A History of The Inquisition of The Middle Ages; Volume III

History > Medieval

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by Henry Charles Lea

BOOK III.

SPECIAL FIELDS OF INQUISITORIAL ACTIVITY.

CHAPTER I.

THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS.

IN a former chapter we considered the Mendicants as an active agency in the suppression of heresy. One of the Orders, however, by no means restricted itself to this function, and we have now to examine the career of the Franciscans as the subjects of the spirit of persecuting uniformity which they did so much to render dominant.

While the mission of both Orders was to redeem the Church from the depth of degradation into which it had sunk, the Dominicans were more especially trained to take part in the active business of life. They therefore attracted the more restless and aggressive spirits; they accommodated themselves to the world, like the Jesuits of later days, and the worldliness which necessarily came with success awakened little antagonism within the organization. Power and luxury were welcomed and enjoyed. Even Thomas Aquinas, who, as we have seen, eloquently defended, against William of Saint-Amour, the superlative holiness of absolute poverty, subsequently admitted that poverty should be proportioned to the object which an Order was fitted to attain.

It was otherwise with the Franciscans. Though, as we have seen, the founders determined not to render the Order a simply contemplative one, the salvation of the individual through retreat from the world and its temptations bore a much larger part in their motives than in those of Dominic and his followers. Absolute poverty and self-abnegation were its primal principles, and it inevitably drew to itself the intellects which sought a refuge from the temptations of life in self-absorbing contemplation, in dreamy speculation, and in the renunciation of all that renders life attractive to average human nature. As the organization grew in wealth and power there were necessarily developed within its bosom antagonisms in two directions. On the one hand, it nourished a spirit of mysticism, which, though recognized in its favorite appellation of the Seraphic Order, sometimes found the trammels of orthodoxy oppressive. On the other, the men who continued to cherish the views of the founders as to the supreme obligation of absolute poverty could not reconcile their consciences to the accumulation of wealth and its display in splendor, and they rejected the ingenious devices which sought to accommodate the possession of riches with the abnegation of all possession.

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