Righteous Persecution

Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages

Christine Caldwell Ames

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812201093
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Righteous Persecution examines the long-controversial involvement of the Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, with inquisitions into heresy in medieval Europe. From their origin in the thirteenth century, the Dominicans were devoted to a ministry of preaching, teaching, and pastoral care, to "save souls" particularly tempted by the Christian heresies popular in western Europe. Many persons then, and scholars in our own time, have asked how members of a pastoral order modeled on Christ and the apostles could engage themselves so enthusiastically in the repressive persecution that constituted heresy inquisitions: the arrest, interrogation, torture, punishment, and sometimes execution of those who deviated in belief from Roman Christianity.Drawing on an extraordinarily wide base of ecclesiastical documents, Christine Caldwell Ames recounts how Dominican inquisitors and their supporters crafted and promoted explicitly Christian meanings for their inquisitorial persecution. Inquisitors' conviction that the sin of heresy constituted the graver danger to the Christian soul and to the church at large led to the belief that bringing the individual to repentance—even through the harshest means—was indeed a pious way to carry out their pastoral task. However, the resistance and criticism that inquisition generated in medieval communities also prompted Dominicans to consider further how this new marriage of persecution and holiness was compatible with authoritative Christian texts, exemplars, and traditions. Dominican inquisitors persecuted not despite their faith but rather because of it, as they formed a medieval Christianity that permitted—or demanded—persecution. Righteous Persecution deviates from recent scholarship that has deemphasized religious belief as a motive for inquisition and illuminates a powerful instance of the way Christianity was itself vulnerable in a context of persecution, violence, and intolerance.

PART I

In the Garden

CHAPTER 1

The Wolves and the Sheep

FRANCESCA DE MUSELLO, testifying before Friar Joachim in Bologna in 1305, recounted a conversation she had had with Bartolomea de Savigno (“Bona”), who was sympathetic to the radical poverty of the Apostolic Brethren, or Dolcinites. According to Francesca, Bona asked her a perfectly orthodox question: if she confessed her sins, and to whom. When Francesca answered that she confessed to Dominican friars, the “heretic” Bona’s response was a rejection neither of confession nor of penance, but of those confessors. She asked, “What good to you are fasts, or prayers, when you adhere to the Friars Preachers, who are the enemies of God?”¹ About twenty years after Francesca’s testimony, the Dominican Jean Gobi’s exempla collection, Scala coeli (1323–1330), recounted a century-old tale that voiced similar tension over identity. When Bishop Fulk of Toulouse once preached that heretics were wolves and faithful Catholics sheep, he was interrupted by a heretic who had been blinded and whose nose had been cut off by Count Simon of Montfort during the Albigensian Crusade. When the maimed heretic asked when it had become customary for the sheep to bite the wolf, Fulk responded that every community needed dogs to attack its wolves.²

Who were the “enemies of God” according to western European Christians in the Middle Ages? Who were the sheep and who were the wolves? This was a contested question in the world of medieval “heresy” and inquisition, so contested that it generated lay violence against inquisition that answered inquisitorial violence; moreover, it mattered to Christians (wherever they sat on a variable spectrum of belief) that “enemies of God” existed. Of course, Christian texts that treated, maligned, and identified various heretical positions are multiple and stretch back to the earliest days of the movement, from Paul’s warnings about “pseudoapostles,” schismatics, and dissent in letters written before the Gospels; to the attacks of the adversus hereticos genre beginning in the second century; to Augustine’s defenses of the imperial coercion of the Donatists. In Christianity’s first centuries, these polemics were often productive for both institutional cohesion and the related settlement of theological debates; also, charges of heresy were an effective, if obfuscating, way to inflate reassuring claims of ecclesiastical truth. Very simply, charges of heresy performed a different function amid institutional and theological development and persecution than they would in the context of hegemony.

Many scholars have considered ecclesiastical depictions of “heresy,” and of individual beliefs and practices deemed heretical, after that hegemony was effected in Europe. Historians, most notably R. I. Moore, have investigated the secular and ecclesiastical discourse of all groups that began to suffer persecution in the high Middle Ages, including supposed heretics in the period before the Albigensian Crusade. Studies of the eleventh and twelfth centuries have produced a debate about “reappearance” of heresy and clerics’ retroactive epistemology in categorizing difference, about the balance between ecclesiastical “fantasy” and the real existence of dissent among Christians.³ Nevertheless, the existence of genuine deviation from the Roman church’s theology or order—most lastingly the “good men” of Languedoc and various movements of apostolic poverty—is undeniable. As Moore and others have pointed out, whatever the weaknesses of the fable of “the Cathar church,” dualism was indeed being advocated by the 1230s. In addition, the differences over poverty, papal authority, and biblical interpretation patent among the Waldenses, the Spiritual Franciscans and their lay supporters (Beguins), and the Dolcinites were matters of theology as well as discipline. Also, as previously noted, the “heresy” that permitted inquisitorial investigation was an expansive category encompassing degrees of sinful behavior and sympathy for heretics.⁴

In the twelfth century, the circulation of antiheretical literature, the stiffening of positions in the face of opposition, and the connections between heresy and rejection of discipline intensified “heresy.” Two of the most prominent churchmen of the twelfth century, the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cluniac abbot Peter the Venerable, both attended to heresy. Bernard joined his order in preaching against the boni homines in the Midi, and he joined them also in disseminating a popular typology of heresy. One of Bernard’s sermons on the Song of Songs, composed at the behest of Praemonstratensian prior Everwin of Steinfeld in 1143, who had requested that Bernard expound on 2:15 (the little foxes spoiling the vines), particularly popularized that text as a metaphor for heresy.⁵ Peter’s hatred of heresy matched his antipathy against Jews and Muslims. Peter’s letter to the bishops of Arles, Embrun, Die, and Gap that introduced Contra Petrobrusianos (1139–1140) condemned the “impious heresy” of Peter of Bruys (d. c.1130) and his adherents with familiar rhetoric: “now hiding itself from fear, now having taken up boldness…it deceives whom it can, it corrupts whom it can, and now these and now those it gives to drink deadly poisons.”⁶ Other polemical texts helping to shape a “heretical essentialism” in this period included the former heretic Bonacursus’s Manifestatio heresis catarorum or Vita hereticorum (1176–1190); Alan of Lille’s De fide catholica contra hereticos sui temporis praesertim Albigenses libri quatuor (1179–1202); the anonymous Summa auctoritatum (c.1200); the Disputatio inter catholicum et paterinum hereticum (c.1210–1216), attributed to a certain Georgius, a layman; Durand of Huesca’s Liber antiheresis (c.1190) and Liber contra Manicheos (c.1223), written respectively before and after his return to the Roman church from Waldensianism in 1207; and the layman Salvo Burci’s Liber suprastella (1235).⁷ And the common antiheretical imagery and rhetoric deployed in such texts was attached explicitly to inquisitio hereticae pravitatis most prominently by Innocent III. Innocent repeatedly cited in his writings several biblical allusions that would be frequently reiterated in later inquisitorial texts: foxes having diverse faces but tails bound together (Judges 15:4); a crab crawling in secret (2 Timothy 2:17); wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15); “merchants who mix wine with water and give to drink the dragon’s poison in the golden cup of Babylon” (Deuteronomy 32:33; Jeremiah 51:7; cf. Revelation 16:19; Proverbs 23:30–32), and the little foxes spoiling the vines.⁸ Also commonly deployed was the ambivalent parable of the wheat and the tares, which could be read both as favoring tolerance and forbidding it.⁹

The intent here then is not to sketch how heretics were represented by Christians from the first century to the fourteenth. Instead, we will focus on a different dynamic for Dominican inquisitors and their supporters in the order. A location of heresy within a biblical and ecclesiastical history of enmity to God that long preceded Dominican appointments certainly relates to the greatest challenge that inquisitors met in their attempted spiritual discipline of laypeople: discernment.¹⁰ Difference, disobedience, and rejection positioned “heretics” as “enemies of God” standing in ontological and genealogical line with biblical apostates and antichrists, but also with the subtler “pseudoprophets” and wolves dressed as sheep, those who from the church’s origins had offered the specter of an alternative Christianity impugning as errant the majority of believers. To inquisitors, even those who believed that heresy was the “true Christian faith” were then touched by this apostasy. The matter of constructing a discourse of heresy—venerable in the Christian church, and adopted and adapted in the circumstances of heresy inquisitions—was then deeply bound with the problem of discernment that inquisition in practice both sought to resolve authoritatively and to claim as its privileged domain. As we will see further below, the inquisitorial conversation was a site of careful instruction, the guidance of the individual will that necessarily attempted to settle controversies of discerning the “true faith,” the genuinely pious, and so on. Discernment, then, which created such obvious problems for inquisitors by engendering sympathy for the ostensibly pious, weakening authority, and generating resistance, itself productively manufactured opportunities for spiritual discipline, for seeking to assert and to implement the individual’s belonging to the universal community of the Roman church. The most obvious utility of the antiheretical discourse inherited and transformed by Dominican inquisitors and supporters in the early thirteenth century was, then, as background and embodying muscle for these contentious conversations.

But in the precise context of inquisitio hereticae pravitatis beginning in the 1230s, we witness a different kind of contestation. Asserting that the Roman church was “good” (allied with God) and knowing deviations from it “evil” (allied with Satan), which took place through various inquisitorial media, was not a hermetically sealed process of claiming heretics to be wicked in a flat typology. It is indubitable that Dominicans supportive of heresy inquisitions iterated traditional biblical imagery, spoke of “common beliefs” and of foxes with different faces bound by the tail, and could reach back into the past for identification and categorization. (Bernard Gui still spoke of “new Manichees” in 1323.) But the inquisitorial encounter rendered this more complex than such language might immediately suggest. Those identifications were often untidily public and often responsive; the division was not so neat as between simple sinners and elaborate fantasy. Moreover, there was an ironic fragility to this discourse of traditional heretical sin and wickedness. First, greater sensitivity, diversity, and change in reading “heresy” is perhaps more patent among inquisitors than a transmuting discourse would imply, and was so because of the experience of inquisition. But if that experience confronted inquisitors with the failure of “heretical essentialism” as they encountered complexities in practice, this difference could be retrofitted into a condemnation just like essentialized flatness. Second, the biblical texts constructing heretical typology were polysemous messages about heresy in theology and history, potentially unstable both in interpretation and in modern analogue. Third, related and most important, antiheretical discourse could slip its leash, as “overarching rhetorical patterns” had ambiguous targets, and could even be turned against inquisitors.¹¹ As we see with Bona and Francesca, the pendant of quarrels over discerning “good Christians” was that lay contestation itself assumed and deployed antiheretical rhetoric against inquisition, charging that inquisitors and their brethren were the true heretics, antichrists, and “enemies of God.”¹²

What we see in the inquisitorial encounter is something more complex than inquisitors’ tossing up of a reified, impermeable antiheretical discourse that fell flat at the feet of disdainful laypeople. Nuancing this deployment were the experience of contestation, the experience of change in dissent, the expansion of inquisitorial attention to broad “sin,” and, crucially, lay acceptance of some fundamentals in that discourse, particularly after decades of its airing throughout the thirteenth century. Medieval Christian authors’ and inquisitors’ antiheretical discourse—however much it awkwardly matched dissent or difference to inherited notions of “heresy”—was ultimately bound to a deeper and broader ideology of sin, evil, justice, and punishment disseminated to laypeople in venues beyond inquisition. And particularly because discernment was the heart of inquisitio, and instruction its instrument, lay Christians could place inquisition itself within the discursive rhetoric long used in characterizing and impugning heresy, understanding inquisitors as the wicked and falsely pious about whom they were told. In practice, then, this was not the identical “heretical essentialism” one might perceive in twelfth-and early thirteenth-century treatises. The dynamic was more troubled than simple assertion and rejection mapped on an inquisitor/laity faultline; the operations and contestation lay at a lower level where diverse people struggled over the content, and true earthly representatives, of the Christian faith. That faith was simultaneously stable and unstable; in the matter of identifying “enemies of God,” it was often traditional in its currents, but uncertain in its identifications. We attend here not to an antiheretical discourse that did or did not resemble reality, but rather to one striking, and perhaps unexpected, way in which inquisition served as a contentious crafting of Christian belief.

The Wolves and the Sheep

Texts

Working inquisitors began to produce antiheretical treatises immediately after the first commissions of Dominicans in the 1230s. These were the heirs of those late antique antiheretical polemics and, more immediately, of the disputation literature of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Like their predecessors, the inquisitorial texts ostensibly arose from and were intended to serve the actual confrontation between cleric and accused heretic. The influence of this interaction was clear in the treatises (through structure as well as language like dicendum est), and their authors were explicit that they intended their brethren to use them as handy guides. And like the earlier antiheretical treatises, they claimed dependably to inform their readers on heretical beliefs and practices. Yet in the special context of inquisitio hereticae pravitatis, this literature performed other functions. Most simply, unlike the pre-Albigensian Crusade and pre-inquisition disputation literature, we are in a very different context of compulsion. By the mid-thirteenth century, the rhetoric of “disputation” was more farcical, although lay contestation to inquisition was a strong undercurrent. Inquisitorial authors continued to locate dissidents from the Roman church within a “tradition” of contumacious error and apostasy, while valorizing inquisition as a current manifestation of the divine discipline with which God had long met such disobedience. We see then a balance of structural discourse and response, a balance of past and present. And in these treatises, we can both “witness” debate that occurred on the ground, and read inquisitors’ more variegated images of heresy. But apprehending (or, acknowledging) that diversity did not mean a retreat from condemnation; to inquisitors, disunity could connote diabolism, and their sensitivity could still be disparagement.

A quick example of the disparaging language with which these treatises were dappled comes from Peter of Verona (d.1252), whom we will meet in the following chapter as the canonized “Peter Martyr.” Born in Verona in 1203 reportedly into a family of heretics, Peter was received into the Order of Preachers in Bologna in 1221, possibly under Dominic himself. His activities as a Dominican illustrate the diversity of works that members of the order could undertake in “seeking those who go astray.” He preached widely in Italy, participated in public disputations against heretics, and is the likely author of a Summa contra hereticos circa 1235. Peter possibly played a role in ensuring the establishment and enforcement of antiheretical statutes in Milan, although this has been disputed.¹³ In addition to this work against heresy, Peter fulfilled other duties in the order, including the priorates of the Dominican houses at Asti and Piacenza in 1248 and 1249 respectively, and pastoral care among religious women in Milan, founding the convent of St. Peter of the Vine in 1247.¹⁴ Like that of his colleague Raynier Sacconi below, Peter’s background in a Cathar community in Verona was offered as unusual expertise, the elucidation of what was otherwise secreted, obfuscated, and cloaked with false piety. He claimed both to prove the antique charge of secrecy and dissimulation and to destroy it through his treatise. Peter’s treatise included blunt castigations of heresies as “error,” “dementia,” “pestilence,” “madness” and “perfidy.” Heretics “babble,” “err mortally,” “blaspheme,” “rave,” and were “made fools of.” But Peter did not describe deviation from the Roman faith as simply insanity and illogic; it was a form of diabolism. Heretics “speak demonically,” an—in a likely allusion to 1 Timothy 1:19–20—“in this article, as also in others, they are led by diverse and diabolical fantasies” to suffer their various theological “shipwrecks.”¹⁵

The diversity of those fantasies was paralleled (or created) by the diversity of heresies. In Peter’s summa, the practical knowledge gained about differences transmuted into attack, as this diversity contrasted negatively to unity. “Dissent” here meant not just from the Roman church’s creeds and practices, but additionally from each other. Peter’s treati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I In the Garden
• Part II Inquisition as Divine Discipline
• Conclusion
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments