Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/62

 46 THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS. themselves as his disciples. Certain it is that the Council of Yienne, in 1312, treated his memory with great gentleness. While it con- demned with merciless severity the mystic extravagances of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, it found only four errors to note in the voluminous writings of Olivi — errors of merely speculative in- terest, such as are frequent among the schoolmen of the period — and these it pointed out without attributing them to him or even mentioning: his name. These his immediate followers denied his holding, although eventually one of them, curiously enough, be- came a sort of shibboleth among the Olivists. It was that Christ was still alive on the cross when pierced by the lance, and was based on the assertion that the relation in Matthew originally dif- fered in this respect from that in John, and had been altered to secure harmony. All other questions relating to the teachings of Olivi the council referred to the Franciscans for settlement, show- ing that they were deemed of minor importance, after they had been exhaustively debated before it by Bonagrazia da Bergamo in attack and Ubertino da Casale in defence. Thus the council con- demned neither his person nor his writings ; that the result was held as vindicating his orthodoxy was seen when, in 1313, his feast- day was celebrated with unexampled enthusiasm at aSarbonne, and was attended by a concourse equal to that which assembled at the anniversary of the Portiuncula. Moreover, after the heat of the controversy had passed away, the subsequent condemnation of his writings by John XXII. was removed by Sixtus IV., towards the end of the fifteenth century. Olivi's teachings may therefore fairly be concluded to have contained no very revolutionary doctrines. In fact, shortly after his death all the Franciscans of Provence were required to sign an abjuration of his errors, among which was enumerated the one respecting the wound of Christ, but noth- ing was said respecting the graver aberrations subsequently at- tributed to him.* Inq. Tolos. pp. 306, 319.— Coll. Doat. XXVII. fol. 7 sqq.-Lib. i. Clement, i. 1.— Tocco, op. cit. pp. 509-10.— MSS. Bib. Nat. No. 4270, fol. 168.— Franz Ehrle (ubi sup. 1885, p. 544 ; 1886, pp. 389-98, 402-5 ; 1887, pp. 449. 491).— Raymond de Fronciacho (Archiv, 18S7, p. 17). The traditional wrath of the Conventuals was still strong enough in the year 1500 to lead the general chapter held at Terni to forbid, under pain of imprison-
 * Wadding, ann. 1291, No. 13; 1297, No. 35; 1312, No. 4.— Lib. Sententt.