For the medieval attitude towards heterodoxy was unflinching and
uncompromising. To remain sceptical when the Church had defined was as the sin
of witchcraft or idolatry. The existence of the rebel was an insult to the Most
High, a menace to the salvation of the simple; he was a diseased limb of the
body politic, calling for sharp surgery. And yet these nonconformists were
anything but unbelievers. The free-thinkers of the schools, apart from a few
obscure eccentrics, only desired to find a rational basis for the common creed
or to eliminate from it certain articles which, on moral grounds and grounds of
history, they stigmatised as mere interpolations. The offence of Berengar was
that he attacked a dogma which had been an open question within the last two hundred
years; of Abelard, that he offered his own theories on some points in regard to
which the orthodox tradition was mute or inconsistent.
As for the sectaries,
their offence usually consisted in exaggerating one or other of three doctrines
which the Church acknowledged in a more moderate shape. Either, like the Poor
Men of Lyons, they desired that the Church should return to primitive simplicity;
or, like the Albigeois, they harped upon the Pauline antithesis between the
spirit and the flesh, pushed to extremes the monastic contempt for earthly
ties, and exalted the Christian Devil to the rank of an evil deity, supreme in
the material universe. Or, finally, with Joachim of Corazzo and the Fraticelli,
they developed the cardinal idea of the more orthodox mystics, the belief in
the inner light, and taught that the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.
In short, all were guilty, not of repudiating Christianity, but of interpreting
the Christian doctrine in a sense forbidden by authority. Beneath all
differences there was unity; behind the controversy, agreement. There are no
feuds more bitter, no recriminations more unjust, than those of men who look at
the same faith from different sides.
