I wrote this in responce to a criticism of one of Mr. Hilaire Belloc's two books on the so called Protestant Reformation. I think however, that my ideas are complete enough to stand on their own, and since they have occupied much of my thoughts for the last two weeks, I am going to go ahead and post them here.
This has been updated 2006-06-12, correcting and clarifying some of the language in responce to comments from Miss Ferret.
"Heresy" is the belief and teaching of an idea contrary to the Faith. Several faiths, religions, believe that there is and can be known the Truth of God's will, revelation, and interaction with man. Truth, that is fact, as opposed to subjective knowledge. These groups would define heresy in contrast to the term "apostasy." This latter term is defined as renouncing that faith, be it Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam. To be an apostate, then, is to "think differently." The heretic, and more so the heresiarch (one who originates or teaches heresy intentionally), is something, someone, different. The heretic is not someone who simply thinks differently, but someone who seeks to deceive others. They profess to teach the Faith, but in actuality teach something contrary to or divergent from it. One who disagrees with a group normally takes one of two paths, [s]he tries to convert the group by influencing it in its normative operation, or [s]he leaves the group entirely. Societies of every sort have deemed it necessary to react strongly to the presence of members who not only deviate from its established norms, but attempt to subvert others to follow in deviancy.
In different times and places, in groups both religious and secular, and of those religious, both Catholic and non-Catholic, have reacted with undue violence to both heresy and apostacy. This (how to react to heresy or apostacy) is, however, a question of discipline, not one of dogma or morality. The Church claims to teach infallibly only in these latter two categories, not in matters of discipline. Still though, I will insist that heresy is not simply a crime of thinking differently. Being a greater threat to the integrity of any faith and/or society, it requires stronger (though still measured and just) response than apostacy. For the reality of each successive heresy is that it did not regard its beliefs as opinions, but that the heresiarch (a teacher of heresy) wished to make doctrine yet more sharp, to define more, and more precisely. The conflict with heresy is and was that this increase of precision resulted in a loss of accuracy. For this reason some protestants accuse the Church of "creating" new dogma, for the most effective way to combat the heresy was to more precisely define what the Church had always taught. To pick its terms yet more carefully, or to create new terminology with the aim to exclude the error that the heresiarchs taught.
Yet even to talk of heresy requires that there be a concept of Truth, of absolute, of something known beyond mere opinion. Both the heresiarch and the orthodox believe this, even most of your original protestants believed it. The unconverted Roman citizen though would not have believed that, [s]he would have held the same sort of moral and philosophical relativism that is prevalent today.
But that aside, that the heretic is to be punished is left beyond doubt. St. Paul, in his epistles (which make up many of the later books of the Bible), states that the heretic is to be "anathema," a word I confess I only vaguely understood the meaning of until researching this reply. The Catholic Encyclopedia's article on "heresy" documents the history of this sentence, tracing it to the Apostles themselves, The article there and the one on anathema itself show how the meaning developed from being synonymous with excommunication (or formal exclusion), to being something more. Once again though, I will differentiate between matters dogma and moral from matters discipline, the particulars of any time require a discipline fitted to that time, and may even in fact be in error without undermining the Church's teaching authority on matters dogma and moral.
France, Gaul, was conquered and assimilated with unprecedented speed, in little more than the lifetime of a man. It went from being something undeniably Other, to being indistinguishable from the Roman Empire. What followed from that was, as you state, the Pax Romana. We disagree though in our understanding of the process by which it disintegrated, and it is a material disagreement. As a matter of historical fact, it is either the case that Gaul was conquered by some other, perhaps rougher and/or cruder, civilization, or it is the case that the Roman Empire simply disintegrated without being conquered. It is not a question of opinion, but rather one of fact, which happened?
The Roman Empire faced only one other Civilization: the Persians, who shared a (relatively) short boundary with Rome, largely separated by significant desert. While Alexander had some success in conquering the Persians, Rome had little and, by the end of the 1st Century CE, made little or no attempt. Surrounding Rome to the south and north (to the west was obviously the Atlantic) and parts of the East, were much more sparsely populated areas, highly influenced by Rome in language and organization, though differing in prosperity and thus in art, refinement, and morality. It was indeed a rougher, more enterprising life: it was the difference between subsistence living and civilization.
These groups largely envied the corporate life of Rome, and were jealous of it. They wanted not to destroy it, as Carthage sought to destroy Rome and Rome Carthage, but to join it. They did so by recruitment into its armies, by invasion, or by what would today be called "Illegal immigration": simply crossing the borders with an intent to join the corporate body in whatever form proves possible. The Roman legions and their auxiliaries, recruitable only from the (relatively small) body of free or freed men in the Empire, were called to a sort of police action. The "barbarians" stood no chance of facing them in the field, they might win a battle or two, but the outcome of any conflict was assured. Rather, than repelling any invasion then, the job of the legions (and their auxiliaries) was to settle the peace, dispense (what passed for) justice, and reestablish order. Thus from the 2nd century CE (the 100s and on) you see Rome facing more or less consistent and constant fighting, but no real warfare, no clash of civilizations. Concurrent to this, you see a slow but increasing reluctance among the free and senatorial classes (the other class being slave, and thus ineligible) to join the army. As a result, the senators, each responsible for providing his quota of recruits, increasingly find these recruits from among the "barbarians," that is from those who have come to be part of Rome, but are not fully assimilated to it, and among those not part of Rome, but wishing to be so.
Thus it came to be that Rome "fell" to a Visgoth who was a Roman General, and who held a Roman citizenship. A general who was fighting Rome as consequence of a disagreement partly about pay and partly about rank & military honors. Having assisted in destorying a true barbarian invasion, he was dissatisfied with his reward, and proceeded to overthrow Rome twice, each time setting up a new emperor in place of the old. It was in the second "fall" of Rome that he sacked it. Similar patterns hold for the other "barbarnian" "conquests." It is important to remember as you look at this part of history, that Rome had a habit of retaining a name long after it had ceased to be a true description. Thus the "visgoth" auxillaries had long ceased to be comprised of just those of visgoth ancestry, had long sense ceased to be even mostly visgothic. Later in history this would explain how Clovis and his successors would be "Rex Francorum" and not "Rex Galliae."
As Rome aged, its central government became increasingly powerless, or perhaps more accurately, less willing to exercise its power. The center of the Roman world had moved to Byzantium, where there was little interest in the normal concerns of the west. As a result, the authority of the local representatives, the senators and the generals, proportionately greater. The title "rex" grew in use, denoting that leader of the local military presence, also acting as administrator for the (Roman) government in the area. With time, these reges came to fight each other, not for conquest, the rule of law would be the same regardless of the winner, still Roman either way, but for the control of the tax revenues and treasure held by the other. With time, some of these reges then would be more powerful and more significant than others. This flows rather naturally into is a time of fedualism, in which each local lord is theoretically subject to a more powerful lord, exercising more or less independence as his military might and support waxed or waned. Either way, each lord considered himself part of one Christendom, part of one civilization. The concept of nation had not as yet really been developed, although the concept of "foreigner" had already become something local to a region. Still, as I said, there were no "nations" in a modern sense, thus you see knights and lords holding estates under the vassalage of differing, sometimes even mutually antagonistic, lords and kings.
The remarkable thing is not that Rome dissolved, the remarkable thing is that as it dissolved, law and learning were preserved and increased. For while during the dissolution illiteracy did increase, there was in fact a sort of "dark ages" to be exaggerated by later historians, it is smaller and of shorter duration than one would expect. Reference our own modern inability to reconcile the influx of large immigrant bodies, both here in the United States with the influx of hispanics, and there with the influx of muslims. As a better example, reference how long it took, despite the increases of technology and the greater (cheaper) access to learning (books), for the US to reconcile the influx of first Irish and then eastern europeans (Polish and Italians among others). You see the same sort of phobia of the foreign then towards the Irish and then (later) Italians as you see now towards the hispanics, and with less of the lawlessness that marks the modern day influx.
In a time when a the parchment alone for a Bible cost 10 years income, much less the hand lettering, you see a (relatively) rapid conversion and assimilation into somewhat more national and ethnic bodies that would form the backdrop of the reformation, each nominally subject to one of a handful of Catholic authorities, but in actuality subject only to the local baron, duke, or earl (or their equivalents in other languages). Moreover, you see a decided lack of fragmentation of language. While the languages did indeed fragment as a matter of daily use, giving rise to English, French, Italian, Spanish, and so on, the governing class continued to know and be fluent in one latin language.
That this should happen might not be remarkable had Europe been left to its own devices as it attempted to cope with this dissolution. It was not. From the East it faced the first true threat to its existence that it had seen in centuries. A flood of asian peoples, mongols, breathed life and increased violence into a troublesome little sect mimicking Christianity in the middle east: islam. Fueled by the combination of that (undeniably violent) doctrine, and that new energy, it flooded over the south and east of the Empire. It then came across Gibraltar, overwhelmed Spain, and nearly conquered France. It poored around the other edge of the Mediterranean, and was (barely) held in check by Constantinople (spelling). It flooded across the Mediteranian itself, and was held back by the sea battle of Leptano (spelling). The Empire, or what was left of it, was besieged. The same peoples (mongols), further north, developed into the Huns, and raged across north eastern Europe, again threatening to overwhelm and destroy.
Still further north, a separate people, the Scandinavians, started (for reasons I do not know) to turn increasingly to raiding and pillaging. So successful was this that civilization in England (which had been transformed in language by those auxiliary troops settled there by Rome) was nearly lost in England, nearly destroyed by this new threat. This was a true clash of civilizations, a clash of cultures, and of peoples. However, Europe did not so much change as prevail. The western Empire halted, but could not turn back the Moslem. The Empire barely repelled the Huns. England and Gaul converted and absorbed the Scandinavians, creating in those Scandinavians that remained (in France, England, and Ireland) citizens, not of some new government or governing body, but the same governing structure and even largely the same economic structures that were recovering from the loss of centralization that was Rome. In the process Scandinavia was so depopulated that the change is noticeable despite the lack of surviving written record from those far northern areas.
Thus started the crusades. Christendom (for by that point the Empire and its heirs was entirely Christian, the Church having preserved what could be preserved, reformed what could be reformed (though not all was yet reformed when it comes to matters discipline)) was imperiled by the Muslim. For while the Hun and the Scandinavian had been stopped and/or converted, the Moslem yet held 2/3rds of the Empire, and continued to threaten (militarily) the remaining 1/3rd. The response was the only one possible. Society has no intrinsic value, no intrinsic right to exist. It exists or ceases to exist only by virtue of the willingness of its members to defend it from threats subtle and threats violent. and Islam then (as it might be becoming again, if the jihadist elements have their way) was truly a violent threat. Those who did not convert were enslaved outright, taxed into poverty (and often enslaved for their debt), or killed outright. They existed in bondage, and cheered their rescue by the crusader, both in Spain, and, later, in the Middle East.
During this time, the Albigensesian heresy arose, primarily in France. Coming into existence, around 1025 CE, the Church battled this heresy for the next 200 years. First trying both diplomatic and civil remedies, it gradually became increasingly harsh, with the use of force authorized in the 1170s, AT LEAST partly in response to the rioting, insurrection, looting, and assassination with which the Albigensians were devastating Southern France. Though theoretically condemning war and capital punishment, they were FAR from peaceful, pacifistic spiritualists. (It is, in an intellectual sense, interesting that they should condemn war or capital punishment, when they not only tolerated but encouraged suicide and universal celibacy. This discrepancy may explain the disparity between their professed avoidance of war and the reality of their civil insurrection. Alternatively, it is equally possible that their own clergy condemned this behavior as immoral, just as Pope Innocent III and his bishops attempted to reign in the excessive force on the part of orthodox French civil authorities in the late 1100s and 1200s.) Once force was authorized, greed is sufficient to explain the degeneration into conquest that occurred. Still, it would be unjust and inaccurate to place this fully at the feet of the Church, as Pope Innocent III and his bishops and legates condemned the excess and attempted (fruitlessly) to restrain the violence and massacre.
Even so, this authorized use of force, and then unauthorized use of excessive and inordinate force, failed to control or stem this heresy. An Inquisition was thus established, intended to replace the essentially mob action with a true legal process, and a true intent to achieve the salvation of souls. Not everything done by the inquisition is justifiable. It did use torture, though more rarely and more moderately than any other court in existence at that time. It did sentence some to death, though only a tiny fraction, 1-3% of those it tried, to death, even though without it, these people, and many more who were innocent, would have almost certainly died at the hands of the mob. BUT, as historians looking at the documentary evidence left behind are increasingly admitting, it was NOT the mass murdering, mass torturing, blood thirsty kangaroo court that it was made out to be by protestant and atheistic historians of the 16th and 17th centuries would later make it out to be. The popular, common knowledge image of the inquisition, both in France, and later in Spain, is 99% false. For more information on this, you could start with a BBC documentary on the inquisitions produced in 1994 (unfortunately, I do not have better bibliographic information for it than that, my own knowledge of that documentary is because it is cited in Matthew Arnold's audio book "Fire and Sword" produced by Saint Joseph Communications).
Was Christendom, as a civilization, much less as a unity, worth this cost in human life? That is a question whose answer remains in doubt. If we fail to make it so, then it was not. If we persist in reforming, in forming, ourselves and persist in perpetuating our society (both of which the culture as a whole is failing at, more markedly so in Europe than here, but in a very real way on both continents), then we can make the cost of the crusades less than the light of civilization that Christendom can shine around the world. If we refuse to create the next generation, if we refuse to form ourselves into citizens worthy of the prosperity, liberty, and morality that our ancestors have bequeathed to us, then the society of the future, a muslim one, will look back at the crusades as a darker time than any other.
Either way, more here was at stake than simply the unity of Christendom, a unity that would be lost in the protestant revolt anyway. Even historians hostile to the Church have been forced to admit that in the case of the Albigenses, what was at stake was nothing less than civilization in western Europe. It is not merely a question of if that civilization would be Christian, or Albigensian, or pluriform, but whether the peoples to survive would in fact be recognizably civilized. So hostile to the rule of law and to all (not just Christianity) that our western civilization is predicated on were they.
But I challenge you to look more deeply into the inquisitions, both in France and Spain (for there is no Inquisition that can be called "The Inquisition," there were 3 separate inquisitions), to look at scholarship on it from the last 20 years. So much of the black legend is purely protestant propaganda. It never had the size, pervasiveness, or power that most school texts would have you believe.
The religious wars, especially in England, brought far more than extortion to the Catholics. For every protestant that "Bloody Mary" killed (and for now at least I make no attempt to defend her, though I reserve the right to change my mind on that at some future point), you can find someone killed by BOTH Henry VIII and Elizabeth. That is, the protestants killed two to one what Mary did. Remember that the victors write the histories here, and that while Mary killed the newly rich and the powerful, Henry and Elizabeth's crimes would have made a lesser impression, targeting as they were the priests, monks, and nuns first and the general populace only second. Much of the fighting in that era might well have been unjustifiable. Matthew Arnold (referenced earlier) disagrees with Belloc about the possibility of rescuing Christendom from shipwreck in that storm of revolt and heresy. Both both agree that this was NOT, as it is popularly portrayed, a case of virtuous protestant leaders attempting to create a society of religious tolerance and intelligent debate. Rather, the protestants were quick to use any means (including all those methods of torture and execution they claim were typical of the spanish inquisition) to suppress any disagreement in areas they gained ascendancy in.
Faced with that, how could those who remained Catholic do anything other than fight? To submit was to face the exact persecution you claim the Church is responsible for. While I agree with you on the death penalty, I cannot agree with you that the Christian is called to avoid all forms of judgement. That was not the message of Christ when he drove the money changers out from the temple. A quick, trivial, text search of the Bible shows 7 references to false prophets, those who would profess teaching authority they did not have, in the Gospels alone. Surely you do not think Christ intended us to trust everyone, to fail to judge the false prophet from the true? There is a sort of judgement we cannot as individuals make: we cannot determine with accuracy the state of a person's soul, for we cannot know what occurs in that infinite moment of death. It is this that is referred to when you read "judge not lest you be judged." And yes, individuals in the Church, even bishops and priests, have been guilty of doing exactly this, they are as human as you or I. Yet still, it remains both possible and necessary that Christians, as must all men, exercise judgement in determining good and evil in their own actions, and those around them. It would not be wise for me to surround myself with habitual liars and thieves, yet I cannot determine who is a worthy companion, worthy friend, or who would make a good spouse without exercising judgement.
Nor did Christ condemn all government and all military action. Nowhere do you see in the New Testament either Christ or the apostles telling those soldiers who came to follow Christ that they must leave the military, and take up some more peacable trade. Rather, we see the Baptist's command to soldiers is to avoid extortion, false accusation, and to be satisfied with their pay (Luke 3:14). Later, Christ would tell the Jews to give to Caesar what is Caesar's, that is to pay their taxes and be good Roman citizens where citizenship did not conflict with their religious duties (such as not worshiping idols).