Catholic Church in the Middle Ages
It is not necessary to enter on one of the most difficult problems in history to decide how far the development and organisation of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages were worth the price that civilisation paid in moral, intellectual, and in material loss. Still less can we attempt to justify such Crusades as that which established the Latin kingdom in Constantinople, or the Crusade to crush the revolt of the Albigensian heretics, and all the enormous assumptions of Innocent in things temporal and things spiritual. But before we decide that in the thirteenth century civilisation would have been the gainer, if there had been no central Church at all, let us count up all the great brains of the time, with Aquinas and Dante at their head, all the great statesmen, St. Louis, Blanche of Castile, in France; Simon de Montfort and Edward i., in England, and Ferdinand HI., in Spain; Frederick n. and Rudolph of Hapsburg, in the Empire,—who might in affairs of state often oppose Churchmen, but who felt that society itself reposed on a well-ordered Church.
If the great attempt failed in the hands of Innocent III, surely one of the finest brains and noblest natures that Rome ever sent forth — and fail it did on the whole, except as a temporary expedient — it could not succeed with smaller men, when every generation made the conditions of success more hopeless. The superhuman pride of Gregory IX., the venerable pontiff who for fourteen years defied the whole strength of the Emperor Frederick IL, seems to us to-day sofia city tour, in spite of his lofty spirit, but to parody that of Hildebrand, of Alexander HI., and Innocent HI. And when we come to Innocent iv. (1243-1264), the disturber of the peace of the Empire, he is almost a forecast of Boniface. And Boniface himself (1294-1303), though his words were more haughty than those of the mightiest of his predecessors, though insatiable ambition and audacious intrigue gave him some moments of triumph, ended after nine years of desperate struggle in what the poet calls ‘the mockery, the vinegar, the gall of a new crucifixion of the Vicar of Christ.’ Read Dante, and see all that a great spirit in the Middle Ages could still hope from the Church and its chiefs — all that made such dreams a mockery and a delusion.
When Dante wrote, the Popes were already settled at Avignon and the Church had entered upon one of its worst eras. And as we follow his scathing indignation, in the nineteenth canto of the Inferno, or in the twenty-seventh of the Pamdiso, we feel how utterly the vision of Peter had failed to be realised on earth.
But for one hundred years before, all through the thirteenth century, the writing on the wall may now be read, in letters of fire. When Saladin forced the allied kings of Europe to abandon the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre, and Lion-hearted Richard turned back in despair (1192), the Crusades, as military movements, ended. The later Crusades of the thirteenth century were splendid acts of folly, of anachronism, even crime. They were ‘magnificent, but not war’ — in any rational sense. It was Europe that had to be protected against the Moslem — not Asia or Africa that was to be conquered. All through the thirteenth century European civilisation was enjoying the vast material and intellectual results of the Crusades of the twelfth century. But to sail for Jerusalem, Egypt, or Tunis, had then become, as the wise Joinville told St. Louis, a cruel neglect of duty at home.
It was not merely in the exhaustion of the Crusading zeal that the waning of the Catholic fervour was shown. In the twelfth century there had been learned or ingenious heretics. But the mark of the thirteenth century is the rise of heretic sects, schismatic churches, religious reformations, spreading deep down amongst the roots of the people. We have the three distinct religious movements which began to sap the orthodox citadel, and which afterwards took such vast proportions — Puritanism, Mysticism, Scepticism. All of them take form in the thirteenth century — Waldenses, Albigenses, Petrobussians, Poor Men, Anti-Ritualists, Anti-Sacerdotalists, Manichaeans, Gospel Christians, Quietists, Flagellants, Pastoureaux, fanatics of all orders. All through the thirteenth century we have an intense ferment of the religious exaltation, culminating in the orthodox mysticism, the rivalries, the missions, the revivalism, of the new allies of the Church, the Franciscans and Dominicans, the Friars or Mendicant Orders.
