was a vacillating one. Rational interpretation, timid credulity, or the suspicion of diabolical ruses, have the upper hand by turns. The Church did its best to combat superstitions. Friar Richard, the popular preacher at Paris, has the mandrakes brought to him to be burned, "which many foolish people kept in safe places, having such great faith in this ordure, that, indeed, they firmly believed, that so long as they had it (provided it were very neatly wrapped up in silk or linen folds) they would never be poor so long as they lived."
Dogmatic theology was always studious to inculcate the exact distinction between matters of faith and of superstition. Benedictions and conjurations, says Denis the Carthusian in his treatise Contra vitia superstitionum, have no effect in themselves. They operate only in so far as they are pronounced as humble prayers, with pious intention and placing one’s hope in God. Since popular belief, nevertheless, attributes magical virtue to them, it would be better that the clergy forbade these practices altogether."
Unhappily, the zeal of the Church for the purity of the faith did not affect demonomania. Its own doctrine prevented it from uprooting belief in it. For it kept to the norm, fixed by the authority of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas: Omnia quae visibiliter fiunt in hoc mundo, possunt fieri per daemones.[1] Conjurations, says Denis, continuing the argument we have just cited, often take effect in spite of the absence of a pious intention, because then the devil has taken a hand in it. This ambiguity left room for a good deal of uncertainty. The fear of sorcery and the blind fury of persecution continued to darken the mental atmosphere of the age. The official confirmation of both the theory and the practice of persecution was effected in the last quarter of the fifteenth century by the Malleus maleficarum, the Hammer for Witches, by two German Dominicans, which appeared in 1487, and by the bull, Summis desiderantes, of Pope Innocent VIII, of 1484.
So towards the end of the Middle Ages this dark system of delusion and cruelty grew slowly to completion. All the deficiencies of medieval thinking and its inherent tendencies
- ↑ All that happens visibly in this world, can be done by demons.
