Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/576

 560 INTELLECT AND FAITH. Averrhoes from uttering the phrase commonly attributed to him — " The Christian faith is impossible ; that of Judaism is a religion of children, that of Islam, a religion of hogs." * Still less credible is the popular assertion which assigns to him the famous speech referring to Moses, Christ, and Mahomet as the three impostors who had deluded the human race. This saying became a convenient formula with which the Church horrified the faithful by attributing it successively to those whom it desired to discredit. Thomas of Cantimpre fathered it upon Simon de Tour- nay, whose paralytic stroke in 1201 he ascribed to this impiety. Gregory IX., when in 1239 he arraigned Frederic II. before the face of Europe, did not hesitate to assert that he was the author of this utterance, which Frederic made haste to deny in the most solemn manner. A certain renegade Dominican named Thomas Scot, who was condemned and imprisoned in Portugal, was said to have been guilty of this blasphemy among others, and the phrase drifted through the centuries until there was a current be- lief that an impious book existed under the title De Tribus Im- postoribuS) the authorship of which was attributed variously to Petrus de Yineis, Boccaccio, Poggio, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Ser- vetus, Bernardino Ochino, Rabelais, Pietro Aretino, Etienne Dolet, Francesco Pucci, Muret, Yanini, and Milton. Queen Christina of Sweden vainly caused all the libraries of Europe to be searched for it, but it remained invisible until, in the eighteenth century, va- rious scribblers put forth volumes to gratify the popular curiosity.f Yet to Frederic II. may be attributed the introduction of Averrhoism in central Europe. In Spain it was so prevalent that about 1260 Alonso X. describes heresies as consisting of two prin- cipal divisions, of which the worst was that which denies the im- mortality of the soul and future rewards and punishments, and in t Th. Cantimpr. Bon. Univers. Lib. n. c. 47. — Matt. Paris ann. 1238. — Hist. Diploni. Frid. II. T. V. pp. 339, 349.— Pelayo, Heterodoxos Espanoles, I. 507-8, 782-3. One of these supposititious Traite des Trois Imposteurs, published at Yver- don in 1768, is written from a pantheistic standpoint, and not without a certain measure of learning. Although it quotes Descartes, there is a somewhat clumsy attempt to represent it as a translation of a tract sent by Frederic II. to Otho of Bavaria.
 * Renan, pp. 22, 29-36, 167-9, 297.