Summary
1 Historical Meaning of “Medieval Christianity”
2 Defining Latin Christendom (5th-10th Centuries)
2.1 The Ecclesia and the New Situation in the West
2.2 The Role of Monasticism
2.3 Carolingian Christendom
3 Defining Papal Christendom (11th-15th Centuries)
3.1 The Historical Significance of the Papacy’s Assertion
3.2 The Advance of Papal Power
3.3 Universities and Medieval Scholasticism
3.4 Christianity and the Disciplining of Society
3.4.1 The Crusades
3.4.2 The Tribunal of the Inquisition
4 Bibliographical References
1 Historical Meaning of “Medieval Christianity”
No particular event or characteristic authorizes us to consider the Christianity that developed in the West after the deposition of the Roman emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476 as medieval, that is, “in opposition to or as a supersession of” antiquity. From a political point of view, the Churches of the West thereafter maintained the same Eastern tradition of being protected and, in a way, governed by Roman imperial authority and, in its absence, by the Romano-Germanic monarchs, historically echoing the social model of Christendom (christianitas) defined after the so-called “Constantinian turn” of 313. From a theological point of view, debates surrounding the natures of Christ and his will, the place and action of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity and in history, continued to occupy the minds of Eastern and Western bishops and to trouble the governors of the Empire, who continued the custom of convening ecumenical and regional councils to seek peace and consensus among the many theologies of the Church. This does not prevent profound changes from marking the future of this history, such as, for example, the gradual cultural, theological, and disciplinary estrangement between the Eastern and Western churches (between the 5th-11th centuries), the emergence of national churches with the formation of the barbarian kingdoms (5th-6th centuries), the rise of the papacy as a center of ecclesial government willing to occupy the highest point of authority in the Ecclesia (5th-11th centuries), and the intensification of persecutory systems against dogmatic and moral deviations, which gradually took on increasingly social and political characteristics (8th-14th centuries), attracting a historical significance of the first order in the Latin West.
2 Defining Latin Christendom (5th-10th Centuries)
2.1 The Ecclesia and the New Situation in the West
The Roman world, in the 5th century, experienced a major turning point in its history, with significant consequences for the history of Christianity: foreign populations, which the Romans called barbarians (Goths, Burgundians, Suebi, and Vandals), settled permanently in the western regions of the empire (GEARY, 2005). These populations were likely not Christian before entering Roman territory, and their Christianization process is quite broad and complex, marked, grosso modo, by a collective adoption of Christianity that occurred as part of the establishment of the so-called federated kingdoms (or Romano-Germanic kingdoms), that is, substitutes for Roman authority in the western provinces (DUMÉZIL, 2005, p.143-64); it was, therefore, a political act made from the decision of the barbarian rulers and extended to the populations that recognized their authority (WICKHAM, 2013, p.118-9). While the citizens of the empire in the West professed the faith defended by the councils of Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451), the barbarian populations adopted another type of Christianity, defined in the regional councils of Seleucia and Rimini in 359, whose doctrine was pejoratively called “Arian” because, according to its critics, it still defended the subordination of Christ in relation to the Father, a premise defended by Arius of Alexandria and rejected by the Council of Nicaea. However, for the barbarians, the issue was not dogma, but the construction of a collective identity for multi-ethnic groups, such as the Goths and Vandals, who found in Christianity a way to assert themselves as a community distinct from the Romans.
Thus, while the Latin (Nicene) episcopate saw the barbarians as “Arians,” that is, heretics, the barbarians saw the Nicene Christians (Latins) as Romans: two stances, two types of church (FRIGHETTO, 2010, p.114-30). The Romano-Germanic kingdoms established in the West had a particular ecclesiastical hierarchy that formed their own national churches, which identified with the barbarian populations and were defended by them as a mark of their community identity. With the exception of the Vandals in North Africa, the so-called Arian Christians did not usually antagonize or intimidate the Nicene Christians, with whom they lived in the same cities; they did not depose Nicene bishops, did not confiscate their property, and certainly did not intend to convert the Latins, an attitude much practiced by the latter. The Latin (Nicene) episcopate mainly sought to influence the governing mechanisms of these kings who, despite not being Nicene, intended to adopt the Roman political tradition and, therefore, saw in the Latin episcopate an important vector of Romanization. This demand led to an alliance between government and faith, but with characteristics quite different from the alliance of the time of Theodosius I (380). In the East, the visible head of the Church was the emperor, but in the West, without imperial authority since 476, this position was vacant, as the kings, not being of the Nicene faith, were legally heretics and, in this sense, could not be seen by the bishops in the same condition as the emperors. Thus, the Latin Catholic episcopate took upon itself the mission of evangelizing the kings and teaching them how to govern. And, among all the bishops, the one from Rome assumed a prominent position.
The fact that there was only one apostolic see in the West, that of Rome, raised the authority of its bishop to a unique position among the bishops of the various churches which, although Latin, did not yet recognize themselves as dependent on a Roman-papal tradition, as was the case with the Iberian or North African churches. The situation was somewhat different in Gaul, where, by political force, Emperor Valentinian III, in 444, had linked the Gallican church to the church of Rome, making its bishops obey all canonical laws sanctioned by the pope, accept any warnings he might issue, and they could even be punished politically if the pope reported them to the provincial governor.
In 595, when Pope Gregory the Great sent forty Roman monks to the kingdom of Kent (in the south of modern-day England), which was still pagan, with the mission of converting King Æthelberht and founding the church in the kingdom (597), he legally bound that church, led by Augustine of Canterbury, his former collaborator in Rome, to papal authority. The mark of this dependence, unprecedented in the history of the Church, was evident in the rite of papal concession of the pastoral pallium to the primate bishop of Canterbury. This gesture would be repeated with another monk-bishop missionary, Boniface (673-754), who, under the orders of another pope named Gregory (Gregory II, pope from 715 to 731), took on the evangelization of the Germanic areas of Saxony, Hesse, and Bavaria: a troubled, violent, and imposed evangelization that took the tendency of barbarian kingdoms to be converted along with their kings to an extreme (BROWN, 1999, p.273). The bestowal of the pallium, which marked the extension of papal authority over mission churches, later became mandatory for all metropolitan bishops.
2.2 The role of monasticism
Monks and their monasteries became the main vectors for the evangelization of the West because they knew how to adapt Christianity to non-Romanized regions. First, it is important to remember that the initial establishment of Christian communities always depended on the Roman administrative system of the civitates (cities): such a prerequisite was very difficult to find in non-Romanized areas or in regions of northern Europe, where there were no cities or where they were very rare. Whereas a city was necessary for there to be a bishop, monasteries could be built in remote regions, with or without a prior population, with or without a defined political system, property, and ecclesiastical hierarchies. In this sense, monasteries were always more flexible, more adaptable to the most diverse environments, given that monasticism, considered in itself, is not an institution but a way of life. Furthermore, in a region with a strong predominance of small rural communities or in the presence of a clan or tribal system, as was the case in Ireland in the 5th century (DUMÉZIL, 2006, p.58), monasteries adapted to all sorts of environments and, in all of them, established churches and offered the sacraments and preaching, thus reproducing what previously only the ecclesia mater of the bishop, present in a city, was able to offer.
Let us also remember that Western monasticism, inspired by the Eastern model, conceived its way of life based on a profound asceticism that often translated into a concrete confrontation with the dangers and challenges that the most inhospitable regions and not-yet-Christianized populations had to offer. We cannot interpret the fuga mundi (flight from the world), one of the great themes of monastic life, as a disinterest in the world as a field of action for the spiritual life. Monasteries were never closed to the surrounding society and, based on the cenobitic experience proposed by the Rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia (480-543), they always presented themselves as schools for the Lord’s service, both for the vocational candidate who arrived and for the inhabitants of the surrounding areas.
While the episcopal church, established only in cities, constituted a public space of worship, monasteries could be built by private individuals on private property. This, on one hand, opened up the possibility of having as many monasteries as there were benefactors and, on the other, associated the monastery with the patrimony of a family that sought, through its construction, to link itself to an inexhaustible spiritual capital, to provide a place of memory for their kin buried there, as well as to find a future for sons and daughters who had not secured good marriages: the monastery reproduced the aristocratic status of the family (LE JAN, 2006, p.56-82). The Rule of Benedict, for example, valued the practice of donating young children to monasteries (the oblates), along with a monetary or patrimonial gift that ensured their education, which turned abbeys into true aristocratic houses. Thus, cenobitism of Benedictine observance corresponded well to the noble characteristics of the Romano-barbarian societies that developed in the West between the 5th and 8th centuries, and this constitutes an important explanation for the success of Western monastic life in the process of Christianization, as the advance of the gospel was interpreted as the simultaneous advance of the socio-political structures of the Romano-Germanic kingdoms.
In Germanic regions that had not known Romanization and urbanization, the Christian communities founded there from the 7th century onwards depended exclusively on the action of monks, such as Saint Boniface. By building monasteries as the initial base for the start of evangelization, they gave rise to true cities, this time built exclusively on Christian tradition and according to a Christian presupposition. This is because monasteries of Benedictine origin are organized as autonomous centers of goods production, miniaturizing and adapting the urban system within the limits of the cloister and then around it, hence their importance in the reproduction of the socio-political systems of the Christian West.
As we have seen, Boniface was invested with missionary authority conferred by the pope of Rome, and was militarily protected by the arms of the Frankish kingdom. Now, the communion of interests among the missionary monks of Saint Boniface, the papal See, and the Carolingian power is what gave vigor to the model of Latin Christendom, with its spiritual center in Rome and its political center in Gaul. Although the actions of the Carolingians, who established a Christian empire in the West under the blessings of the successors of Saint Peter, included a social reform through a complete reform of the clergy, they had the unrestricted support of the monks, like a heroic phalanx of contemplative-missionaries who, in the case of the evangelization of Frisia (modern-day Netherlands), revived the ancient martyrial spirit of the origins. Between the 7th and 9th centuries, the monasteries were, in fact, the intellectual centers of Latin Christendom, as the Carolingians, including their ideologues, understood that the Christian empire was not just an empire of arms, but of the word and, above all, of the Word, in the evangelical sense.
The monasteries became workshops for manuscripts, grammar, art, and thought: there, the officials of the imperial bureaucracy studied, who would later found the cathedral schools (9th century) and, in the future, the faculties that gave rise to the Western university system (12th century). This did not mean that the monks appropriated written culture, a universal heritage, and prevented the laity from approaching it; on the contrary, the Romano-barbarian culture, typical of the Carolingian period, segmented society into almost professional categories, reserving for the contemplatives the office of letters, for the lay aristocrats, the office of arms, and for the non-aristocrats, the other manual labors. Thus, we owe to the monasteries a large part of all the Christian culture of the West, including art, philosophy, and political thought.
2.3 Carolingian Christendom
The Carolingian dynasty owes its name to Charles Martel (686-741), grandfather of Charlemagne (c. 747-814) and father of Pepin III (715-768). Charles founded the aristocratic family that carried out a coup d’état (WICKHAM, 2013, p.472) in the Frankish kingdom in 751, deposing the Merovingian king Childeric III. This coup had the approval and connivance of the bishop of Rome, Pope Zachary (741-752), and his immediate successors, who, one by one, approved and granted privileges to the new ruling family. The popes granted the Carolingians the title of kings, anointed them, crowned them, made them emperors of the entire West, and with them implemented a project to make the entire western territory a single Christendom, capable of rivaling and supplanting the Christendom of the East, which at that time was governed by iconoclast emperors. The union of the papacy with the Carolingians was of immense importance for the future history of the Church. On one hand, it ratified the coup d’état, making it the will of God; on the other, it shielded the papacy from the advances of the Lombard kings, who insisted on not recognizing the political superiority of the popes on the Italian peninsula. This era marks the decisive beginning of an institutional journey that would elevate the bishops of Rome to the status of sovereign pontiffs, a process that took centuries and required great effort. But in the 8th century, the apostolic authority of the See of Rome, recognized by all the churches of the West, did not yet mean the preeminence of the popes over bishops or kings. Thus, the Christendom we see unfolding in this period should more properly be called Carolingian or Frankish, because its borders still coincided with those of the Franco-Carolingian kingdom. In fact, the ideologues of royal power, including clerics of the stature of Alcuin of York (735-804) and Theodulf of Orleans (750-821), as well as the various episcopal councils and synods, like that of Frankfurt in 794, insisted on using the terms ecclesia (church) and imperium (empire) as synonyms (DE JONG, 2003, p.1255). This suited Charlemagne’s political agenda of domination well, as he promoted an association between his kingdom and that of ancient Israel, governed by David, Solomon, and Josiah—three figures always cited in documents from the royal court and represented in the churches of his palaces. Ultimately, it was hoped that the kingdom of the Franks would surpass that of the Israelites of the Old Testament because it constituted the kingdom of Christ and was, therefore, universal and eschatological. From this perspective, the political and military actions of Charlemagne and, later, Louis the Pious (778-840) were initiated and interpreted according to the Old Testament theme of exterminating God’s enemies, now identified with Muslims, pagans, and all kinds of heretics.
As an empire-church, liturgical celebrations, as well as doctrinal definitions, held a position of prime importance and greatly concerned the Carolingian emperors. After all, it was prayers that maintained the kingdom’s invincibility and the expansion of the faith. In the 9th century, the most brilliant liturgists and renowned theologians with their monastic or episcopal schools were found in Frankish territory. The court of Charlemagne, rightly called the sacrum palatium, in Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), was seen by the bishops of the West as the center of perfect liturgy, a model for the various particular churches. It was from Charlemagne’s monasteries that perhaps the greatest reform of the Latin Mass emerged, as the Gallican and Roman liturgies were mixed and adapted into a synthesis that came to define the Roman missal. This missal then became universal throughout the empire and put an end to the Gallican missal, which quickly fell into disuse.
Despite recognizing that, without the popes, the Carolingians would not have gone so far, they were well aware that the Christendom they formed was complete in itself, due to the fraternity between bishops and kings. At this time, both bishops and kings knew well that the power of the keys, given to Peter by Jesus according to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 16, was extensible to episcopal power as a whole and that the popes of Rome did not yet have exclusivity in this field (DE JONG, 2003). Thus, the Council of Frankfurt in 794 invalidated, for the West, the effects of the Second Council of Nicaea (787) which, presided over by a woman, Empress Irene, put an end to the iconoclast schism. Such was the authority of the Carolingian episcopate that, even though the pope of Rome considered this council legitimate and ecumenical, he was forced to equivocate and find a point of balance between the two ecclesiologies. Now, the Carolingian church, by denying the possibility of conferring excessive reverence upon icons, as the Second Council of Nicaea intended, sought to ensure that both the Eucharistic sacrament and the episcopal ministry itself did not lose their exclusive role as mediators between God and men. At this moment, it was the episcopate led by Charlemagne that kept the Latin Church in the tradition of Gregory the Great, for whom images and icons were vehicles of doctrinal and moral teaching and not objects of veneration in themselves. The strong idea that the Christian empire maintained the integrity of the faith gave the clergy and the faithful the impression that they were, in fact, living in the kingdom of Christ and that this kingdom was now approaching.
However Christian the Carolingian empire might have been, the fact remained that, theologically, the ecclesia possessed a different nature from that of the earthly kingdom, born, according to Genesis, after Adam’s sin; the ecclesia, judging by patristic literature like the Shepherd of Hermas, preceded the creation of the world. Now, the consciousness of the bishops of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian period gradually increased reflection on the limits of royal power over the very notion of the church, and with this, we have the emergence of ecclesiological inflections on new bases. It is not that the episcopate and, with it, the papacy, were already strong enough to deny kings and princes a fundamental place in the concept of ecclesia, but that they no longer wanted to allow the role played by them to serve to diminish the power of the bishops, as well as the size of their assets, which were frequently used for the needs of the kings themselves.
3 Defining Papal Christendom (11th-15th Centuries)
3.1 The Historical Significance of the Papacy’s Assertion
Among the most frequent stereotypes of the so-called Middle Ages is that related to the temporal power of the popes. It is thought that they were all-powerful men capable of bending kings and emperors and establishing social order in times of crisis, when kings and emperors, for base motives, were unable to fulfill their role. Such stereotypes find endorsement from important historians, to the extent that, in the 20th century, many of them saw in the medieval papacy the beginning of the political-state order that even marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity (RUST, 2014). The era of the statesman popes, undisputed priestly monarchs, seems today more the product of a modern historiographical myth than a social fact established in the period we are dealing with. Not that the popes did not exercise a broad and stable authority far beyond the limits of the diocese of Rome and its suburbicarian churches, but we must distinguish the different levels and meanings of the Roman primacy throughout history.
3.2 The Advance of Papal Power
Various historical documents lead us to see that, from the 11th century onwards, popes began to claim greater recognition of their temporal power. This attitude was part of a clerical, intellectual, and monastic movement that, little by little, began to want to reverse the rules of the game, seeking to make the papacy emerge as the sole power capable of legitimately and effectively governing Christendom. The unfolding of this story became known, at least since the work of Augustin Fliche (1924), as the “Gregorian Reform.” It is said that the reform driven by the 11th-century popes was responsible for liberating the Church from the influence of lay lords who, by virtue of their own condition, could not interfere in ecclesiastical affairs without distorting and degenerating them; it is also said that the reform moralized the clergy because it affirmed celibacy, excluded married clerics, and instituted community life as the ideal state for priests. It is said that the reform made the popes independent of imperial pressures and prevented emperors from imposing their candidate during the conclave.
In fact, we know there was a disciplinary and spiritual trend, of a reformist character, that questioned the morality of the clergy and the situation of the church. But this trend was never controlled solely by the popes or by the clerics allied with them. Among those who were elected popes by the influence of emperors and later deposed by opposing popes, such as Clement III (1029-1100) and Gregory VIII (d. 1137), were many clerics who defended the same moral ideas as Leo IX (1002-1054) and Gregory VII (c. 1020-1085), such as the end of lay investiture, mandatory celibacy, and the fight against simony. The monks and ecclesiastics who preached the reform of the Church also coexisted with large sectors of the laity who defended the same values and demanded a purification of Christendom. With this, we say that the spiritual renewal did not pit clerics thirsty for holiness against laypeople corrupted by the world. The latter were never obstacles to the reform, but rather, great enthusiasts: in other words, they were not victims of the reform, but its agents. In this sense, it is good to avoid thinking that the 11th-century reform was Gregorian and clerical, because, in truth, it was a yearning established at the base of Christian society and had the support of the laity, like Countess Matilda of Canossa (1046-1115), the right hand of Pope Gregory VII. In any case, theologically, the papacy emerged from the 11th century greatly strengthened: as Congar (1997, p.104) wrote, in the eyes of the Roman curia, it was no longer the Ecclesia that constituted the fundamental reality of the faith, but the pope: without a pope, there was no church. Such an ecclesiological discourse had the unrestricted support of men like Gregory VII, Peter Damian (1007-1072), Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), and many others from monasteries that had been justly raised to immunity by papal favor. Now, to accept the premise that it is the pope who establishes the Ecclesia is to admit that the patriarchal and autocephalous churches of the East were not properly churches, and with that, we have a true schism. But, even in the West, those bishops and theologians who, moved by the authority of tradition, defended the old ecclesiology, were branded as simoniac heretics because they doubted that only the popes could manage the church, being defenders of an imperial (Constantinian) church that usurped papal powers. The main field of observation for these clashes is, in my view, the process of choosing new bishops, who, according to ancient custom, were elected by the clergy and the people of the local church, but which, during the 9th-10th centuries, became an attribute of the imperial system. The papacy of the 11th and 12th centuries sought to remove this prerogative from both the clergy/people and the empire, centralizing the choice of bishops in the hands of the Roman Curia. One can understand this rise of the papacy, on one hand, as part of the process of the rise of the West itself and the advance of a Romano-centric ecclesiology that, at that time, had a great aversion to Eastern ecclesiologies. But such a change in perspective would not have reached the levels it did without the strategic arrangements between the papacy and powerful monastic orders, such as Cluny and Cister, orders that intended to control the seigniorial (or feudal) society more than to make a supposed worldly church disappear (IOGNA-PRAT, 1998).
3.3 Universities and Medieval Scholasticism
The emergence of universities between the 12th and 13th centuries gave even greater support to the socio-political system of Latin Christendom, as it provided not only the means of diffusion but also the ideas to be disseminated that would cement the universality of Christian society. Thus, alongside the authority of the popes and the power of emperors and kings, the university was born as a third force (the studium, or in other words, science) that, like a tripod, helped to keep the other two powers upright. In the words of Lima Vaz (2002, p.21), the university was an “institutional organ of the religious-political body of Christendom” that made its teaching character explicit. Universities were founded in cities like Paris (1200), Bologna (1158), Montpellier (1220), and Oxford (1208) and were organized as craft guilds, that is, an association of masters and/or students concerned with protecting the status quo of the intellectual profession. It is in this sense that one can say that universities surpassed the legal, scientific, and didactic limits of the cathedral and monastic schools that had marked the history of the Latin Church in previous centuries. No longer tied to the authority of a bishop (like the cathedral school) or an abbot (like the monastic school), universities were born from the desire to guarantee freedom and institutional autonomy for what came to be called faculties, divided into two types: the first, the preparatory faculty of arts, which taught the liberal disciplines (logic, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) and became, in the mid-13th century, a proper faculty of philosophy specializing in Aristotelian and Jewish-Muslim studies; the second type were the higher faculties, basically divided into three: the faculty of theology, considered the art of arts, the faculty of law (canon and civil), and the faculty of medicine. As Verger emphasizes (1999, p.82), the autonomy sought by the universities aimed at the institution’s ability to manage its own internal organization, establishing its statutes, curricula, methodologies, titles, courses, etc.; it also intended to prevent the instrumentalization of these centers of knowledge by external powers, whether lay or ecclesiastical, reserving for the masters and also, in some cases, for the students, the decision-making power over the mechanisms of knowledge reproduction and the management of the resources invested there.
It is curious, in my view, that the universities, a concrete expression of a Christendom that thinks and projects itself, made use of the Greco-Roman philosophical heritage that was only accessible through the communities that Christendom excluded from itself, such as the Muslims, the Orthodox Christians (“schismatics” to the Latins), and the Jews. These were the ones who had access to the oldest manuscripts, to the Syriac and Arabic translations through which the Greek texts reached the medieval West. This leads us to see that, in the universe of fine letters, there were no ethnic and religious borders: ancient wisdom traveled the Mediterranean from east to west in various copies that multiplied in schools inhabited by Muslim, Christian (Eastern and Latin), and Jewish masters, in a friendly relationship that the Eurocentric mentality of today has difficulty accepting.
From an academic point of view, the universities of Christendom were marked by a method of investigation that, in Latin, was called disputatio (debate) and which consisted of the proposition of a question (quaestio) by a master who exposed his students, arranged around him, to the clashes of conflicting theses, syllogisms, and counter-arguments, until reaching the conclusion considered most appropriate to the game of philosophy. In the words of Alain de Libera (1999, p.148), medieval university thought is profoundly agonistic, “the law of discussion imposes itself on everyone.” Alongside the disputes, the commentary on the texts of the great authorities (auctoritates) of Christian culture (the Bible, the Church Fathers, and Greco-Roman and Arab philosophers) constituted another important branch of scholarly inquiry. In the case of theology, commenting on the Book of Sentences by Peter Lombard was a fundamental step to obtain the title of baccalarius theologiae; paraphrasing Thomas Aquinas (Liber de coelo et mundo, I, lect. 28, n.8), one can say that commentary was not just an attempt to understand what the authorities had said, but a way to seek the truth of things. It is thus, through debates and commentaries, summas and treatises, that thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Alexander of Hales, and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, to name only the most well-known, became notable for deepening the dialogue between Christianity and Hellenism, between revelation and philosophy. They bequeathed to the West an original and sufficiently mature philosophical reflection that, in many aspects, contributed to the development of modern philosophy.
However, it is worth noting that the fact that men like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio became the most famous names among medieval theologians remains paradoxical. Coming from the two important mendicant orders, both masters did not pursue theology as their primary vocation, as they shared the foundational ideal of their congregations by which academic erudition was at the service of announcing the Gospel against the enemies of the Church. Dominicans and Franciscans, before being theologians, were supposed to be preachers, and this office, renewed since the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), was more properly directed towards the conversion of heretics and infidels than to the kerygmatic announcement ad gentes. The historical significance of this choice for the consolidation of theological studies cannot be minimized. For about twenty years (from 1254 to 1274), the university masters of Paris, members of the secular clergy, raised their intellectual arms against the mendicants and their teaching: they fought the “hypocrisy of their poverty” and criticized their uncooperative way of dealing with teaching (CONGAR, 1961). Thus, the papacy had to intervene to ensure the friars’ permanence in their chairs and, thereby, at the same time, reinforce its own authority over the universities. The mendicant-papacy alliance made the universities, especially the faculty of theology, an instrument to broaden and strengthen the conquering tone of Christendom, particularly in a period of great questioning of the religious and moral bases of the Catholic program. The mendicant friars, born under the aegis of defending the faith against the enemies of the Church, sought out the universities to be even more equipped to fight for the cause of Christendom; the popes, since Innocent III, if not before, dedicated special care to the universities because from them came the apologetic discourses of the Christian society presided over by the apostolic See. The faculty of theology, despite all its contribution to philosophical development, was at the service of the reform of the Church, which certainly included the clash with dissidents, infidels, and pagans: the production of knowledge was the consequence of a fierce struggle between the forces of Christ, in his Church, and those of the antichrist, understood as the opposite of Latin Christian society (the inverse image of itself, visible in Islamic lands).
3.4 Christianity and the Disciplining of Society
It is common to hear or read categorical statements about the violent, grotesque, and unreasonable methods that the Church or the Latin Christian empire used to coerce, restrict, and even execute the lives of men and women who, for some reason, confronted its authority. Names like inquisition, crusades, and heresy arouse endless feelings that, mixed with a lack of historical expertise, are damaging to the understanding of the period. First and foremost, we must point out that Christianity, as an ancient religious system, is distinguished from Mediterranean religions precisely because it includes, in its belief system, a morality strictly defined in terms of a reaction to the Mediterranean culture widespread by the Roman Empire. In this sense, the correctness of worship or faith (orthodoxy) was not enough; it was also necessary for the believer to present correctness of conduct, in both private and public spheres (orthopraxy), translated into a disciplined and ascetic life. This Christian characteristic is so striking that, in the oldest theological elaborations on the legitimacy of political powers, Christian thinkers, like the Apostle Paul, admitted that, in the name of correcting vices, God used physical force, exercised by rulers, or spiritual force, performed by legitimate pastors and ecclesial ministers, and to the extent that coercion provided for the practice of good, it was good and meritorious (SENELLART, 2006, p.72). Now, the episcopal ministry was always conceived from this disciplining and moralizing matrix that placed bishops in the position of overseers of the conduct of their flock, always ready to exhort, correct, and even punish. The history of the sacrament of reconciliation and the mechanisms for readmission to ecclesial communion for those who had left it shows how great the disciplining character of the Christian community was. In the so-called medieval times, this characteristic is accentuated to the extent that the ideals of building the new people of God, confused with the Carolingian Frankish kingdom and, ultimately, with Latin Christendom itself, required a concrete moral adequacy compatible with doctrinal unity. This was only possible and justified in the face of a culture that, unlike ours, prioritized synchrony, in which past, present, and future were always implicated in the now, and communitarianism, that is, the belief that community life is the highest expression of charity, made society a single body, with individuals as its members. Hence, the moral sickness of one person necessarily implicated the spiritual health of the entire social organism, and therefore every sin, vice, or error needed to be corrected for the maintenance of social order (MIATELLO, 2010).
3.4.1 The Crusades
The Crusades were part of a primarily, but not exclusively, military movement, with eschatological, millenarian, and penitential inspiration, originating from an idea of expansionist Christendom, characteristic of the Carolingian experience, and linked to the various political and social problems and crises that marked the history of the Latin West. Its immediate objective was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other holy places of Christ’s earthly life which, since the 7th century, had been under the political power of the Muslim empire. This commitment encompassed all the other objectives of establishing the Romano-Germanic Christian order, by military means, in the spaces dominated by Byzantine orthodoxy (or any other type of orthodoxy), by Islam, and by any other ecclesiology that did not conform to the Western presuppositions of Carolingian-papal inspiration. Chronologically, the crusading movement can be placed between the end of the 11th century (1095) and extending to at least 1272. In general terms, the Crusades combined two very important aspects of Latin Christendom: the warrior dimension, constitutive of Christian aristocrats and kings, and pilgrimage which, for a long time, was one of the most relevant mechanisms of penance and, therefore, of social reintegration for those who had sinned and broken the unity of the body that was Christian society. Although the warrior aristocracy had always found an ecclesial place and function, the invention of chivalry around the 11th century brought to the fore, once again, the debate on the legitimacy of violence and the use of weapons within Christian society (FLORI, 2013). Once pacified, it was believed that Christendom could not see itself split into rival groups in fratricidal struggle, which is exactly what never ceased to occur, since Christendom, despite being strong, never managed to completely erase the weight of the regionalist tradition of the great kindreds that gave rise to lordships, principalities, and even kingdoms. In this way, the leaders of Christendom needed to find a mechanism that, despite internal disagreements, would congregate the warriors in a superior cause relevant to their vocation: the defense of the kingdom of Christ and victory over its enemies.
Concurrently, pilgrimage, as penance, also provided warriors with an appropriate occasion to link their social function to the project of a societas christiana that sought to reform itself in order to conquer. Inasmuch as Jerusalem was excessively distant and outside the limits of Christendom, it offered that burden of dangers and sacrifices that made the city the perfect place for a complete and, perhaps, definitive penance. Although there are those who interpret the Crusades based on their political and economic presuppositions, supposing it was a profitable enterprise, its often precarious and deficit-ridden functioning relied on the symbolic force that Jerusalem evoked for the religious culture of that time. After all, the kingdom of God that the Latin Christians hoped to make triumph mixed that theocracy of Ancient Israel, whose center was Jerusalem, with the mystical and allegorical meaning that this city acquired in early Christian culture. Prophecies, millenarian expectations, popular preaching, an evangelical reawakening, and penitential impetus—the Crusades were much more driven by spiritual forces than by material interests, and their social significance lies in the triumph of the idea of Christendom understood as a mystical State that elaborates its political projects in the light of Christian and Catholic theodicy.
The values that a society proclaims do not conceal the hypocrisy of its actions; the Crusades, inspired by penance and eschatology, were often a path of pure and gratuitous violence, especially when their agents, imbued with feelings that we can classify as xenophobic and fanatical, used force to raze and destroy not only opposing soldiers but also defenseless people. It seems symptomatic that, in the eyes of Muslims, the main targets of the attacks, the crusaders were not identified as “Christians,” but as “Franks,” a title that designated the subjects of the former Carolingian empire, Francia, before France. Thus, what the children of Christendom called a spiritual enterprise, the Muslims saw as an act of war, of a conquering, military, and material nature. It is certain that both Islam and Christendom did not distinguish between politics and religion; but, in the detail of the crusade, the Muslims identified well that all that war was not only aimed at recovering Jerusalem but also at destroying the Muslim states and, perhaps, the religion of the Prophet itself.
3.4.2 The tribunal of the inquisition
The role of the inquisition does not differ much from the purposes and procedures of the crusade. But, to better understand the phenomenon that was the inquisition, we must remember that, in a society that believes itself to be mystical, doctrinal deviations mean the shaking of social bonds of a spiritual nature that keep this society standing. In this sense, the persecution of heresies should be interpreted more as an attempt to overcome socio-political crises than as a dogmatic problem. This can be verified, for example, in the various papal documents that, when launching the accusation of heresy, identified as heretics entire groups from certain cities, especially Italian ones, who actually professed a pro-imperial and anti-papal policy, which fatally made the political adversary a potential heretic: in the eyes of the pontifical agents, every Ghibelline, that is, a supporter of the emperor, could become a heretic if they did not respect the limits granted for opposition. With this, we say that heresy is an invention of those who govern (ZERNER, 2009): it is not, therefore, an opposition to a church, but opposition to the world that allows itself to be governed by a particular church. If we leave this aspect aside and do not distinguish the heresy of the Late Middle Ages from what heresy was in Antiquity, we will fail to understand why the mechanisms for identifying and suppressing heresy were always linked to political rights, political authorities, and their institutions (both in communal cities and in kingdoms and principalities) and why torture, in this case, was adopted.
The origins of the inquisition should be sought in the Fourth Lateran Council, held in Rome in 1215. This council represented a moment of an immense and general revision of Christendom: it was the time to seek an internal reordering that would be capable of endowing Christians with the moral strength to defeat Islam. Therefore, the horizon of the council was the crusade, a new crusade, carried out by authentic Christians, since the other crusades had failed, according to the understanding of the time, due to the moral failure of the crusaders and the sins of the Christians, the main one being heresy. Canon III of the Lateran Council established the procedures for exclusion and repression: heretics were to be identified by clerical powers and punished by secular powers, with their goods confiscated. Suspects would also suffer: they were to be socially ostracized until they proved their innocence, and in the meantime, they would incur the penalty of the guilty, with a one-year period for their defense. If the problem were solely ecclesiastical, we should ask ourselves why Canon III insists on defining punishments in political terms: public servants who did not work for the extirpation of pravitas haeretica (heretical depravity) would be removed from office, and all their subjects could disobey them. It was a true political nullification of both the heretic and those who did not persecute them. They lost the rights to vote/be voted for, take an oath, and hold public office (loss of political rights); they could not make a will or receive an inheritance; if they were a judge or lawyer, their legal acts would lose validity (loss of civil rights); they could not receive the sacraments or have a Christian burial (loss of religious rights). The identification of such deviants would be done through mutual surveillance, first, by the pastors (priests and bishops) in parochial and diocesan spaces; second, by neighbors, over each other, and through denunciation, the error was to be pointed out. That is why, at this time, parishes were strongly encouraged to reform themselves and increase the mechanisms of control over the particular attitudes of their parishioners; bishops were again warned to visit the parishes frequently and to write reports, and once the errors were identified, they were to bring them to trial.
Although it had not yet been founded, the tribunal of the inquisition was already anticipated in these procedures. All that was missing was for the decision to be made, which indeed happened under Pope Gregory IX in 1239. It is interesting to think that this pope, long before his election (when he was called Hugolino de Segni), had been an efficient agent of the determinations of the Fourth Lateran Council; as an apostolic legate, he traveled through northern Italy to raise money for the Fifth Crusade and, simultaneously, to implement the council’s anti-heretical policy. When he became pope in 1227, he took his desire to order Christendom according to pontifical ecclesiology to the highest degree. To do so, he relied on the support of two important movements that had recently been elevated to the category of religious orders, the Friars Preachers, or Dominicans, and the Friars Minor, or Franciscans, whose founders had lived with Cardinal Hugolino and, after their deaths, were canonized by Gregory IX. This pope, very sensitive to the new movements of religious reform, used the friars to expedite both the pacification of cities and the repression of heresy. He granted them powers of political action in the cities, including powers superior to those of the bishops, so that they could act in the pope’s name. Based on legal procedures, with reconciliation as the goal and the defense of truth as the theoretical horizon, the inquisitor friars sought to identify the error and correct it through exhortation and, if that was not enough, with the punishments already provided for by the council. The thorough investigation (inquisitio) of possible errors of faith was also called the negotium fidei (business of the faith), incidentally, the same name given to the tribunal that investigated candidates for sainthood, a procedure we know as the process of canonization, an innovation established by Innocent III in 1198. Thus, in the same way that the sanctity of a deceased Christian had to be proven, the orthodoxy of a living Christian accused of heresy had to be proven. The procedures were the same: establishment of a panel of arbiters (judge, prosecutor, rapporteur, lawyer), hearing of witnesses, questioning of the accused, etc. Until at least 1252, we cannot say that this tribunal used any brutal means to extract the truth. However, with the assassination of the great inquisitor, Peter of Verona (1205-1252) of the Dominican order, in that same year in Milan, the then-Pope Innocent IV, his authority affronted, launched a counter-offensive: he canonized Peter, henceforth called Saint Peter Martyr, and further hardened the procedures of investigation and punishment. It is at this moment that torture comes into play. However, we must never confuse the inquisition founded by the pope in the 13th century (rightly called the pontifical inquisition) with the one that the Iberian kings (Portuguese and Spanish), through the right of padroado, used to persecute their political opponents from the 15th century onwards (called the Iberian, Spanish, or modern inquisition). They are often distinct institutions, procedures, purposes, and results. Although this does not serve as a justification, the pontifical inquisition, according to historical documents, never reached the persecutory levels we imagine. In fact, there was a real policy of delaying the establishment of the tribunal or the punishments, since such procedures did not always correspond to the will of local leaders, who were often implicated with the accused and sentenced. In this way, the drastic cases of intervention and violence should be seen within the escalation of regional and momentary political issues and not as the effective logic that controlled the institution. Thus, the pontifical, or medieval, inquisition was articulated within a socio-political perspective of Christendom in which, despite the synchrony between secular and religious power, the simple distinction between the representatives of both powers (kings and popes, respectively) prevented the inquisition from being entirely instrumentalized by the reason of State that marked the Iberian inquisition.
André Miatello, UFMG/FAJE. Brazil.
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