And this element in the middle age, for the most part ignored by those
writers who have treated it pre-eminently as the "Age of Faith"--this
rebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of which has made the
delineation of the middle age by the writers of the Romantic school in
France, by Victor Hugo for instance in Notre-Dame de Paris, so
suggestive and exciting, is found alike in the history of Abelard and
the legend of Tannhaeuser. More and more, as we come to mark changes and
distinctions of temper in what is often in one all-embracing confusion
called the middle age, this rebellious element, this sinister claim for
liberty of heart and thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian
movement, connected so strangely with the history of Provencal poetry,
is deeply tinged with it. A touch of it makes the Franciscan order, with
its poetry, its mysticism, its "illumination," from the point of view of
religious authority, justly suspect. It influences the thoughts of those
obscure prophetical writers, like Joachim of Flora, strange dreamers in
a world of flowery rhetoric of that third and final dispensation of a
"spirit of freedom," in which law shall have passed away.
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