Medieval Heresy & the Inquisition

For none go to Paradise but I’ll tell you who. Your old priests and your old cripples, and the halt and maimed, who are down on their knees day and night, before altars and in old crypts; these also that wear mangy old cloaks, or go in rags and tatters, shivering and shoeless and showing their sores, and who die of hunger and want and misery. Such are they who go to Paradise; and what have I to do with them? Hell is the place for me. For to Hell go the fine churchmen, and the fine knights, killed in the tourney or in some grand war, the brave soldiers and the gallant gentlemen. With them will I go. There go also the fair gracious ladies who have lovers two or three beside their lord. There go the gold and silver, the sables and the ermines. There go the harpers and the minstrels and the kings of the earth. With them will I go, so I have Nicolette my most sweet friend with me.original: "For none go to Paradise but I’ll tell you who..." (This is a translation of a medieval French narrative poem).

Comparable to the fearless skepticism of this romance is the outspoken unorthodoxy produced by the intellectual ferment of the twelfth century. That epoch, which saw the new movement of monastic reform that gave birth to the order of Grammont, the Carthusians, and the Cistercians, is most notable in the history of the universities—Paris, Oxford, Bologna. From one to another, from the feet of one learned doctor to another, flocked wandering scholars thirsty for pure knowledge. Even if this knowledge had a theological bias and a religious garb, it nevertheless inevitably tended to produce a spirit of rationalism, to substitute freedom for discipline and individual consciousness for authority. The philosophy of the day—Scholastic Philosophy—sprang from the concentration of theologians trained in logic on the question of the relationship between the individual unit and the universal, the eidosGreek: "Form" or "Idea".: for if the Middle Ages knew little of Plato, they were conversant with his doctrine of ideas. The scholastic philosophers are remarkable for their great erudition within the limitations of contemporary knowledge, but still more for the extreme acuteness and subtlety that came from their dialectical training.