Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/581

 THE RENAISSANCE. 505 Averrhoism had thus fairly conquered a position for itself, and it is one of the inscrutable problems why the Inquisition, so unre- lenting in its suppression of minor aberrations, should have con- ceded impunity to speculations which not only sapped the foun- dations of Christian faith, but by plain implication denied all the doctrines on which were based the wealth and power of the hier- archy. Even the University of Paris, so vigilant in its guard over orthodoxy, seems during the remainder of the fourteenth century to have abstained from condemning Averrhoism and its deductions, although there w T ere numerous decisions against minute errors of scholastic theology. Yet to Gerson Averrhoes was still the most insolent adversary of the faith ; he was the man who had condemned all religions as bad, but that of the Christians as w r orst of all, for they daily ate their God ; and, in the allegorical paintings of Orcagna, Traini, Taddeo Gaddi, and their successors, Averrhoes commonly figures as the impersonation of rebellious unbelief.* It was not till 1512 that Averrhoism had its first recorded vic- tim since Peter of Abano, in the person of Hermann of Ryswick, w^ho, in 1499, had been condemned for teaching its materialistic doctrines — that matter is uncreated and has existed with God from the beginning, that the soul dies with the body, and that angels, w T hether good or bad, are not created by God. He abjured and was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, but escaped and per- sisted in propagating his errors. When again apprehended, in 1512, the inquisitor at The Hague had no hesitation in handing him over as a relapsed to the secular arm, and he was duly burned. f In northern Europe, where scholastic theology was engaged in mortal combat w r ith Humanism, rigor like this is to be looked for, but the case w^as different in Italy. There letters had long before got the better of faith. The infection of culture and philosophy, of elegant paganism, pervaded all the more elevated ranks of so- ciety. A succession of cultured popes, who were temporal princes rather than vicars of Christ, and w T ho prided themselves on the patronage of scholars, could turn aside from the affairs of state to Ejusd. contra Medicum Lib. u. (Ed. Basil. 1581, p. 1098). — Decamerone, Giorn. I. Nov. 3.— Marina, Theorie des Cortes, Trad. Fleury, Paris, 1822, II, 515. t D'Argentre* I. n. 342. — Alph. de Castro adv. Haereses, Lib. n. s. v. Angelus.
 * Gerson. sup. Magnificat. Tract, ix. (Ed. 1489, 89f, 91f ).— Renan, p. 314.