More than any other religion, Jewish religion centers on the expectation of a future Golden Age; Christianity … inherited that expectation.—NORMAN COHN1
For Lenin, as we have seen, Marxism resulted from the confluence of a form of economics, a critical reaction to a philosophical tradition, and the ideological and social effluence of the French Revolution. In the previous chapter, I have maintained that this was an inadequate architecture or genealogy. Challenging Lenin’s formulation, however, brings forward the additional duty of replacing the epistemological conceits and historical texts woven into his truth claims. In appealing to preeminent intellectual systems like political economy, idealism, and utopian socialism, Lenin’s assertions clearly appropriated from them a certain political authority. And because these were very nearly contemporary systems of knowledge, they also bore, and shared with historical materialism, the legitimating seal of the modern. Moreover, and at a more profound level, the epistemological justifications domiciled in these newer disciplines were transferred almost unnoticeably with Lenin’s claims. These theoretical foundations were, of course, empiricism, positivism, and historicism. And in turn, each of these philosophical positions was embedded in the materialist posture of Marxism.
Marx, Engels, and others answering to Marxism all insisted that their economistic facticity, their comprehension of the most basic human activity, extended to them the superior authority to supersede alternative discourses on the meaning of history. But what on the face of it might seem arrogant was in one sense a rather modest claim: Marxists maintain that it is possible for them to construct a science of history largely because capitalist forces of production have made property and class relations transparent for the first time in human history. As Engels put it, “The abolition of social classes has as its presupposition a stage of historical development at which the existence not merely of some particular ruling class or other but of any ruling class at all, that is to say, of class difference itself, has become an anachronism.”2 Unlike previous (“pre-capitalist,” Marxists would say) modes of production, capitalism could not conceal or justify exploitation through ideology. So the extraordinary comprehension of human society of which we are now capable is both a consequence of an accident of birth and the ineluctable accretion of productive forces over millennia.
The premise, however, that alone of all social orders, capitalist society unmasks itself, relegates all social understanding before the capitalist era mired in the ideological muck of their own eras. But neither the facts surrounding the epistemological foundations and antecedents of historical materialism nor the emergence of pre-Marxian socialist discourses bear out these presumptions. And so to confirm these insufficiencies, I intend a reconsideration of Lenin’s genealogy through the poising of a fourth and a fifth element, each of very different material. The first of these appends and swells our comprehension of the several historical sources of materialism. This authorizes the investigation of the epistemological contributions of “primitive materialism” (Engels’s terms). The second, in a similar quest, sleuths out the popular germination of socialist discourse. What I have in mind is interrogating these events as consorts to the social and ideological formations of late medieval Christianity and the Roman Church. We shall use the Church’s history as a means of resolving the misapprehensions of Lenin’s list. With respect to Christianity and its relationship to the eventual appearance of Marxism, we shall mark two developments: the evolving idea of materialism, and the historical advent of Western socialism.
As a concept, materialism refers to the physical being of the world and the motion of matter. But more than the trivial reference to matter, materialism designates an epistemological posture: the presumption that all human experience, all human consciousness proceeds from our species’ encounter with the objective world, that consciousness is a product of, and is inevitably bounded by, the experience of the world as a concatenation of things. We feed on things, we breathe things, we stand on things, our whole lives we are surrounded by things: the world as the objective earth, the world as the material universe. What remains, then, is to determine whether the material world is apprehended through the mind or the soul.
Philosophical materialism maintains that the matter which surrounds us and of which we are a part defines our human existence and our consciousness. And no matter how ancient the social philosophy or the social creed or the received tradition, some reference to the thingness of the world intrudes.3 Thus in absolute materialism, the material world possesses priority and physical change is the precept of all consciousness. Matter and matter in motion come first and provide the basis for human order, perception, language, conceptualization, etc. Inevitably, then, as A. E. Taylor suggests, it is possible to reason that the material world is beyond our comprehension: “In general we have to admit that, except for that small portion of physical nature in which we can directly read purposive experience of a type specially akin to our own, we are quite unable to say with any confidence how nature is organized.”4 Such a possibility has shadowed materialistic monism for more than two millennia. This, however, has not obstructed the present influence of materialism, i.e., the acceptance of theories like evolution or the “Big Bang” origins of the universe as the most widely held tenets of Western science.
In the “Western” experience, the first division between philosophical materialists and idealists was to be found in sixth-century (BC) Greek thought. Hellenist scholars have alluded to the division as between the Ionian (materialist) and Italian (idealist) traditions. The materialist tradition was associated with the Miletians—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes—and the notion of Atomism. As Aristotle testified, originating in the Hellenic East (Ionia), materialism (Atomism) was the first dominant epistemology: “Most of the first philosophers,” he observed, “thought that principles in the form of matter were the only principles of all things.”5 The idealists, the most prominent among the ancient Greeks being Pythagoras and then Plato, posited that the mysteries of the cosmos were profoundly sympathetic to numbers and the human souls. “They supposed,” Aristotle recorded, “the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things and the whole heaven to be a harmonia and a number.”6 And their tradition, like that of the Ionians, has endured the millennia.
At the turn of the present century, Ionian philosophy, to the extent that it could be known from the fragmentary references to it by the fifth- and fourth-century writers, had come to be known as “naïve materialism.” Technically encapsulated by the term “hylozoism” (attributing to matter properties belonging to life), as its modern nomination suggests it was assumed to be of little significance in the history of philosophy. Nevertheless, it was employed by historical materialists as a demonstration of the derivative character of thought, the mirroring of production. George Thomson, the Marxist historian and philosopher, maintained that early Greek materialism was grounded in a metaphysics drawn from an even earlier social order. Commenting on Anaximander’s cosmology, Thomson insisted that “this theory rest[ed] on three preconceived ideas—common origin, perpetual motion, and the conflict of opposites—all of which are derived from primitive thought, being in origin nothing more than a projection of the structure of the tribe.”7
Thomson’s interpretation might, at first blush, appear eccentric, but it is echoed by non-Marxist scholars who have undertaken the study of ancients. Jonathan Barnes, for instance, has argued that drawing from Phoenician and pre-Hellenic tribal organization and myths, the “pre-Socratics” crafted a natural philosophy from the most rudimentary precepts of socio-political order: cosmos, arche, phusis, and logos (derived, respectively, from the cognate verbs: to order; to begin/rule; to grow; and to say/state).8 In this view, the preclassical Greek materialists/naturalists thus are thought to have constructed a notion of an autonomous, ordered, intelligible nature—materialism—which was pre-European historically and culturally.9
Marx, as he himself acknowledged, came much too late to be the first European materialist. Moreover, as Thomson suggests, materialism was not simply the product of an intellectual genius. As an ideologeme, it inspired philosophies, each of which was an apprehension of a particular historical moment. Indeed, as we review the extraordinary events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the social revolutions which overturned the traditional orders of Western Europeans, we discover that classical materialism, the modern variant which prioritized the objective world, had sprung from the attack on Christianity and the political order (absolutism) it had come to authorize. The absolute monarchies and aristocracies of the feudal and late Middle Ages were more than social and political orderings; they were a divine order, a natural ordering as sacrosanct as God. As Georges Duby described feudal political authority, “Like the bishop, this personage [the king or prince] was prelatus, designated by God because of the virtue in his blood. God had set him over the rest of mankind as their leader.”10
However, let us review the development of materialist philosophies in their reverse order: proceedings from those to which Marx was closest and then to their predecessors.
The materialist interpretation to which Marx responded was a mere two hundred years old. The materialist philosophy to which Marx objected had been constructed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Earlier, we had observed, the cultural construction of history which became dominant and to which Marxism is obligated could be traced to Judeo-Christian traditions and more immediately to the intervention of Kant and Hegel. What Marx was implicated in was the reconciliation between German idealism and classical materialism and his immediate objects were the works of Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach.
Marx distinguished his beliefs from those of his predecessors by referring to their philosophy as “classical” materialism. These “classical materialists,” however, were not intellectuals of aristocratic origins like their ancient antecedents nor of peasant or working-class backgrounds. They were, to the contrary, closely linked to the commercial strata emerging in Germany, France, and Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Marx referred to this class as a bourgeoisie (generally meaning “town-dwellers”). The bourgeoisie was implicated in a long-distance trade, industrial and manufacturing production, and the bureaucracies of the Absolute and nation-states. Such were the origins of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and many of the other intellectuals we have already mentioned. So, too, were those of Engels and Marx: Engels’s family was commercial bourgeois (textile manufacturers). Marx’s civil service. The intellectuals nurtured in this class reinvented materialism and quite naturally their reformulation became an expression of their class’s interests.
Despite the protestations of Engels and Marx, historical materialism and classical materialism shared in common the social origins of their adherents: both were philosophies which originated with intellectuals drawn from the bourgeoisies. Moreover, as theories of history, historical materialism and classical materialism drew on the materialist implications found in an identical stadial architecture of history. More specifically, when Marx eventually argued that culture, politics, and consciousness were based on the organization of production, he was reiterating a social theory which emerged from an earlier attempt by bourgeois intellectuals to arrange human history into specific stages of economic development.
Marx first articulated the relationship between economics (what Marxists call the Base) and the legal, political, and customary structures of society (what Marxists call the Superstructure) in the preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). There he wrote:
A guiding thread for my studies can be briefly formulated as follows: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.11
Every historical moment, Marx argued, has a specific organization of production which “conditions” a particular superstructure, “the social, political and intellectual process in general.” This seems to make clear that the one—material productive forces—held primacy. And the convention of Anglophone Marxists of employing “base” and “superstructure” as designators was meant to settle the question, definitely one might say. However, S. H. Rigby recites a cautionary tale which must be kept in mind: “Marxists have been unable to agree on whether it is society’s productive forces (its specific forms of tools, raw materials, labor power, and technological knowledge) or its relations of production (its class and property relations) which enjoy an ultimate social primacy.”12 Notwithstanding the existence of these two terrains of human activity provided Marx and Engels a powerful historical tool: “It is this hierarchy of social forces which, for better or worse, gives Marxism its distinctiveness as a theory of the social world and history.”13
Marx reasoned that the conflict which led to profound change in every period of human history implicated the “correspondence” between productive forces and the relations of production:
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. … No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.14
The Base produces a Superstructure, a legal, political, and ideological complement to the way production is organized. The Base, however, has its own momentum or inertia. It continues to develop dynamically until a new Base is configured. This new organization of production, Base1, is no longer complemented by the original Superstructure. When this occurs, “an era of social revolution” begins, and this whole immense Superstructure (law, political order, ideology) is transformed.
One of the critical implications of this theory is that historical change is intrasocietal, the idea that the motive forces of change come from within the society. This is underscored by Marx’s insistence on a paradox: “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed.” Each social order obtains its own perfection and in that perfection is its ultimate destruction. Thus social orders destroy themselves. Marx was not submitting an episode from a national history for his readers to peruse in the comfort of their clubs. His was not a theory of history based on some particularly fascinating or compelling era. His was a grand theory of history, encompassing nations, civilizations, and indeed the human species. Thusly, Marx contrasted his method to previous historical explanations which were dependent upon external interventions: wars, invasions, etc. To the contrary, he argued, internal contradictions produce historical change—the revolutionizing of production results in the revolutionizing of the relations of production. Social Revolution is an accommodation of momentous economic change. In these remarks we can begin to see revealed what historical materialism owed to classical materialism.
When we review the writings of some of Marx’s immediate predecessors—Montesquieu in France, John Millar and Adam Smith in Scotland, etc.—all of whom wrote in the mid-eighteenth century—we are struck by their adherence to a four-stage history. Each believed that human history began with a hunting stage, and then was progressively succeeded by pastorage, agriculture, and finally commerce. First the domestication of animals (“why should we have to chase animals?”), and then the domestication of plants. Hunting (and gathering) was succeeded by pastorage (animal domestication—with its attendant sexual taboos), and then agriculture: the domestication of plants. And then finally came commerce, a kind of domestication of other peoples. And each of these intellectuals asserted that these “modes of subsistence” (an anticipation of what Marx called mode of production) directly affected human institutions.
In Montesquieu, perhaps, we find the weakest or most qualified relationship between modes of subsistence and the forms of social order. Considering the ethnographic disguise he had assumed so successfully as the author of the Persian Letters, it is not surprising that the baron would display a certain sensitivity to the several local variables (climate, religion, etc.) which might influence the institutions and cultures of nations. In his The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu observed that laws “have a very great relation to the manner in which the several nations procure their subsistence.” A perplexing stylist, but nevertheless Montesquieu was clear that laws are made by people in definite circumstances. But as Ronald Meek has observed, “There is certainly no indication in The Spirit of Laws that Montesquieu regarded the mode of subsistence as being in any sense the key factor in the total situation.”15 However, for Adam Smith, as we can gather from his writings and lectures from the 1750s and 1760s, the mode of subsistence was central. He wrote, “In a certain view of things all the arts, the sciences, law and government, wisdom and even virtue itself tend all to this one thing, the providing meat. Drink, raiment, and lodging for men.”16 Each of the stages of human history: hunting, pastorage, agriculture, and commerce, constituted a different set of arts, sciences, laws, governments, and social philosophies. And ten years later, another Scot, John Millar, in his quest to penetrate “beneath that common surface of events which occupies the details of the vulgar historian” concluded:
In searching for the causes of those peculiar systems of law and government which have appeared in the world, we must undoubtedly resort, first of all, to the differences of situation, which have suggested different views and motives of action to the inhabitants of particular countries. Of this kind, are the fertility or barrenness of the soil, the nature of its productions, the species of labor requisite for procuring subsistence, the number of individuals collected together in one community, their proficience in arts, the advantages which they enjoy for entering into mutual transactions, and for maintaining an intimate correspondence. There is thus, in human society, a natural progress from ignorance to knowledge, and from rude to civilized manners, the several stages of which are usually accompanied with peculiar laws and customs.17
Much of this is now terribly familiar. But in the eighteenth century, it was a substantial break from previous conceptualizations of history, primarily those dominated by Christian philosophies of history. Here the engine, the motive force of history, of change, was to be found in the mode of subsistence, not the writ and will of god. They were constructing a secular history, sometimes quite aware that in their break with the Christian tradition there would be all sorts of spiritual, moral, and intellectual consequences.
Marx, of course, agreed with his predecessors and defined the institutions and beliefs of law and property as a basis for securing the “relations of production” for each stage of history.18 The reasons for this concurrence between Montesquieu, Smith, Millar, Marx, and others is suggested by Meek in his discussion of the Scot and French intellectuals:
In the 1750s and 60s, in cities like Glasgow and in areas such as the more advanced provinces in the north of France, the whole social life of the communities concerned was being rapidly and visibly transformed, and it was fairly obvious that this was happening as a result of profound changes taking place in economic techniques and basic socio-economic relationships. And the new forms of economic organization which were emerging could be fairly easily compared and contrasted with the older forms of organization which still existed, say, in the Scottish Highlands, or in the remainder of France—or among the Indian tribes in America. If changes in the mode of subsistence were playing such an important and “progressive” role in the development of contemporary society, it seemed a fair bet that they must also have done so in that of past society.19
The intellectuals of the bourgeoisie projected the social forces of their own experiences back into their constructions of previous social orders. Such was the onset of a modernist materialism, picking up from the logical method employed by Hobbes and Locke who imagined some primordial “state of nature” which mirrored their own tumultuous seventeenth century. But rather than sovereigns and states, neither of which had proven to secure the social peace that Hobbes and Locke had promised, eighteenth-century philosophers of history sought to situate their own class at the helm of social advancement. Sovereigns could not plan an economy or organize trade, conduct science or create new mathematics. Sovereigns and the state were superfluities, second-order instruments of social organization. Rather it was businessmen and the landlords who made states and sovereigns possible, who provided states with the means of diplomacy, war, and social regulation. It was commerce which drove nations to greatness, which transformed villages into towns and towns into cities, which destroyed or fertilized whole populaces. It was the economy which was at the center of human achievement, not politics, not religion. And whatever affected the economy most powerfully—and ambition seemed to be an obvious first choice—became manifest through the creation of new technologies, the true source of social change.
This, then, was the primary intellectual character of the materialism, classical materialism, which preceded historical materialism. It was history seen as political economy by intellectuals and publicists sympathetic to the commercial revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And when radical intellectuals like Joseph Barnave (or Marx) took over this conception of history, part of what they added to it was the obvious. Of the agricultural stage, Barnave would write: “When the agricultural stage supervenes, ‘the inequality of possession soon becomes extreme,’ and it is not long before landed property becomes ‘the foundation of aristocracy.’ And eventually, ‘just as landed property is the basis of aristocracy and federalism, commercial property is the principle of democracy and of unity.’”20
Commerce shortened the social distance between the bourgeoisie and the old feudal ruling classes, commerce leveled the differences between those who ruled by right of birth and those who conducted the affairs of the nation by right of intellect, ambition, and concentrations of wealth. Commerce democratized and unified. And by democracy Barnave did not mean the poor or the many. Rather he meant the displacement of the few (the nobility and monarchs) by the more numerous (the commercial classes). Marx, of course, not satisfied with what other bourgeois intellectuals and the bourgeoisie would define as democracy, would push political economy to a critique of commercial property.
These then were the intellectual strands which provided one of the bases for Marx’s construction of historical materialism.
There is, however, an even older conception of materialism to which we must attend in our pursuit of the historical, theoretical, and philosophical anticipation of historical materialism. And as I have suggested, it is to be discovered in the history of the Roman Church. This materialism was associated with an earlier bourgeoisie which would not be triumphant over feudalism or the Church, those twinned (but never equal or coterminous) institutions which served as the foundations of the Absolute State of the Middle Ages. It was also associated with a renegade peasantry whose organized opposition to both their temporal and spiritual masters drove them to be linked with social philosophies and political ideologies which challenged the moral order of the ruling class.
Over and above the identity between Marx’s critical historiography and its predecessors in classical materialism, the real history of bourgeois development in the West has two other uses. It is useful for subverting the “natural history” of the bourgeoisie which they invented for themselves. It also provides the occasion for ascertaining an even older meaning to the notion of materialism, one which implicates the Catholic Church.
The discrete stages which appear in Western bourgeois historiography repress the appearances of earlier commercial classes and an older world economy. As a rationalization of history, the bourgeois historiography which begins to make an appearance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attempts to conclude history with the emergence of their particular social order. However, commercial classes, bourgeoisies, had appeared a number of times in European history before the advent of that commercial and civil bourgeoisie which began to achieve significant political as well as economic impact in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. To understand how earlier bourgeoisies were incapable of transcending the social, political, and economic orders in which they appeared, one must pay close attention to the development of Europe.
Reviewing a map of the Old World, one inevitably discovers that Europe is not a continent but a peninsular projection from a continent. It might as easily have come to be known as the Asian continent. In point of fact the continent became the locus of several civilizations, most if not all of them prior to the invention of Europe. Indeed, Europe as the marker of a distinct civilization came into being as a colonial backwater of the ancient civilizations which had appeared and flourished in Asia, the Indus Valley, the Near East, and Africa. As such it would be anachronistic, at least, to state that the development of Europe—which is normally assigned at the close of the Dark Ages (sixth to eleventh centuries)—required access to the non-European world. The more significant error, however, is the presumptive one: since there was no Europe, the notion of the non-European conceals the truer positivity; that is, Europe emerged from the negation of the era. In order to fabricate Europe, institutional, cultural, and ideological materials were consciously smuggled into this hinterland from afar by kings and popes, episcopals, clerics, and monastic scholars. No reality, then, substantiates the imagined, autonomous European continent. But as we proceed, this myth of the autochthonous will constitute only one of the many suspicious narratives concerning the origins of the West.
The Dark Ages were such because of the retreat of knowledge, the atrophy of civilization, the interdiction of long-distance trade, nomadic invasions, the eventual fragmentation of the social order into rural self-subsistent political units, and the disintegration of imperial structures in the hinterland between the Pyrenees and the Elbe which would become known as Europe. Further, the Dark Ages are associated with the significant decline—for still undiscovered reasons—of Europe’s population over four centuries, “dropping to 26m by AD 600—25% less than the AD 200 peak.”21 Bourgeois historiography, however, had no provision for the retreat of civilization.
Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones report that: “The Roman Empire declined and fell, classical civilization crumbled away and in its place a new society began to form, the feudal society of the medieval period.”22 During this Dark Age, the pre-Europe was fragmented into rural manors, demesnes, etc. Warren Hollister has maintained:
Specialists in medieval history are inclined to limit “feudalism” to the network of rights and obligations existing among members of the knightly aristocracy—the holders of fiefs. Although resting on the labor of peasants, the feudal structure itself encompassed only the warrior class of lords and vassals. There was, in other words, a world of difference between a vassal and a serf. Beneath the level of the feudal warrior class, 80 or 90 percent of the population continued to labor on the land, producing the food that sustained society. Yet the peasants were scorned by the nobility as boors and louts, and were largely ignored by the chroniclers of the age.23
People were consolidated into rural units, most were peasants in villages of a few hundred, some few were serfs bound to wealthy monastic communities. The cities of an earlier age were for the most part “shells” bereft of “administration, ceremony, or commerce,” Lester Little insists.24 To the extent that the countryside was governed, it was where the land-controlling class set up households supported by peasant labor generally commanded by a defensive structure or institution. More in the retrospective view of historians than in reality, the model countryside assumed a geometry of a patchwork of warlords, each lord of a fortress or burg (from which the term “bourgeoisie” derived). Between the Pyrenees and the Elbe, the burg was the center of the medieval city, a clustering of communities which gradually grew up under the protective shadow of the burg. The vagabonds who eventually took up trade established warehouses (ports) in the proximity of the fortresses.25 And eventually as the populations and the wealth of the towns amassed into cities, their inhabitants frequently demanded of the lords separation and free or citizen status. They wished to be excused from the duties and responsibilities which bound the serfs and other vassals under the lord’s protection to the feudal legal order. When the political balance was fortuitous, the free cities of the Middle Ages arose. But the merchant strata grew up through servicing the inevitable imbalances in the primitive self-subsistent systems of feudal agriculture—transferring commodities (foodstuffs, manufactures, cloths, etc.) to demesnes which were temporarily rendered insufficient or whose manufactures had exceeded local demands.
However, in terms of long-distance trade and a moneyed economy, the businesses which were characteristically associated with mature bourgeoisies, it was not the European hinterlands of Germany and France which served as their primary sites of operation. As Lester Little reports:
The first area of intense commercial activity … was northern Italy, an area that united the head of the Adriatic Sea with the Valley of the Po. …
… The earliest significant commercial activity of Latin Christendom was located at the periphery, and was directed outwards to Byzantine Italy, Islamic Spain, and the Scandinavian northern seas. The economic history of the period from the late tenth century through the early twelfth century consists, in part, of the tying into one network of these externally oriented frontier areas, of their amalgamation into a single interdependent economy.26
The most important bourgeoisies which emerged with Europe out of the Dark Ages were located in the Mediterranean and the Low Countries of the north.
By the eighth and ninth centuries, Islam had come to dominate Europe’s access routes to the precious metals, manufactures, silks, and textiles produced in Africa and Asia. Henri Pirenne, the Belgian historian (Mohammed and Charlemagne), had characterized this historical moment by declaring (in somewhat poetic terms) that by the eighth century, the Mediterranean had been transformed into a “Muslim lake.” Summarizing Pirenne’s argument, the English historian Trevor-Roper (now Lord Dacre) wrote:
Gold and silk are used in the barbarian courts. Spices and papyrus find their way to the monasteries of northern Europe. But about AD 700 all these cease. Gold disappears from European currency; eastern luxuries and Syrian merchants from barbarian Europe. A new European society presents itself before us. It is a society based on rural self-sufficiency: self-sufficiency which will afterwards find its expression in the forms of feudalism. …
So Europe was turned in on itself, and society was gradually systematized on its new basis. It was systematized, again in one word, by Charlemagne.27
Pirenne had argued that the Dark Ages were characterized by Islamic control over the seats of civilization and the trade routes of long-distance trade. And until mechanisms were found in Europe to open its doors to peoples of the book, European thought, too, was confined: sequestered in monastic cells in remote locations in Ireland and England or the literary and cultural conservatories—the domiciles of the knowledge which would serve in the reconstruction of Europe—were so radically dissimilar that rather substantially different narratives have emerged to describe these events. Paradoxically those historians who focus on the monastic role, on those communities of the “most perfect men” since their members claimed to be wholly dedicated to prayer and the study of scriptural exegesis, have stressed the importance of secular rulers in the origins of Europe. On the other hand, those historians persuaded that it was the higher Church, bishops, archbishops, and popes, which brought Europe into being, are struck by an anomaly: recognizing that these clerics were drawn from the warrior caste, they nevertheless pursued a theory of governance which would make the Church paramount.
Historians committed to the first interpretation, like Trevor-Roper and Lester Little, argue that the notion of Europe begins with Charlemagne. And they insist that the notion of Europe is closely identified with the reemergence of the Church: Europe is Latin Christendom. Secular authority, from Charles Martel to Charlemagne, used the Church to unify Europe against the Muslim infidel:
When the family of Charles Martel sought to re-create western life, it was not on that old secular basis that they sought to do it. A new impulse was needed; and that new impulse had to be religious. Monasticism, puritanism, rigid doctrine—these were the forces which alone, it seemed, could re-inspire the West, provide the spiritual or intellectual or ideological force to animate the new “feudal” resistance. So Charles Martel, though he secularized Church property, had no intention of undermining the Church. On the contrary, he summoned monks from England and Ireland to reorganize the Frankish Church, and his grandson Charlemagne and his great-grandson Louis the Pious used the great monasteries they founded—“the cultural centers of the Carolingian empire,” as they have been called—as a source of power for a new policy: a policy of alliance with the pope, support of the pope, emancipation of the pope from the still secular Eastern Empire and, ultimately, puritan reform of the papacy. By these methods they would unite the two new cells of religious and feudal power.28
But as Little says somewhere, Charlemagne was essentially a Germanic warrior-king who occupied himself during much of his long reign with fighting wars and preparing to fight wars.29 Governance, as a result, was not the king’s strongest suit. And so he became more and more dependent upon a retinue of educated officials. Teasing out that caveat Trevor-Roper argues that the inspiration for Charlemagne’s administration and its rationale came out of Ireland and England:
By the year 700 European learning had fled to the bogs of Ireland or the wild coast of Northumbria. It was in the monasteries of Ireland that fugitive scholars preserved a knowledge of the Latin and even of the Greek classics. It was in a monastery in Northumbria that the greatest scholar of his time, the greatest historian of the whole Middle Ages, the Venerable Bede, lived and wrote. And it was from the monasteries of Ireland and England, in the eighth and ninth centuries, that English and Irish fugitives would return to a devastated Europe: men like the Englishmen St. Boniface, who would convert the Germans to Christianity, Alcuin of York, the teacher of Charlemagne, or the Irishman John Scotus Erigena, who went to teach at the court of the Emperor Charles the Bald.30
Despite the evident necessity of conceding that much of what was of significance occurred outside the British Isles, Lord Dacre’s account is essentially Anglocentric: Bede, Boniface, Alcuin, and John Scotus came from England bearing the gifts of ancient knowledge. It also lays great emphasis on secular authority, showing particular affection for monarchs. However, in their narratives of this intellectual fertilization which coincided with the appearance of Europe, William Ullmann and Georges Duby explicitly or implicitly took issue. They represent the second mode of interpretation.
Ullmann presented testimony that the collaboration between Charlemagne and Alcuin actually failed, collapsing under the assault of the papacy, another manifestly more sophisticated and centralized seat of learning. Unlike Lord Dacre’s tale of the quest of Anglo-Saxon and Irish holy men, this different narrative reflects something of the intrigues and literary machinations so frequently encountered in the medieval history of the Bishop of Rome’s court.
On Christmas Day in 800 when Charlemagne was anointed “emperor of the Romans” by Pope Leo III, he was being ushered into a world-vision far beyond his imagination. Ullmann assures us that Charlemagne had rejected the pope’s fuller nomination to “supreme governorship of the world”: “Charlemagne objected. For universal governorship, that is, Roman emperorship, he had not intended nor had agreed to accept. His governmental intention was to be in the West what the Byzantine was in the East. What he wanted to see was a parity of position, a kind of coexistence with the East. … Charlemagne was simply a Frankish monarch who had no understanding of the whole involved and (to him) abstruse Roman emperorship ideology.”31
Charlemagne (and Alcuin) resisted, but in 823 with the coronation of his grandson, Lothar I, the papacy had secured the Carolingian rulers as an affirmation of its primacy over the Eastern church, as its protectors, and as instruments of its policies in the creation of Europe: “More important, through the accentuation of the Western ‘Empire’ as a wholly Latin-Christian body, the gulf between East and West considerably widened. The implications of the concept of Europe—and this is what Byzantium clearly perceived—was that the ‘Greeks,’ that is, the Eastern empire, did not belong to Europe. … The empire ruled from Constantinople was considered alien to Europe.”32
In order to avoid the fate of the Church in the East, where the Emperor ruled over the prelates, the high officials of the Roman Church had divided a once united Christendom into two: the Latin Church and the Greek Church. But the two could not be perceived as equals, one had to be superior. This was achieved through a new geography: Europe and non-Europe; and the manufacturing of a new past.33
The power of bishops and popes over the Carolingian kings was part magic and partly due to the fact that the “bishop was the repository of classical culture,” Duby asserts.34 The liturgical act combining anointing and crowning was a mixture of Byzantine and Frankish rituals, legitimated by the supposedly inherited (by “blood”) gift of sapientia, the knowledge of hidden truths, and the industry of the episcopal conservatory: “From the episcopal see a continual renaissance of Latinity flowed forth. This cultural labor was carried out in the school, that workshop that stood alongside the cathedral—there, a small crew of men of all ages set themselves to copying texts, to analyzing sentences, to dreaming up etymologies, endlessly exchanging what they knew with one another, constantly working over that most precious raw material, that treasure of homilies and incantations, the words of God.”35
Among them were the forgers of the Pseud-Isidore and the Benedictus Levita, documents which purportedly provided the doctrine of hierocratic principle just as seven hundred years earlier, a similarly spurious document, a letter from Pope Clement I, had established papal succession from St. Peter.36 Forgeries of other sorts abounded: For one example, having once embraced slavery, the Church now condemned the sale of enslaved Christians to pagans (Muslims) by resurrecting scriptural authorities which had been ignored for centuries.37 And when the time was thought propitious, they brought forward the knowledge of the ancient pagan. The lifting of the veil of the Dark Ages was thus due in part to the introduction into Europe of “pagan” knowledge—the works of Egyptian and Greek scientists and philosophers, a process which germinated during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. The stage was thus set for the disruptive appearance of a medieval bourgeoisie. The moment at which we shall intervene in our pursuit of the antecedents of historical materialism is the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
According to Fernand Braudel, the European world-economy began at the two poles: Italy and the Low Countries. The north was more “industrial,” while the Italian city-states commanded trade and commerce. Braudel characterized the merchants of Bruges, Antwerp, and Lubeck (the Hansa) as carrying on “an elementary kind of capitalism.” But Italy was by far the stronger force—clearly dominant from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.38 Indeed, in the late thirteenth century, the Italian merchant capitalists (Venetian and Genoese) could be said to have begun the colonization of the trade of the Low Countries and the hinterland just as they would colonize Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century.
In 1277, the first Genoese ships put in to Bruges. The establishment of a regular maritime link between the Mediterranean and the North Sea ushered in a decisive invasion by the southerners—for the Genoese were but a foretaste of what was to come: the last of the newcomers, the Venetian galleys, arrived in 1314. For Bruges this could be described both as an annexation and as a new departure. … The arrival of the sailors, ships, and merchants of the Mediterranean brought in a wealth of goods, capital, and commercial and financial techniques.39
This was the first European bourgeoisie, the commercial class which appeared at the beginnings of feudalism. In Classical Athens, more than a millennium and a half before, there are several indications that the Athenians had nurtured a bourgeoisie of aliens and resident aliens (metics)40 but the Greeks had not considered themselves European. Indeed in cultural as well as populational terms, “European” would have been more than a little premature: the Keltoi (Celtics), of whom the ancient Greeks were aware, had not yet been joined by the Germanic, Scandinavian, and Viking tribes to form the basis of the medieval European populations. Regardless, during the Hellenistic Age, this bourgeoisie, like democracy, was extinguished. De Ste. Croix argues that the effective cause of their disappearance was the collaborations secured by the Greek propertied classes, first with the Macedonian and later their Roman overlords.41 Later, as documented in Roman Law, the Roman republic and empire had their commercial classes (negotiators or mercatores), as well. But the last commercial class under Roman authority atrophied with the collapse of the empire.42
As it happens, the medieval commercial class would also come to a dead end, quite literally. The Black Plague of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the tyrants and monarchs of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries extinguished this first bourgeoisie.43 They did not survive to transcend feudalism. The bourgeoisie which did had a very different site of development. The first European world-economic bourgeoisie flourished in the Mediterranean and gradually colonized and spawned from Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean towards the west. Eventually it moved north and was then succeeded by bourgeois formations in Western Europe and Britain. But the process would take nearly five hundred years and it would involve external (that is, long-distance) trade and commercial relations to the west, that is, across the Atlantic.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century, in the midst of social, political, and ideological upheavals which would endure for a further two centuries the Church institutionalized a variant of socialism in the forms of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. In 1209 the Catholic Church incorporated the Franciscans, and in 1213, the Dominicans. They were soon joined by the Carmelites and the Augustinians. These four orders were described as mendicant (begging) orders and penitents (devoted to poverty). They were not a first cause, but a reaction; the Church’s reaction to a social phenomenon which threatened to destroy the Roman Church.
As a consequence of its Carolingian stratagem for the reconstruction of Europe, the Church had become enormously wealthy and closely identified with secular authority. And with the formation of the first bourgeoisie—the bourgeoisie of the Italian city-states which dominated the Middle Ages: Venice, Genoa, Milan, Florence (based on the long-distance Mediterranean trade with Asia and Africa)—vast dislocations occurred in European social stratigraphy. The vastly wealthy houses of the Italian city-states and the feudal royalties were the source of the Church’s higher prelates. And the Church had become identified with the protection of the merchant bourgeoisies and the feudal states. Michael Goodich observes: “Every royal family of Europe was credited with at least one … saint, and more if its policies adhered more closely to those of Rome. The Andrechs of central Europe could boast no less than twenty-one saints and beati between 1150 and 1500. The Castilian royal family numbered four local saints in the thirteenth century alone.”44 There was an identity between wealth and the Church, not simply in institutional terms but family interlocks. The officers of the Church most frequently came from the wealthy and the nobilities. And the Church rewarded its allies with sainthoods.
To be certain, the source of the Church’s wealth was in no way restricted to nepotism. At Rome, Lester Little records that “nearly every operation of the papal government required a money payment, whether a salary, a tax, a fee, a fine, or a bribe.”45 There and elsewhere, high prelates sold offices, and along with the lesser clergy collected tithes and sold indulgences. The result was a “self-financing elite” which could deploy many of its members in the most powerful secular offices in the administrations of kings, princes, barons, and untitled landlords.46 Furthermore, Rodney Hilton recounts, “by the thirteenth century, monasteries not only were recipients of lay benefactions, but actively entered the land and commodity markets, buying land to enlarge or round off their estates, accumulating cash by selling wool, grain or wine, and using their cash reserves to lend money to the chronically embarrassed nobility, usually on the security of land.”47 Such was the result of the Carolingian stratagem of European reconstruction.
The inevitable opposition to this identity between wealth, feudal power, and the Church resulted from the massive dislocation of wealth associated with merchant capitalism, the increasing conflict between the cities and their countrysides, and the onus of exploitation and repression associated with feudal relations and authority.
Between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, it is estimated that the population of Europe increased some 300 percent, much of this increase resulting in new villages, some of it swelling the urban populations of regions now designated Italy, France, Spain, Germany, the Low Countries, and England.48 In the same period, economic specialization appeared: “Cloth was sent from Flanders to the Parisian basin; grain from the Parisian basin to Scandinavia; timber from Scandinavia to the Low Countries; cheese from the Low Countries to Iceland; fish from Iceland to Germany; salt from Germany to England; beer and bacon from England to Flanders.”49 Wool and cloth industries appeared in Flanders, England, and Spain; construction industries (“churches, castles, town walls, communal palaces, covered market-places, and bridges”) appeared all over the area. And as long-distance trade encouraged the organization of fairs in northern Europe, coinage became common by the twelfth century as did the visas of members of Italian merchant companies.50 Adapting to the practices innovated in northern Italian cities, “Merchants held money on deposit from other persons; they exchanged money in varying currencies; and they sometimes extended credit to their depositors by allowing them to overdraw their accounts. In such a way, certain of the essential functions of banking were served by merchants, some of whom, as the economy became increasingly specialized in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, became full-time bankers.”51
As a concomitant to the wealth being amassed by the Church and the commercial classes, peasants, the rural and urban poor suffered calamitously in the twelfth century. Actually, the disasters which heaped upon poverty began at the end of the eleventh century. In 1095, droughts ravished the harvests in England and much of France; in 1097, floods rotted the wheat in Anjou which had been devastated by the drought two years earlier. In the 1120s, Portugal, Anjou, Germany, and Bruges were visited by famine, while merchants hoarded grain or marketed it at prices which were prohibitive. In the 1140s, food was scarce in the Low Countries, France, England, and Catalonia. Famines struck France again in the 1160s, and from 1194 to 1196, heavy rains brought floods and food prices soared in much of Europe. The numbers of poor increased, according to contemporary chroniclers, and little relief was at hand: “At Val-Saint-Pierre seventeen hundred were said to have died each day in 1997.”52 Michel Mollat writes that there are no means of determining the number of the twelfth century’s poor, except that “it seems to have been large. … Without the escape valve provided by the First Crusade, the West might have experienced as early as the end of the eleventh century troubles similar to those that arose in the period 1180–1200. On the fringes of rural society, which remained stable, and even on the outskirts of the cities, which with their newfound vitality were more than hospitable to newcomers, groups of marginals and rebels lived beyond the pale and outside the faith.”53
But Mollat suspects the portents were already present in the early eleventh century: “In 1038 … in Bourges, [bishop] Aymo of Bourbon, led a ‘multitude of unarmed commoners’ (multitudio inermis vulgi) against those who had violated an oath to keep the peace. Was this insurrection one episode in a sporadic series of popular uprisings?”54 Even earlier, Rodney Hilton reports on the sparse evidence of a peasant war in Normandy in 996; but he is in doubt that peasant movements increased in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. And Mollat seems substantiated that Pope Urban II’s call for the First Crusade was more domestic than a concern for Christendom. One evidence for this is that the first crusade was not the one Urban anticipated or authorized. At the appointed hour in 1096, few of the noble crusaders were prepared and so an army of 300,000, mostly peasants, set off for the holy land under the leadership of Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless. By the time the Peasants’ Crusade reached Constantinople, only a third had survived (“a trail of bones reached back to the Rhineland and to France”); and most of the rest were slaughtered when they crossed the Bosphorus.55 Such fanaticism, it is safe to assume, had both social as well as religious origins. The “First” Crusade, two years later, was more noble, thus more professionally military, and ultimately more successful. But when its army took Jerusalem in 1100, Hilton reminds us, “it was the poor in that army, especially those from southern France, who were responsible for the pressure which forced the land-hungry lords to press on to the end.”56
Urban lied in 1095 when at Clermont in France he apparently described eastern churches being defiled and depicted eastern Christians being raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered by infidels (the Turks). As Marcus Bull discerns: “Most Westerners’ understanding of the politics and peoples of the Middle East was vague at best, and Urban exploited this.”57 The fanciful catastrophe in the East, however, masked the real catastrophe in the West where in northern Italy a peasant communal movement had sprung forth and gained momentum in the 1090s in Verona, Caprino, and Padovano;58 and by the second decade of the twelfth century, peasant uprisings were everywhere: “In 1110 peasants of the Beauvaisis burned forests belonging to their bishop. In the Bray region peasants set fire to the suburbs of Poix in 1112. The peasants of Ponthieu invaded Saint-Riquier in 1125, and in Cambresis a castellan was stoned to death in 1127. At the other end of Europe, in Galicia, the bishop of Sahagun had to confront an uprising of ‘field workers and little people’ in 1110.”59 And Immanuel Wallerstein mentions that peasant republics were established in Frisia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.60 Contemporaneously, first in Parma in 1260 under the leadership of the illiterate Gerard Segarelli, and then in Brescia, Novara, Bergamo, Trento, and Modena with Fra Dolcino, the son of a priest, a revolutionary movement termed the Apostles appeared. After three years of siege, some 1,400 Apostles had been defeated by an army under the Bishop of Vercelli in 1307. But before that awful massacre and even afterwards, the popular revolt had attracted peasants, artisans, workers, and even a canon and some nuns.61
Even among the canons of the Church, there were some who made their stands with the poor. In the second quarter of the eleventh century, Peter Damian had denounced avarice and the practice of simony, and then in the 1050s had rejected the possession of private property by priests. In the next century, Arnold of Brescia, whose native city had fomented a communal revolt in the 1130s, took up the cause that Peter Damian had championed. Seeking reconciliation with the Bishop of Rome, Arnold of Brescia had traveled to Rome in 1147 only to be stunned by the wealth he discovered in the papal court. So instead of a truce, Arnold and the cardinals engaged in mutual denunciations; Arnold was expelled from the court and then joined the communal revolt in Rome which had begun in 1143. He was among the leaders of the Roman Commune when it was crushed by the emperor’s army. Ten years later he was hanged and his corpse burned by Frederick Barbarossa. And the emperor’s uncle, Otto of Freising, recorded: “After his corpse had been reduced to ashes in the fire, these were scattered on the Tiber, lest his remains be held in veneration by the mad populace.”62 Like Peter Damian and Ivo of Chartres before him, and like his contemporary, Gerhoh of Reichersberg, Arnold of Brescia had come to the conclusion that “voluntary poverty … was the key to the holy life.”63 But unlike the others, Arnold of Brescia had resorted to violence to reform the Church. On this latter score his closest spiritual companions were heretics like Tanchelm (killed by a priest in 1115), the heretical priests of Ivois (ca. 1120), Henry of Lausanne, Peter de Bruys (the founder of the Petrobrusians), and Éon de l’Étoile.64
The peasant as well as the urban rebellions of the thirteenth century were indisputable class wars, even in the eyes of contemporary chroniclers. Jacques (James) of Vitry, a thirteenth-century monk (and disciple of the Beguine leader, Marie d’Oignies) who would eventually assume the bishopry of Acre, is one of the most famous reporters:
All that the peasant amasses in one year of stubborn toil, the noble devours in an hour. Not content with his lawful revenues, he despoils them by illicit exactions. As wolves devour carrion while the crows croak overhead, awaiting their share of the feast, so when knights pillage their subjects the provosts [their agents] and others of the hellish crew rejoice at the prospect of devouring the remainder. … Ye nobles are ravening wolves; therefore shall ye howl in hell [for you] despoil your subjects and live on the blood and sweat of the poor.65
In northern Italy, the rural commune movement won victories in the diocese of Padua, Milan, and at Bassano, securing the nomination of officials and juridical powers from feudal nobles or high clergy. In France, as the market economy transformed feudal service duties into taxes, urban communes won charters which regulated legal rights and the abolition or regulation of customary taxes. In Lorraine, some 280 charters were established; in the Parisian region, nearly 60; in Picardy, 120 villages won chartered rights.66 Peasants relied on collective action, sometimes (as at Itteville in 1268) on force. In 1233–34, urban mobs associated with the Alleluia movement pillaged in Bologna while the movement swept from city to city throughout Lombardy and Romagna.67 And in 1251, the Pastoureaux movement anticipated the mass and largely peasant uprisings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: “The revolt in maritime Flanders 1323–27; the Jacquerie in the Paris region in 1358; the Tuchin movement in central France, from the 1360s to the end of the fourteenth century; the English rising of 1381; and the wars of the remansas in Catalonia during the 1460s and the 1480s.”68 Apocalyptic, anti-clerical, and often egalitarian, Hilton concludes: “There was one prominent feature which they had in common: the emergence, among some of the participants, of a consciousness of class.”69
Long before Urban’s magnificent distraction, the Church and civil authorities had begun to formulate a stratagem which would marshal Latin Christendom against moral dissent and social rebellion. In 1022, heretics were burned at Orléans and at Milan in 1028; a group similarly designated had been hung at Goslar in 1052. R. I. Moore maintains that these are some of the beginning of a persecuting society: “Religious persecution had, of course, been familiar in the Roman Empire, and remained so in the Byzantine world throughout its history. But in the West, far from being ‘normal’ in medieval society, it faded away with the Roman Empire, and did not reappear until the eleventh century; even then … it became regular and established only gradually during the next hundred years or so.”70
In England, in 1166, Henry II had forbidden assistance by any of his subjects to the heretics he had ferreted out at Oxford. And in 1179, the Third Lateran Council had denounced the Cathari, Paterines, and other heretics; and in 1216, the Fourth Lateran Council had resumed the attack on the enemies of the Church (Cathari) who for two generations had grown rapidly in Languedoc, Provence, and Lombardy.71 By then, of course, the Church was already in the seventh year of its decades-long brutal and bloody war (1208–29) against the Cathars of Albi, the Albigensians.
Rent, taxation, land clearances, famines, and the inflation of food prices, however, were more constant than the wars on the poor that the Church or its secular allies could mount. As Mollat had indicated, though there is no creditable means by which the poor could be numbered, the mass movements of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries provide evidence that they were sufficiently numerous to organize in impressive collectives. In 1212, the Children’s Crusades (one began in Vendôme and marched to Paris; the second, marched from Cologne to Genoa, Venice, Pisa, and Rome) were launched by quite literally visionary young shepherds, massing largely adolescent herdsmen.72 Forty years later, in the midst of devastating famines which reached from England to Italy, very likely one of those young shepherds led the Pastoureaux movement in Orléans and Bourges. Mollat, quoting from contemporary sources (Primat and Saint-Denis) tells us that “leaving animals in their pastures they set out without bidding farewell to either mother or father and entrusted their messianic hopes to the ministerings of outlaw priests who styled themselves bishops.”73 Now, according to Hilton, thieves, exiles, fugitives, and excommunicates joined the herdsmen, quickly transforming into a radical anti-clerical movement: “In particular they attacked in detail the religious orders of the church for their characteristic sins: the Dominicans and Franciscans as vagabonds and hypocrites; Cistercians as greed amassers of flocks and lands; the Benedictines for their pride; the canons for their secular lives; and the bishops and their officials for their pursuit of money. Nor was the Roman curia exempt from attack; the audience welcomed these attacks on the clergy.”74 And though they were dispersed in 1251 when their Shepherd was killed, the movement began again in 1320 at Rouen. But even before the twelfth century, what the Church decried as heresy had begun to loosen the bonds of the poor, transforming them into a noble estate.
From the perspective of eight hundred years or more, the oppositions to feudal rule can be said to have assumed two discrete forms: a heretical attack on the Church and revolutions against the ruling classes.75 And each achieved a socialist discourse. Nonetheless to their contemporaries, particularly those who left their impressions in documents (letters, legislature, decrees, chronicles, and the like), the notion of heresy concealed different social and ideological origins.
Jonathan Sumption believes that it was the lesser clergy, the merchants, and the recruits of the Crusading armies which were the ideological carriers of the heretical opposition. Its form was Manichaeism, dualism.
Already in the first half of the eleventh century, sporadic outbreaks of heresy were occurring in northern Europe, which contemporaries who had read their Augustine described as “Manichaean.” … The cloth merchants of the northern towns often had commercial links with the east. So had many Italian merchants, who might have encountered dualism in Constantinople, in the Dalmatian cities of Ragusa and Spalato, or even, rather later, in Serbia and Croatia. Pilgrims too generally followed the great imperial road from Belgrade to Constantinople which took them through the heartland of Paulician dualism. More important than these causal carriers of the eastern heresy were the crusaders, who encountered dualism both in the Balkans and in Asia Minor.76
R. I. Moore, on the other hand, argues that the sources and forms of heretical doctrine were more complex. Distinguishing between what he terms learned and popular heresy, Moore maintains that early in the eleventh century, indeed some seventy years before the First Crusade, evidence of learned heresy among the educated strata had already surfaced. Among those branded as heretics in 1024 and 1028 there were implications of their exposure to classical literature. Gerard was the leader of the band (which included a countess) executed in 1028. Interrogated by Aribert, the archbishop of Milan, Gerard proclaimed their vow of chastity, abhorrence of meat-eating, and their commitment to communal property and prayer: “It is now established that the formative influence on them … was the Neoplatonist approach to the understanding of the scriptures which had been developed in the late Carolingian schools and was much in vogue both north and south of the Alps at this time. This view laid heavy emphasis on the liberation of the individual from the bonds of fleshly preoccupation through personal abstinence, and on the allegorical interpretation of the scriptures, especially the New Testament.”77
Gerard was described as a peasant, and four years earlier, in 1024, a heretical group made up entirely of illiterate peasants and unfree persons (evidenced by the use of torture in their interrogations) had been discovered by Bishop Gerard of Cambrai. This was an instance of the popular heresy for Moore. Yet their beliefs closely resembled those of the Milan heretics: “They lived, they said, according to the tenor of the Gospels and the Apostles, which they summed up as being ‘to abandon the world, to restrain the appetites of the flesh, to do injury to nobody, to extend charity to everybody of our own faith.’ ‘If these rules are followed,’ they continued, ‘baptism is unnecessary; if they are not it will not lead to salvation.’”78
Marx had declared in 1844 that the “criticism of religion is essentially complete.” But here some eight centuries before a quite different criticism of religion had made its appearance. Instead of a philosophic school of rigorously trained scholars exposing the ideological cover of the State, we find peasants and some drawn even from the enslaved taking a stand against a religious estate which constituted an apparatus of actual power. And rather than the rigors of academic arguments and refutation, these men and women braved torture and death. They understood the risks, and quite frequently went to their deaths proclaiming the rightness of their faith.
It was, of course, partly the times: Christians, even renegade or heretical Christians, believed in the millennium. It had been a thousand years since the birth of Christianity, and it was generally believed that sometime between 1000 and 1033 AD, the world of pain and sin would be overturned. In medieval cultures, the practice of alloying magic with chronology was mixed again with eschatological expectations for the eleventh century which gave free reign to the imaginations of Christians of every estate.79 Ralph Glaber (the Bald), in his Five Books of History written sometime before the first half of the eleventh century, expressed these expectations by illustrating “the apocalyptic prophecy that ‘Satan will be released when a thousand years have passed.’ Accordingly Ralph grouped ominous happenings around the years 1000 and 1033.”80 So among these heretics there was no purpose in adhering to the rules of a Church in which wealth was amassed and corruption of the flesh flourished. And in the course of the eleventh century as their faith in the millennium failed, many heretics seized on a religion based on the teachings of Mani (d. 276), which was no Christianity at all:
They called themselves Christians, based their teachings on the parts of the Bible that they recognized, notably the Gospels and the Acts, clothed much of their doctrine in Christian garb, and increasingly as time went on, some historians now argue, drew closer to Christianity in their attitudes and assumptions. But they differed from Christians at a fundamental point: they believed not in one God but in two. … All their life and teaching was derived from one premise of overwhelming importance, that creation was a dual process: there was a kingdom of good which was immaterial, and a kingdom of evil—the material world—into which their souls had fallen or been led captive, and to which belonged their bodies, the prisons of the evil god.81
And thus through the purest of syllogisms the Christians’ Jehovah became Satan, the evil god. As one dualist told the bishop of Alet: “Everything that exists under the sun and the moon is but corruption and chaos.” And Peter Garcia, another Manichaean, declared during his interrogation by an Inquisition court: “God is perfect; nothing in the world is perfect; therefore nothing in the world was made by God.”82
Manichaeism was for Europeans a new conception of the universe, a conception which was philosophically substantiated when Aristotle’s writings became a part of intellectual life in Europe from the eleventh century. Aristotle’s division of the world between the incorruptible circular motion of the heavens and the corruptible and oppositional rectilinear movement of the terrestrial world confirmed dualist mysticism: the earth as the creation of Satan, the heavens as the creation of God.83 Remnants of this argument would reappear in Kant and Hegel seven hundred years later. Aristotle imposed an opposition between the celestial and terrestrial worlds, and the medieval mystics transposed this into an opposition between God and Satan.84 The Church, in commanding the terrestrial arena, the arena belonging to Satan, marked itself as a creature of Satan. “[The dualist congregations] avoided meat and milk, disapproved of procreation, and ridiculed the sacraments. They were strict dualists, ascribing the creation of all matter to the Devil, and holding the Devil to be coeval with God. They divided themselves into believers and initiates, the latter class being called Cathars, a name which was henceforth used to describe all western dualists. The Greek word ‘Cathar’ (‘purified’) itself suggests an eastern origin for their creed.”85
Aristotle seemed to corroborate this dualism. Since circular motion had no opposition, Aristotle had argued (in De Caelo) it was incorruptible, that is, unchangeable. No change had ever been observed in the heavens, Aristotle insisted. The terrestrial world, on the other hand, was eminently corruptible, changeable. This confirmed the Manichaean vision, an anti-Christian theology. And the justification of dualism was the rottenness and decadence of the Church and secular authority.86 An alternative social vision was needed and Manichaeism provided that.
Manichaeism delivered a theological framework for the heretical ideas and unorthodox opinions which much before dualism stormed into Europe could be found among peasants and others of the lower levels of society. And long after the Inquisition had driven dualism into remote retreats in the mountains and secret little urban communities, rationalist, naturalist, and materialist ideas persisted. But during its years of greatest influence, Manichaeistic dualism coupled with the poverty movement which began in the eleventh century (and continued into the sixteenth) inspired the formation of fanatical sects.
Two of the most important of the radical sects were the Cathari and the Waldensians. These were the heresies (in company with such communist sects as the Humiliati and Communiati) which defined heresy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. These heresies, concomitant with the mass movements of “plebians of town and country,”87 required the Church to mount Crusades, armies, and the Inquisition. They were also the heresies which compelled the Church to incorporate or construct an alternative: the Franciscans (who included the Poor Clares), the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Carmelites.88 And by the thirteenth century, following on the role their founder had played in the Albigensian Crusade, the Dominican order was the Church’s primary repressive tool with regard to heresy. St. Dominic’s order received its papal approval for the purpose of suppressing heresy. Still the vows of these orders adopted many of the characteristics of the poverty movements: they renounced property (retaining no possessions from one day to the next) and adopted poverty and begging as the vita apostolica. For these heretics, this was following the life of Christ. To live like Christ meant to renounce property and material things. In amassing wealth, the Church had pursued an un-Christ-like existence. The instruction of Christ’s life was in poverty, the renunciation of property.
On the margins between dualistic heresies and the mendicant orders stood the religious or pious women who would so radically influence theological debate from the thirteenth century onwards. Forbidden clerical office and largely beyond official supervision and approval, they came to dominate criticism of official corruption. Sometimes as nuns (the Poor Clares, Catherine of Siena, Douceline of Digne), sometimes as lay mystics (Marie of Oignies, Margaret of Cortona, Ida of Nivelles, Marguerite Porete, Margaret of Ypres, Ida of Louvain, Mechthild of Magdeburg, etc.), and sometimes as heretics (Margarita d’Arco, Guglielma, Heilwige Bloemardinne) they appropriated the vita apostolica with a vengeance: experiencing and declaring a special relationship with Christ through Eucharist-inspired visions; preaching the gospel; living lives of poverty; and organizing communes.89 One, Mayfreda de Pirovano, even declared herself “the first pope of the Holy Spirit.”90 Another, Na Prous Boneta, who was burned as a heretic in 1325, had confessed to the Inquisition at Carcassonne, France, that the papacy had been annulled for perpetuity by God after she had been appointed as the body of the Holy Spirit. For ten years, Na Prous had been persecuted as a heretic and heresiarch. Nevertheless, at the end she persisted in her loyalty to St. Francis and Peter John Olivi (“Jesus Christ told her that St. Francis began his order in that same perfection and attitude as had Christ, when he began with his apostles to hold to poverty”), while certain that John XXII, in condemning lepers, Spirituals, and Beguines to death, was the Antichrist.91 Indeed, many women did assume priestly authority and men as well as women were to be found in their religious communities. Caroline Bynum insists that at base, the women’s movement were anti-dualist, encompassing Aquinas’s rejoinder to the Cathars that “the person is his body, not just a soul using a body.”92 Equally significant, it was the sheer number and charismatic force of pious women which transmitted their criticism of corrupt clergy into the foreground of religious discourse: “There is no question that this aspect of thirteenth-century religious women was particularly stressed by men, that it was men in particular who saw women as an alternative to and a criticism of wealth, power and office.”93
As Max Weber had determined, women, particularly women from the privileged classes, were a disproportionately large representation in the learned heretical movements of the thirteenth century. But Bynum agrees with Herbert Grundmann that the presence of women in both heterodox and orthodox movements was remarkable.94 This was not a demographic but an ideological and political effect. Despite the fact that women were denied clerical office, they were held in awe by monastics and their ecstatic spirituality was deemed a counter to the radical anti-materialism of the dualists. John Coakley has detailed how thirteenth-century friars revealed in letters, vitae, and other writings a persistently unfavorable comparison of themselves with women: “The friars’ admiration tended to carry with it an awareness of something lacking in themselves, specifically the privileged contact with God that they ascribed to the women.” In their dreams, ecstasies, and visions, women were thought to have direct and privileged communication with God, an experience denied to most of their male superiors and confessors. “In these friars’ case, the fascination and sense of difference were focused on the women’s relationship to the divine, which the friars saw as privileged, unique, and remote from their own experience.”95 Friars pleaded with their female communicants to intercede with the divine: to correct their ministerial failures and egoistic conceits; to advise them on whether their lives were pleasing to their divine overlords; and to provide substantiation of their holiness. And in her discussion of the social context for this gendered construction of spirituality and mystery, Bynum reminds us of the political:
Theologians and prelates found women’s experiential piety useful in the thirteenth-century fight against heresy. The increased emphasis on bodily miracles and indeed the appearance of new miracles of bodily transformation came at exactly the time of the campaign against Cathar dualism. Women whose bodies became one with the crucified man on the cross in stigmata, and visions in which the consecrated wafer suddenly turned into bleeding meat, were powerful evidence against the Cathar assertion that matter and flesh could not be the creations of a good God. Some of the earliest supporters of this bodily aspect of women’s piety, James of Vitry and Thomas of Cantimpré, held it up explicitly as a reproach to the dualists.96
But women were used by anti-heretic theologians, prelates, and crusaders in another way: as proof that heresy was ungodly.
The vast majority of holy or pious women documented by medieval chroniclers were from the upper classes, the higher and lesser nobility and prominent merchant families.97 The documentation, as such, directly reflects the practice of restricting access to nunneries to wealthy women, just as the Beguine movement was predominantly practiced by women of means who took vows of chastity. Among those women becoming nuns or joining the Beguines, then, there were most naked expressions of disgust for the accumulation of wealth.98 The more radical Poor Clares, of course, emulated Christ and St. Francis in their commitment to voluntary poverty. Nevertheless, these females from the noble or wealthy classes were significantly outnumbered by the women who participated in communes, rebellions, and heretical movements. The presence of these females drawn from the peasant and unfree, the rural and urban poor, is largely attested to by the frequency with which chroniclers typified whores and fornicators among the dissenters and heretics. Moore instructs us that the poor of Christ (paupers Christi) really signified the powerless of Christ, and one of the functions of the guardians of the Church was to reassign them as “somebody else’s poor.”99 Satan’s realms of heresy and prostitution were two such receptacles. Anticipating much of the propaganda to be found in the denunciation of heretics and rebels, the eleventh/twelfth century priest/hermit Robert of Arbrissel saw the women among them as “whores and spurners of men.”100 James Capelli, so Lester Little informs us, was one of the few thirteenth-century anti-Catharists to insist that such charges were false.101
A religious consciousness, Catholic or Cathar, blanketed the elements of feudal and post-feudal socialism. Consciousness of class and the struggle against a ruling class, for instance, assumed an anti-clerical as well as a secular form, and distilled from millenarian prophecy apocalyptic and then revolutionary expectations. Property was an issue of the voluntary poverty movements and as well, in the peasant uprisings and urban revolts, as an articulation of exploitation in the use if not the ownership of the things labor produced. The idealistic impulse of religious consciousness was universalistic—Christendom—making the persistent demands on the Church or its secular ruling class confederates similarly Congregationalist: the claims of the many whom Christ represented or God protected against the conceits of the few who were ungodly. And moral authority, moral superiority resided among the humble and the poor: the poor of Christ, the poor men of Lyon, the pious women who renounced wealth and class privilege. And the thread of a disgust with the world, the domain of Satan and the Antichrist, inspired a rejection of material wealth and a hatred of those whose lives were propelled by greed and decorated with ostentatious accumulations of material things.
Joachim of Fiore (d. 1199 or 1202) was the principal ideologist of the radical poverty movements in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. This is attested to by the condemnation of Joachim’s teaching by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.102 And it was subsequently substantiated by Joachim’s doctrinal reach across the generations and centuries. Joachim’s apocalyptic vision of the coming of a communist society influenced prominent activists in the two centuries which followed his death: among them the Spirituals or Zealots in the Franciscan Order and Fra Dolcino at the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the next. As the condemnation of his works attests, Joachim also inspired institutional as well as intellectual opposition, the latter not always consistent. Among the Scholastics (university-trained and, from 1270 on, increasingly influenced by Aristotle and Averroes), Thomas Aquinas, the most eminent of these scholars, opposed Joachim’s prophecies of the proximity of the world’s end. On the other hand, the Franciscan Minister General, Bonaventura of Bagnoregio, appropriated much of Joachim’s historical prophecy as an antidote to Aristotelianism.103
A Cistercian abbot, Joachim had taken up voluntary poverty during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And from his hermitage in southern Italy he authored his three principal works: Concordia Novi et Veteris Testamenti, Expositio in Apocalypsim, and Psalterium Decem Chordarum. And in these writings, he synthesized the apocalypsism of the Old and New Testaments into secular history and social criticism: “Joachim believed that the history of the world was divided into three periods—the Age of the Father, or the Old Testament; that of the Son, or the New Testament; and the final epoch was that of the Holy Ghost, when spiritual understanding of the Scriptures would be given to all men. According to him this new age would begin after the destruction of the Antichrist, and would be preached by an order of bare-footed monks.”104
Among the Franciscans, the Order split into two warring factions, the Spirituals and the Conventuals. The Spirituals identified closely with Joachim’s prophecy, some concluding that one of several popes was the Antichrist.105 Joachimism became even more extreme after the passing of 1260, the year Joachim had prophesized which would mark the beginning of the Age of the Holy Ghost. In consequence, many Spirituals (and their heirs, the Beguines of Provence), in defiance of their Superiors and successive popes, were declared heretics and fell into the hands of the Inquisition and its secular appendages.106 The famous Dominican inquisitor, Bernard Gui, had summarized their beliefs at the beginning of the fourteenth century, drawing no doubt from his tortured victims:
At the end of the sixth age of the world—in which the world was at that moment—Christ would reject the carnal church. Antichrist would at this time persecute all the religious orders, so that only one-third of the Franciscan Order out of all of them would survive. From this surviving rump about a dozen poor and evangelical men-of-the-spirit would found the spiritual church of the seventh and final stage. Antichrist would die and the whole world would become good and benign. All goods would be held in common, all men would love one another under one shepherd. This golden age would last one hundred years, but through a failure of love, evil would re-enter society, so that Christ would come and usher in the day of the Last Judgement.107
Principal Franciscan-Joachimist ideologists like Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, Pontius Portugati, and Leonard were condemned to perpetual imprisonment; Peter John Olivi was branded a heretic, his followers persecuted and his writings condemned; and many others suffered inquiries, exile, and death. Ubertino da Casale, one of the most prominent Spiritualist intellectuals and a disciple of Angela of Foligno, seems to have kept his head by political and doctrinal evasion before simply disappearing from history.108 It was Fra Dolcino, however, who pushed Joachimism to its revolutionary limits, professing a fourth age when “a good, last emperor would arise … who would kill the cardinals, the secular clergy and most of the religious orders. He would then establish an Angelic Pope chosen by God. Dolcino and all the spiritual men would reign over a society in which private wealth was to be eschewed, but (a significant departure from Franciscan doctrine) in which there would be no mendicancy.”109 As Umberto Eco put it in his novel The Name of the Rose, Dolcino was “a man who did insane things because he put into practice what many saints had preached.”110
The social and political influence of hereticals and near-hereticals, the Franciscan “Spirituals,” the Beguines of Provence, the Dolcinians, the Cathari, the Waldensians, and the other radical sects, emanated less from their heretical ideologies than their coincidence with revolutionary movements. Perhaps this is what Marx had in mind when he referred to “the accidental support which the poor found in the monasteries.”111 Drawn largely from the “more privileged strata of society, notably from the mixture of noble and merchant families which formed the dominant class in the Italian towns,”112 the divergences of the sects were themselves inspired by the recurrent social upheavals which beset rural and even urban Europe:
It was always in the midst of some great revolt or revolution that the revolutionary millenarian group first emerged into daylight. This is equally the case with John Ball and his followers in the English peasants’ revolt of 1381; the extreme Taborites during the early stages of the Hussite revolution in Bohemia, 1419–1421; Thomas Müntzer and his “League of the Elect” in the German peasants’ revolt of 1525; and the Radical Anabaptists who, in the midst of a wave of revolts in the capitals of the ecclesiastical states in northwest Germany, established the “New Jerusalem” at Munster in 1534–1535. What is seldom realized—and what Marxist and right-wing historians have united in concealing—is how little these groups had in common with the mass uprisings which they tried to exploit.113
Among the rural poor, interred in the “backwater” of unrelieved repression and exploitation, the opposition to the first European world economy assumed the form of rebellions. But among the urban privileged, the revulsion against the venalities and social extremes of merchant capitalism was made manifest in a socialistic variant of Christianity.114
So the record of the opposition to materialism begins with Manichaeistic mysticism, and assumes an ideological construction when it converges with social movements of the eleventh century. The Inquisition and centuries-long repression left little behind of the social ideology of the heretics and peasant rebels, but Norman Cohn has provided us with some sense of the latter’s worldviews. In the popular proverbs from the twelfth century one finds: “The poor man works always, worries and labors and weeps, never laughing from his heart, while the rich man laughs and sings”; from their miracle plays: “each man ought to have as much property as every other, and we have nothing we can call our own. The great lords have all the property and poor folk have nothing but suffering and adversity”; and their satires: “Magistrates, provosts, beadles, mayors—nearly all live by robbery. … They all batten on the poor, they all want to despoil them. … They pluck them alive. The stronger robs the weaker”; “I would like to strangle the nobles and the clergy, every one of them. … Good working-men make the wheaten bread but they will never chew it; no, all they get is the siftings from the corn, and from good wine they get nothing but the dregs and from good cloth nothing but the chaff. Everything that is tasty and good goes to the nobles and the clergy.”115 Cohn writes:
On occasion this sullen, passive resentment would give place to a militant egalitarianism. As early as the 1180s a carpenter in central France was moved—as usual by a vision of the Virgin—to found a fraternity which would clear the land of a plague of disbanded mercenaries turned brigand. At first these “crusaders of peace,” as they called themselves, were a pious association … included people of all classes, sanctioned by bishops, pledged not to drink or gamble or swear. But by the time they had coped with the brigands, the Caputiati—so called from their white hooded uniform—had turned into a revolutionary movement of poor folk which proclaimed the equality of all men and insisted that all alike were entitled to the liberty which they had inherited from Adam and Eve. In the end the Caputiati became violent and began to kill nobles, until they were suppressed by armed force.
The socialist political discourse had begun.
When the rich layman came to be seen as Dives he was launched on a metamorphosis which in the course of time was to transform him into the Capitalist of present-day Communist mythology—a father-figure as demonic, in its destructiveness, its cruelty, its gross sensuality, its near-omnipotence, as the demonic cleric of the medieval chiliasts, and as great a deceiver as Antichrist himself. … If it was only towards the close of the Middle Ages that the rich were allotted their regular place in the hosts of Antichrist, a move in that direction started already in the twelfth century.116
For the next several hundred years, this radical ideology and its rationalist and naturalist concomitants would be sequestered in the Church’s official teachings: in the vows, formal declarations (sometimes hypocritically)117 and scholarship of the penitent and missionary orders, in the Southern European mountain retreats of the surviving heresies, and of course in the imaginations and folk-cultures of the rural and urban poor.118
The role that elements among the Franciscans played in subverting feudal rule is suggested by the forty papal bulls issued between 1221 and 1297 to protect Franciscans from civil authorities. In his exegesis of the Encyclical Letter (1882) issued by Leo XIII on the occasion of the seventh centenary of St. Francis’s birth, Rev. Zaremba maintains that “this papal protection of the rights of the Tertiaries [the Franciscan Third Order of lay penitents] considerably contributed to the popularity of the order and its consequent growth, as well as to the social change which weakened the power of the feudal lords over the masses. In particular these issues dealt with certain exemptions and privileges of the Tertiaries, namely: exemption from taking the oath of fealty [from military service, certain public offices, extraordinary taxes, secular judiciary, and] the right to own and freely administer corporate property.” Zaremba concluded, “it is clear that the Third Order contributed greatly in dealing a deathblow to feudalism.”119 During the first two centuries of their existence the Franciscans became famous for denouncing the abuses of the powerful and the profiteering of money lenders.120 They also served to mediate some of the more acute social divisions of feudalism by acting as peace mediators between feuding monarchs and princes, and by founding poorhouses, hospitals, orphanages, and other charitable institutions.121 And in the passionate writings of Francis, Bonaventura, Olivi, Ubertino, and Marsilius of Padua, dame Poverty combated wealth, private property, and oppressive power.122
While the early Franciscans did not live the vita communis, their renunciation of property (“even one’s thoughts”), their commitment to social equality (“fraternity”) with its concomitant absence of hierarchical organization, and their submission to a barter economy (“payment in kind, never in money”) purveyed an anticipation of many of the principles of socialism.123 By accommodating many of the attributes of the popular rebellions, even when as the Spirituals they were reduced to minority factions (the Poor Clares, the Third Order, the Marches of Ancona, the Friars Minor, the Joachimists) within the Order, the Rule of the early Franciscans insinuated presocialist forms within the Church.124
As fate would have it, however, it was the work of a very different sect, the Jesuit Order, which attracted the attention of influential writers in the eighteenth century.125 In the sixteenth century, not long after the founding of the Order, Jesuit scholars like the political philosophers Francisco Suárez and Juan de Mariana had already interrogated contract theory and put forth defenses of the rights of the people in relation to the monarch and even tyrannicide.126 Notwithstanding, the generals of the Society like Claudio Acquaviva, as well as prominent provincials like Edmond Auger, Claude Matthieu, and Henri Samier, were largely caught up in the perplexing politics of the Counter-Reformation. As the papal court’s “shock troops of the Counter-Reformation,” the Society’s “rigorous novitiate and education were designed to prepare Jesuits not for a contemplative life in a monastery but for an active life in the world.”127 Accordingly, Jesuit intellectuals and politicians served as confessors and advisors to some of the most powerful Catholic (and, on occasion, Protestant) secular authorities. Two centuries later, however, the object of interest among European intellectuals was Jesuit missionary activity among South American Indians during the intervening centuries.
In 1549, just short of a decade from their official establishment in 1540, the Jesuit mission in Brazil was begun. And because, perhaps, of their unparalleled capacity for publicity through self-promotion, propaganda documentation, and historiography, the missions—or at least the Jesuit construction of the missions—among the Guarani of present-day Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Paraguay came to intrigue the European intelligentsia. Here were communes (reducciones) of Christian native agriculturalists, whose days were taken up with farming, textile-making, militia training, choral singing, and even the manufacture of European musical instruments. Among the Guarani, the Franciscans had preceded the Jesuits by founding missions in 1580, and compared to the discipline which the Jesuits pursued from 1610 on, Margarita Durán Estragó maintains “Franciscan reductions were open, flexible and adapted to reality, as distinct from those of the Jesuits, where everything was ordered and preestablished.”128 The Jesuit reductions, however, provided the Guarani an alternative to the Spanish Crown’s encomienda (tribute in labor), to slavery, and protection from native enemies.
But the Jesuits had acquired a rather special reputation in the New World and in Europe by their military assistance to the Guarani in the 1630s and 1640s. In those decades the Portuguese and “half breeds” had taken to the practice of taking off thousands of Guarani to São Paulo to be sold as slaves. In 1641, at the battle of Mborore, with Jesuit support the Guarani had defeated the slavers.129 From that moment until the middle of the next century, Morner attests, the Guarani reductions “became a kind of privileged frontier garrison at the disposal of the Spanish authorities of Buenos Aires.”130 All of this came to an end in the mid-eighteenth century with the Spanish-Portuguese treaty of 1750, the Guarani War of 1754–56, and the expulsions of the Jesuits from Latin America.
The founding of the Jesuit and Franciscan reductions in Latin America coincided with the Renaissance’s indulgence in literary utopias. These included Thomas More’s Utopia (1515–16), Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), Tomasso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602 and published in 1623), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantic, and Gerrard Winstanley’s Digger defense, The Law of Freedom (1652). In the post-Renaissance, other utopias, indeed communist utopias followed: L. S. Mercier’s Memoirs of the Year 2500 (1770), Abbé Morelly’s Code of Nature (1775), and Thomas Spence’s History of Crusonia on Robinson Crusoe’s Island (1782).131 And whether or not there is a direct connection to these utopian fantasies, there is evidence that the Jesuit version (rather than the Guarani version) of the reductions was very much in the consciousness of Europe’s intelligentsia. For Montesquieu, the “Jesuit State of Paraguay” (which in the eighteenth century comprised 100,000 people and thirty missions) was comparable to Plato’s Republic. Hegel supposed by “the creation of wants” that the Jesuit missionaries had inserted the Indians into the system of History.132 Commenting on the characterizations of the Jesuits in the writings of Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Montesquieu, Magnus Morner observes: “In spite of the fact that for them the Jesuits were the principal representatives of hypocrisy and superstition, the ‘Jesuit State’ appeared to the great leaders of the Age of Enlightenment above all as an admirable experiment by which European intellect proved its ability to create a society according to given plans.”133 Morner also informs us that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the collective character of the missions inspired the socialist Cunninghame Graham’s book A Vanished Arcadia and induced the Scot historian William Robertson to describe them as an “ideal community.” But while the ex-Jesuit historian Reynal praised the rationalistic and communistic character of the missions, Chateaubriand dwelt on their aesthetic and religious aspects.134
Regardless of how different were the various interpretations of the “Jesuit State,” its very existence constituted an attempt at the realization of the socialist ideal insinuated into the Church five hundred years earlier. The Jesuit Doctrine, Robert Southey believed, skirted heresy; nevertheless in Paraguay the Jesuits sought to establish the perfect commonwealth among the Guarani Indians: “Acting upon these views, they formed a Utopia of their own. The first object was to remove from their people all temptations which are not inherent in human nature; and by establishing as nearly as possible a community of goods, they excluded a large portion of the crimes and miseries which embitter the life of civilized man. For this they had the authority of sages and legislators.”135
For more than two hundred years (with only one brief interruption) the Jesuit missions in Paraguay persevered against hostile colonists, slavers, the private interests and royal and papal intrigues in the metropoles of the Old World, and their own flawed ambitions.136 And Morner concludes: “The reasons for the political and economic influence of the Jesuits, as demonstrated in the Paraguayan Jesuit province, can all be traced back without very many intermediate stages, to theoretic and practical characteristics in the organization of the Jesuit Order, which in its turn was certainly conceived by a medieval Spanish intellect, but still so remarkably resilient that it has resisted the strain of the most widely differing epochs and environments.”137
In 1759 the Jesuits were expelled from Portuguese America, and in 1767 they were expelled from Spanish America; in 1773 their order and their writings were suppressed by Rome and their libraries burned.138 And though in Europe and the New World the Order survived in one guise or another, it was only in Russia and Prussia that Jesuits operated openly during the remainder of the eighteenth century.
The notions of materialism and socialism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were embedded ideologically and institutionally in the most reactionary institution of medieval Europe: the Catholic Church. They survived through the rule of the mendicant orders and the efforts of missionary orders, and through the hidden heresies and the folk cultures of the masses.139 Other mass movements of the poor would arise but neither the Church, its Inquisition or the State could entirely eradicate the identification of wealth with evil. Thus it was that eventually Marx and his more immediate intellectual predecessors would have available to them the sign of the capitalist, the hoarder of material possessions, the thief.
We have now explored four discourses which encompassed meanings for materialism:
1. The Aristotelian: a philosophic critique of the Ionian (Atomistic materialism) tradition. Aristotle denounced this materialism by subverting its premise: the objective world could not be the basis of existence since it is in constant flux, deterioration, corruption. Though originating in the fourth century BC, it reappeared in our interrogation during the reconstruction of Europe (eleventh/ twelfth centuries).
2. Dualism (Manichaeism): Heretical mysticism which identified the world as Satanic. A popular mythology which was propagated by lesser clerics, hysterical merchants, crusaders, pilgrims, and peasant intellectuals. Its theological complement was “scientifically” confirmed by the reintroduction of Aristotle’s writings to European scholars.
3. Classical materialism: Modes of subsistence are the basis of law, politics, custom, consciousness. It was the hegemonic sociohistorical construction of the mercantile bourgeoisies which triumphed in the seventeenth century. As the basis for discursive practices, it was reiterated in the human sciences initiated and developed in the nineteenth century.
4. Historical materialism: The organization of production is the basis of social order. And through the dialectic, the processing of matter has the capacity to qualitatively change the human condition. Socialism is possible because the bourgeoisie have provided the means of mastering nature—the precondition of Socialism.
The re-creation of Europe begun during Carolingian rule resulted in the formulation of an extensively exploitative Europe in collaboration with the revivifying Church. By the thirteenth century, a world-economy had formed in Europe, commanded by the merchant capitalists in the South, supported by a more rudimentary and dependent bourgeoisie in the North. Resistance against the mature social order necessarily took form as an attack on the Church. The ideology of the social movement, that is, Manichaeistic dualism, originated from beyond Europe, in the hinterlands of Croatia, Serbia, Dalmatia, and Asia Minor. As such, the mass movements became identified with heresy. But their real social practice took the form of socialist communities: the destruction of private property as well as representatives of the propertied classes; the reinvigoration of communal property; the reconceptualization of the social and spiritual role of women, etc.140 The ruling classes of Europe, the feudal-political classes, the prelates of the Church, and the wealthy bourgeoisies were compelled to co-opt these heresies in the form of mendicant Catholic orders. It was through these societies, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and later the Jesuits, etc., that a socialist ethos survived over the next several hundred years. Then it reappeared as a popular impulse in the French Revolution and its attendant popular movements in Europe and Britain. Its secular expression eventually included Marxism.
Marx, however, took over many of the presumptions of bourgeois historiography as well. He accepted (with some modification) the stadial historiography as well as its ideological implications. Marx would argue that bourgeois society was a necessary precondition for socialism. He maintained that without the mastery of nature, the unique technological contribution of industrial society, socialism was not possible. We now know differently. The rudiments of Western socialism appeared as early as the thirteenth century—without industrial production.