A History of Freedom of Thought - John Bagnell Bury
[46] failure, the Christians were now too numerous to be crushed. After
the abdication of Diocletian, the Emperors who reigned in different
parts of the realm did not agree as to the expediency of his policy, and
the persecution ended by edicts of toleration (A.D. 311 and 313). These
documents have an interest for the history of religious liberty.
The first, issued in the eastern provinces, ran as follows:--
"We were particularly desirous of reclaiming into the way of reason and
nature the deluded Christians, who had renounced the religion and
ceremonies instituted by their fathers and, presumptuously despising the
practice of antiquity, had invented extravagant laws and opinions
according to the dictates of their fancy, and had collected a various
society from the different provinces of our Empire. The edicts which we
have published to enforce the worship of the gods, having exposed many
of the Christians to danger and distress, many having suffered death and
many more, who still persist in their impious folly, being left
destitute of any public exercise of religion, we are disposed to extend
to those unhappy men the effects of our wonted clemency. We permit them,
therefore, freely to profess their private opinions, and to assemble in
their conventicles
[47] without fear or molestation, provided always that they preserve a
due respect to the established laws and government." [5]
The second, of which Constantine was the author, known as the Edict of
Milan, was to a similar effect, and based toleration on the Emperor's
care for the peace and happiness of his subjects and on the hope of
appeasing the Deity whose seat is in heaven.
The relations between the Roman government and the Christians raised the
general question of persecution and freedom of conscience. A State, with
an official religion, but perfectly tolerant of all creeds and cults,
finds that a society had arisen in its midst which is uncompromisingly
hostile to all creeds but its own and which, if it had the power, would
suppress all but its own. The government, in self-defence, decides to
check the dissemination of these subversive ideas and makes the
profession of that creed a crime, not on account of its particular
tenets, but on account of the social consequences of those tenets. The
members of the society cannot without violating their consciences and
incurring damnation abandon their exclusive doctrine. The principle of
freedom of conscience is asserted as superior to all obligations to the
State, and the State, confronted
[48] by this new claim, is unable to admit it. Persecution is the
result.
Even from the standpoint of an orthodox and loyal pagan the persecution
of the Christians is indefensible, because blood was shed uselessly. In
other words, it was a great mistake because it was unsuccessful. For
persecution is a choice between two evils. The alternatives are violence
(which no reasonable defender of persecution would deny to be an evil in
itself) and the spread of dangerous opinions. The first is chosen simply
to avoid the second, on the ground that the second is the greater evil.
But if the persecution is not so devised and carried out as to
accomplish its end, then you have two evils instead of one, and nothing
can justify this. From their point of view, the Emperors had good
reasons for regarding Christianity as dangerous and anti-social, but
they should either have let it alone or taken systematic measures to
destroy it. If at an early stage they had established a drastic and
systematic inquisition, they might possibly have exterminated it. This
at least would have been statesmanlike. But they had no conception of
extreme measures, and they did not understand --they had no experience to
guide them --the sort of problem they had to deal with. They hoped to
succeed by intimidation.
[49] Their attempts at suppression were vacillating, fitful, and
ridiculously ineffectual. The later persecutions (of A.D. 250 and 303)
had no prospect of success. It is particularly to be observed that no
effort was made to suppress Christian literature.
The higher problem whether persecution, even if it attains the desired
end, is justifiable, was not considered. The struggle hinged on
antagonism between the conscience of the individual and the authority
and supposed interests of the State. It was the question which had been
raised by Socrates, raised now on a wider platform in a more pressing
and formidable shape: what is to happen when obedience to the law is
inconsistent with obedience to an invisible master? Is it incumbent on
the State to respect the conscience of the individual at all costs, or
within what limits? The Christians did not attempt a solution, the
general problem did not interest them. They claimed the right of freedom
exclusively for themselves from a non-Christian government; and it is
hardly going too far to suspect that they would have applauded the
government if it had suppressed the Gnostic sects whom they hated and
calumniated. In any case, when a Christian State was established, they
would completely forget the principle which they
[50] had invoked. The martyrs died for conscience, but not for liberty.
To-day the greatest of the Churches demands freedom of conscience in the
modern States which she does not control, but refuses to admit that,
where she had the power, it would be incumbent on her to concede it.
If we review the history of classical antiquity as a whole, we may
almost say that freedom of thought was like the air men breathed. It was
taken for granted and nobody thought about it. If seven or eight
thinkers at Athens were penalized for heterodoxy, in some and perhaps in
most of these cases heterodoxy was only a pretext. They do not
invalidate the general facts that the advance of knowledge was not
impeded by prejudice, or science retarded by the weight of unscientific
authority. The educated Greeks were tolerant because they were friends
of reason and did not set up any authority to overrule reason. Opinions
were not imposed except by argument; you were not expected to receive
some "kingdom of heaven" like a little child, or to prostrate your
intellect before an authority claiming to be infallible.
But this liberty was not the result of a conscious policy or deliberate
conviction, and therefore it was precarious. The problems
[51] of freedom of thought, religious liberty, toleration, had not been
forced upon society and were never seriously considered. When
Christianity confronted the Roman government, no one saw that in the
treatment of a small, obscure, and, to pagan thinkers, uninteresting or
repugnant sect, a principle of the deepest social importance was
involved. A long experience of the theory and practice of persecution
was required to base securely the theory of freedom of thought. The
lurid policy of coercion which the Christian Church adopted, and its
consequences, would at last compel reason to wrestle with the problem
and discover the justification of intellectual liberty. The spirit of
the Greeks and Romans, alive in their works, would, after a long period
of obscuration, again enlighten the world and aid in re-establishing the
reign of reason, which they had carelessly enjoyed without assuring its
foundations.
[1] This has been shown very clearly by Professor Jackson in the article
on "Socrates" in the Encyclopoedia Britannica, last edition.
[2] He stated the theological difficulty as to the origin of evil in
this form: God either wishes to abolish evil and cannot, or can and will
not, or neither can nor will, or both can and will. The first three are
unthinkable, if he is a God worthy of the name; therefore the last
alternative must be true. Why then does evil exist? The inference is
that there is no God, in the sense of a governor of the world.
[3] An admirable appreciation of the poem will be found in R. V.
Tyrrell's Lectures on Latin Poetry.
[4] For the evidence of the Apologists see A. Bouche-Leclercq, Religious
Intolerance and Politics (French, 1911) --a valuable review of the whole
subject.
[5] This is Gibbon's translation.
CHAPTER III
REASON IN PRISON
(THE MIDDLE AGES)
ABOUT ten years after the Edict of Toleration, Constantine the Great
adopted Christianity. This momentous decision inaugurated
[52] a millennium in which reason was enchained, thought was enslaved,
and knowledge made no progress.
During the two centuries in which they had been a forbidden sect the
Christians had claimed toleration on the ground that religious belief is
voluntary and not a thing which can be enforced. When their faith became
the predominant creed and had the power of the State behind it, they
abandoned this view. They embarked on the hopeful enterprise of bringing
about a complete uniformity in men's opinions on the mysteries of the
universe, and began a more or less definite policy of coercing thought.
This policy was adopted by Emperors and Governments partly on political
grounds; religious divisions, bitter as they were, seemed dangerous to
the unity of the State. But the fundamental principle lay in the
doctrine that salvation is to be found exclusively in the Christian
Church. The profound conviction that those who did not believe in its
doctrines would be damned eternally, and that God punishes theological
error as if it were the most heinous of crimes, led naturally to
persecution. It was a duty to impose on men the only true doctrine,
seeing that their own eternal interests were at stake, and to hinder
errors from spreading. Heretics were more
[53] than ordinary criminals and the pains that man could inflict on
them were as nothing to the tortures awaiting them in hell. To rid the
earth of men who, however virtuous, were, through their religious
errors, enemies of the Almighty, was a plain duty. Their virtues were no
excuse. We must remember that, according to the humane doctrine of the
Christians, pagan, that is, merely human, virtues were vices, and
infants who died unbaptized passed the rest of time in creeping on the
floor of hell. The intolerance arising from such views could not but
differ in kind and intensity from anything that the world had yet
witnessed.
Besides the logic of its doctrines, the character of its Sacred Book
must also be held partly accountable for the intolerant principles of
the Christian Church. It was unfortunate that the early Christians had
included in their Scripture the Jewish writings which reflect the ideas
of a low stage of civilization and are full of savagery. It would be
difficult to say how much harm has been done, in corrupting the morals
of men, by the precepts and examples of inhumanity, violence, and
bigotry which the reverent reader of the Old Testament, implicitly
believing in its inspiration, is bound to approve. It furnished an
armoury for the theory of
[54] persecution. The truth is that Sacred Books are an obstacle to
moral and intellectual progress, because they consecrate the ideas of a
given epoch, and its customs, as divinely appointed. Christianity, by
adopting books of a long past age, placed in the path of human
development a particularly nasty stumbling-block. It may occur to one to
wonder how history might have been altered --altered it surely would have
been--if the Christians had cut Jehovah out of their programme and,
content with the New Testament, had rejected the inspiration of the Old.
Under Constantine the Great and his successors, edict after edict
fulminated against the worship of the old pagan gods and against
heretical Christian sects. Julian the Apostate, who in his brief reign
(A.D. 361-3) sought to revive the old order of things, proclaimed
universal toleration, but he placed Christians at a disadvantage by
forbidding them to teach in schools. This was only a momentary check.
Paganism was finally shattered by the severe laws of Theodosius I (end
of fourth century). It lingered on here and there for more than another
century, especially at Rome and Athens, but had little importance. The
Christians were more concerned in striving among themselves than in
[55] crushing the prostrate spirit of antiquity. The execution of the
heretic Priscillian in Spain (fourth century) inaugurated the punishment
of heresy by death. It is interesting to see a non-Christian of this age
teaching the Christian sects that they should suffer one another.
Themistius in an address to the Emperor Valens urged him to repeal his
edicts against the Christians with whom he did not agree, and expounded
a theory of toleration. "The religious beliefs of individuals are a
field in which the authority of a government cannot be effective;
compliance can only lead to hypocritical professions. Every faith should
be allowed; the civil government should govern orthodox and heterodox to
the common good. God himself plainly shows that he wishes various forms
of worship; there are many roads by which one can reach him."
No father of the Church has been more esteemed or enjoyed higher
authority than St. Augustine (died A.D. 410). He formulated the
principle of persecution for the guidance of future generations, basing
it on the firm foundation of Scripture--on words used by Jesus Christ in
one of his parables, "Compel them to come in." Till the end of the
twelfth century the Church worked hard to suppress heterodoxies. There
was much
[56] persecution, but it was not systematic. There is reason to think
that in the pursuit of heresy the Church was mainly guided by
considerations of its temporal interest, and was roused to severe action
only when the spread of false doctrine threatened to reduce its revenues
or seemed a menace to society. At the end of the twelfth century
Innocent III became Pope and under him the Church of Western Europe
reached the height of its power. He and his immediate successors are
responsible for imagining and beginning an organized movement to sweep
heretics out of Christendom. Languedoc in Southwestern France was
largely populated by heretics, whose opinions were considered
particularly offensive, known as the Albigeois. They were the subjects
of the Count of Toulouse, and were an industrious and respectable
people. But the Church got far too little money out of this anti-
clerical population, and Innocent called upon the Count to extirpate
heresy from his dominion. As he would not obey, the Pope announced a
Crusade against the Albigeois, and offered to all who would bear a hand
the usual rewards granted to Crusaders, including absolution from all
their sins. A series of sanguinary wars followed in which the
Englishman, Simon de Montfort, took part. There were
[57] wholesale burnings and hangings of men, women and children. The
resistance of the people was broken down, though the heresy was not
eradicated, and the struggle ended in 1229 with the complete humiliation
of the Count of Toulouse. The important point of the episode is this:
the Church introduced into the public law of Europe the new principle
that a sovran held his crown on the condition that he should extirpate
heresy. If he hesitated to persecute at the command of the Pope, he must
be coerced; his lands were forfeited; and his dominions were thrown open
to be seized by any one whom the Church could induce to attack him. The
Popes thus established a theocratic system in which all other interests
were to be subordinated to the grand duty of maintaining the purity of
the Faith.
But in order to root out heresy it was necessary to discover it in its
most secret retreats. The Albigeois had been crushed, but the poison of
their doctrine was not yet destroyed. The organized system of searching
out heretics known as the Inquisition was founded by Pope Gregory IX
about A.D. 1233, and fully established by a Bull of Innocent IV (A.D.
1252) which regulated the machinery of persecution "as an integral part
of the social edifice in every city and every
[58] State." This powerful engine for the suppression of the freedom of
men's religious opinions is unique in history.
The bishops were not equal to the new talk undertaken by the Church, and
in every ecclesiastical province suitable monks were selected and to
them was delegated the authority of the Pope for discovering heretics.
These inquisitors had unlimited authority, they were subject to no
supervision and responsible to no man. It would not have been easy to
establish this system but for the fact that contemporary secular rulers
had inaugurated independently a merciless legislation against heresy.
The Emperor Frederick II, who was himself undoubtedly a freethinker,
made laws for his extensive dominions in Italy and Germany (between 1220
and 1235), enacting that all heretics should be outlawed, that those who
did not recant should be burned, those who recanted should be
imprisoned, but if they relapsed should be executed; that their property
should be confiscated, their houses destroyed, and their children, to
the second generation, ineligible to positions of emolument unless they
had betrayed their father or some other heretic.
Frederick's legislation consecrated the stake as the proper punishment
for heresy. This
[59] cruel form of death for that crime seems to have been first
inflicted on heretics by a French king (1017). We must remember that in
the Middle Ages, and much later, crimes of all kinds were punished with
the utmost cruelty. In England in the reign of Henry VIII there is a
case of prisoners being boiled to death. Heresy was the foulest of all
crimes; and to prevail against it was to prevail against the legions of
hell. The cruel enactments against heretics were strongly supported by
the public opinion of the masses.
When the Inquisition was fully developed it covered Western Christendom
with a net from the meshes of which it was difficult for a heretic to
escape. The inquisitors in the various kingdoms co-operated, and
communicated information; there was "a chain of tribunals throughout
continental Europe." England stood outside the system, but from the age
of Henry IV and Henry V the government repressed heresy by the stake
under a special statute (A.D. 1400; repealed 1533; revived under Mary;
finally repealed in 1676).
In its task of imposing unity of belief the Inquisition was most
successful in Spain. Here towards the end of the fifteenth century a
system was instituted which had peculiarities of its own and was very
jealous of
[60] Roman interference. One of the achievements of the Spanish
Inquisition (which was not abolished till the nineteenth century) was to
expel the Moriscos or converted Moors, who retained many of their old
Mohammedan opinions and customs. It is also said to have eradicated
Judaism and to have preserved the country from the zeal of Protestant
missionaries. But it cannot be proved that it deserves the credit of
having protected Spain against Protestantism, for it is quite possible
that if the seeds of Protestant opinion had been sown they would, in any
case, have fallen dead on an uncongenial soil. Freedom of thought
however was entirely suppressed.
One of the most efficacious means for hunting down heresy was the "Edict
of Faith," which enlisted the people in the service of the Inquisition
and required every man to be an informer. From time to time a certain
district was visited and an edict issued commanding those who knew
anything of any heresy to come forward and reveal it, under fearful
penalties temporal and spiritual. In consequence, no one was free from
the suspicion of his neighbours or even of his own family. "No more
ingenious device has been invented to subjugate a whole population, to
paralyze its intellect, and to reduce it
[61] to blind obedience. It elevated delation to the rank of high
religious duty."
The process employed in the trials of those accused of heresy in Spain
rejected every reasonable means for the ascertainment of truth. The
prisoner was assumed to be guilty, the burden of proving his innocence
rested on him; his judge was virtually his prosecutor. All witnesses
against him, however infamous, were admitted. The rules for allowing
witnesses for the prosecution were lax; those for rejecting witnesses
for the defence were rigid. Jews, Moriscos, and servants could give
evidence against the prisoner but not for him, and the same rule applied
to kinsmen to the fourth degree. The principle on which the Inquisition
proceeded was that better a hundred innocent should suffer than one
guilty person escape. Indulgences were granted to any one who
contributed wood to the pile. But the tribunal of the Inquisition did
not itself condemn to the stake, for the Church must not be guilty of
the shedding of blood. The ecclesiastical judge pronounced the prisoner
to be a heretic of whose conversion there was no hope, and handed him
over ("relaxed" him was the official term) to the secular authority,
asking and charging the magistrate "to treat him benignantly and
mercifully." But this
[62] formal plea for mercy could not be entertained by the civil power;
it had no choice but to inflict death; if it did otherwise, it was a
promoter of heresy. All princes and officials, according to the Canon
Law, must punish duly and promptly heretics handed over to them by the
Inquisition, under pain of excommunication. It is to be noted that the
number of deaths at the stake has been much over-estimated by popular
imagination; but the sum of suffering caused by the methods of the
system and the punishments that fell short of death can hardly be
exaggerated.
The legal processes employed by the Church in these persecutions
exercised a corrupting influence on the criminal jurisprudence of the
Continent. Lea, the historian of the Inquisition, observes: "Of all the
curses which the Inquisition brought in its train, this perhaps was the
greatest--that, until the closing years of the eighteenth century,
throughout the greater part of Europe, the inquisitorial process, as
developed for the destruction of heresy, became the customary method of
dealing with all who were under any accusation."
The Inquisitors who, as Gibbon says, "defended nonsense by cruelties,"
are often regarded as monsters. It may be said for them and for the
kings who did their will that
[63] they were not a bit worse than the priests and monarchs of
primitive ages who sacrificed human beings to their deities. The Greek
king, Agamemnon, who immolated his daughter Iphigenia to obtain
favourable winds from the gods, was perhaps a most affectionate father,
and the seer who advised him to do so may have been a man of high
integrity. They acted according to their beliefs. And so in the Middle
Ages and afterwards men of kindly temper and the purest zeal for
morality were absolutely devoid of mercy where heresy was suspected.
Hatred of heresy was a sort of infectious germ, generated by the
doctrine of exclusive salvation.
It has been observed that this dogma also injured the sense of truth. As
man's eternal fate was at stake, it seemed plainly legitimate or rather
imperative to use any means to enforce the true belief--even falsehood
and imposture. There was no scruple about the invention of miracles or
any fictions that were edifying. A disinterested appreciation of truth
will not begin to prevail till the seventeenth century.
While this principle, with the associated doctrines of sin, hell, and
the last judgment, led to such consequences, there were other doctrines
and implications in Christianity which, forming a solid rampart against
the
[64] advance of knowledge, blocked the paths of science in the Middle
Ages, and obstructed its progress till the latter half of the nineteenth
century. In every important field of scientific research, the ground was
occupied by false views which the Church declared to be true on the
infallible authority of the Bible. The Jewish account of Creation and
the Fall of Man, inextricably bound up with the Christian theory of
Redemption, excluded from free inquiry geology, zoology, and
anthropology. The literal interpretation of the Bible involved the truth
that the sun revolves round the earth. The Church condemned the theory
of the antipodes. One of the charges against Servetus (who was burned in
the sixteenth century; see below, p. 79) was that he believed the
statement of a Greek geographer that Judea is a wretched barren country
in spite of the fact that the Bible describes it as a land flowing with
milk and honey. The Greek physician Hippocrates had based the study of
medicine and disease on experience and methodical research. In the
Middle Ages men relapsed to the primitive notions of a barbarous age.
Bodily ailments were ascribed to occult agencies--the malice of the Devil
or the wrath of God. St. Augustine said that the diseases of Christians
were caused by demons,
[65] and Luther in the same way attributed them to Satan. It was only
logical that supernatural remedies should be sought to counteract the
effects of supernatural causes. There was an immense traffic in relics
with miraculous virtues, and this had the advantage of bringing in a
large revenue to the Church. Physicians were often exposed to suspicions
of sorcery and unbelief. Anatomy was forbidden, partly perhaps on
account of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The opposition
of ecclesiastics to inoculation in the eighteenth century was a survival
of the mediaeval view of disease. Chemistry (alchemy) was considered a
diabolical art and in 1317 was condemned by the Pope. The long
imprisonment of Roger Bacon (thirteenth century) who, while he professed
zeal for orthodoxy, had an inconvenient instinct for scientific
research, illustrates the mediaeval distrust of science.