i. 20) “delivered unto Satan” Hymenaeus and Alexander,
“that they might learn not to blaspheme.” The penalty of
death by stoning inflicted by the book of Deuteronomy upon
those who deserted the true faith (Deut. xiii. 6-9, xvii. 1-6) is
thus reduced to a purely spiritual excommunication. During
the first three centuries of the Church there is no trace of any
persecution, and the earlier Fathers, especially Origen and
Lactantius, reject the idea of it. Constantine, by the edict
of Milan (313), inaugurated an era of official tolerance, but from
the time of Valentinian I. and Theodosius I. onwards, laws against
heretics began to appear, and increased with astonishing regularity
and rapidity. We can count sixty-eight distributed over
fifty-two years; heretics are subjected to exile or confiscation,
disqualified from inheriting property, and even, in the case
of a few groups of Manichaeans and Donatists, condemned to
death; but it should be noticed that these penalties apply only
to the outward manifestations of heresy, and not, as in the middle
Opinions of the Fathers.
ages, to crimes of conscience. Within the Church,
St Optatus alone (De schismate Donatistarum, lib. iii.
cap. iii.) approved of this violent repression of the
Donatist heresy; St Augustine only admitted a
temperata severitas, such as scourging, fines or exile, and at the
end of the 4th century the condemnation of the Spanish heretic
Priscillian, who was put to death in 385 by order of the emperor
Maximus, gave rise to a keen controversy. St Martin of Tours,
St Ambrose and St Leo vigorously attacked the Spanish bishops
who had obtained the condemnation of Priscillian. St John
Chrysostom considered that a heretic should be deprived of the
liberty of speech and that assemblies organized by heretics
should be dissolved, but declared that “to put a heretic to death
would be to introduce upon earth an inexpiable crime.” From
the 6th to the 9th century the heterodox, with the
In the early Middle Ages.
exception of the Manichaean sects in certain places,
were hardly subjected to persecution. They were,
moreover, rare and generally isolated, for groups
of sectaries only began to appear to any extent at the
time of the earliest appearances of Catharism. However, at
the end of the 10th century, the disciples of Vilgard, a heretic
of Ravenna, were destroyed in Italy and Sardinia, according
to Glaber, ferro et incendio, probably by assimilation to the
Manichaeans. Perhaps this was the precedent for the punishment
of the thirteen Cathari who were burnt at Orleans in 1022
by order of King Robert, a sentence which has been commonly
quoted as the first action of the “secular arm” (or lay power)
against heresy in the West during the middle ages. However
that may be, after 1022 there were numerous cases of the execution
of heretics, either by burning or strangling, in France, Italy,
the Empire and England. Up till about 1200 it is not quite
easy to determine what part was taken by the Church and its
bishops and doctors in this series of executions. At Orleans
the people, supported by the Crown, were responsible for the
death of the heretics; the historians give only the faintest indications
of any direct intervention of the clergy, except perhaps for
the examination of doctrine. At Goslar (1051–1052) the proceedings
were the same. At Asti (1034) the bishop’s name
appears side by side with those of the other lords who attacked
the Cathari, but it seems clear that it was not he who had the chief
voice in their execution; at Milan, it was again the civil magistrates,
and this time against the wish of the archbishop—who
gave the heretics the choice between the adoration of the cross
and death. At Soissons (1114) the mob, distrusting the weakness
of the clergy, took advantage of their bishop’s absence to burn
heretics at the stake. It was also the mob who, infuriated at
seeing him destroy and burn crosses, burnt the heresiarch Peter
of Bruis (c. 1140). At Liége (1144) the bishop saved from the
flames certain persons whom the faithful were attempting to
burn. At Cologne (1163) the archbishop was less successful,
and the mob put the heretics to death without even a trial.
The condemnation of Arnold of Brescia was entirely political,
though he was denounced as a heretic to the secular arm by
Bernard of Clairvaux, and his execution was the act of the prefect
of Rome (1155). At Vézelay, on the contrary (1167), the
heretics were burnt after ecclesiastical judgment had been
pronounced by the abbot and several bishops. From 1183 to
1206 Hugh, bishop of Auxerre, took upon himself the discretionary
power of exiling, dispossessing or burning heretics,
while about the same time William of the White Hands, archbishop
of Reims, in concert with Philip, count of Flanders,
stamped out heresy from his diocese by fire. There was a
similar unanimity between the lay and ecclesiastical authorities
in the famous condemnation of the disciples of Amalric of Bena,
who were burnt at Paris in 1209 by order of Philip Augustus
after an ecclesiastical inquiry and judgment. The theory in
these matters was at first as uncertain as the practice;
Conflicting views as to the punishment of heresy.
in the 11th century one bishop only, Theodwin of
Liége (d. 1075), affirms the necessity for the punishment
of heretics by the secular arm (1050). His predecessor,
Wazo, bishop of Liége from 1041 to 1044, had expressly
condemned any capital punishment and advised the
bishop of Chalons to resort to peaceful conversion.
In the 12th century Peter the Cantor[1] protested against the
death penalty, admitting at the most imprisonment. It was
imprisonment again, or exile, but not death, which the German
abbot Gerhoh of Reichersperg (1093–1169) demanded in the
case of Arnold of Brescia, and in dealing with the heretics of
Cologne, St Bernard, who cannot be accused of leniency where
heterodoxy was concerned, recommended pacific refutation,
followed by excommunication or prison, but never the death
penalty (see Bernard, St, of Clairvaux). In the councils, too,
The Church Councils.
Influence of the Canon Law.
it is clear that the appeal to the secular arm was
equally guarded: at Reims (1049) excommunication
alone is decreed against heretics; and when, as at
Toulouse (1119) and the Lateran council (1139), it
is laid down that heretics, in addition to excommunication,
should be dealt with per potestates exteras, or when, as at the
council of Reims (1148), the secular princes are forbidden to
support or harbour heretics, there is never any suggestion of
capital punishment. But it must be noticed that from the
opening years of the 12th century date the beginnings
of a decided evolution in the canon law, continuing up
to the time of Innocent III., which substituted for
arbitrary decisions according to circumstances an
organized and particularized legislation, in which judgment was
given secundum canonicas et legitimas sanctiones. Anselm of
Lucca and the Panormia attributed to Ivo of Chartres reproduced
word for word under the rubric De edicto imperatorum in dampnationem
hoereticorum, law 5 of the title De hereticis of Justinian’s
code, which pronounces the sentence of death against the
Manichaeans; and we should remember that the Cathari, and
in general all heretics in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries
were considered by contemporary theologians as Manichaeans.
Gratian in the Decretum proclaims the views of St Augustine
(exile and fines). Certain of his commentators (2a pars Caus.
xxiii.), and notably Rufinus Johannes Teutonicus, and the
The Council of Tours, 1163.
Definition of the procedure under Lucius III. and the Emperor Frederick I.
anonymous glossator (in Uguccio’s Great Summa of
the Decretum) declare that impenitent heretics may,
or even should, be punished by death. As early as
1163, the council of Tours suggested to the ecclesiastical
authorities definite penalties to be inflicted on heretics, namely,
imprisonment and loss of all their property. Pope Alexander
III., who had attended the council of Tours of 1163, renewed
at the Lateran council (1179) the decisions which
had already been made with regard to the heterodox
in the south of France, and at Verona in 1184
Pope Lucius III., in concert with the emperor
Frederick Barbarossa, took still more severe measures:
obstinate heretics were to be excommunicated, and
then handed over to the secular arm, which would
inflict a suitable penalty. The emperor, on his side, laid them
under the imperial ban (exile, confiscation, demolition of
their houses, infamia, loss of civil rights, disqualification from
- ↑ Pierre de Beauvoisis (?), choir-master (grand-chantre) of the university of Paris (1184), bishop of Tournai (1191), of Paris (1196); died as a Cistercian in 1197. He was beatified.
