Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/174

148 We not unfrequently find individual expressions of avowed unbelief. “Beaux seigneurs,” says Captain Bétisac to his comrades when about to die, “I have attended to my spiritual concerns and, in my conscience, I believe I have greatly angered God, having for a long time already erred against the faith, and I cannot believe a word about the Trinity, nor that the Son of God has humbled Himself to such an extent as to come down from Heaven into the carnal body of a woman; and I believe and say that when we die there is no such thing as a soul. … I have held this opinion ever since I became self-conscious, and I shall hold it till the end.” The provost of Paris, Hugues Aubriot, is a violent hater of the clergy; he does not believe in the sacrament of the altar, he makes a mock of it; he does not keep Easter, he does not go to confession. Jacques du Clercq relates that several noblemen, in full possession of their faculties, refused extreme unction. Perhaps we should regard these isolated cases of unbelief less as wilful heresy than as a spontaneous reaction against the incessant and pressing call of the faith, arising from a culture overcharged with religious images and concepts. In any case, they should not be confounded either with the literary and superficial paganism of the Renaissance, nor with the prudent epicureanism of some aristocratic circles from the thirteenth century downward, nor, above all, with the passionate negation of ignorant heretics who had passed the boundary-line between mysticism and pantheism.

The naïve religious conscience of the multitude had no need of intellectual proofs in matters of faith. The mere presence of a visible image of things holy sufficed to establish their truth. No doubts intervened between the sight of all those pictures and statues—the persons of the Trinity, the flames of hell, the innumerable saints—and belief in their reality. All these conceptions became matters of faith in the most direct manner; they passed straight from the state of images to that of convictions, taking root in the mind as pictures clearly outlined and vividly coloured, possessing all the reality claimed for them by the Church, and even a little more.

Now, when faith is too directly connected with a pictured representation of doctrine, it runs the risk of no longer making