A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Church had nothing whatever to do with religion. Rodrigo Borgia was not a particularly bad man.
Apart from conniving at the murder of a few cardinals, he did nothing very wicked. But he had no
more to do with the teaching of Jesus than Tiberius had. He was simply an updated Caesar. The
Church was on to a good thing, and he knew it.
We have seen that history seems to be a story of the pendulum-swings of the human spirit between
evolutionary purpose and mere materialism - that is, between religion and crime. Man needs
material prosperity; it is basic to his survival. But when he has achieved material security, he finds
himself oddly dissatisfied and confused. An instinct tells him that it is now time to turn to more
important matters. This instinct aims ultimately at control: control of his own conscious processes.
He recognises intuitively that such control can only be achieved if he can attach himself to some
greater purpose, like a water-skier to a speedboat. And, absurdly enough, that he could achieve this
aim more satisfactorily in a monastery cell or on a mountain top than in a palace. This is why
Petrarch and Boccaccio became famous all over Europe, in spite of the fact that their books had to
be copied by hand. Petrarch is remembered as the first man who climbed to a hilltop merely to look
at the view. And when Boccaccio described his young men and women telling their risque stories
in the midst of trees and flowers, he was giving expression to a new form of human longing - the
same longing that had swept the Mediterranean world thirteen centuries earlier when the preacher
from Nazareth announced the end of the world and a ‘new deal’ for the human race. What man
wanted instinctively was a ‘new deal’. The plague only focused and intensified that longing. And
the soul of man could begin to grasp its meaning on mountain tops or in the midst of woods and
streams. Yet no one could deny the practical need for palaces - and hovels.
It must have seemed to these men of the late Middle Ages that the Persian prophet Mani was
obviously right when he said that man consists of two warring principles, body and spirit. And this
is why movements like the Cathars were so dangerous to the Church, and were stamped out with
such murderous ferocity. To us, it seems obvious that the Cathars had oversimplified the problem
to the point of absurdity. We know that man does possess two egos, that they appear to be
associated with the double-brain, and that their purpose is to co-operate with each other like two
lumberjacks at either end of a double-handed saw. The Cathars believed that the two principles
were engaged in a war to the death, and that religion demanded that we should starve and humiliate
the conscious ego. Naturally, then, they believed that the popes, with all their wealth, were on the
devil’s side without knowing it. The popes were more reasonable and, in a logical sense, closer to
the truth. They felt that man must learn to balance on a tightrope between body and spirit, and try to
give each its due. They also recognised that man is ignorant and undisciplined and needs some kind
of authority to give his life a basic semblance of order. Since the Cathars wanted to destroy that
authority, they could not be treated with tolerance.
John Wycliffe was another spiritual reformer, the religious equivalent of Petrarch, expressing the
same craving for simplicity and deeper purpose. It was on a visit to Bruges in 1374, as an
ambassador to the papal court, that he was shocked by the worldliness of the Catholic clergy. The
impulse that drove him was identical to the impulse that drove the abbots of Cluny and St Francis
of Assisi - a desire to give people a sense of religious purpose. In Rome, he might well have started
his own religious movement within the Church and ended by being canonised. But he happened to
be an Englishman who lived in a time when the pope was a pawn of the king of France, and
England was at war with France. John of Gaunt used him as a pawn in his own political
machinations. So Wycliffe, by a historical accident, became the first ‘Protestant’. He happened to
concentrate his attack on what was, for the Church, a particularly dangerous point: the notion that