The labour of reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian doctrine did not come easily. Many contributed to it; but none more so than a Dominican called Thomas, a native of Aquino, a small town just south of Rome. The book he worked on between 1265 and his death in 1274, a great compendium of ‘things pertaining to Christianity’,37 was the most comprehensive attempt ever undertaken to synthesise faith with philosophy. Thomas Aquinas himself died thinking that he had failed in his efforts, and that, before the radiant unknowability of God, everything he had written was the merest chaff; in Paris, two years after his death, various of his propositions were condemned by the city’s bishop. It did not take long, though, for the sheer scale of his achievement to be recognised and gratefully acknowledged. In 1323, the seal was set on his reputation when the pope proclaimed him a saint. The result was to enshrine as a bedrock of Catholic theology the conviction that revelation might indeed co-exist with reason. A century after the banning in Paris of Aristotle’s books on natural philosophy, no one had to worry that the study of them might risk heresy. The dimensions that they had opened up – of time, and of space, and of the unchanging order of the stars – were rendered as Christian as scripture itself.
To those who read him in the decades that followed his death, Aquinas seemed like a voice from the radiance of heaven. To Christians long fearful of heresy he offered a double reassurance: that the teachings of the Church were true; and that the light of that truth was manifest even in dimensions that might seem to threaten it. Aristotle was not the only philosopher cited by Aquinas in his great work. There were other pagans too; there were even Saracens and Jews. His readiness to acknowledge them as authorities was a sign, not of any cultural cringe, but of the opposite: an absolute confidence that wisdom was Christian, no matter where it might be found. Reason was a gift from God. Everybody possessed it. The Ten Commandments served not as prescriptions, but as reminders to humanity of what it already knew. They were manifest in the very fabric of the universe. The love of God for his creation was the centre of a circle, to which all parts of the circumference stand in an equal relation. ‘So orderly has everything been fashioned which wheels through mind and space that to contemplate its harmony is to taste of Him.’38
Yet this very sublimity had its shadow. If all of eternity were Christian, then it rendered those who persisted in the ways of heresy, obdurate in their folly, only the more damnable. The slaughter of the Albigensians had set a precedent that was not readily forgotten. Dominicans, for all the care they brought to their work as inquisitors, the painstaking manner in which they applied the methods of Aristotle to the task of identifying heretics, were not immune to fantasies of mass extermination. In 1274, the same year that Aquinas became convinced that his life’s labours had been in vain, a former head of his order, Humbert de Romans, urged crusaders at a council held in Lyon to take their inspiration from Charles Martel, ‘who killed 370,000 of those who came against him with very little loss of his own men’.39 Saracens, heretics, pagans: all, if they threatened Christendom, were to be viewed as legitimate targets for eradication.
Yet against the most determined of all Christ’s foes, there could be no campaign of slaughter. The Jews, Humbert de Romans reminded the council of Lyon, were not to be eliminated. At the end of days, so it had been foretold, they would be brought to baptism; but their fate it was, until then, to serve the Christian people as living witnesses to the workings of divine justice. ‘Although,’ as Innocent III had put it, ‘the Jewish perfidy is in every way worthy of condemnation, nevertheless, because through them the truth of our faith is proved, they are not to be severely oppressed by the faithful.’40 A pallid and mocking display of mercy. Founded as it was on the conviction that the Jews, unlike the Saracens, presented no threat to Christendom, it took for granted their superannuated quality: that they and all their laws, their customs and their learning had been superseded, and now lay withered in the dust. Yet the backwardness of the Jews was not quite as manifest as the Church authorities liked to pretend. Unlike the Waldensians, they had a degree of erudition that put most Christians to shame. Aquinas was not alone in admiring the achievements of their scholarship. Even the pope’s own household had long been managed by Jewish administrators. As a pupil of Abelard had freely acknowledged, ‘A Jew, however poor, if he had ten sons would put them all to letters, not for gain, as the Christians do, but for the understanding of God’s law – and not only his sons, but his daughters.’41
Perhaps it was hardly surprising, then, that the course of reformatio, impatient as it was of rivals, should have brought much suffering to Jews. The ideals that it proclaimed – of a Christendom cleansed of corruption, of a Church robed in light – had provoked among many Christians, in towns and villages across Europe, an escalating hostility to their Jewish neighbours. Long before Conrad of Marburg’s letter to Gregory IX, warning the Pope that heretics were consorting with demons, Jews had been fingered as willing agents of the Devil. They were sorcerers; they were blasphemers; they were enemies of the Church, who, whenever they had the chance, would pollute the sacred vessels used in the eucharist with their spit, their sperm, their shit. Darkest of all, they were murderers. In 1144, the discovery of a young boy’s corpse in a wood outside the English city of Norwich had prompted a priest eager for a local martyr to concoct a host of sensational accusations: that the boy had been kidnapped by the local Jews; that he had been tortured as Christ had been tortured; that he had been offered up as a sacrifice. The story, although widely discounted, had not entirely been discredited; and so, like a plague, it had begun to spread. In time, as similar tales were reported, a further hellish refinement had been added: that the Jews, in a grotesque parody of the eucharist, were in the habit of mixing children’s blood into their ritual bread. That this claim was condemned as a libel first by an imperial commission, and then, in 1253, by the papacy itself, did nothing to stop its spread. Two years later – again in England – another mortal blow to the good name of the Jews was struck. The discovery in Lincoln of the body of a small boy named Hugh at the bottom of a well saw ninety Jews arrested for the murder on the orders of the king himself. Eighteen were hanged. The dead boy, entombed in Lincoln cathedral, was hailed by locals as a martyr. That the papacy pointedly refused to confirm this canonisation did little to check the growth of the cult of Little Saint Hugh.