April 18, 2023 • 26 mins
In the 12th century, there was an intellectual revolution that included a pursuit of questions, an evangelical awakening, and the church decrying the dangers of heresy. Chris explains this pivotal time of the Renaissance and what led to the Spanish Inquisition.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
(00:31):
You're listening to half hour history Secrets of the Medieval World.
I'm your host and resident history nerd Mike Coscarelli. Remember
when we talked about the Renaissance a few episodes back.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Well, there's more to the story, including a spiritual awakening,
the birth of the scholastic method, and a serious challenge
to the Church's power.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
It's a lot, but Chris, as you covered.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
The twelfth century from eleven hundred to about twelve hundred
used to be the baby brother in medieval history courses.
Everyone used to call the next century, the thirteenth century,
the greatest of centuries. But the research that's really been
cutting edge in the last twenty or thirty years in
the study of medieval history has been focusing increasingly on
(01:27):
the twelfth century the eleven hundreds, and it's a very
exciting period of time, I think, particularly because having now
spent two topics on really high end top history, can
we even call it top down history? Because we never
really descended from the top, did we really looking at
(01:47):
the twelfth century Renaissance as something that was operative all
throughout medieval society, church and state, using that artificial distinction
bottom up, top down, left to right, and right to left.
And so it's very important that even though we're talking
about an in intellectual revolution, and yes, we'll be talking
about universities in a little while, and universities are for
(02:11):
an elite at that time. Nevertheless, what fueled this notion
of intellectual recovery is a spiritual awakening as well, and
I want to start with the spiritual awakening. So fundamentally,
when we're talking about the twelfth century Renaissance, we're talking
about something called scholastic humanism. Yew, let me note that
(02:33):
I'm not talking about scolasticism. How many angels danced on
the head of a pin? Guess what? Nobody ever asked
that question. We can't find it anywhere, and everybody's been
looking for it for hundreds of years. No Way, what
we're doing is scholastic humanism. At the end of the
(02:54):
Middle Ages, yes, people got very involved in this expression
the forest and the trees. People got very involved in
the roots and the leaves. But in this period of time,
in the eleven hundreds, people are kind of woken up
that those dimmer centuries have kind of passed us. There's
been an ebb, and now there's a flow. And what
people are really getting excited about is the relationship between
(03:18):
divinity and humanity. But not in a way that puts
divinity up there untouchable and humanity down here bad stained
tainted by sin.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
No way.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Scholastic humanism is about the recognition that within human beings
there is the divine. And in fact, this takes us
all the way back to Greek philosophy with Socrates, Know Thyself,
with all sorts of spiritual masters throughout world history, throughout
world religions. By the way, if you want to find God,
(03:54):
be quiet and look within. You can find this from
the Buddha to meister Eckart. And that's what's going on.
And the fuel for this is the love and acceptance
and reverence of the broken body of Jesus. Now there's
a theological point to be made that way. Back in
the two and the three hundreds, there was a heresy
(04:17):
called arianism, and arianism at the very end of the
two hundreds of the early three hundreds believed that Jesus
was not quite divine Jesus was like Superman. He was
the most human of all humans, and he approached divinity,
but he wasn't quite divine.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
And so the Church to fight back.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
I canographically remember, in an illiterate society, what I see
is what I know had the very foreboding Jesus. The
Jesus seated almost stern, doing what God does, separating the
wheat from the chaff and the sheep from the goats.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
But now that.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Arianism has died a slow death but is now gone,
we can become more familiar with this Jesus who's like
me in the Gospels. I think most people when they
go to church or a synagogue or a mosque, they
can't identify with these great patriarchs doing all sorts of fabulous,
incredible things. They can identify with Jesus when he cries,
(05:16):
when Mary, when she's probably sitting there saying, how am
I going to explain that I'm pregnant to my fiance
and to my parents, they can identify with the human
aspects there. And we call this an evangelical awakening. Now,
don't put evangelical in the box that it's become in
(05:37):
the United States with you know, televangelists and stuff like that.
That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the Evangelus,
the Gospel, the real close encounter with the Jesus of
the gospels, who swept, who cried, who worked, who got
blisters on his hands, who walked all over the place,
who got angry, who got frustrated with his friends. People
(05:59):
just love this, and what they want to do is
they want to identify with this kind of creator of God.
And the phrases that we see now are day use fabar,
God the maker, God, the creator of the universe. If
God created the universe, then the universe is something good.
And therefore, if God created human beings, human beings create things,
(06:21):
remember guilds, remember the Gothic landscape. Then when human beings
create things, they're good. And the phrase we see is
homo fabear, and homo doesn't mean male, it means human
kind or homo artifacts human beings as artisans. So you
can see the attraction of the suffering Jesus and the
human marry. And so people want to live what's called
(06:44):
a vita apostolica and apostolic life. They want to get
up off their knees and they want to get into
the world, and they want to do what Jesus did.
That's very different than the contemptous mundi of the monks.
Not that the monks, you know, didn't give a damn
about the world, absolutely not. They were trying to make
the world better by making themselves better, one person at
a time through this great humility. But they did do
(07:05):
that in an atmosphere that was divorced from the world,
which made some sense because the world in the five, six,
seven hundreds is a dangerous place. And so this apostolic
life really becomes under into fruition with this person called
Francis of Assisi, who's known as an altair Christus, another
Christ who at one point in his life received what's
(07:25):
called the stigmata, the marks of Jesus from the crucifixion
on his feet, on his hands, and in his side
with flowing blood. And so Francis really becomes this kind
of thing. Now, Francis never said the phrase that is
attributed to him. Well, maybe he said it. We can't
find it. Preach the gospel, use words if you must.
But that's really what the Vita Apostolica and this humanism
(07:48):
and this evangelical awakening are all about so that the
simple butcher, baker and candlestick maker, the illiterate mother can
be like Mary and Jesus.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
Now that's the fuel.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Now at the top of this is the universities where
elites take place.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
This is part of scholastic humanism.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
So people start asking these questions, and some people pursue answers,
baking bread and feeding the poor next door and taking
care of the little old lady down the block. And
other people begin to say, well, let's God gave me
a brain. Let me figure out as much as possible
as I can about God. And so universities become the
place of these guilds of learning, and so scholastic theology
(08:29):
moves from the monastic scriptoria, which was a bit conservative
and not aggressive and accepting of authority and not asking questions,
to the urban setting. The cathedral schools and universities feed
the need for an educated elite to staff church and
secular courts. And they do this in a big way
(08:54):
by recovering Greek philosophy from the Muslims and the Jews
in Spain and Italy. The Muslims had never lost contact
with Greek language, and they had translated things into Arabic
and other things into Latin. And some key people remember
that Spain is this place where these religions are all
(09:17):
coming together, so we should not be surprised to find
it to be an intellectual center with some famous names. Avicenna, Averroes.
Averroes translated Aristotle from Greek into Arabic, and from Arabic
we got it into Latin.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
And that is.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Where Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century got his encounter
with Aristotle, which revolutionized Christian theology. From the twelfth century
from a Muslim or Moses Mimonodes also in the twelfth century,
the great Jewish theologian and commentator on scripture, who gave
(10:02):
these allegorical interpretations a very miliar passages from scripture and
applied them to current events, interpreted them for the audience
in front of him. And this is what's called mid rush,
which has a very long history as well. And so
what is scholastic humanism trying to do. It's trying to
marry marry faith and reason. And we live in a
(10:24):
world's post enlightenment where we try to separate faith and reason.
You know, why would anyone with a PhD. Or an
MD believe in God. You know what, are you a moron?
When did you check your brain at the door. That's
a caricature fidees at ratzio, Faith and reason. The characteristics
of this pursuit is to put reason at the service
of faith and faith at the service of reason.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
And so it's aggressive.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Yes, let's ask questions, let's ask questions, but the goal
is also that it's very systematic.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
Now you could see.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Where the more you talk about love, let's say, the
further you get from love. The more you talk about God,
the further you get from God, because you get into
all of these topics and subtopics and head and what
do you mean by that word? And what do you
mean by this word? And is there a Greek version
of the Latin word? What about a French version? And
you could see how that could evolve into scholasticism, but
(11:16):
that's several centuries away. The key person here is a
fellow named Abalard. Yes, that Abalard. Abalard who had an
affair with Eloise, who ended up castrated by Eloise's uncle
and they have a child. Before that happens, that Abalard.
But before we get you know, to the soap opera
version of it. Let's talk about Abalard, the scholastic theologian
(11:39):
who writes a book with the great title yes and
No in.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
Latin sic et none.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
He says, I read back into history, I read interpretations
of scripture, I read canon law, I look at cases,
and if I read these books, it's I say yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
But if I read those books, I say no.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
It's kind of like the last ten minutes of any
criminal show that you've seen on TV, where one lawyer
sums up before the jury and you agree with the person,
and then they have the commerce'll break and come back.
The other lawyer sums up and you say, well, yeah,
I'm really glad I'm not on that jury because I'd
have to decide.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Well, that's Abalarde's job, Abilige Jodge is to decide.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
And he says there's nothing wrong with asking questions by doubting.
He says, we come to inquiry. Through inquiry, we gain truth.
Let me repeat that, by doubting, we come to inquiry,
through inquiry, we gain truth. And so Abillard is fully
(12:40):
living this scholastic humanism, so much so that his talk
of love is so abstract that it must be incarnated
in his love with eloise, which was you know, is
often used as almost this porno routine, and it's not.
I mean, if you look at their letters, this is
this was an intellectual relationship.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
This was a relationship of love and respect. So what
do these universities do? They system ties the way we
look at questions.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Have you ever walked in a room and the room
is a mess and you say to yourself, I don't
know where to begin, I just don't know where to start. Well,
that's kind of what the scholastic method was trying to do.
Where do we start? Do we take the stuff from
the front of the room, from the back of the room,
from the top, from the bottom, stuff that we can
throw out, stuff that we can keep, this kind of thing.
And the scholastic method is to take a question and
(13:28):
pursue an answer.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
Through five steps. And I'm going to give you the
Latin in the English.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
The first step is the question, the question. I tell
my students all the time that I can serve them
best by teaching them to ask a question. When your
children come home, the worst thing you can say to
them is what did you learn today? It's far better
to say to them, did you ask a good question today,
because if you learn how to ask a question, the.
Speaker 4 (13:54):
Rest will follow.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
And in Latin that's outram So I'll say, whether angels
have bodies? Arguments against the Latin is vda quote none. Oh,
it seems not no, they don't have bodies. On the
other hand, arguments for said contrast. But on the other hand,
(14:16):
here are all of these authorities that say, yes, they
do have bodies. And I respond race bondeo what's called
a determination or a determinazio, that they don't have bodies.
And then you go back to the other argument, and
you say, well, if you say this, my answer to
odd premium to the first point is that if you
(14:38):
say odd sekan sekent gundum, my answer to the second point.
Speaker 4 (14:42):
Is that and on and on and on.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
So what we have in this period in the twelfth
century beginning and going into the thirteenth century is basically
a new shelf of books in the library, new genres
which reach back a little bit to Greek philosophy, but
they didn't quite have the genres in this way. One
is a questiono is the pursuit of a particular question.
The other is a suma, which is the collection of
(15:05):
all topics together, and the suma of the Sumas is
Thomas Aquinas's Suma Teologgier where he breaks everything down, all
the questions, all the headings, and all the subheadings, and
they're often put in like textbooks. Right, marriage questions, relationship questions,
ord nation questions, sacramental questions, civil questions, towards questions, litigation questions.
(15:29):
And then at quod le beet these are my favorites.
This would be the op ed piece of the Middle Ages.
A quad libetan means what have you? So? What's going
on in this particular topic? And if the people in
the Middle Ages could blog, they'd be writing quote libets,
little short essays on particular topics. Well, when you start
asking hard questions about what Christianity teaches, you come up
(15:56):
against examples that don't match the way things should be.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Well, that's the problem.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Remember the question about secular authority and moral authority and
political power, particularly within the church. And what happens are
some people who are labeled as outsiders, labeled as heretics,
who certainly do not see themselves as heretics, begin to
question the church. And this is not some separate topic.
(16:27):
It is part and parcel of the twelfth century Renaissance
of the evangelical Awakening. Because these people are going back
to the gospel, they find this poor carpenter from Nazareth.
They look around the church as it exists, and they say,
there's a disconnect here.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
After the break, a couple popes go on the defense
when the church's core beliefs are under attack. Plus Chris
explains the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Peter Waldo is the name sometimes Pierre Valdez in a
French translation. Is a man who was, you know, like
Francis of ASSISI, you know, like Augustin of Hippo, living
a nice life, making some money, you know, had a
family and things are great. And he has a conversion
experience where he says, is this all there is? There's
(17:29):
got to be more to this, and my life is
not matching this gospel life that I'm hearing when I
go to church. And he puts together a group of
people who follow him.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
Now it just kind of happens.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
He doesn't, you know, form an organizational statement and write
a business plan. And these groups start to spread all
over and primarily they're in Leol and Lombardy, Okay, So
they're in France and they're in northern Italy, and they
believe radically in the evangelical life, meaning the life as
(18:01):
Jesus and his disciples and the women are around him,
including Mary lived in the Gospels, a life of abject poverty,
of simplicity, of utter service. And when he measures that
against what he sees, it causes him to reject the
(18:21):
sacramental system. Why do I have to pay for sacraments?
Why is there so much pay involved in getting to heaven?
I see people doing all of these pious practices or
paying for the good that'll come from those pious practices.
I'm just going to go open a soup kitchen that
(18:42):
to me is real. Well you can see how this
would be seen as a challenge to the institution, But
those Waldensians tended to be kind of a blue collar,
low end bottom up at the bottom of the social scale.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
Group.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
There's another group that also critiques the church, but it
does it in a highly intellectual fashion, and these are
the Albigensians. Now, the Albigensians are so called because they
were centered around to town in France.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
Called I'll be Albi.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
But they harkened back to an earlier tradition of heresy
in the Church, known as the Cathars, or the Bogomiles sometimes.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Or the Duellists.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
They're very well educated, they in fact come out of
the university system, and they ask a very classic question.
We've all asked this, right, Why do bad things happen
to good people?
Speaker 4 (19:35):
Why is there evil in the world?
Speaker 3 (19:37):
If God is good and what God creates is good,
how can there be evil in the world. And the
answer that they come up with, an ancient answer, is
there must be two gods. There must be a God
who created the spiritual world and a God who created
the material world. And the God who created the material
world fought with the God who created the spiritual world,
echoes of Lucifer being thrown from heaven, and therefore matter
(20:01):
things stuff including bread and wine, including water for baptism
and oil for anointing, including my body, must be evil.
And so therefore the way toward purity is to reject
as much of materialism as you can possibly imagine. So
(20:22):
they were not just vegetarians. They were vegans, we would say,
because they were trying to avoid eating flesh. Even though
water and fruit or matter they do have to eat
to survive. It was a very large church. There were
tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. There are some
estimates that say all of southern France was more Albigensian
(20:44):
than it was Christian, and they had basically a parallel church.
Now it was not a parallel church structure in the
way that Catholicism was, because they want to reject these
Christian structures, these Christian symbols, things like chasubles and gloves
and rings and vessels and chalices, church buildings. They want
to reject all of that. Nevertheless, they did have organization
(21:05):
of three groups. I'll give you their Latin names and
their English equivalents, the Perfecti, the Credentes, and the Audi Torres.
The Perfecti the perfect ones, the elites, the ones who
as much as possible could live a life of radical purity,
not having sexual intercourse, not eating any meat, living as
(21:29):
simply as.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
Possible, serving as much as possible.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
The Credentes the believers who bought into it but married,
lived in the world, had careers. And the Audi Torres
what people call catechumens.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
You know, I'm interested in that.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
I'm going to listen, I'm going to be a hearer,
and I'm going to see whether or not this fits
me and whether or not I should join.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Now, what were the church reactions to this?
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Well, I mean, apart from the obvious, right, the church
is not going to countenance this kind of attack on
its core beliefs and on its structures. The church is
going to say, yes, I understand, you're going to go
back to the gospel, but the church lives in place
and time, and the church must be allowed to develop. Okay,
maybe we developed too much, maybe we went overboard, but
(22:20):
let's kind of clean the church up as it is.
What you want to do is get rid of the
church as it exists now, and that we cannot countenance.
So originally, whenever you have heresy, the deal was that
the local bishop is the one who would be in
charge of cleaning things up. Well, the local bishop is
(22:43):
one of the biggest targets, especially of the Albigensians and
the Waldensians, and so the local bishop probably is not
going to be the best person to fight back, particularly
if he is not as well.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Educated as they are.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
And so a couple of popes won by the name
of Innocent the Third in eleven ninety nine, you remember
Innocent and another Gregory named Gregory the ninth and twelve
thirty one. Really want to make clear to people how
dangerous heresy is. Heresy, they say in two church documents,
is a crime against the Church's body. Now remember that
(23:21):
the church's body in Christian theology is the mystical body
of Christ. They basically call it treason against the community.
And the bishops, they say, are doing a lousy job,
and so they remove some bishops, they put some other
tougher bishops in there. The bishops are still not doing
a good job. So what they do is they give
the tasks to the Dominicans. Remember I said, Francis of
a CC before the alta Christus who radically lived the
(23:45):
life of Christ. And then there was another friar. We
call these people friars, not monks, because the friars were out.
You know, where was Francis in the ghetto. Why was
Francis in the ghettos because that's where the poor people were.
And Dominic was also living a radical life, of an
apostolic life. But whereas Francis, you know, didn't worry about education.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
That was what Dominic was all about.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Dominic believe we can use our intellects to the tenth degree.
Not that Francis said we couldn't, but it wasn't his interest.
Dominic said, we can use our brains to the tenth
degree to fight these Albagensians where they are, because if
they're very well educated, then we're very well educated. And
the Dominicans are a very clerical, university based order. And
(24:28):
when the Dominicans come to town, these procedures are You're
given many chances to prove your orthodoxy, but there are
there's little in the procedures that we would call due
process in any modern sense. Now, okay, let's talk about
the Spanish Inquisition for a moment, because, let's face it,
we have to do what's what people think about. And
some of you may remember a movie by mel Brooks
(24:48):
where he has the kind of an inquisition dance. The
Spanish Inquisition actually comes late in our period, even though
what Innocent and Gregory set up in eleven ninety nine
and twelve thirty one are inquisitorial procedures. Basically the goal
of those procedures is to get people to say, Hey,
I'm in a stake.
Speaker 4 (25:05):
And I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Whereas the Spanish inquisition is much more aggressive. It's mostly
a secular activity, and some apologists try to say, no,
it wasn't a church activity.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
Of course, it was a church activity.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
It was secular structures, but the people who staffed it
were church people. And the context is back to Ferdinand
and Isabella fourteen seventies, eighties nineties, wrapping up the reconquest,
and there was a real concern that Jews in Spain
called Conversos or Moranos and Muslims referred to as Mariscos
(25:35):
were suspected of false conversions. So they had been they
converted so that they wouldn't be killed. But were they
really converted was the question? Or mystics, the Alambrados, the
illuminated ones, and this would be John of the Cross,
Teresa Avula, Ignatius of Loyola, and others. And here there
was a much greater use of torture and the death penalty,
especially under the evil character of history, the Dominican Thomasti Torquemada.
(26:01):
This all leads to that very place, into that kind
of repressive dark Gauge's myth. But we must remember that
all of this is actually part of this great twelfth
century Renaissance called the Spiritual Awakening.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Thanks for listening to another episode of Half Hour History
Secrets of the Medieval World. In our next episode, get
Ready for Knights and Shining Armor. Half Hour History Secrets
of the Medieval World from One Day University is a
production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're
(26:39):
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Speaker 4 (26:57):
School of Humans
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
(00:31):
You're listening to half hour history Secrets of the Medieval World.
I'm your host and resident history nerd Mike Coscarelli. Remember
when we talked about the Renaissance a few episodes back.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Well, there's more to the story, including a spiritual awakening,
the birth of the scholastic method, and a serious challenge
to the Church's power.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
It's a lot, but Chris, as you covered.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
The twelfth century from eleven hundred to about twelve hundred
used to be the baby brother in medieval history courses.
Everyone used to call the next century, the thirteenth century,
the greatest of centuries. But the research that's really been
cutting edge in the last twenty or thirty years in
the study of medieval history has been focusing increasingly on
(01:27):
the twelfth century the eleven hundreds, and it's a very
exciting period of time, I think, particularly because having now
spent two topics on really high end top history, can
we even call it top down history? Because we never
really descended from the top, did we really looking at
(01:47):
the twelfth century Renaissance as something that was operative all
throughout medieval society, church and state, using that artificial distinction
bottom up, top down, left to right, and right to left.
And so it's very important that even though we're talking
about an in intellectual revolution, and yes, we'll be talking
about universities in a little while, and universities are for
(02:11):
an elite at that time. Nevertheless, what fueled this notion
of intellectual recovery is a spiritual awakening as well, and
I want to start with the spiritual awakening. So fundamentally,
when we're talking about the twelfth century Renaissance, we're talking
about something called scholastic humanism. Yew, let me note that
(02:33):
I'm not talking about scolasticism. How many angels danced on
the head of a pin? Guess what? Nobody ever asked
that question. We can't find it anywhere, and everybody's been
looking for it for hundreds of years. No Way, what
we're doing is scholastic humanism. At the end of the
(02:54):
Middle Ages, yes, people got very involved in this expression
the forest and the trees. People got very involved in
the roots and the leaves. But in this period of time,
in the eleven hundreds, people are kind of woken up
that those dimmer centuries have kind of passed us. There's
been an ebb, and now there's a flow. And what
people are really getting excited about is the relationship between
(03:18):
divinity and humanity. But not in a way that puts
divinity up there untouchable and humanity down here bad stained
tainted by sin.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
No way.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Scholastic humanism is about the recognition that within human beings
there is the divine. And in fact, this takes us
all the way back to Greek philosophy with Socrates, Know Thyself,
with all sorts of spiritual masters throughout world history, throughout
world religions. By the way, if you want to find God,
(03:54):
be quiet and look within. You can find this from
the Buddha to meister Eckart. And that's what's going on.
And the fuel for this is the love and acceptance
and reverence of the broken body of Jesus. Now there's
a theological point to be made that way. Back in
the two and the three hundreds, there was a heresy
(04:17):
called arianism, and arianism at the very end of the
two hundreds of the early three hundreds believed that Jesus
was not quite divine Jesus was like Superman. He was
the most human of all humans, and he approached divinity,
but he wasn't quite divine.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
And so the Church to fight back.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
I canographically remember, in an illiterate society, what I see
is what I know had the very foreboding Jesus. The
Jesus seated almost stern, doing what God does, separating the
wheat from the chaff and the sheep from the goats.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
But now that.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Arianism has died a slow death but is now gone,
we can become more familiar with this Jesus who's like
me in the Gospels. I think most people when they
go to church or a synagogue or a mosque, they
can't identify with these great patriarchs doing all sorts of fabulous,
incredible things. They can identify with Jesus when he cries,
(05:16):
when Mary, when she's probably sitting there saying, how am
I going to explain that I'm pregnant to my fiance
and to my parents, they can identify with the human
aspects there. And we call this an evangelical awakening. Now,
don't put evangelical in the box that it's become in
(05:37):
the United States with you know, televangelists and stuff like that.
That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the Evangelus,
the Gospel, the real close encounter with the Jesus of
the gospels, who swept, who cried, who worked, who got
blisters on his hands, who walked all over the place,
who got angry, who got frustrated with his friends. People
(05:59):
just love this, and what they want to do is
they want to identify with this kind of creator of God.
And the phrases that we see now are day use fabar,
God the maker, God, the creator of the universe. If
God created the universe, then the universe is something good.
And therefore, if God created human beings, human beings create things,
(06:21):
remember guilds, remember the Gothic landscape. Then when human beings
create things, they're good. And the phrase we see is
homo fabear, and homo doesn't mean male, it means human
kind or homo artifacts human beings as artisans. So you
can see the attraction of the suffering Jesus and the
human marry. And so people want to live what's called
(06:44):
a vita apostolica and apostolic life. They want to get
up off their knees and they want to get into
the world, and they want to do what Jesus did.
That's very different than the contemptous mundi of the monks.
Not that the monks, you know, didn't give a damn
about the world, absolutely not. They were trying to make
the world better by making themselves better, one person at
a time through this great humility. But they did do
(07:05):
that in an atmosphere that was divorced from the world,
which made some sense because the world in the five, six,
seven hundreds is a dangerous place. And so this apostolic
life really becomes under into fruition with this person called
Francis of Assisi, who's known as an altair Christus, another
Christ who at one point in his life received what's
(07:25):
called the stigmata, the marks of Jesus from the crucifixion
on his feet, on his hands, and in his side
with flowing blood. And so Francis really becomes this kind
of thing. Now, Francis never said the phrase that is
attributed to him. Well, maybe he said it. We can't
find it. Preach the gospel, use words if you must.
But that's really what the Vita Apostolica and this humanism
(07:48):
and this evangelical awakening are all about so that the
simple butcher, baker and candlestick maker, the illiterate mother can
be like Mary and Jesus.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
Now that's the fuel.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Now at the top of this is the universities where
elites take place.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
This is part of scholastic humanism.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
So people start asking these questions, and some people pursue answers,
baking bread and feeding the poor next door and taking
care of the little old lady down the block. And
other people begin to say, well, let's God gave me
a brain. Let me figure out as much as possible
as I can about God. And so universities become the
place of these guilds of learning, and so scholastic theology
(08:29):
moves from the monastic scriptoria, which was a bit conservative
and not aggressive and accepting of authority and not asking questions,
to the urban setting. The cathedral schools and universities feed
the need for an educated elite to staff church and
secular courts. And they do this in a big way
(08:54):
by recovering Greek philosophy from the Muslims and the Jews
in Spain and Italy. The Muslims had never lost contact
with Greek language, and they had translated things into Arabic
and other things into Latin. And some key people remember
that Spain is this place where these religions are all
(09:17):
coming together, so we should not be surprised to find
it to be an intellectual center with some famous names. Avicenna, Averroes.
Averroes translated Aristotle from Greek into Arabic, and from Arabic
we got it into Latin.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
And that is.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Where Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century got his encounter
with Aristotle, which revolutionized Christian theology. From the twelfth century
from a Muslim or Moses Mimonodes also in the twelfth century,
the great Jewish theologian and commentator on scripture, who gave
(10:02):
these allegorical interpretations a very miliar passages from scripture and
applied them to current events, interpreted them for the audience
in front of him. And this is what's called mid rush,
which has a very long history as well. And so
what is scholastic humanism trying to do. It's trying to
marry marry faith and reason. And we live in a
(10:24):
world's post enlightenment where we try to separate faith and reason.
You know, why would anyone with a PhD. Or an
MD believe in God. You know what, are you a moron?
When did you check your brain at the door. That's
a caricature fidees at ratzio, Faith and reason. The characteristics
of this pursuit is to put reason at the service
of faith and faith at the service of reason.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
And so it's aggressive.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Yes, let's ask questions, let's ask questions, but the goal
is also that it's very systematic.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
Now you could see.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Where the more you talk about love, let's say, the
further you get from love. The more you talk about God,
the further you get from God, because you get into
all of these topics and subtopics and head and what
do you mean by that word? And what do you
mean by this word? And is there a Greek version
of the Latin word? What about a French version? And
you could see how that could evolve into scholasticism, but
(11:16):
that's several centuries away. The key person here is a
fellow named Abalard. Yes, that Abalard. Abalard who had an
affair with Eloise, who ended up castrated by Eloise's uncle
and they have a child. Before that happens, that Abalard.
But before we get you know, to the soap opera
version of it. Let's talk about Abalard, the scholastic theologian
(11:39):
who writes a book with the great title yes and
No in.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
Latin sic et none.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
He says, I read back into history, I read interpretations
of scripture, I read canon law, I look at cases,
and if I read these books, it's I say yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
But if I read those books, I say no.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
It's kind of like the last ten minutes of any
criminal show that you've seen on TV, where one lawyer
sums up before the jury and you agree with the person,
and then they have the commerce'll break and come back.
The other lawyer sums up and you say, well, yeah,
I'm really glad I'm not on that jury because I'd
have to decide.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Well, that's Abalarde's job, Abilige Jodge is to decide.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
And he says there's nothing wrong with asking questions by doubting.
He says, we come to inquiry. Through inquiry, we gain truth.
Let me repeat that, by doubting, we come to inquiry,
through inquiry, we gain truth. And so Abillard is fully
(12:40):
living this scholastic humanism, so much so that his talk
of love is so abstract that it must be incarnated
in his love with eloise, which was you know, is
often used as almost this porno routine, and it's not.
I mean, if you look at their letters, this is
this was an intellectual relationship.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
This was a relationship of love and respect. So what
do these universities do? They system ties the way we
look at questions.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Have you ever walked in a room and the room
is a mess and you say to yourself, I don't
know where to begin, I just don't know where to start. Well,
that's kind of what the scholastic method was trying to do.
Where do we start? Do we take the stuff from
the front of the room, from the back of the room,
from the top, from the bottom, stuff that we can
throw out, stuff that we can keep, this kind of thing.
And the scholastic method is to take a question and
(13:28):
pursue an answer.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
Through five steps. And I'm going to give you the
Latin in the English.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
The first step is the question, the question. I tell
my students all the time that I can serve them
best by teaching them to ask a question. When your
children come home, the worst thing you can say to
them is what did you learn today? It's far better
to say to them, did you ask a good question today,
because if you learn how to ask a question, the.
Speaker 4 (13:54):
Rest will follow.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
And in Latin that's outram So I'll say, whether angels
have bodies? Arguments against the Latin is vda quote none. Oh,
it seems not no, they don't have bodies. On the
other hand, arguments for said contrast. But on the other hand,
(14:16):
here are all of these authorities that say, yes, they
do have bodies. And I respond race bondeo what's called
a determination or a determinazio, that they don't have bodies.
And then you go back to the other argument, and
you say, well, if you say this, my answer to
odd premium to the first point is that if you
(14:38):
say odd sekan sekent gundum, my answer to the second point.
Speaker 4 (14:42):
Is that and on and on and on.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
So what we have in this period in the twelfth
century beginning and going into the thirteenth century is basically
a new shelf of books in the library, new genres
which reach back a little bit to Greek philosophy, but
they didn't quite have the genres in this way. One
is a questiono is the pursuit of a particular question.
The other is a suma, which is the collection of
(15:05):
all topics together, and the suma of the Sumas is
Thomas Aquinas's Suma Teologgier where he breaks everything down, all
the questions, all the headings, and all the subheadings, and
they're often put in like textbooks. Right, marriage questions, relationship questions,
ord nation questions, sacramental questions, civil questions, towards questions, litigation questions.
(15:29):
And then at quod le beet these are my favorites.
This would be the op ed piece of the Middle Ages.
A quad libetan means what have you? So? What's going
on in this particular topic? And if the people in
the Middle Ages could blog, they'd be writing quote libets,
little short essays on particular topics. Well, when you start
asking hard questions about what Christianity teaches, you come up
(15:56):
against examples that don't match the way things should be.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Well, that's the problem.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Remember the question about secular authority and moral authority and
political power, particularly within the church. And what happens are
some people who are labeled as outsiders, labeled as heretics,
who certainly do not see themselves as heretics, begin to
question the church. And this is not some separate topic.
(16:27):
It is part and parcel of the twelfth century Renaissance
of the evangelical Awakening. Because these people are going back
to the gospel, they find this poor carpenter from Nazareth.
They look around the church as it exists, and they say,
there's a disconnect here.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
After the break, a couple popes go on the defense
when the church's core beliefs are under attack. Plus Chris
explains the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Peter Waldo is the name sometimes Pierre Valdez in a
French translation. Is a man who was, you know, like
Francis of ASSISI, you know, like Augustin of Hippo, living
a nice life, making some money, you know, had a
family and things are great. And he has a conversion
experience where he says, is this all there is? There's
(17:29):
got to be more to this, and my life is
not matching this gospel life that I'm hearing when I
go to church. And he puts together a group of
people who follow him.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
Now it just kind of happens.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
He doesn't, you know, form an organizational statement and write
a business plan. And these groups start to spread all
over and primarily they're in Leol and Lombardy, Okay, So
they're in France and they're in northern Italy, and they
believe radically in the evangelical life, meaning the life as
(18:01):
Jesus and his disciples and the women are around him,
including Mary lived in the Gospels, a life of abject poverty,
of simplicity, of utter service. And when he measures that
against what he sees, it causes him to reject the
(18:21):
sacramental system. Why do I have to pay for sacraments?
Why is there so much pay involved in getting to heaven?
I see people doing all of these pious practices or
paying for the good that'll come from those pious practices.
I'm just going to go open a soup kitchen that
(18:42):
to me is real. Well you can see how this
would be seen as a challenge to the institution, But
those Waldensians tended to be kind of a blue collar,
low end bottom up at the bottom of the social scale.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
Group.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
There's another group that also critiques the church, but it
does it in a highly intellectual fashion, and these are
the Albigensians. Now, the Albigensians are so called because they
were centered around to town in France.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
Called I'll be Albi.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
But they harkened back to an earlier tradition of heresy
in the Church, known as the Cathars, or the Bogomiles sometimes.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Or the Duellists.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
They're very well educated, they in fact come out of
the university system, and they ask a very classic question.
We've all asked this, right, Why do bad things happen
to good people?
Speaker 4 (19:35):
Why is there evil in the world?
Speaker 3 (19:37):
If God is good and what God creates is good,
how can there be evil in the world. And the
answer that they come up with, an ancient answer, is
there must be two gods. There must be a God
who created the spiritual world and a God who created
the material world. And the God who created the material
world fought with the God who created the spiritual world,
echoes of Lucifer being thrown from heaven, and therefore matter
(20:01):
things stuff including bread and wine, including water for baptism
and oil for anointing, including my body, must be evil.
And so therefore the way toward purity is to reject
as much of materialism as you can possibly imagine. So
(20:22):
they were not just vegetarians. They were vegans, we would say,
because they were trying to avoid eating flesh. Even though
water and fruit or matter they do have to eat
to survive. It was a very large church. There were
tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. There are some
estimates that say all of southern France was more Albigensian
(20:44):
than it was Christian, and they had basically a parallel church.
Now it was not a parallel church structure in the
way that Catholicism was, because they want to reject these
Christian structures, these Christian symbols, things like chasubles and gloves
and rings and vessels and chalices, church buildings. They want
to reject all of that. Nevertheless, they did have organization
(21:05):
of three groups. I'll give you their Latin names and
their English equivalents, the Perfecti, the Credentes, and the Audi Torres.
The Perfecti the perfect ones, the elites, the ones who
as much as possible could live a life of radical purity,
not having sexual intercourse, not eating any meat, living as
(21:29):
simply as.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
Possible, serving as much as possible.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
The Credentes the believers who bought into it but married,
lived in the world, had careers. And the Audi Torres
what people call catechumens.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
You know, I'm interested in that.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
I'm going to listen, I'm going to be a hearer,
and I'm going to see whether or not this fits
me and whether or not I should join.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Now, what were the church reactions to this?
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Well, I mean, apart from the obvious, right, the church
is not going to countenance this kind of attack on
its core beliefs and on its structures. The church is
going to say, yes, I understand, you're going to go
back to the gospel, but the church lives in place
and time, and the church must be allowed to develop. Okay,
maybe we developed too much, maybe we went overboard, but
(22:20):
let's kind of clean the church up as it is.
What you want to do is get rid of the
church as it exists now, and that we cannot countenance.
So originally, whenever you have heresy, the deal was that
the local bishop is the one who would be in
charge of cleaning things up. Well, the local bishop is
(22:43):
one of the biggest targets, especially of the Albigensians and
the Waldensians, and so the local bishop probably is not
going to be the best person to fight back, particularly
if he is not as well.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Educated as they are.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
And so a couple of popes won by the name
of Innocent the Third in eleven ninety nine, you remember
Innocent and another Gregory named Gregory the ninth and twelve
thirty one. Really want to make clear to people how
dangerous heresy is. Heresy, they say in two church documents,
is a crime against the Church's body. Now remember that
(23:21):
the church's body in Christian theology is the mystical body
of Christ. They basically call it treason against the community.
And the bishops, they say, are doing a lousy job,
and so they remove some bishops, they put some other
tougher bishops in there. The bishops are still not doing
a good job. So what they do is they give
the tasks to the Dominicans. Remember I said, Francis of
a CC before the alta Christus who radically lived the
(23:45):
life of Christ. And then there was another friar. We
call these people friars, not monks, because the friars were out.
You know, where was Francis in the ghetto. Why was
Francis in the ghettos because that's where the poor people were.
And Dominic was also living a radical life, of an
apostolic life. But whereas Francis, you know, didn't worry about education.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
That was what Dominic was all about.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Dominic believe we can use our intellects to the tenth degree.
Not that Francis said we couldn't, but it wasn't his interest.
Dominic said, we can use our brains to the tenth
degree to fight these Albagensians where they are, because if
they're very well educated, then we're very well educated. And
the Dominicans are a very clerical, university based order. And
(24:28):
when the Dominicans come to town, these procedures are You're
given many chances to prove your orthodoxy, but there are
there's little in the procedures that we would call due
process in any modern sense. Now, okay, let's talk about
the Spanish Inquisition for a moment, because, let's face it,
we have to do what's what people think about. And
some of you may remember a movie by mel Brooks
(24:48):
where he has the kind of an inquisition dance. The
Spanish Inquisition actually comes late in our period, even though
what Innocent and Gregory set up in eleven ninety nine
and twelve thirty one are inquisitorial procedures. Basically the goal
of those procedures is to get people to say, Hey,
I'm in a stake.
Speaker 4 (25:05):
And I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Whereas the Spanish inquisition is much more aggressive. It's mostly
a secular activity, and some apologists try to say, no,
it wasn't a church activity.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
Of course, it was a church activity.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
It was secular structures, but the people who staffed it
were church people. And the context is back to Ferdinand
and Isabella fourteen seventies, eighties nineties, wrapping up the reconquest,
and there was a real concern that Jews in Spain
called Conversos or Moranos and Muslims referred to as Mariscos
(25:35):
were suspected of false conversions. So they had been they
converted so that they wouldn't be killed. But were they
really converted was the question? Or mystics, the Alambrados, the
illuminated ones, and this would be John of the Cross,
Teresa Avula, Ignatius of Loyola, and others. And here there
was a much greater use of torture and the death penalty,
especially under the evil character of history, the Dominican Thomasti Torquemada.
(26:01):
This all leads to that very place, into that kind
of repressive dark Gauge's myth. But we must remember that
all of this is actually part of this great twelfth
century Renaissance called the Spiritual Awakening.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Thanks for listening to another episode of Half Hour History
Secrets of the Medieval World. In our next episode, get
Ready for Knights and Shining Armor. Half Hour History Secrets
of the Medieval World from One Day University is a
production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're
(26:39):
enjoying the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app,
and check out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history,
pop culture, true crime, and more.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
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