6. Philosophy in the Middle Ages
Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, most of Europe entered a stage of barbarism known as the Dark Ages which was characterised by a tragic decline of culture. All the enormous advances made by the Greeks and the Romans in the spheres of art, science and philosophy were lost for hundreds of years. Humanity would have to go through a painful path lasting almost 1,000 years to recover them again.
Gradually, a new form of society emerged from the wreckage of the old system, based on the exploitation of a peasantry who were no longer slaves, but were tied to the land under the domination of temporal and spiritual lords. The pyramidal structure of society reflected this domination, with a rigid system of alleged duties and rights to one’s ‘natural superiors’. The fundamental duty, however, upon which everything else depended, was the duty of the serf to provide free labour service for his lord and master. This is what distinguishes this form of society from both chattel slavery, which came before it, and capitalism, which followed it. The whole system was sanctified by the Church, which wielded immense power, and was organised along similar hierarchical lines.
The rigid social hierarchy that characterised the feudal system found an ideological expression in the fixed dogmas of the Church, which demanded unquestioning obedience based on the official interpretation of the sacred texts. In place of reason, the Church Fathers preached blind faith, summed up in the celebrated phrase attributed to Tertullian, “Credo, quia absurdum est” – “I believe because it is absurd”. Science was looked on as suspicious, a heritage of paganism.
The heritage of classical Greek philosophy was lost, and only partially revived in Western Europe in the twelfth century. Such a situation was not conducive to the development of thought and science. J. D. Bernal writes:
The conditions of feudal production reduced the demand for useful science to a minimum. It was not to increase again till trade and navigation created new needs in the later Middle Ages. Intellectual effort was to go in other directions and largely in the service of a radically new feature of civilisation – organised religious faiths.[1]
According to Forbes and Dijksterhuis:
Generally speaking it may be said that during the first centuries of its existence Christianity was not conducive to scientific pursuits. Science was regarded with suspicion because of its pagan origin; moreover, the ideal prevailed that it was not advisable for the spiritual welfare of Christians to penetrate more deeply into the secrets of nature than was made possible by the Holy Scriptures and than was required to understand these.[2]
When the remnants of classical culture eventually reached Western Europe, it was in translations from Arabic. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the great energy shown by the Arabs in conquering North Africa and Spain right up to the Pyrenees was matched by their intelligent and flexible attitude to the culture of the conquered peoples, in marked contrast to the ignorant barbarism displayed by the Christians after the reconquest of Al-Andalus. For centuries, the Islamic universities in Spain, especially the one at Córdoba, were the only real centres of learning in Western Europe, if we exclude Ireland, which, because of its remoteness, remained outside the mainstream. The Arabs made great advances in a whole number of fields – mathematics, astronomy, geography, medicine, optics and chemistry, as well as important technological advances, shown by the vast irrigation schemes which were wantonly destroyed by the Christians. But it took hundreds of years for this knowledge to percolate through to Western Europe.
Because of the Church’s monopoly on culture, all intellectual life had to be channelled through it. For centuries, education was confined to the monasteries under the strict control of the Church officialdom. For the medieval Schoolmen – or Scholastics, as the official intelligentsia were called – philosophy was the “handmaiden of theology.” Science was reduced to a bare minimum: “Arithmetic was numeration; geometry the first three books of Euclid; astronomy hardly got past the calendar and how to compute the date of Easter; and the physics were very remote and Platonic.”[3] No interest was shown in scientific research and experiment.
REALISM AND NOMINALISM: THE QUESTION OF UNIVERSALS
The ideological pillar of mediaeval theocracy was the ideas of St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), the most influential philosopher of the Dark Ages. Augustine based himself on the most reactionary elements of neoplatonist thought. His philosophy was a mix of Christian mysticism and a crude and impoverished form of Platonic idealism. As the main ideology of the Roman Catholic Church, any and all opposition to Augustinian thought was deemed inherently heretical and persecuted.
Following Plato, Augustine believed that all beings were formed in accordance to universal archetypes, which are real entities existing beyond our physical world. In Plato’s system, these archetypes – or ‘forms’, as he called them – exist in a different realm which can only be accessed by humans by way of pure philosophical thought. For Augustine, however, the archetypes – or ‘reasons’, as he called them – exist in the divine mind and are only accessible to humans by way of faith.
Augustine’s theory of universals lay at the base of the trend in mediaeval philosophy confusingly called Realism. The Realists, following Augustine and Plato, believed that the general concepts that we have, such as ‘man’, ‘animal’, ‘tree’, ‘rock’ etc., are based on real existing and unchanging archetypal things. These universals in turn form the basis of the singular and changing men, animals, trees and rocks that we experience in life. But how do we get to know these universals? According to Augustine, it is in God’s mind that the true essence of things can be found. Hence, there is no point in looking for them on earth: rather, we should direct our gaze to the heavens where God resides.
Augustine’s world view leaves no room for science or investigation, and ultimately not even for rational thought. Here the intellect is passive and merely receives knowledge on grounds of its faith. In accordance with Christian doctrine, Augustine considered all material and earthly things to be inherently inferior, and even sinful. The bodies of men and women (particularly women) were objects of sin, to be regarded with abhorrence. Real life began at the moment of death, when the soul was finally freed from its material prison. From this point of view, it was quite natural that truth was not to be found in the material world: “… truth in any genuine sense is not something to be expected from the bodily senses.”[4]
Accordingly, the objective world is, at best, of a secondary importance, and our senses are useless in leading us to the truth. “Crede, ut intelligas” – “Believe so that you may understand” – Augustine famously said. Truth is only to be found in the static and immutable mind of God, who in turn illuminates our minds with his truth – that is, if we are ‘pure’ and ‘holy’ enough. Thus, the ultimate judgement of all truth is placed in the hands of the holiest of holies: the clerical elite of the Catholic Church. This theory of knowledge was known as the theory of Divine Illumination and, along with Augustinian Realism, it laid the philosophical foundation of mediaeval reaction.
This school of thought reigned supreme in Europe for hundreds of years, when all hope for science and culture appeared to be lost. However, underneath the surface, the mole of history was still burrowing away. The productive forces were developing – albeit very slowly – and along with them science and technology.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, feudal society in Europe was reaching its peak. Almost all arable land was in use and the productivity of the land, as well as the total yield of agriculture, was at its highest. On this basis, the population increased and the sparsely populated continent of the early mediaeval period gave way to a vast network of small towns, and even a few cities. Paris, Florence, Venice and Genoa reached populations of around 100,000, while London, Ghent and Cologne reached around 50,000. The state apparatus and urban institutions swelled, and with them the need for professionals. The old monastic education institutions were no longer sufficient. Hence, we witness the rise of the universities, where law and medical science developed separately from theology.
In the monastic educational tradition, students were not allowed to speak, not even to ask questions. But in the universities matters were quite different. Here, one of the main methods of learning was through ‘disputations’, which were open public debates about theological topics. Another important discipline, which developed in conjunction with the disputations, was dialectics, the discipline of rational argument. The topics in question in these debates were still highly mystical and religious. Departure from Christian authority was not allowed. The exceptions were Plato and Aristotle, along with commentaries on these, which the Church reluctantly had to accept.
Nevertheless, this partial liberation of ideas gave philosophy a new lease on life. Underneath debates on such things as whether angels are individuals or a species, whether God is simple or complex, and the question of the Universals in the divine mind, the mediaeval Schoolmen were slowly rediscovering philosophy.
Meanwhile, another important event gave a major impulse to this development. To fill the curriculums in the universities, in particular for the arts faculties and the medical sciences, a serious endeavour was made to translate scientific and philosophical texts from Arabic into Latin. Almost all of the classical Greek works had been lost during the Dark Ages, but now they started finding their way back into Europe, along with works by Arabic scientists and philosophers.
This was the early beginning of the process of separation of philosophy and science from religion. For the first time in hundreds of years, a glimmer of light could be seen in the darkness that had covered Europe. In philosophy, contradictions began to pile up that the old Augustinian paradigm could not account for.
The first break with the old way – via antiqua, as it was called – came from the French scholastic, Peter Abelard (1079-1142). Abelard is known for his tragic love life with another prominent thinker of the time, Heloïse. This often distracts from the fact that he was an innovative and courageous thinker, renowned across Europe for being the most formidable debater and dialectician of his time.
Abelard was also the father of Nominalism, the school of thought that, as opposed to Realism, claimed that universals do not exist as real things in the mind of God or anywhere else. Basing himself on Aristotle and a meticulous logic, he rejected Augustinian Realism and proved that universals are not really existing archetypes in which singular things in the world participate or otherwise reflect. Rather, he maintained that all beings are singular: a man is just that man, and a rock is just that, a particular rock.
He held that concepts such as man, animal, etc., are just words that humans have evolved by convention to signify things in the real world, but which have no reality beyond human consciousness. According to Abelard, the form of material objects – apart from God, angels and human beings – is merely the result of different combinations of the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Universals do not figure as a separate compound in this equation.
But this does not mean that Abelard thought that our general universal concepts do not correspond to anything at all. According to him, singular things have similar natures. It is in the nature of birds, for instance, to lay eggs and to have wings – something we can deduce from our experience of them. Our universal words, he said, correspond to what he calls the ‘statuses’ of things – a term we can broadly interpret to mean their mode of existence or their inner lawfulness. Hence, the shared features of say, animals, are not arbitrary. They reflect the similar natural processes that lead to the creation of animals.
This is a radical departure from conventional Church beliefs and leaves little room for the supernatural. The only role God has in this process, according to Abelard, is to define these laws of nature at the inception of time. It also means that no divine illumination is needed for humans to acquire knowledge. Rather, our knowledge is acquired by way of our sense experiences, as well as our ability to abstract and generalise the phenomena that we meet in the real world.
This deviation from the official doctrines caused a lot of anger among the Catholic officialdom, but Abelard stubbornly stood his ground. In spite of all the attempts of his enemies to shut him up, he dealt a mortal blow to the theory of knowledge via divine illumination. After his time, it was almost universally accepted that knowledge is acquired via sense experience and abstraction. Later on, this would lead to the complete unravelling of Augustinian thought.
Abelard was a devout Christian, but he was more dedicated to his convictions and rational thought, something which time and time again brought him into conflict with the Church. For his many deviations from the official doctrines, Abelard was persecuted, excommunicated and condemned as a heretic on several occasions by ecclesiastic authorities. At one point, his books were ordered to be burned, and only narrowly escaped that fate thanks to the intervention of a wealthy patron. Nevertheless, Abelard remained hugely popular with young students, who flocked to his lectures in their thousands.
While Abelard was by no means a revolutionary, his ideas were seen as an existential threat to the ideological stranglehold of the Catholic Church on medieval society. But the Church was fighting a losing battle. Abelard anticipated the developments of the thirteenth century, where the old way of Augustinian thought entered a period of definitive decline. The final element in this development was the recovery of Aristotle’s works, which had long been forgotten in the monastic educational tradition.
Prior to the twelfth century, only Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation were available in Latin, and these were some of Aristotle’s poorest works. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, almost all of his existing books were translated from Arabic into Latin along with commentaries from Islamic thinkers like Avicenna and, most importantly, Averroes. In fact, Averroes became the primary guide to Aristotle to the degree that where Aristotle was spoken of as ‘The Philosopher’, Averroes was known as ‘The Commentator’. On the basis of Averroes’ writings, a trend of radical Aristotelianism began to develop amongst the Schoolmen.
This newly unearthed material revolutionised all of philosophy and religious thought, and led to a full-blown crisis within the prevailing ideology. The scientific and inquisitive method of Aristotle stood in sharp contrast to Augustine’s Platonic dogmas. The Church attempted to censor its way out of this. In the condemnations of 1210, 1270 and 1277, lists of forbidden books and theses were drawn up, mainly as an attempt to censor Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the radical interpretation of Aristotle by Averroes.
But the Church could not stop the march of history. Abelard’s theory of knowledge was now universally accepted and backed up by the rediscovery of Aristotle. Along with the slow advance of science, bigger and bigger gaps were beginning to appear in the Augustinian approach. In this context, Averroism was rapidly gaining ground. Therefore, a trend emerged trying to merge the Platonic and Aristotelian world views, in order to combat the radical Averroist interpretation of Aristotle.
The most prominent representative of this trend was Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), perhaps the most famous mediaeval scholastic. Aquinas had to admit that knowledge of universal concepts is acquired via sense experience, which the mind then abstracts. However, he maintained that this ability to abstract is a function of the soul, which has been provided with intelligible light by God in order to be able to understand universals. In this manner, Aquinas believed that the contradiction between Aristotle’s materialism and Plato’s idealism could be reconciled. In reality of course, he was bastardising Aristotle’s ideas and using them to save the Platonism of the Church.
He also admitted that the world is only inhabited by singular beings, but that these are composed of a combination of matter, as well as a separate universal essence, which only reason – without recourse to experience – is able to understand. Again, Aquinas believed that this would reconcile the scientific approach, which was gaining traction in Europe with the old tradition. But in effect, Aquinas remained a Realist and his ideas were merely an attempt at propping up the ruling ideas of the time.
At first, Aquinas was met with hostility by many of the ecclesiastic elite. Later on, however, as the advances of science increasingly exposed the old views, the Church had to concede and incorporate Thomism – as Aquinas’ philosophy was called – into its canon. Augustinian thought was doomed to perish. Aquinas’ ideas thus became the best way to sell the old dogma in a quasi-scientific guise. To this day in fact, neo-Thomism remains a basic position of the Roman Catholic Church.
In opposing Aquinas, Scottish philosopher John Duns Scotus (1265-1308) developed the theory of the Univocity of Being. Univocity means the quality of only possessing one meaning, which maintains that the same propositions that we use about the natural world can also be used to speak about God. This went against the official doctrine, which claimed that God and the propositions we apply to him belong to an entirely different realm. Essentially, what Scotus’ view was hinting at was that the difference between God and other creatures is merely a matter of degree. Marx said of Scotus:
Materialism is the born son of Britain. Even one of his great schoolmen, Duns Scotus, asked himself “whether matter cannot think.” In performing this wonder, Duns had recourse to God’s omnipotence, that is, he made theology itself preach materialism.[5]
This outlook is in many ways an early anticipation of the Pantheism later developed by Spinoza.
The last of the important Schoolmen was William of Ockham (1287-1347), who developed Nominalism – the school of thought inaugurated by Abelard – to its fullest. Like other Nominalists, he maintained that the world is only populated by singular elements, and that there is no room in it for universal entities. In fact, he went as far as to denounce Realism’s position on universals as “the worst error in philosophy”.[6] Instead, Ockham held that universals were merely concepts of the human mind solely based on our experiences. Thus, when I say ‘man’, according to Ockham, I am merely speaking about the concept I have developed through all of my experiences of men. It is on the basis of such experiences that science can establish universal truths.
Ockham also maintained that the existence of God and other religious dogmas could not be proven by reason, and was thus founded solely upon faith. This was a dangerous doctrine, since it would mean separating philosophy from religion, enabling it to develop separately, freed from the dead hand of the Church. Ockham was excommunicated in 1328, but escaped from the Pope’s territory in Avignon and fled to the protection of Louis, King of France, who was also excommunicated. Louis then appealed to a general Council, and the Pope found himself accused of heresy. It is said that when Ockham met the Holy Roman Emperor, he said to him: “Do you defend me with the sword, and I will defend you with the pen?”. At bottom, this was not an abstract debate about philosophy, but the reflection of a life and death struggle between the Church and Emperor, and between France, England and Germany. The struggle over seemingly abstract ideas was itself part of the general crisis of the feudal order that had emerged in the thirteenth century, even prior to the Black Death.
While containing the germ of a correct materialist idea, the philosophy of Nominalism went too far in assuming that general concepts (‘universals’) are only names, and nothing else. In fact, they reflect real qualities of objectively existing things, which, apart from their particular features, also embody within themselves elements of the general, which identify them as belonging to a specific genus or species. These are not supernatural general features, but features reflecting the general lawfulness of nature itself. This denial of the general and insistence on particulars is a peculiar feature of the empirical cast of mind, which has characterised the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition ever since. As a reaction against the sterile idealist doctrines of the medieval Church, it represented an important advance – a step in the direction of scientific experiment.
Nominalism contained the germ of materialism, but a one-sided and superficial materialism which later led to a philosophical dead-end with Berkeley, Hume and the modern semantic philosophers. At the time, however, it represented a huge advance. Ockham was the last of the great Schoolmen, but his approach encouraged a new generation of thinkers who would make important discoveries in science. In reality, Ockham’s Nominalism represented the last nail in the coffin of scholasticism as such. From this point, science and philosophy embarked upon a distinctly separate path from theology.
While the medieval Schoolmen did have among them brilliant thinkers, they were limited in what they could achieve due to the official dogma imposed by the Church. Even the works of the greatest minds of the time were clouded by religious mysticism. Hence, in the main, scholastic philosophy did not go beyond the achievements of classical Greek philosophy. Nevertheless, it played an important role in recovering the advances of the past, setting the stage for the advances made during the Renaissance.
SCIENCE VS. RELIGION
For hundreds of years prior to this, the progress of science had been stifled by the spiritual police of the Church. Most of the (not inconsiderable) intellectual energies of the Schoolmen were dissipated in endless and complicated debates on such subjects as the sex of angels. Nobody was permitted to go beyond the limits laid down by Church dogma, and those who attempted to do so left themselves open to harsh reprisals. But that was beginning to come to an end. People like Roberte Grosseteste, Albert the Great and, later on, Jean Buridan also made important contributions to the proliferation of science and the scientific method of observation and experimentation.
Nevertheless, it called for great courage when the English scholastic Roger Bacon (c. 1214-92) went so far as to challenge the Schoolmen’s dogmatism and veneration of authority. Going against the spirit of the times, and anticipating the scientific method, he advocated the experimental study of nature. Given the fact that science had still not separated itself from alchemy and astrology, it is not surprising that elements of these were present in Bacon’s writings. Nor is it surprising that he was rewarded for his boldness by being dismissed from teaching at Oxford and confined to a monastery for his heretical views. Given the circumstances, he got off lightly.
Nicholas of Oresme, a pupil of Ockham’s, anticipated Copernicus by considering the geocentric theory of the universe, which places the Earth at the centre of the universe. Comparing this idea with the heliocentric theory, which states that the sun is at the centre, he concluded that either theory would serve to explain all the known facts, and that, therefore, it was impossible to choose between them. This apparently cautious conclusion was, in fact, quite a bold step, since it put a question mark over the orthodox position of the Church, and thereby challenged its whole world outlook.
The cosmology of the medieval Church formed an important part of its general world outlook. It was not a secondary issue. The picture of the universe was supposed to be a mirror image of the world, with the same kind of static, unchanging character, the same rigid hierarchy. It was not derived from observation, but taken over from the cosmology of Aristotle and the Alexandrines, and accepted dogmatically. Bernal comments:
The hierarchy of society was reproduced in the hierarchy of the universe itself; just as there was the pope, bishops, and archbishops, the emperor, kings, and nobles, so there was a celestial hierarchy of the nine choirs of angels: seraphim, cherubim, thrones; dominations, virtues, and powers; principalities, archangels, and angels (all fruits of the imagination of the pseudo Dionysius). Each of these had a definite function to perform in the running of the universe, and they were attached in due rank to the planetary spheres to keep them in appropriate motion. The lowest order of mere angels that belonged to the sphere of the moon had naturally most to do with the order of human beings just below them. In general there was a cosmic order, a social order, an order inside the human body, all representing states to which Nature tended to return when it was disturbed. There was a place for everything and everything knew its place.[7]
This view of the universe could not be challenged without calling into question the entire world outlook of the Church, and the type of society it defended. The conflict around the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo was not an abstract intellectual debate, but a life-and-death battle between opposing views of the world, which ultimately reflected a desperate struggle between two mutually exclusive social orders.
THE RISE OF THE BOURGEOISIE
In the later Middle Ages, the rise of the towns and trade saw the emergence of a new and vigorous element in the social equation. This development had an uneven character. Some regions grew faster than others. Tawney shows how the embryo of a new society was growing within the womb of the old:
In spite of the ubiquity of manor and gild, there was as much difference between the life of a centre of capitalist industry, like fifteenth-century Flanders, or a centre of capitalist finance, like fifteenth-century Florence, and a pastoral society exporting raw materials and a little food, like medieval England, as there is between modern Lancashire or London and modern Denmark.[8]
In this context, the rising class of wealthy merchants began to flex its muscles, demanding rights. The expansion of commerce, the opening up of new trade routes, the rise of a money economy, the creation of new needs and the means of satisfying them, the development of arts and crafts, the rise of a new national literature: all these developments heralded the birth of a revolutionary force in society, the bourgeoisie, whose interests laid in breaking down the artificial feudal barriers which impeded its development, and also, to an ever-increasing extent, in developing and exploiting technical innovations.
The development of open-sea navigation, for example, demanded the production of new and better charts, based on accurate astronomical observations, and also of more advanced navigational instruments. The introduction of paper and printing had a revolutionary effect on the accessibility of ideas, which had earlier been limited to a tiny minority of ecclesiastics. The production of literature written in the vernacular for the first time had the same effect, with the emergence of great recognisable national writers like Boccaccio, Dante, Rabelais, Chaucer and, finally, Luther. The introduction of gunpowder not only revolutionised warfare and helped undermine the power of the nobles, but also gave a new impetus to the study of physics and chemistry.
First in Italy, then in the Low Countries, Britain, Bohemia, Germany and France, this new class began to challenge the old order, which, after nearly a thousand years, had exhausted itself and entered a phase of decline. The endless wars and civil wars of the period bore witness to the impasse of feudalism. The Black Death, which decimated the population of Europe in the fourteenth century, hastened the dissolution of feudal relations on the land. The peasant jacqueries in France and the Peasant Rising in England in 1381 were a warning of the approaching dissolution of the feudal order. To many people, it seemed that the end of the world was approaching. The sensation of impending doom gave rise to phenomena like the flagellant sects, groups of religious fanatics who travelled the country, whipping and otherwise inflicting pain on themselves in anticipation of the impending Day of Wrath. This was merely a confused reflection in the popular imagination of the impending break-up of the existing social order.
CRISIS OF IDEOLOGY
The breakdown of a social system is anticipated by a crisis of the official morality and ideology, which increasingly enters into conflict with the changed social relations. A critical spirit arises among a layer of the intellectuals, a barometer of the tensions building up within the depths of society. The moral and ideological basis for the feudal system was the teaching of the Church. Any serious challenge to the existing order meant an assault on the Church, which defended its power and privileges with all the means at its disposal, including excommunication, torture and burning at the stake.
The Middle Ages are usually depicted as a time of extreme religious devotion and piety. But that description certainly does not apply to the period under consideration. The Church, a wealthy and powerful institution which weighed heavily on the back of society, was widely discredited. Huizinga writes:
Of all the contradictions which religious life of the period presents, perhaps the most insoluble is that of an avowed contempt of the clergy, a contempt seen as an undercurrent throughout the Middle Ages, side by side with the very great respect shown for the sanctity of the sacerdotal office … Hence it was that nobles, burghers and villeins had for a long time past been feeding their hatred with spiteful jests at the expense of the incontinent monk and the guzzling priest. Hatred is the right word to use in this context, for hatred it was, latent, but general and persistent. The people never wearied of hearing the vices of the clergy arraigned. A preacher who inveighed against the ecclesiastical state was sure of being applauded. As soon as a homilist broaches this subject, says Bernardino of Siena, his hearers forget all the rest; there is no more effective means of reviving attention when the congregation is dropping off to sleep, or suffering from heat or cold. Everybody instantly becomes attentive and cheerful.[9]
The undercurrents of dissent were felt even within the Church itself, reflecting the pressures of society. Heretical movements like the Albigenses were put down in blood. But new oppositional trends appeared, sometimes disguised in the garb of mysticism. A nineteenth century Italian historian relates:
The same spirit of reformation which animated the Albigenses had spread throughout Europe: many Christians, disgusted with the corruption and vices of the clergy, or whose minds revolted against the violence on their reason exercised by the church, devoted themselves to a contemplative life, renounced all ambition and the pleasures of the world, and sought a new road to salvation in the alliance of faith with reason. They called themselves cathari, or the purified; paterini, or the resigned.[10]
The Dominican and Franciscan orders were founded in the early twelfth century to combat heresies, anti-clericalism and new philosophical ideas. Sismondi says of Pope Innocent the Third:
He founded the two mendicant orders of Franciscans and Dominicans; new champions of the church, who were charged to repress all activity of mind, to combat growing intelligence, and to extirpate heresy. He confided to the Dominicans the fearful powers of the inquisition, which he instituted: he charged them to discover and pursue to destruction the new reformers, who, under the name of paterini, multiplied rapidly in Italy.[11]
Violent repression of opposition of any kind was a constant feature of the conduct of the ecclesiastical authorities from the highest level, as the history of the papacy shows. Pope Urban the Sixth, when he could not get the support of his cardinals, resolved the problem by the simple expedient of accusing them of conspiracy against him. He had many cardinals put to the torture in his presence, while he calmly recited his rosary. Others he ordered to be put in sacks and drowned in the sea. The reforming monk Girolamo Savonarola, an Italian precursor of Luther, was tortured until he confessed all the crimes attributed to him, and burnt alive with two other monks. Examples can be multiplied at will.
But no amount of repression can preserve an idea whose time has passed. An ideology and morality which no longer reflects reality is one that has outlived itself and is destined to be overthrown. The ground was prepared for one of the greatest revolutions in history. When, on 31 October 1517, an obscure monk called Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, he lit a fuse that blew the old feudal order sky-high, opening the door to a new epoch – the age of the bourgeois revolution.
Endnotes
[1] J. D. Bernal, Science in History, p. 254.
[2] R. J. Forbes, and E. J. Dijksterhuis, A History of Science and Technology, Vol. 1, pp. 101-2.
[3] Ibid., p. 218.
[4] St Augustine, Eighty-Three Different Questions, p. 41.
[5] K. Marx, ‘England and Materialist Philosophy’, The Revolutionary Philosophy of Marxism, p. 252.
[6] Quoted in R. Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, p. 280.
[7] J. D. Bernal, Science in History, p. 227.
[8] R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 29.
[9] J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, pp. 172-3.
[10] J. S. Sismondi, A History of the Italian Republics, p. 66.
[11] Ibid. p. 60.