Similarly, the heretics and rationalists, whose criticism
was even more dangerous to the Church than the open violence of the State, had
more in common with their opponents than we should infer from the duration and thcharacter of the disputes which they provoked. In the background of medieval
history, and developing pari passu with the feud of Papacy and Empire,
there was a war, of arguments and persecution, against free thought, in which
the religious Orders figured as the protagonists of orthodoxy. Berengar of
Tours, who challenged the doctrine of transubstantiation and so endangered the
basis of the sacerdotal theory, lived in the age when a regenerated Papacy was
arming for the war on secularism; it was Hildebrand himself who pronounced the final
sentence on the first of the heresiarchs. The age of Henry V and of the
Concordat of Worms saw the rise of a medieval Puritanism in Languedoc and
Flanders.
Between the Concordat of Worms and the schism of Frederic Barbarossa
lies the age of Abelard,--the metaphysical free-lance who made philosophy the
talk of the street-corner and the marketplace,--and of Arnold of Brescia, who
demanded that the Church should be reduced to apostolic poverty. To the
youthful days of Frederic II belong the Albigensian Crusade, the futile
campaign of authority against Averroes and Aristotle, the heresy-hunts of
volunteer inquisitors in Italy and Germany. While the same Emperor was trying conclusions
with Innocent IV, the Papal Inquisition became a permanent branch of the
ecclesiastical executive; and the Mendicant Orders, who supplied the
inquisitors, simultaneously took upon themselves the harder task of converting
the universities from the cult of Aristotle to a belief in the Christian
scholasticism formulated by Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. The weapons of this
interminable and many-sided controversy were as rude as the age which forged
them: on the one side, coarse invective and irreverent paradox; on the other,
scandalous imputations, spiritual censures, the sword, the prison, and the
stake.
