inquisitors in Italy and Germany. While the same Emperor was trying
conclusions with Innocent IV, the Papal Inquisition became a permanent
branch of the ecclesiastical executive; and the Mendicant Orders, who
supplied the inquisitors, simultaneously took upon themselves the harder
task of converting the universities from the cult of Aristotle to a
belief in the Christian scholasticism formulated by Albertus Magnus and
Aquinas. The weapons of this interminable and many-sided controversy
were as rude as the age which forged them: on the one side, coarse
invective and irreverent paradox; on the other, scandalous imputations,
spiritual censures, the sword, the prison, and the stake. For the
medieval attitude towards heterodoxy was unflinching and uncompromising.
To remain sceptical when the Church had defined was as the sin of
witchcraft or idolatry. The existence of the rebel was an insult to the
Most High, a menace to the salvation of the simple; he was a diseased
limb of the body politic, calling for sharp surgery. And yet these
nonconformists were anything but unbelievers. The free-thinkers of the
schools, apart from a few obscure eccentrics, only desired to find a
rational basis for the common creed or to eliminate from it certain
articles which, on moral grounds and grounds of history, they
stigmatised as mere interpolations. The offence of Berengar was that he
attacked a dogma which had been an open question within the last two
hundred years; of Abelard, that he offered his own theories on some
points in regard to which the orthodox tradition was mute or
inconsistent. As for the sectaries, their offence usually consisted in
exaggerating one or other of three doctrines which the Church
acknowledged in a more moderate shape. Either, like the Poor Men of
Lyons, they desired that the Church should return to primitive
simplicity; or, like the Albigeois, they harped upon the Pauline
antithesis between the spirit and the flesh, pushed to extremes the
monastic contempt for earthly ties, and exalted the Christian Devil to