were worse than this before St. Francis came; and again there was a falling-off in many ways when the Friars became as corrupt as the rest of the clergy. For the heroic days described in the Fioretti and Thomas of Eccleston and Jordan of Giano were brief indeed; and long before the first example of self-sacrifice had made its definite mark on the world, such self-sacrifice was already rare in the Order itself.1 In brief, the Friars took the colour of the old world far more rapidly than their own better leaven worked among the people. In the divine inspiration of the earliest days Francis might almost have blessed his Order (if Order it could then be called) in Virgil’s words to the purified Dante: “Free, upright, and whole is thy will, and ’twere a fault not to act according to its prompting; wherefore I do crown and mitre thee over thyself.” But even before the Saint’s death, Franciscanism could no longer be left safely to its own promptings. The stricter friars found themselves driven into a severity of discipline, a stern and sad view of human life such as became characteristic of later Puritanism.2 Others at the opposite pole abused Franciscan liberty in vagabondage, gluttony, wine-bibbing and wantonness. The large majority, between these two extremes, tried more or less unconsciously to make the best of both worlds, and lived such a life as we see reflected in Salimbene’s pages.
For Salimbene, in spite of all that may be said to the contrary by those who have formed their ideas from only one side of the early records, is quite the typical better-class Franciscan of the generation between St. Francis and Dante. He had many better friends, and many worse, but he himself was quite up to the average. That average may seem low indeed to those who 335 know what St. Francis not only expected of all his Brethren, but obtained from many by the magnetism of his personal influence. Yet we must not judge of the Order from that first group of missionaries: for a serious rift appeared even in the saint’s lifetime between Franciscan theory and practice, and widened rapidly into an almost impassable gulf.
Every friar on entry swore obedience to the Rule, which contained these words, written by St. Francis and solemnly ratified by the Pope: “I straitly command all my Brethren to receive in no wise either money or coin, whether directly or through any third person.” The Brethren were further forbidden to possess houses of their own; and on his deathbed the Saint solemnly laid it on their consciences never to explain away these plain words, nor to obtain Papal letters of interpretation, whether directly or indirectly. Each novice, as he was admitted, swore obedience to this Rule, and received in return a solemn and official assurance that by keeping it he would earn eternal life. Compare this theory with an incident which Salimbene relates without comment, and which is confirmed by official documents, exactly 30 years after St. Francis’s death. (463) “This year . . . . in the month of May, the Lord Guglielmo Fogliani, Bishop of Reggio, sold to the Friars Minor of that city, that they might make their habitation there, the Imperial palace, which the Lord Nicholas his predecessor had had as a gift from the Emperor; except that the Emperor kept the right of lodging there on his journeys. And the friars bought it, and paid for it with money which they had from the Sisters of the Order of St. Clare, to whom they sold their old convent. . . . . And because the friars had bought the aforesaid palace, (save for the Emperor’s right of lodging there), therefore in process of time, they sent word to the Lord Rodolph, who had been elected Emperor by Pope Gregory X, that they possessed and dwelt in his palace in the city of Reggio, and they would gladly have his leave to dwell there. And he answered that he was exceeding glad to have such guests, and whatever rights he had therein he gave wholly and freely to the Friars Minor. And of this he gave them two indented letters, confirmed with his own seal, promising to confirm them yet more strongly if he were successful in getting possession of the Empire. And because the aforesaid dwelling was narrow, therefore the Friars Minor bought more ground and houses round about.” Lower down he describes the buying of this new land and the building of the additions to the convent, “and the commune,” he adds, “gave them valuers to value in good faith the price of the houses to be 336 bought.” Alberto Milioli, the contemporary chronicler of Reggio, adds the information (implied even in Salimbene’s text), that the Friars evicted the unwilling sellers from their houses; and our friar’s own words, “they made a new street,” imply that these additions were of considerable value and extent. Yet the original palace must have been a very large building: for, even before the alterations, when the Emperor of Constantinople passed through the city, he solemnly knighted a noble “in the convent of the Friars Minor,” on which occasion “all the knights and almost all the ladies of Reggio,” were present. (483; 487) Only twelve years after St. Francis’s death, in 1238, the Friars of Valencia were presented with a palace by a Moorish king, recently converted at the point of the sword; and dozens of cases might be quoted to show how rapidly and how completely the Order disobeyed their master’s solemn precepts on this point. So also on the point of dress. The Rule bids them be content with two tunics, which they may patch with sackcloth. These patches were also used to thicken the tunics where the body was most sensible to cold.3 But less than 15 years after St. Francis’s death the friar who contented himself with two old frocks was already a rara avis. Salimbene (286) speaks with admiration of Brother Buoncompagno da Prato “a spiritual man: for when I dwelt with him in the convent of Pisa, whereas each Brother took two new woollen tunics yearly, yet he would never accept but one, and that an old one; and when I enquired the reason, he would answer me saying, ‘Brother Salimbene, the Apostle saith, Every one of us shall render account to God for himself; and God shall also demand such an account, saying “Give an account of thy stewardship.” Indeed, I shall scarce be able to satisfy God for this single tunic which I take.’ ”4 Ubertino says that some friars in the Genoa province had two frocks and five under-tunics; and that all of the Milan province wore frocks of the finest cloth made in Italy. The appalling quibbles by which this kind of thing was justified may be read in the answer of the Community to these accusations. Indeed, here and elsewhere, the facts themselves are less significant than the jesuitry with which such flat disobedience was explained away even by men like St. Bonaventura. For the mere breach of their Rule the friars had indeed the precedent of centuries. The monk also was forbidden by his Rule to possess anything whatever of private property. Popes condemned the souls of “proprietary” monks to hell, and their bodies to the dunghill. Books of convent miracles swarm with tales of their damnation. On the very threshold of the Reformation, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada 337 gravely decides that it is a mortal sin for any monk to say even of a book or any similar object (except by a mere slip of the tongue) “That is mine.” On the other hand monks did in fact enjoy their private pocket-money, or even private incomes, for centuries, and would have enjoyed them for centuries more but for the violent interference of the State: yet even the crooked excuses offered for this breach of the Monastic rule seem straightforward compared with the jugglery of which Ubertino convicted his fellow-Franciscans. The degradation of the friars was unquestionably hastened by the habitual jesuitry with which their false position was defended.5
In this matter of buildings, especially, modern writers have painted even the earliest days in false colours which cannot but prove mischievous in the long run. Dr. Jessopp outbids Dr. Brewer, Canon Rawnsley outbids M. Sabatier, and Father Cuthbert outbids them all. But nothing can need a lie, and least of all the spirit of St. Francis, who loses far more than he gains by pious exaggerations. Professor Brewer, by a very natural slip, greatly exaggerated the meanness of the Cambridge Friars’ chapel: but all the rest follow him without suspicion, in spite of the extreme inherent improbability of the story.5a Again, he exaggerated the meanness of the town or suburban districts in which the friars settled; yet Dr. Jessopp outdoes these first exaggerations even in the case of the two Norfolk boroughs which lie close to his own home. He writes “The Friars settled outside the city walls at Lynn . . . . in a filthy swamp at Norwich through which the drainage of the city sluggishly trickled into the river, never a foot lower than its banks.” These words are typical of the false perspective which dominates nearly all modern popular writings on the early Franciscans. Lynn had no town walls when the Friars settled there: and the later fortifications, never including a continuous wall, left the Greyfriars inside their enclosure by a good quarter of a mile! Their site was then, as now, central and healthy. At Norwich, their site was separated from the river, first by one of the oldest streets in the town and then by a broad stretch of meadow. Of these meadows between the Friars and the river all were held by great folk: and in one of them, about 1300, Sir Thos. Roscelyn built himself a house which passed into the hands of other equally noted citizens.6 Only a small fraction of the city could possibly have drained past the Friary: nearly all the streets lay on the other side of the slope, and drained into the other bend of the river. As the old antiquary Kirkpatrick puts it, the Friars had “a large parcel of land, and of a very pleasant situation.” In London, where space 338 was extremely scarce, they evidently did settle at first on an unpleasant site: but a beautiful Early English capital dug up on the site of Christ’s Hospital shows that they very soon joined the many offenders against the constitution forbidding large or ornamental churches; indeed, within a short space afterwards their church became one of the most magnificent in the city. If this was so even in England, where Franciscans prided themselves on their special strictness, we need not be surprised that in Italy, long before the century was out, they had given grave offence with their gardens and orchards and vineyards. The Spirituals attacked, and St. Bonaventura very lamely defended, their rapidly-growing habit of settling, “to the scandal of clergy and people,” no longer in the country or the suburbs, but actually within the great towns; where, in spite of the enormous cost of land, they yet managed to get their great burial-grounds and their orchards. This complaint is still further emphasized by Bernard of Besse’s admission that the strict observance of St. Francis’s ideal of poverty “is precluded in cities, by men’s wickedness and by the multitude of the Brethren.”7 The Franciscan churches of Assisi, Florence, Padua, Todi, Bologna, Parma, — all built within a century of the Saint’s death — are like so many cathedrals. The inference of poverty commonly drawn from the fact that the Friaries yielded little spoil at the Dissolution, and that they had sometimes sold their books even earlier, is extremely fallacious. It only shows that, whatever their income was, they spent it as fast as they got it; or even, like other religious Orders, incurred heavy liabilities by living beyond it. The amount of plunder which could be squeezed at the present moment from the Salvation Army would be no true measure either of its actual income or of the comforts enjoyed by its officers: yet General Booth’s financial arrangements are far more precise and business-like than those of the friars; and a modern liquidator would have advantages which were altogether lacking in the 16th century. We have evidence that, long before Dante’s death, the friars were collecting large sums of money which were not always spent on such worthy objects as buildings and church ornaments, illicit as even these were. Ubertino describes many of his brother Friars begging all over the country, with servants at their heels bearing money boxes of which the masters alone kept the key: “and how they spend it, the tavern-keepers know, and the servants who bear the money. . . . . They have so corrupted the roads that such poor Friars as will not or cannot take bursars with them can now scarce find a living, since men believe they must possess money 339 like these others.” Here we have already Chaucer’s friar, as described by the Summoner, with his servant to carry the spoils. Ubertino only stops short of the last and most intolerable accusation — that, after writing down the benefactor’s names to be mentioned in his prayers —
“Whan that he was out at dore anon,
He planed away the names everichon: . . . .
— Nay, there thou lixt, thou Summoner! quod the Frere.”
Yet for this also we have plain documentary evidence. The still existing mortuary book of the Landshut Friary has had all its earlier names carefully erased with pumice-stone to make room for later entries; so that even the special glory of the convent’s earlier days, “the Venerable Father Brother Conrad von Weilheim,” had no longer any share in the prayers of the later Brethren. Similarly Ubertino tells us how the Friars would sell the same wax taper ten times over to different devotees, each of whom had paid for it in the hope of receiving its spiritual benefit for himself alone.8 The mere greed of money would of itself have seriously impaired the Friars’ authority over the people: but the evil was increased by others which it drew in its train. The earliest Brethren had braced themselves for their missionary work by frequent retreats to solitary hermitages: but in Salimbene’s time they already crowded into the cities as modern country-folk crowd into London. Of this he gives us, quite incidentally, a remarkable example. After speaking of the miracles of Brother Roland of Padua he goes on to speak of the convent of La Vernia (556) “where the seraph marked the Blessed Francis with the five wounds after the likeness of our Lord Jesus Christ. So I saw all the places of devotion which are there: and on the Lord’s Day I celebrated the convent Mass, and after the gospel I preached to the assembled people, both men and women. And note that, when I was at Alvernia, Brother Lothario, who had formerly been my Custos at Pisa, was still dwelling there, though old and infirm. I believe that this convent would have been deserted by the Brethren (as he said to me), unless it had been retained by his good offices.” It may seem almost incredible that a hermitage so sacred in Franciscan tradition as La Vernia should have been almost abandoned: but another sacred spot, Monte Casale, where Brother Angelo joined the Order and St. Francis converted the three robbers, was actually given up by the Brethren before 1450. Before that year of Jubilee in which Dante imagines his poem, there were not many friars left who had enough 340 firmness of purpose to live the old simple life. Ubertino complains that the Order in general had already quite lost its faith in the promises of Christ and St. Francis, and relied instead on the money gained from burials of rich folk, absolutions of usurers, legacy-hunting, and fees for masses and spiritual services. And Salimbene shows us this process already actively at work. He bitterly regrets that the earlier loyalty to St. Francis’s ideal should have lost to the Order the bodies of Count Raymund of Toulouse and St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and many other such rich prizes, including a whole convent, richly endowed, which Innocent IV had offered them at Lavagna. (61, 295.) He shows us usurers compounding for their sins by giving conscience-money to the friars (452: 609). Moreover, even the grosser forms of usury received underhand encouragement from the very Church which damned them; and none sinned more deeply in this respect than the ordinary friars, whom the Spirituals charged with habitually absolving the impenitent for the sake of a share in the plunder. Certain it is that the century of their first and strongest influence saw a rapid development of usurious practices, as the Franciscan Nicole Bozon himself complains, about the date of Dante’s death. “Nowadays,” he complains, “the old fashion is changed; for those who once avoided to give such men the kiss of peace in church, are now ready to kiss their feet, . . . and they whose bodies were wont to be buried in the field or the garden are now entombed, in churches before the High Altar.”9
Again, this growing thirst for money brought the Franciscans into collision with the other clergy and Religious — no longer now with the vicious and jealous only, but with the whole body outside their own Order. Already in Thomas of Celano’s “Second Life” we find complaints of quarrels with their old friends and allies the Dominicans. Salimbene tells us plainly of the breach with their nearest friends, the Cistercians. The Spirituals were justly scandalized by the Bulls which the laxer Brethren obtained to hinder other Orders from building convents within a certain radius of their own Friaries. The holy violence with which we have seen them evict a priest from his own church in Genoa was quite common, by Bonaventura’s own confession. One by one, they obtained Papal privileges enabling them to encroach by force on parochial duties, and to compete for parochial fees. The consequences may be guessed. St. Francis had indeed protested on his deathbed “If I had the wisdom of a Solomon, and found paltry secular priests, I would not preach against their will in the churches wherein they reside.” But, 341 only 30 years afterwards, St. Bonaventura writes “If we were never to abide in parishes but by the priest’s will, then we should scarce ever be able to stay long; since, whether of their own motion or at others’ instigation, they would eject us from their parishes sooner than heretics or Jews.”10 Indeed, it was not long before the parish clergy began to retort the worst of the accusations brought against themselves by the Friars. St. Francis himself, apparently, had not altogether escaped suspicion; and he in turn sounded a plain note of warning to his Brethren in the eleventh chapter of his Rule. Scandals, and sometimes more real difficulties, compelled the Franciscan authorities to renounce, over and over again, the official direction of the Poor Clares. Salimbene (421) tells us how one day at Faenza “as I was walking through the garden thinking of the Lord, I was called by a certain secular man of Ferrara named Matulino, a very great talker and composer of Canzoni and Serventesi, and one who noted us Religious and found fault with us: for he sat under a fig-tree with two Brethren of whom he asked questions; and he cried to me ‘Dan Friar, come hither and sit with us.’ ” Matulino had lately been at dinner with the Bishop of Forlì, and there the clergy had made much the same complaints against the Friars with which St. Bonaventura deals in the Quaestiones circa Regulam and Libellus Apologeticus: for, (as Salimbene puts it) “it is plain that the priests and secular clergy always lie in wait for us and are glad to calumniate us . . . . As to the sixth of these malicious accusations, that we are ladies’ men; that is, that we gladly see women and spake with ladies, and are in familiar talk with them, we say that these are the words of such as ‘lay a blot on the elect’ — that is, of buffoons and play-actors and such as are called Knights of the Court, who think to excuse themselves from their own vanity and wantonness in defaming others.’ Then answered Matulino and said ‘I tell you in truth, Brother Salimbene, those were the words of the Bishop of Forlì, and not of a buffoon. And, under my eyes, he arose from table and took a Bible and showed me how it was written “Sit not at all with another man’s wife, or repose upon the bed with her; and strive not with her over wine, lest thy heart decline towards her, and by thy blood thou fall into destruction.” And he said that ye Friars Minor and Preachers do daily contrary to that Scripture; and his clergy consented with him and confirmed his words.’ Then I answered and said ‘The Bishop of Forlì is such as Ecclesiasticus saith “he lieth in wait and turned good into evil, and on the Elect he will lay a blot”; and of his clergy I say that I care not 342 for their praise, for Seneca saith “Care no more to be praised by base folk than if thou were praised for base things.” We and the Friars Preachers are poor mendicants who must needs live on alms; and among those who help us are women, as it is written in Ecclesiasticus “Where there is no wife, he mourneth that is in want”: for they are more merciful to help the poor and more pitiful to the afflicted then men, who are harder of heart. Wherefore, when they send for us, we must needs go to them for their sick folk or for any other tribulation which they have, that we may make them some return of kindness and not be found ungrateful, since the Apostle saith “and be ye thankful.” We strive not with any women over wine; for according to our constitution we dare not drink in cities, save with prelates and Religious and Lords of Manors.’ ” This plea, which after all only rehearses the theory of Franciscan life and still leaves its practice to be proved, is reinforced by a digression in which our Friar brings against the clergy some of the accusations recorded in a previous chapter: and Matulino professed himself abundantly satisfied. “But I said to him: ‘five years I dwelt in the city of Ravenna, yet I never set foot in the house of the lord Marquis Michael, who is one of the greatest and most noble and richest of that city.’ ‘And I,’ said he, ‘have been there an hundred times at meat with him.’ Then answered I ‘Who therefore is the greater ladies’ man, thou or I?’ And he said ‘I see that it is I: and you have hemmed me in and given me checkmate, nor have I more to answer.’ Then said I to Matulino” — and here follows the second little sermon against ladies’ society and in praise of chastity from which I have already quoted in chapter viii: after which Salimbene ends in triumph, “Since, then, we are not ignorant of all these things, we are no ladies’ men, as our friends assert against us, but (as it is written in the book of Tobias) ‘we are the children of saints, and look for that life which God will give to those that never change their faith with him.’ What more shall I say?” What more, indeed? How could Matulino fail to become “such a friend of mine that I always found him ready to render me service; but he lost nothing thereby, for I gave him to wife the daughter of a man of Ferrara who dwelt at Ravenna, by whom he had a great dowry . . . for the girl’s father confessed to me in that sickness whereof he died.”
It is a long step from all this to the Fioretti or to Thomas of Eccleston: and indeed that intervening half century had wrought far-reaching changes among the Franciscans. The fact is, that the very strictness of the Rule in theory hardened 343 the average friar’s heart against its literal observance in practice, just as the very Puritanism of the medieval theory of religion partly accounts for the absence of Puritanism in medieval practice. A limited number of men were precisians by profession, and the majority felt all the more dispensed from the necessity of imitating them; as the crowds of our great towns claim a sort of vicarious merit in the achievements of their professional football-players. St. Francis’s straightforward glance had already noted how many of his Brethren “were fain to receive praise and honour only by rehearsing and preaching the works that the saints did themselves achieve.” So Ubertino asserts solemnly before God that, although there was no longer any real difference between friars and monks as to the reception of money, his brethren continued to glory in the strictness of their own Rule.11
Moreover, quite apart from their quarrels with the clergy, they rapidly lost popularity with the laity. Salimbene has told us how the country-folk attribute the barrenness of the earth to the malign influence of the Friars: and the same complaint meets us in a saying of Jordan of Saxony. St. Bonaventura and Ubertino, however else they differ, agree in frequently referring to the waning popularity of their Order.12 Almost more significant are the disciplinary books of the early Franciscans, in their extreme and petty anxiety to avoid unsympathetic criticism. Mr. McCabe describes the painful efforts of the modern Franciscans to hide all their doings from even the most sympathetic outsiders: and there was just the same jealous secrecy in the 13th century.13 Eccleston describes how Albert of Pisa, Minster General of the Order (d. 1280) “was wont to say to his companion, Ognibene by name, when they came to the house of spiritual friends, ‘Eat now, eat: we may eat securely here!’ For he was wont, so far as in him lay, to beware of all secular folk.” He goes on to tell another story to point the same moral, that the less layfolk see of the inner life of the Religious, the more they are likely to honour them. St. Bonaventura’s secretary shows the same jealous exclusiveness. “If novices are questioned about the doings of the Order, as of their fashion of fasting, their silence, or other points, let them plead that they are fresh to the Order, and pass the question on to a senior; lest perchance, while they think themselves to answer wisely and well, they say something foolish and altogether unfit to be said. L et them reveal the secrets of the Order to none, however religious or familiar; nor let them publish any statute, unless, perchance, it cannot conveniently be concealed.” Again, “Let them never invite strangers, even 344 their familiar friends, to visit the Offices of the Convent. Or if ever, at some man’s urgent entreaty, they are permitted to show these, let them show only the more common buildings, not entering and going from place to place and from corner to corner, but standing at the door and, with all possible expedition short of discourtesy, furtively hiding all that can be concealed from the strangers’ gaze. There is no Religion where all things are open to all men.” Moreover, even where the Friar thinks himself most secure he must still be on his guard. “A certain Brother was wont to relate that he had discovered in certain lay folks’ houses secret loopholes, whereby all that was unsuspiciously done in those houses could be clearly seen.” “Let [friars] altogether avoid loud speech . . . . and especially when they are in woods or thickets: for, (as the vulgar proverb hath it) woods have ears, and the level plain hath eyes. Let them therefore abstain altogether, in thick and woody places, from all things which they would not say before secular folk; unless perchance they wish to say anything under their breath, as it were, and in the Latin tongue. Miserable confusions from this cause are reported oftentimes to have befallen certain friars who have not used due caution.” Even in the estimate of the gravity of an offence this consideration of scandal plays a great part. St. Bonaventura, commenting on the clause of the Rule which bids friars who have committed mortal sin to have recourse at once to their Provincial for absolution, adds — “This is to be understood of notorious sins only: for those which are secret should not be made public: since, other things being equal, a sin done publicly to the scandal of others is more grievous than a hidden sin, and therefore more grievously to be punished.”14
Yet all this was a mere daubing with untempered mortar; for, when it was known that so many scandals really existed, the very effort to conceal them did more harm than good. As the adversary objects to St. Bonaventura, “since the Religious are wont so studiously to conceal their doings, it is suspected that certain improprieties take place among them; for why else are things so studiously hidden, since there is no need to conceal that which is good?” To which the Saint can only reply that this is partly in order to avoid vainglory, partly to conceal real shortcomings, but “mainly for the laity’s sake . . . . for friars cannot look into all men’s hearts and satisfy all with a reason why this or that is done [in their convents]., since secular folk are rude, and prone generally to suspect evil of the Religious.”15 Yet there is nothing hid that shall not be revealed; and from a thousand little scattered indications we can reconstitute pretty 345 exactly the life of a Franciscan cloister. However, it is no part of my task here to present a full picture of the ordinary Friar’s daily life: that would need a special volume to itself. I shall only attempt to bring out certain points which are necessary to the full appreciation of Salimbene’s autobiography, yet on which the most accessible books tell us little or nothing.
Next to the matter of money and possession, in which even the Papal Bulls mark clearly step by step the rapid lowering of the Franciscan ideal, perhaps the Friar’s most natural and insidious temptation lay in the hospitality of the outside world towards his Order and himself. It is a matter of common observation that the customary inactivity of the modern Sunday generates, in all but the most earnest and ascetic minds, a positive craving for creature comforts; and the 13th century was no more able than our own age to supply enough really earnest and ascetic minds to form one tenth of the multitudes who crowded into the new Orders. “Why,” asks St. Bonaventura’s adversary, “do we see all Orders of Religious decay in religious life, even while they seem to advance in temporal prosperity and in certain ceremonial observances?” And the Saint, admitting the fact, answers sadly that “one cause is the multitude of those that enter in.” As Roger Bacon tells us, thousands of these converts were ignorant schoolboys: many others brought into the Order a mind and body broken by dissipation, like the typical husband of French Romance: and there can be no doubt that this collocation of those who knew nothing of real life with others who knew only to much of one side of it, reacted almost as injuriously on the discipline of the cloister as it notoriously did on that of the medieval universities. We find in these Franciscan manuals evident efforts to keep the old and the young apart to some extent, though nothing like the elaborate system of precautions which the Benedictines attempted. After all the goodwill of their first conversion, the majority found themselves still very human. The strictly ascetic minority, again, were too few, under the most favourable circumstances, to leaven the mass thoroughly; while in most places they were actually persecuted and imprisoned, or even done to death and buried with the burial of a dog, for their inconvenient puritan zeal. Hence we find very early indications of that recoil of oppressed nature which Mr. McCabe describes so graphically among the modern Franciscans. He relates how casuists permit a fast-dinner to be protracted for four hours, and how he himself has assisted at such which have lasted for three; statements which square well enough with the menu of the fast-dinner given by St. Louis, and with several 346 other indications in our chronicle. Salimbene complains more than once of habitual self-indulgence on the part of the higher officials. Similarly, Ubertino writes “while Prelates guzzle daily, the sick are almost starved:” and again “so high has the flood of idleness and gluttony and continued familiarities with women risen, that I rather wonder at those who stand than at those who fall.”16
The early Franciscan documents show us at every turn how the ultra-ascetic ideal defeated its own object. The whole tragedy of the Friar’s decay during the lifetime of those who had known the founder himself, may be found written in St. Bonaventura’s Quæstiones circa Regulam and his two Epistles to the Provincials of the Order. As the early heroes of Franciscanism dropped out of the ranks — some by premature death, others eking out a crippled existence in the convent infirmaries after the ascetic excesses of their earlier days — a new generation grew up which, while it knew the old rigours mainly by hearsay, had the plainest ocular testimony of the irregular luxuries with which the discrepit Religious were daily pampered. The enormous popularity of the Order, and the indiscriminate reception of candidates, contributed still more to relax the earlier discipline. St. Bonaventura bewails the growing extravagance of their buildings and private expenses, and their wearisome demands, direct or indirect, upon the charity of the laity, so that the wayfarer already fears a friar as he would fear a robber. The Saint himself “would willingly be ground to powder,” if so he could bring the Order back to its purity of only half-a-century ago: but (as Father Ehrle points out) the downward impetus was too strong, and the “relaxed” party made rapid strides even during the Saint’s long generalate.17 Moreover these relaxations among the large majority necessarily entailed sufferings upon the strict minority, who, as even moderates like St. Bonaventura and David of Augsburg complain, were already not only despised but actually persecuted.18 It only remained that the too strict observance of St. Francis’s Rule and Testament should be publicly condemned as heresy; and this was done by John XXII in 1317. From that time forward, friars were burned by their fellow-friars for loyalty to the first traditions of the Order; since, helplessly subject as they were to the Roman hierarchy, they were not even allowed for many years to form separate congregations of their own for the strict observance of the Rule. This must always be borne in mind when we are tempted to draw invidious parallels between the Franciscans and, for instance, the Wesleyans. The price which St. France had paid for the official recognition of his Order by 347 Innocent III was in fact the degradation of the whole ideal. From the moment that the Friars became a sort of papal militia, they must needs conform to the general policy of the Roman Court, and come to terms with the greed, the ambition, and the corruption for which that Court long had been, and was long to be, notorious. The Wesleyans, as an independent body, have thus been able to work more powerfully for good on the Church which they left, than the Friars could act on the Church to which they clung. In the face of powerful spiritual rivals, Anglicanism has had no chance of holding her ground but by her learning and her good works. On the other hand, when once the Roman Court had succeeded in assimilating the Friars, she had little further to fear from their inconvenient reforming energy. Under its garb of poverty, the Order soon became notorious for its flattery of the rich. The friars of the 13th century had indeed protested almost with Luther’s violence against the abuses of the indulgence system: but the friars of the 15th and 16th centuries were the chief pardon-mongers.19 When we speak of schism as a great evil, let us also admit that even greater evils may conceivably spring from conformity to a system deeply corrupted in practice. The failure of the Franciscans is in fact a direct justification of the policy of our Reformers: for certainly one of the most potent causes of Franciscan corruption lay in a false notion of Authority. It was that notion which enabled the less spiritual majority among the Friars, while swearing obedience to the Rule and boasting the strictness of that Rule, to torture or put to death those few who really followed the Rule.
Of this, however, Salimbene gives us little direct evidence, though his Chronicle supplies us with the most valuable indirect corroboration of bitter and repeated complaints from contemporaries. It is natural, after all, that he should accept papally approved relaxations as a matter of course, and spend little ink on the dissentient Brethren who clung in spite of persecution to a doomed cause. Of horrors outside the convent he has plenty to tell us: but, so far as the inner life is concerned, the greater part of his Chronicle reflects his own cheerful and slightly cynical humour. In it we see plainly the average Friar, deep in admiration for he Saints of his Order, yet without any strong personal desire for martyrdom: full of fellow-feeling for the sinners, yet keeping himself pure on the whole from all grosser transgressions. If at times his manners and his morals seem strange to us, the fault lies not in the man but in his age. The more intimate study of medieval life, while it deepens our interest and affection for the separate figures which flit over that strange stage, is apt 348 to increase our horror of the gloomy background behind even the gayest and brightest groups of actors. Then, as now, most men struggled with more or less success against disorder and crime: but our hearty recognition of their honest efforts ought not to blind us to the rottenness of many institutions which they sought to uphold, or to the barbarous conditions which too often rendered their labours fruitless.
I HAVE tried to show, through a faithful summary of Salimbene’s autobiography with contemporary illustrations, how life would have looked to us if we had been born in the age of St. Francis and Dante. If I seem to have laid undue stress on the darker side, I would plead two considerations. First, if I had contented myself with a bare translation of Salimbene off-hand — or, for the matter of that, of any among half-a-dozen others of that century whom I could name — the picture thus presented would still have seemed almost incredibly dark to the modern English reader. Imagination staggers at the moral gulf that yawns between that age and ours. Secondly, plain speaking on this subject is rendered imperative by the persistent misrepresentations of those who champion dying theories in our own day. Reactionaries build themselves an imaginary past, just as the femme incomprise takes refuge, in the imaginary homage of distant friends, from the unsympathetic common-sense of those among whom she has to live. The whole Middle Ages cry out to us from Dante’s great poem “Who shall deliver us from the body of this death?” and I have chosen Salimbene’s chronicle for my main theme because he shows us more clearly than any other what was the Body of that Death. I am aware that many will refuse to accept this picture as true: but, as I have already said, I gladly challenge comparison with other contemporary evidence.
Meanwhile it is essential to a comprehension of our own life that we should face honestly and answer as truly as possible the question whether the morality of the “Ages of Faith” stood higher or lower than that of our own time. If the things that are more excellent have been steadily fading from the world during these 600 years, then it should clearly be the aim of civilization to hark back to the ideal of one central and absolute 350 religious authority. If, on the other hand, the struggle among different creed has tended towards a steady elimination of evil and growth of good — if many theories of the past, however massive and imposing, have shown themselves as little fitted to survive, as little worthy of regret, as the Mammoth or the Mastodon — then we may continue without misgiving to shape our creed by the Pauline maxim “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” I have tried, in the spirit of that maxim, to appreciate those real virtues of Romanism which make it still a living creed, and have changed it gradually for the better in spite of its professed immutability. But I have not attempted to conceal my conviction that its exclusive pretensions are flatly contradicted by the history of the very time at which they seemed most nearly justified: and that the world is far purer and better for the decay of sacerdotalism. One tenth of the abuses that reigned in the 13th century would have sufficed to wreck any Church in a less barbarous age. If Romanism dominated the Western world for three whole centuries longer, it was mainly because it maintained a Saturnine supremacy by devouring its own children. The Inquisition ruthlessly murdered every non-Roman organization in its cradle: and all the while, within the Church itself, men hoped for better things till hope grew sick. Dante, with the Franciscan reform not yet dead around him, could still looke for the regeneration of Romanism from within. But Langland, a couple of generations later, though he hated heretics as heartily as Dante did, had already lost Dante’s hope in the Church. For him, the last stronghold of Christianity had already succumbed to the assaults of Antichrist and the treachery of the Friars. Henceforth his pattern of simple faith, his Piers Plowman, must shake the dust of the past from his feet, and wander forth alone to the world’s end in search of the Christ that is to be.1 Wiclif himself scarcely condemns the prelate and the parish priest more outspokenly than St. Bonaventura: it was only that the Englishman’s bolder logic and his century of later experience drove him to the conclusion which the Saint had studiously avoided. Wiclif was the first great philosopher and theologian to confess frankly that the Medieval Church would never be reformed except by a revolution from within and by violent pressure from the laity without.
Much, however, of the generous modern over-estimate of medieval society is due to the admiration for medieval art. Men have jumped to the hasty but mistaken conclusion that the artists whom we now admire so much had greater honour in their own country than their modern successors have.2 Again, the men 351 who built and adorned our churches (it is argued), must have been better men that we. Yet this indirect argument from art to morals is utterly fallacious. Perugino was a rank materialist, who could never be persuaded of the immortality of the soul:3 Raphael painted his Madonnas in the midst of a society rotten to the core: and the peculiarly modern art of landscape may teach us the same lesson. Six hundred years hence, the enthusiastic student of Turner will be tempted to imagine that Englishmen of the 19th century loved their country scenery better than any race in any age. Yet never has man done more to ruin the landscape: never has he crowded more blindly from the fresh fields into the smoky town. Now that we are falling in love with the country again, preserving ruins and lakes by Act of Parliament, and planning our new Garden Cities, who dares on that account to promise us another Turner, or even another David Cox? The art of the Middle Ages stood at that exquisite moment when the first rays of sunrise glisten on the dews of night, and colour its parting clouds. In those wild days, building was the one possible investment, and the church the one building which offered the artist some real hope of protection for himself and his work. The true artistic greatness of the Middle Ages begins with the 11th century, when art an learning began to leave the cloister which had sheltered them in the germ, and to spread freely through the world. The greatest works of those days were carried out not by celibate monks or clerics, but only for monks and clerics. The real artists were the most Bohemian of craftsmen — wandering masons, who loved wine, women, and song, but whose too riotous fancies were chastened by the spirit of asceticism among the clerical patrons that directed the general lines of their work. Even so, the glories of medieval art often seemed superfluous, wasteful, and actually semi-pagan, to the noblest minds of the time. So long as the spirit of St. Bernard lived in the Order, there was no Cistercian school of architecture; and before ecclesiastical art had grown to maturity in the 13th century, the monasteries were already verging on moral decay. St. Francis, again, gave a powerful impulse to art: but only indirectly, and against his own will. The splendid basilica at Assisi, Sta. Croce at Florence, and all the great Franciscan churches which we admire now, were as definitely false to the Saint’s spirit as was the Golden Calf to the Mosaic Law.4 Art was not the product of medieval religion, but of worldliness under some restraint of religion. Many details of church carving are too licentious to be photographed or modelled; and some at least of our most beautiful English cathedrals were built in part 352 from the fines collected from unchaste priests, in part from more questionable sources still.5
The last and most potent cause of modern ignorance of the past lies in the dissatisfaction which many feel with the present world. In all ages, there are many minds of the type so familiar to us in everyday life; unsympathetic to the family or the servants with whom their lot is immediately cast, and spending all their tenderness on cats or dogs or foreign missions. In its milder forms, most men feel this temptation more or less strongly: and many who can see no good in the flesh and blood of the 20th century can see no harm in the ghosts of the 13th. Yet it is idle to seek God in a corner of the past, while we reject the facts of the present. To find only poetry in distant history, only prose in our own age, is not imagination but dulness of imagination: not love of a purer ideal, but bat-like blindness to the broader light. Every spring-time reminds us afresh that the world is eternally young, and that any generation’s weary complaints of old age are merely ridiculous to posterity. There is more hope in the world now, and more of the buoyancy of youth, than 600 years ago when Bernard of Morlaix sang dolefully “The times are waxing late . . . The judge is at the gate.” That ideal of a fast-approaching external judgment was natural enough in days when men feared that Christ and His Saints slept. With us, the truer ideal is that of a present and perpetual judgment: a world in which God asks us daily: “Can you trace My finger everywhere here, or can you only find the Devil’s? — Are you seeking among your living fellow-men for My kingdom, or are you quarrelling with your own age, and whimpering for institutions which had not enough of My spirit to preserve them from decay?” It is easy — at a safe distance of 600 years — to wax sentimental over a dead world which is often all the more picturesque to us because we never dream of living there. It needs a truer effort of faith and charity to see real good in a vulgar fellow at the meeting-house over the way, who daily vexes our righteous soul by preaching our own God in formulas which are not our own. But which is the more truly Franciscan — to chant with wearisome iteration the glories of those past Rolands and Olivers of the faith, or to accept modern facts and make the best of them? How, again, shall we plead Dante’s authority for a policy of idle regret? Thoroughly as he mastered the religious ideas of his time, he has anticipated enough of ours to assure us that he would have been no mere reactionary if his lot had been cast with us. It is quite inconclusive to plead his passionate attachment to the Church as he knew it then: just so may the noblest of women, and the 353 most clear-sighted, cling to some incurably drunken husband. If, again, the ideal Church of his vision bore a close resemblance to the real Church whose decay he lamented, so also a good woman’s ideal always resembles some unworthier object in the flesh. Assuredly, if Dante had lived in the age of modern discoveries, he would no more have neglected science than theology, but would have struggled to possess the future, leaving the dead to bury their dead.
For Dante and St. Francis are great only as they anticipate the world that is to be. While sharing the inevitable belief in the decay of their own age — inevitable then, because true History was impossible — they rose by faith high above the pessimism of their contemporaries. Such too is the real greatness of their century, beneath the purely imaginary virtues with which it is often credited. That age is truly great, not in the false appearance of monumental completeness, which it presents to a distant eye, but in the ferment and struggle which are only apparent to a closer scrutiny. We are often told to admire in the Middle Ages a pastoral of the 18th-century pattern: clean-washed sheep with pink ribbons round their necks lying in the tranquil shade, while a shepherd, in pink ribbons, pipes to them through the livelong day. But in fact they felt themselves as shepherdless as we:
“A thousand of men tho thrungen togyderes,
Criede upward to Cryst and to His clene Moder
To have grace to go with hem, treuthe to seke,
Ac there was wyghte non so wys, the way thider couthe,
But blustreden forth as bestes, over bankes and hilles,
Til late was and longe.”
(P. Plowman. B. v., 517).
In short, they struggled and suffered manfully, as generation after generation has done after them: and with the stripes of these our ancestors we ourselves are healed, if we will only accept their experience. Our later time has inherited a world for which the Middle Ages groaned and travailed in pain: yet half our teachers seem to spend their best energies in trying to put us out of patience with it. In our fight against the evil of our own times, often discouraging enough, we may brace ourselves by pausing for a moment to measure the world’s past progress. There is no fear of present evils and defects being ignored: poverty and crime, luxury and levity, force themselves only too plainly on our notice. The encompassing hosts of wickedness are as visible to the honest Agnostic on one side as to the honest Romanist on the other. But the progress of the past is an 354 earnest of far greater progress in the future. It is melancholy to see good men of every generation spending their whole energies in daubing the bulging bulwarks of the old world, which the next generation abandons as useless. Meanwhile, if we would only look steadily upwards instead of downwards, we should see how many more are with us than with them; — how truly the whole mountain is full of horses and chariots of fire round about us.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1 See note.