XIV

FAITH, REASON AND THE TRINITY

WITH the conversion of the Arian kings in the fifth and sixth centuries and the spread of a Church that lacked effective central authority, heresy had ceased to be a major issue. There is no record in the west of any execution of a heretic (as against the intransigent ‘pagans’, whose deaths were recorded by Bede) until King Robert I of France ordered the burning of fourteen citizens from Orleans in 1022. Although these were accused of belonging to a heretical sect, it appears that they had become caught up in political infighting within the French court, and the charge of heresy was essentially opportunistic. However, the concept of heresy had been revived. Two years later, Bishop Gerard of Cambrai examined a group of virtually illiterate peasants whose ‘heresy’ centred on their determination to return to the teachings of the gospels. They preached abstinence, the abandonment of worldly desires, and charity towards their neighbours. Although there is evidence that these ‘heretics’ were tortured during their preliminary examination, it appears that the persecution of heretics was fairly restrained until the end of the twelfth century. The Jews suffered far worse fates. As the knights of the First Crusade, who set out in the spring of 1096, passed through towns in France and the Rhineland where there were Jewish populations, they carried out several massacres of those who refused to convert. It was part of a hardening of attitudes, as Jews, lepers and heretics were increasingly defined as part of a common threat to the Church and to society.¹ This development went hand in hand with a new determination by the papacy, initiated by the formidable Gregory VII (1073-85), to reassert its control over western Christianity, largely through claiming the right of the Church to intervene in every aspect of human behaviour. The relative freedom of Christians to adapt their faith to local circumstances was now under severe threat.

The most persistent of heresies were those that contrasted the opulence and worldly power of the Church with the teachings of the gospels. The Cathars, for instance, were dualists, rejecting the material world - with which they believed the Church had compromised - in favour of an original purity based on the teachings of Christ and the apostles. They became deeply rooted in southern France in the twelfth century and gained strength because of the continued uncertainty of the Church about how to treat them. In 1198, a vigorous young pope, Innocent III, launched a more determined response. He equated heretics with traitors - heresy was no less than treason against the person of Jesus Christ - and called on secular rulers to support him in what was now as much a political as a religious campaign. A crusade was launched against the Cathars, ending in indiscriminate slaughter of innocent and ‘guilty’ alike. Protests against the bloodshed were met with the bleak rejoinder that God would sort out good from evil when those massacred reached judgement. At the Fourth Lateran Council, held in Rome in 1215, it was decreed that there was no possibility of salvation for anyone who remained outside the Church, and that Church and state should collaborate in the extermination of heresy. The Council laid the foundations of an inquisition of suspected heretics, and over the next thirty years its structure was elaborated. Under the influence of the Dominicans, the inquisitors set about the burning of those found guilty of heresy - to the intense anger of many cities (such as Toulouse), which resented the intrusion of the Church into the affairs of their citizens.²

The heretics with which the Inquisition was concerned were often illiterate, vulnerable and thus scarcely aware of the gravity of the charges against them. Yet by now there was also a new educated elite attuned to the power structure of the Church and the subtleties of its teachings. Would it be possible for the most sophisticated minds of the age to teach freely and creatively without offending the Church? Medieval thought is often presented as scrutinising obscure elements of Christian belief, but if it can also be seen as a battle between intelligent and original minds and a naturally conservative institution embedded in the theology of Augustine, then it becomes more absorbing, not least for the variety of strategies adopted by the protagonists on either side. While the Church might execute heretics from the poorer classes, intellectuals who overstepped the mark were normally ‘only’ excommunicated (although this left them under the threat of eternal hell fire if they did not recant before their deaths).

It was the most brilliant logician of the twelfth century, Peter Abelard (1079-1142), who laid down the challenge. The moving story of Abelard’s love affair with Heloise, which led to her pregnancy, their marriage and then the brutal end of their physical relationship when her uncle had Abelard castrated, tends to overshadow his achievements as a philosopher. From an early age, Abelard had shown enormous intellectual curiosity, and he moved from his native Brittany to Paris, where he began to teach. In the cathedral schools - of which Notre-Dame was the most prestigious - teachers would compete with each other for the best posts, and Abelard, who revelled in debate, became famous for the victories he effected over rival teachers. His primary interest was in logic, but after his separation from Heloise, he retreated to the monastic house at St Denis, where he developed his interest in theology.³

The issue that fascinated him was the Trinity. How could there be three divine persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, distinct from each other, each fully God, but without there being three gods? Could he produce a formula that would provide backing for the doctrine? It was a challenging task. As Michael Clanchy, author of a fine biography of Abelard, puts it: ‘The perfect analogy for the Trinity seemed to be on the verge of discovery, rather like the discovery of a new drug in modern science, and then the most fundamental problem of Christian theology and belief would have been solved. The successful discoverer would achieve the reputation of a Father of the Church, like St Augustine. If the analogy failed, on the other hand, the discoverer might be condemned as a heretic and imprisoned or killed. The stakes were therefore high and Abelard, as the highest player of his time, gambled against his soul to solve the mystery of the Trinity.’⁴

Abelard’s first efforts at solving the problem, the Theologia, were condemned and ordered to be burned in 1121. The reasons remain obscure but seem to have included the accusation that he taught that there were three gods (tritheism). It appears that the underlying philosophical problems of the Nicene Trinity were exposed as soon as an educated mind set to work on them. The doctrine was so carefully balanced between Sabellianism - Jesus as a temporary manifestation of God - and tritheism that any new view of the problem risked being accused of one or the other. But this did not deter Abelard. He caught the mood of the new breed of students, who wanted a defence of the Trinity based on ‘human and logical reasons... something intelligible rather than mere words’. He became obsessed with finding a way in which a coherent defence of the doctrine could be made, and in his later works his arguments became ever more complex. He developed a sophisticated analysis of what was meant by the ‘sameness’ - as in ‘the same substance’, or, a word he was fond of using, ‘essence’ - of the three divine persons, and their ‘difference’. He conceived of a ‘difference in definition’ or ‘a difference in property’, which, he argued, each of the three persons could hold without compromising their sameness. ‘Although God the Father is entirely the same essence as God the Son or God the Holy Spirit, there is one feature proper to God the Father insofar as he is Father, another to God the Son, and yet another to the Holy Spirit.’⁵ Scholars remain unconvinced that he ever provided a watertight argument. But, nevertheless, his approach to the issue had set up a model for critical thinking.

The imposition of orthodoxy meant that all teachers, particularly those with original minds, were exposed to possible accusations of heresy. As always, personal rivalries played their part, and Abelard had offended many by his arrogance and his success in building up an enthusiastic student following. His most prestigious opponent, Bernard of Clairvaux, a powerful Cistercian monk and a close friend of the pope, Innocent II, recounted in horror that as a result of Abelard’s teachings, ‘the Catholic Faith, the childbearing of the Virgin, the Sacrament of the Altar, the incomprehensible mystery [sic] of the Holy Trinity, are being discussed in the streets and the market places’. He accused Abelard of tending towards Arianism when he talked of the Trinity; of Pelagianism when he talked of the grace of God; and of Nestorianism when he talked of the person of Christ. Bernard also attacked Abelard’s use of reason, in fact the process of reasoning itself. ‘Let him who has scanned the heavens go down to the depths of hell and let the works of darkness that he has dared to bring forth be clearly revealed in the light of day.’ In short, ‘faith in God has no merit, if human reason provides proof for it’.⁶ Bernard also challenged Abelard’s view that intention was an essential element in sin (with the implication that, contra Augustine, a baby could not have any guilt as it was too young to be able to form an intention) and that faith could be a matter of private judgement. He drew up a list of Abelard’s supposed heresies to be brought for judgement before the pope at a synod to be held at Sens (in France). Abelard sent his own defence to the pope, but he was outmanoeuvred by Bernard, who held a secret meeting of the bishops before the council had opened and persuaded them to condemn the list of ‘heresies’. On 16 July 1141, Innocent declared Abelard to be excommunicated. Only the intervention of the Abbot of Cluny, who gave Abelard protection for the remaining year of his life, allowed the excommunication to be lifted, so saving, one hopes, Abelard’s already mutilated body from eternal punishment.

In his Collationes (c.1130), a stimulating dialogue between a Christian, a philosopher and a Jew, Abelard bemoaned the intellectual sterility of his age. He expounded on how the bastions of ‘faith’ had become an impediment to rational thought. ‘Human understanding increases as the years pass and one age succeeds another ... yet in faith - the area in which threat of error is most dangerous - there is no progress... This is the sure result of the fact that one is never allowed to investigate what should be believed among one’s own people, or to escape punishment for raising doubts about what is said by everyone... People profess themselves to believe what they admit they cannot understand, as if faith consisted in uttering words rather than in mental understanding.’ The problem could hardly be stated more clearly.⁷

One of the most interesting features of Abelard’s thought was his determination to return to the classics. As yet the texts from classical authors available to him were pitifully few. Two works of logic by Aristotle, Plato’s Timaeus and a couple of texts by Cicero made up the main sources. (There was no way of discovering what classical texts still existed at this time, and it needed determined scholars such as Petrarch (1304-74) to scour monastic libraries for survivors.) Abelard had to have recourse to Augustine’s City of God, which had disparaged ancient philosophy, and recast Augustine’s views to show the importance of what had been rejected. He even attempted to show that the pagan philosophers had grasped the concept of the Trinity. If he had lived a few decades later, he would have been delighted with the flood of classical texts now entering from the Arab world. The link between Islam and Christianity was sustained by the famous commentaries on Aristotle by the Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-98), which were adopted by many Christian theologians of the thirteenth century and helped bring Aristotle, and the reasoned thought he championed, back into the European consciousness. By now, universities had developed from the medieval schools. While Bologna retained its pre-eminence in law, it was the university of Paris (the successor of the cathedral schools) that offered the most sophisticated school of theology. Learning was boosted by the two mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, who between them provided most of the great thinkers of the age.

The challenge of Aristotle, with his emphasis on the primacy of reason and empirical experience, could be met in three ways. One was to adopt his philosophical insights independently of Christianity. This was the response of some Parisian theologians such as Siger of Brabant, who were dubbed the ‘Latin Averroists’ on account of their adulation of the Muslim philosopher. Naturally such an approach, which might have led to genuine intellectual freedom of thought, was abhorrent to the Church, and a large number of specific propositions attributed to Averroes and other rationalists were condemned officially by the Bishop of Paris in 1277. ‘The most significant outcome’, writes the historian of science Edward Grant, ‘was an emphasis on the reality and importance of God’s absolute power to do whatever he pleases short of bringing about a logical contradiction.’⁸ This was essentially an Augustinian approach and did nothing to encourage the study of the laws of the natural world. The second approach to the problem, the one favoured by conservatives, was to reject Aristotle by re-emphasising the teaching of Augustine that faith had primacy over reason and that worldly, empirical knowledge was to be scorned.

The third reaction was perhaps the most challenging: to try and integrate Aristotle with Christianity. It was a path fraught with difficulties, not only because it, risked challenging the Church’s responsibility for its own teaching but because Aristotle offered interpretations of the creation and the immortality of the soul that conflicted with orthodox belief. The greatest of these Aristotelians, and certainly one of the greatest theologians of all time, was the Dominican Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who spent much of his teaching career in Paris. Aquinas absorbed the works of Aristotle through his teacher, another Dominican, Albert the Great, and integrated them into his Summa Theologiae, a massive structural survey of Christian doctrine in which reasoned judgement was placed at the core. Aquinas brought back the possibility of reason, and rather than decrying the power of the human mind, he exults in it. While Augustine had argued that human beings had been so corrupted by original sin that their power of reasoning had been almost extinguished, Aquinas sees reason as a gift from God. He uses it to the full to explain Christian doctrine, including the existence of God. Yet there remained an unresolved tension. What if a particular Christian doctrine could not be defended by reason? With the clarity of thought that was his hall-mark, Aquinas knew that reason had its limits.⁹ In this, as has already been seen, he was going no further than pagan philosophy, which fully accepted that there were matters the human mind could not grasp. The Greek philosophers could live with the idea that there are things we cannot know.¹⁰ This was unacceptable to the Church, which could hardly sustain its authority if it had to accept that there were fundamental problems of existence to which there were no answers. The solution, already implicit in the works of Augustine, was to elevate some aspects of Church teaching as matters of ‘faith’.

Abelard had done his best to bring the Trinity within the realm of reason, but he had suffered for it at the hands of those who wished to preserve ‘the faith’ as some kind of mystery that was sustained above the heads and minds of those ‘in the streets and market place’. Aquinas was wise enough not to try to provide a reasoned defence of the Trinity and he made it an article of faith: ‘The truth that God is three and one is altogether a matter of faith; and in no way can it be demonstratively proved.’ He went on to argue that trying to prove the Trinity by reason would actually detract from faith. First, faith had in itself a dignity that required the mystery of the Trinity to be preserved as one of those ‘invisible realities which were beyond the reach of human reason’. Secondly, Aquinas admitted that rational arguments for doctrines such as the Trinity were bound to be unconvincing and thus they made those who proposed them the laughing stock of unbelievers. This did not mean that Aquinas did not search for analogies to help our understanding of the concept, just as Augustine did, but he accepted that ultimately the human mind was incapable of grasping the full truth.¹¹ One has to admire Aquinas, not only for his extraordinary intellectual qualities but for his integration of reason in theology without destroying Church authority. It was a fine balancing act even if to groups such as the Averroists it would have been seen as a capitulation.

Aquinas himself was always under pressure from conservatives. Some of his writings are to be found in the propositions condemned in 1277, three years after his death, and it is known that other campaigns were launched against him. It took the determination of Pope John XXII to recognise his genius and proclaim him a saint in 1323. His eventual integration into Catholic theology as the greatest medieval scholar of them all confirmed the status of the Trinity as an article of faith, a mystery beyond the power of reason to comprehend. As Dante ascends into Paradise in his Divine Comedy, he experiences the Trinity essentially in mystical terms.¹²

The problem was that this attempt to close off discussion of the Trinity, and other articles of faith, had to call on the support of the authority of the Church and state to sustain it. This explains why Innocent III drew in the secular rulers to support his fight against heresy. The common front of Church and state was underpinned by the rediscovery of Roman law. A single sixth-century manuscript of the Digest of Justinian’s law code had survived in the west and turned up in Padua in about 1070. The code included Justinian’s and Theodosius’ laws against paganism and in support of the Trinity, so those states that now absorbed Roman law, including the Holy Roman Empire, also took on the defence of Christian orthodoxy. Thus the Trinity, embedded at the core of Church doctrine, was upheld in secular and ecclesiastical courts alike. The threat of prosecution for denying the Trinity continued in legal systems for centuries. ‘It is striking to note’, writes the scholar Jaroslav Pelikan, ‘that the unchallenged theological hegemony of the doctrine of the Trinity, beginning in the fourth century and ending in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, was basically coextensive with the willingness and ability of civil authorities to go on enforcing it.’¹³ Even the Act of Toleration, passed by the English Parliament in defiance of the Anglican Church in 1689, did not extend to tolerating arguments against the Trinity. The scientist Isaac Newton worked assiduously to demolish the scriptural arguments for the Trinity, but he could never publish what he had written.

One must not exaggerate the power of the institutional Church. When Pope Boniface VIII (1295-1303) attempted to assert his power over secular rulers by forbidding them to tax clergy and by claiming that popes should be superior over kings, he was widely resisted and then imprisoned by the French king, Philip IV. The undignified exile of the papacy to Avignon followed, and political theorists such as Marsilius of Padua were able to revive Aristotle’s works on the ideal city and mount a strong case for the supremacy of the state over the Church. It was one of several important new forces, including the rediscovery of the importance of classical learning by Petrarch and the so-called humanists, that led to a rethinking of the fundamentals of intellectual life. When the authority of the Roman Catholic Church broke down in the sixteenth century, there was a revival of alternative formulations of the Trinity, including docetism and unitarianism (the belief that there is only one person in the Godhead rather than three). However, most of the Protestant Churches maintained the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.¹⁴ In the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, finalised in 1571 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Nicene Creed, Athanasius’ Creed and the Apostles’ Creed are listed together in Article Eight as acceptable statements of the faith. Catholicism as such could be condemned, but the core doctrine of orthodox Catholicism was absorbed into Protestantism.

This common front forms the background to the sorry story of the sixteenth-century physician Michael Servetus (1511-53). In his native Navarre in Spain, Servetus encountered Muslims and Jews and became aware of how offensive the doctrine of the Trinity was to them on the grounds that it made a human being (Jesus) divine. If Christianity really was a universal religion, of appeal to all, he argued, then the Trinity could not be defended, and after a wide study of the relevant texts, Servetus published his On the Errors of the Trinity in 1531. One of his immediate concerns was to challenge the claim of Peter Lombard, the author of the most influential textbook of medieval theology, The Sentences, that the doctrine of the Trinity could be found on every page of scripture. Servetus responded: ̒̒To me not only the syllables but all the letters and the mouths of babes and sucklings, even the very stones themselves, cry out there is one God the Father and [as a separate being] his Christ, the Lord Jesus ... Not one word is found in the whole Bible about the Trinity nor about its persons, nor about the essence nor the unity of substance nor of the one nature of the several beings nor about any of the rest of their ravings and logic chopping.̓¹⁵

Servetus’ occupation allowed him to travel freely. In Lyons he fell into the hands of the Catholic Inquisition, but the body did not have enough documentary evidence of his views at hand to prosecute him for heresy. The resourceful Servetus escaped over the French border and made for Geneva, which was then presided over by the Protestant reformer John Calvin. But Servetus had sent Calvin a copy of his works, and when he arrived, Calvin had him arrested for his views on the Trinity. With the support of his fellow reformers and the approval of Lutheran leaders, he sentenced Servetus to be burnt as a heretic. The law under which Servetus was convicted had been adopted from the code of Justinian, and it prescribed the death penalty for the crime of the denial of the Trinity. The burning of Servetus was followed by a successful rooting out of the printed edition of his On the Errors of the Trinity; only three copies survive today.

Worse was to come. The inevitable result of having ‘faiths’ based on rival doctrines that could not be supported by reasoned thought was conflict between opposing churches, in this case Catholicism and Protestantism. The destruction caused to Europe by the Wars of Religion between 1618 and 1648 was unprecedented in the range and number of countries affected. In south-west Germany, for example, no other event in recorded history has had similarly devastating effects on the population, and in some areas of central Europe the population fell, under the accumulation of atrocities, epidemics and the breakdown of agriculture, to a third of pre-war levels. It was from sheer exhaustion and horror at the atrocities and counter-atrocities that by 1648, Europeans, in the words of Jonathan Israel,‘had to accept that the Almighty, for whatever reason, refused to signal which church teaches the true faith ... and ordained general confessional deadlock reaching from the Americas and Ireland to Poland, Hungary-Transylvania, and the fringes of the Orthodox world, with many lands in between remaining deeply split’.¹⁶ This ‘profound spiritual crisis’ led to the revival of an ideal that had been lost for well over a thousand years, that of religious toleration. The forces opposing it remained powerful, and the early Enlightenment philosophies of toleration - that of John Locke, for instance - were limited, but the moral bankruptcy of the old spiritual regime was obvious. Never had the loss of the fourth-century concept that ‘God enjoys being worshipped in a variety of ways’ been more keenly felt.