THE AGE OF FAITH IN THE WEST--(_Concluded_).
EFFECT OF THE EASTERN OR MILITARY ATTACK.--GENERAL REVIEW OF THE AGE OF
FAITH.
_The Fall of Constantinople.--Its momentary Effect on the Italian
System._
GENERAL REVIEW OF THE INTELLECTUAL CONDITION IN THE AGE OF
FAITH.--_Supernaturalism and its Logic spread all over Europe.--It is
destroyed by the Jews and Arabians.--Its total Extinction._
_The Jewish Physicians.--Their Acquirements and Influence.--Their
Collision with the Imposture-medicine of Europe.--Their Effect on the
higher Classes.--Opposition to them._
_Two Impulses, the Intellectual and Moral, operating against the
Mediaeval state of Things.--Downfall of the Italian System through the
intellectual Impulse from the West and the moral from the North.--Action
of the former through Astronomy.--Origin of the moral Impulse.--Their
conjoint irresistible Effect.--Discovery of the state of Affairs in
Italy.--The Writings of Machiavelli.--What the Church had actually
done._
_Entire Movement of the Italian System determined from a consideration
of the four Revolts against it._
[Sidenote: The Eastern pressure.] From the West I have now to return to
the East, and to describe the pressure made by Mohammedanism on that
side. It is illustrated by many great events, but, above all, by the
fall of Constantinople. The Greek Church, so long out of sight that it
is perhaps almost forgotten by the reader, comes for a moment before us
like a spectre from the dead.
[Sidenote: Invasions of the Turks.] A wandering tribe of Turks had found
its way into Asia Minor, and, under its leader Ertogrul and his son
Othman, consolidated its power and commenced extending its influence by
possessions taken from the sultans of Iconium and the Byzantine empire.
The third prince of the race instituted the Janissaries, a remarkable
military force, and commenced driving the Greeks out of Asia Minor. His
son Soliman crossed the Hellespont and captured Gallipoli, thus securing
a foothold in Europe, A.D. 1358.
[Sidenote: Extension of their power in Europe.] This accomplished, the
Turkish influence began to extend rapidly. Thrace, Macedon, and Servia
were subdued. Sigismund, the King of Hungary, was overthrown at the
battle of Nicopolis by Bajazet. Southern Greece, the countries along the
Danube, submitted, and Constantinople would have fallen had it not been
for the unexpected irruption of Tamerlane, who defeated Bajazet and took
him prisoner. The reign of Mohammed I., who succeeded, was occupied in
the restoration of Turkish affairs. Under Amurath II., the possession of
the Euxine shore was obtained, the fortifications across the Isthmus of
Corinth were stormed, and the Peloponnesus entered.
[Sidenote: The Byzantine sovereigns apply to the West.] Mohammed II.
became the Sultan of the Turks A.D. 1451. From the moment of his
accession, he turned all his powers to the capture of Constantinople.
Its sovereigns had long foreseen the inevitable event, and had made
repeated attempts to secure military aid from the West. They were ready
to surrender their religious belief. On this principle, the monk Barlaam
was despatched on an embassy to Benedict XII. to propose the reunion of
the Greek and Latin Churches, as it was delicately termed, and to
obtain, as an equivalent for the concession, an army of Franks. As the
danger became more urgent, John Palaeologus I. sought an interview with
Urban V., and, having been purified from his heresies respecting the
supremacy of the pope and the double procession of the Holy Ghost, was
presented before the pontiff in the Church of St. Peter. The Greek
monarch, after three genuflexions, was permitted to kiss the feet of the
holy father and to lead by its bridle his mule. But, though they might
have the will, the popes had lost the power, and these great submissions
were productive of no good. Thirty years subsequently, Manuel, the son
and successor of Palaeologus, took what might have seemed a more certain
course. He travelled to Paris and to London to lay his distress before
the kings of France and England; but he received only pity, not aid. At
the Council of Constance Byzantine ambassadors appeared. It was,
however, reserved for the synods of Ferrara and of Florence to mature,
as far as might be, the negotiation. The second son of John Palaeologus
journeyed again into Italy, A.D. 1438; and while Eugenius was being
deposed in the chamber at Basle, he was consummating the union of the
East and West in the Cathedral of Florence. [Sidenote: The Greek Church
yields to the Latin.] In the pulpit of that edifice, on the sixth of
July of that year, a Roman cardinal and a Greek archbishop embraced each
other before the people; Te Deum was chanted in Greek, mass was
celebrated in Latin, and the Creed was read with the "Filioque." The
successor of Constantine the Great had given up his religion, but he had
received no equivalent--no aid. The state of the Church, its disorders
and schisms, rendered any community of action in the West impossible.
[Sidenote: Mohammed II.] The last, the inevitable hour at length struck.
Mohammed II. is said to have been a learned man, able to express himself
in five different languages; skilful in mathematics, especially in their
practical application to engineering; an admirer of the fine arts;
prodigal in his liberality to Italian painters. In Asia Minor, as in
Spain, there was free thinking among the disciples of the Prophet. It
was affirmed that the sultan, in his moments of relaxation, was often
heard to deride the religion of his country as an imposture. His doubts
in that particular were, however, compensated for by his determination
to carry out the intention of so many of his Mohammedan
predecessors--the seizure of Constantinople.
[Sidenote: The siege of Constantinople.] At this time the venerable city
had so greatly declined that it contained only 100,000 inhabitants--out
of them only 4970 able or willing to bear arms. The besieging force was
more than a quarter of a million of men. As Mohammed pressed forward his
works, the despairing emperor in vain looked for the long-promised
effectual Western aid. In its extremity, the devoted metropolis was
divided by religious feuds; and when a Latin priest officiated in St.
Sophia, there were many who exclaimed that they would rather see the
turban of the sultan than the tiara of the pope. In several particulars
the siege of Constantinople marked out the end of old ages and the
beginning of new. Its walls were shaken by the battering rams of the
past, and overthrown by cannon, just then coming into general use. Upon
a plank road, shipping was passed through the open country, in the
darkness of a single night, a distance of ten miles. The works were
pushed forward toward the walls, on the top of which the sentinels at
length could hear the shouts of the Turks by their nocturnal fires. They
were sounds such as Constantinople might well listen to. She had taught
something different for many a long year. "God is God; there is none but
God." In the streets an image of the Virgin was carried in solemn
procession. Now or never she must come to the help of those who had done
so much for her, who had made her a queen in heaven and a goddess upon
earth. The cry of her worshippers was in vain.
[Sidenote: Fall of the city.] On May 29th, 1453, the assault was
delivered. Constantine Palaeologus, the last of the Roman emperors,
putting off his purple, that no man might recognize and insult his
corpse when the catastrophe was over, fell, as became a Roman emperor,
in the breach. After his death resistance ceased, and the victorious
Turks poured into the town. To the Church of St. Sophia there rushed a
promiscuous crowd of women and children, priests, monks, religious
virgins, and--men. Superstitious to the last, in this supreme moment
they expected the fulfilment of a prophecy that, when the Turks should
have forced their way to the square before that church, their progress
would be arrested, for an angel with a sword in his hand would descend
from heaven and save the city of the Lord. The Turks burst into the
square, but the angel never came.
More than two thirds of the inhabitants of Constantinople were carried
prisoners into the Turkish camp--the men for servitude, the women for a
still more evil fate. The churches were sacked. From the dome of St.
Sophia its glories were torn down. The divine images, for the sake of
which Christendom had been sundered in former days, unresistingly
submitted to the pious rage of the Mohammedans without working a single
miracle, and, stripped of their gems and gold, were brought to their
proper value in the vile uses of kitchens and stables. On that same day
the Muezzin ascended the loftiest turret of St. Sophia, and over the
City of the Trinity proclaimed the Oneness of God. The sultan performed
his prayers at the great altar, directing the edifice to be purified
from its idolatries and consecrated to the worship of God. Thence he
repaired to the palace, and, reflecting on the instability of human
prosperity, repeated, as he entered it, the Persian verse: "The spider
has woven his web in the imperial palace; the owl hath sung her watch
song on the towers of Afrasiab."
This solemn event--the fall of Constantinople--accomplished, there was
no need of any reconciliation of the Greek and Latin Churches. The sword
of Mohammed had settled their dispute. Constantinople had submitted to
the fate of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Carthage. [Sidenote: Terror
of Christendom at the fall of Constantinople.] Christendom was struck
with consternation. The advance of the Turks in Europe was now very
rapid. Corinth and Athens fell, and the reduction of Greece was
completed. The confines of Italy were approached A.D. 1461. The
Mohammedan flag confronted that peninsula along the Adriatic coast. In
twenty years more Italy was invaded. Otranto was taken; its bishop
killed at the door of his church. At this period, it was admitted that
the Turkish infantry, cavalry, and artillery were the best in the world.
Soliman the Magnificent took Belgrade A.D. 1520. [Sidenote: Progress of
the Turks.] Nine years afterwards the Turks besieged Vienna, but were
repulsed. Soliman now prepared for the subjugation of Italy, and was
only diverted from it by an accident which turned him upon the
Venetians. It was not until the battle of Lepanto that the Turkish
advance was fairly checked. Even as it was, in the complicated policy
and intrigues of Europe its different sovereigns could not trust one
another; their common faith had ceased to be a common bond: in all it
had been weakened, in some destroyed. Aeneas Sylvius, speaking of
Christendom, says, "It is a body without a head, a republic without laws
or magistrates. The pope or the emperor may shine as lofty titles, an
splendid images; but they are unable to command, and no one is willing
to obey." But, during this period of Turkish aggression, had not the
religious dissensions of Christendom been decently composed, there was
imminent danger that Europe would have been Mohammedanized. A bitter
experience of past ages, as well as of the present, had taught it that
the Roman Church was utterly powerless against such attacks. Safety was
to be looked for, not in any celestial aid, but in physical knowledge
and pecuniary resources, carried out in the organization of armies and
fleets. Had her authority been derived from the source she pretended,
she should have found an all-sufficient protection in prayer--indeed,
not even that should have been required. Men discovered at last that her
Litanies and her miracles were equally of no use, and that she must
trust, like any other human tyranny, to cannon and the sword.
[Sidenote: Effect of the Turkish invasion.] The Turkish aggression led
to the staying of the democratic outbreak in the bosom of the
Church--the abstaining for a season from any farther sapping of the
papal autocracy. It was necessary that ecclesiastical disputes, if they
could not be ended, should, at all events, be kept for a time in
abeyance, and so indeed they were, until the pent-up dissensions burst
forth in "the Reformation." And thus, as we have related, by Mohammedan
knowledge in the West, papal Christianity was well-nigh brought to ruin;
thus, by a strange paradox, the Mohammedan sword in the East gave it for
a little longer a renewed lease of political power, though never again
of life.
[Sidenote: Nicolas V. a patron of art.] To Nicolas V., a learned and
able pope, the catastrophe of Constantinople was the death-blow. He had
been the intimate friend of Cosmo de' Medici, and from him had imbibed a
taste for letters and art, but, like his patron, he had no love for
liberty. It was thus through commerce that the papacy first learned to
turn to art. The ensuing development of Europe was really based on the
commerce of upper Italy, and not upon the Church. The statesmen of
Florence were the inventors of the balance of power. A lover of
literature, Nicolas was the founder of the Vatican Library. He clearly
perceived the only course in which the Roman system could be directed;
that it was unfit for, and, indeed, incompatible with science, but might
be brought into unison with art. Its influence upon the reason was gone,
but the senses yet remained for it. [Sidenote: Gradual rise of the fine
arts.] In continuing his policy, the succeeding popes acted with wisdom.
They gratified the genius of their institutions, of their country, and
their age. In the abundant leisure of monasteries, the monks had found
occupation in the illumination of manuscripts. From the execution of
miniatures they gradually rose to an undertaking of greater works. In
that manner painting had originated in Italy in the twelfth century.
Sculpture, at first merged in architecture, had extricated herself from
that bondage in the fourteenth. The mendicant orders, acquiring wealth,
became munificent patrons. From caligraphic illustrations to the grand
works of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle is a prodigious advance, yet it
took but a short time to accomplish it.
[Sidenote: Review of the Age of Faith.] I have now completed the history
of the European Age of Faith as far as is necessary for the purposes of
this book. It embraces a period of more than a thousand years, counting
from the reign of Constantine. It remains to consider the intellectual
peculiarity that marks the whole period--to review briefly the agents
that exerted an influence upon it and conducted it to its close.
[Sidenote: Philosophical peculiarities of the Age of Faith.]
Philosophically, the most remarkable peculiarity is the employment of a
false logic, a total misconception of the nature of evidence. It is
illustrated by miracle-proofs, trial by battle, ordeal tests, and a
universal belief in supernatural agency even for objectless purposes. On
the principles of this logic, if the authenticity of a thing or the
proof of a statement be required, it is supposed to be furnished by an
astounding illustration of something else. If the character of a
princess is assailed, she offers a champion; he proves victorious, and
therefore she was not frail. [Sidenote: The character of its logic.] If
a national assembly, after a long discussion, cannot decide "whether
children should inherit the property of their father during the lifetime
of their grandfather," an equal number of equal combatants is chosen for
each side; they fight; the champions of the children prevail, and
therefore the law is fixed in their favour. A relic of some martyr is
bought at a great price; no one seeks to criticize the channel through
which it has come, but every one asks, Can it work a miracle? A vast
institution demands the implicit obedience of all men. It justifies its
claim, not by the history of the past, but by promises and threats of
the future. A decrepit crone is suspected of witchcraft. She is stripped
naked and thrown into the nearest pond: if she sinks, she is innocent;
if she swims, she is in commerce with the Devil. In all such cases the
intrinsic peculiarity of the logic is obvious enough; it shows a
complete misconception of the nature of evidence. [Sidenote: Its
adoption of supernaturalism.] Yet this ratiocination governed Europe for
a thousand years, giving birth to those marvellous and supernatural
explanations of physical phenomena and events upon which we now look
back with unfeigned surprise, half disbelieving that it was possible for
our ancestors to have credited such things. [Sidenote: The Jews and
Saracens destroy supernaturalism.] Against this preposterous logic the
Mohammedans and Jews struck the first blows. We have already heard what
Algazzali the Arabian says respecting the enchanter who would prove that
three are more than ten by changing a stick into a serpent. The
circumstances under which the Jewish physicians acted we shall consider
presently.
It will not be useless to devote a little space to this belief in the
supernatural. It offers an opportunity of showing how false notions may
become universal, embody themselves in law and practical life, and
wonderful to be said, how they may, without anything being done to
destroy them, vanish from sight of themselves, like night-spectres
before the day. At present we only encounter them among the lowest
peasant grades, or among those who have been purposely kept in the most
abject state of ignorance. Less than a century ago the clergy of Spain
wished to have the Opera prohibited, because that ungodly entertainment
had given rise to a want of rain; but now, in a country so
intellectually backward as that--a witch was burnt there so lately as
A.D. 1781--such an attempt would call up sly wit, and make the rabble of
Madrid suspect that the archbishop was smarting under the rivalry of the
prima donna, and that he was furbishing up the rusty ecclesiastical
enginery to sustain his cause.
[Sidenote: Respective influence of the clergy, the lawyers, and
physicians.] In the day of their power the ecclesiastical profession
were the supporters of this delusion. They found it suitable to their
interests, and, by dint of at first persuading others to believe, they
at last, by habit, came to believe in it themselves. The Mohammedans and
Jews were the first to assail it philosophically and by sarcasm, but its
final ruin was brought about by the action of the two other professions,
the legal and the medical. The lawyers, whose advent to power is seen in
the history of Philip the Fair, and whose rise from that time was very
rapid, were obliged to introduce the true methods of evidence; the
physicians, from their pursuits, were perpetually led to the material
explanation of natural phenomena in contradistinction to the mystical.
It is to the honour of both these professions that they never sought for
a perpetuation of power by schemes of vast organization, never attempted
to delude mankind by stupendous impostures, never compelled them to
desist from the expression of their thoughts, and even from thinking, by
alliances with civil power. Far from being the determined antagonists of
human knowledge, they uniformly fostered it, and, in its trials,
defended it. The lawyers were hated because they replaced supernatural
logic by philosophical logic; the physicians, because they broke down
the profitable but mendacious system of miracle-cures.
[Sidenote: Position of the Church.] Yet the Church is not without
excuse. In all her varied history it was impossible to disentangle her
from the principles which at the beginning had entered into her
political organization. For good or evil, right or wrong, her necessity
required that she should put herself forth as the possessor of all
knowledge within the reach of human intellect--the infallible arbitress
of every question that should arise among men. Doubtless it was a
splendid imposture, capable for a time of yielding great results, but
sooner or later certain to be unmasked. Early discovering the antagonism
of science, which could not fail, in due season, to subject her
pretensions to investigation, she lent herself to a systematic delusion
of the illiterate, and thereby tried to put off that fatal day when
creeds engendered in the darkness would have to be examined in the
light, enforcing her attempt with an unsparing, often with a bloody
hand. [Sidenote: She could not extricate herself from her false
position.] It was for this reason that, when the inevitable time of
trial came, no intellectual defence could be made in her behalf, and
hence there only remained a recourse to physical and political
compulsion. But such a compulsion, under such circumstances, is not only
a testimony to the intrinsic weakness of that for which it is invoked,
it is also a token that they who resort to it have lost all faith in any
inherent power of the system they are supporting, and that, in truth, it
is fast coming to an end.
[Sidenote: Successive order in supernatural ideas.] The reader will
remark, from the incidents connected with supernatural delusions now to
be related, that they follow a law of continuous variation, the
particular embodiment they assumed changing with the condition of the
human mind at each epoch under examination. For ages they are implicitly
believed in by all classes; then, to a few, but the number perpetually
increasing, they become an idle story of bare-faced imposture. At last
humanity wakens from its delusion--its dream. The final rejection of the
whole, in spite of the wonderful amount of testimony which for ages had
accumulated, occurs spontaneously the moment that pyschical development
has reached a certain point. There can be no more striking illustration
of the definite advancement of the human mind. The boy who is
terror-stricken in a dark room insensibly dismisses his idle fears as he
grows up to be a man.
[Sidenote: Oriental magicians--Simon Magus.] Clemens Romanus and
Anastasius Sinaita, speaking of Simon Magus, say that he could make
himself invisible; that he formed a man out of air; that he could pass
bodily through mountains without being obstructed thereby; that he could
fly and sit unharmed in flames; that he constructed animated statues and
self-moving furniture, and not only changed his countenance into the
similitude of many other men, but that his whole body could be
transformed into the shape of a goat, a sheep, a snake; that, as he
walked in the street, he cast many shadows in different directions; that
he could make trees suddenly spring up in desert places; and, on one
occasion, compelled an enchanted sickle to go into a field and reap
twice as much in one day as if it had been used by a man. [Sidenote:
Greek thaumaturgists.] Of Apollonius of Tyana we are told that, after an
unbroken silence of five years, he comprehended the languages of all
animals and all men; that, under circumstances very picturesquely
related, he detected the genius of a plague at Ephesus, and dragged him,
self-convicted, before the people; that, at the wedding-dinner of
Menippus, he caused all the dishes and viands to vanish, thereby
compelling the bride to acknowledge that she was a vampire, intending to
eat the flesh and lap the blood of her husband in the night; that he
exhibited the prodigy of being in many places at the same time; raised a
young woman from the dead; and, finally, weary of the world, ascended
bodily into heaven.
[Sidenote: Introduction of an Arabian element.] As Arabian influence
spread, ideas of Oriental aspect appear. There are peris who live on
perfumes, and divs who are poisoned by them; enchanted palaces; moving
statues; veiled prophets, like Mokanna; brazen flying horses; charmed
arrows; dervises who can project their soul into the body of a dead
animal, giving it temporary life; enchanted rings, to make the wearer
invisible, or give him two different bodies at the same time; ghouls who
live in cemeteries, and at night eat the flesh of dead men. As the
European counterpart of these Perso-Arabic ideas, there are fairies, and
their dancing by moonlight, their tampering with children, and imposing
changelings on horror-stricken mothers. [Sidenote: Introduction of
European sorcery and witchcraft.] Every one believes that rain and wind
may be purchased of wizards, and that fair weather may be obtained and
storms abated by prayer. Whoever attains to wealth or eminence does so
by a compact with Satan, signed with blood. The head of the Church,
Sylvester II., makes a brazen head, which speaks to him prophetically.
He finds underground treasures in a subterranean magic palace beneath a
mountain. The protestator of the Greek emperor is accused of a
conspiracy against his master's life by making invisible men. Robert
Grostete, the Bishop of Lincoln, makes another speaking head. Nay, more,
Albertus Magnus constructs a complete brazen man, so cunningly contrived
as to serve him for a domestic. This was at the time that Thomas Aquinas
was living with him. The household trouble arising from the excessive
garrulity of this simulacrum grew so intolerable--for it was incessantly
making mischief among the other inmates--that Thomas, unable to bear it
any longer, took a hammer and broke the troublesome android to pieces.
[Sidenote: These ideas infect all classes.] This reverend father, known
among his contemporaries as the "seraphic doctor," was not without
experience in the mysterious craft. Annoyed by the frequent passing of
horses near his dwelling, he constructed a magical horse of brass, and
buried it in the road. From that moment no animal could be made to pass
his door. Among brazen heads of great celebrity is that of Friar Bacon
and Friar Bungy. This oracle announced, "Time is; time was; time is
passed;" perhaps it was some kind of clock. The alchemist Peter d'Apono
had seven spirits in glass bottles. He had entrapped them by baiting
with distilled dew, and imprisoned them safely by dexterously putting in
the corks. He is the same who possessed a secret which it is greatly to
be regretted that he did not divulge for the benefit of chemists who
have come after him, that, whatever money he paid, within the space of
one hour's time came back of itself again into his pocket. That was
better than even the philosopher's stone.
[Sidenote: Modifications of supernaturalism.] These supernatural notions
were at different times modified by two intrusive elements, the first
being the Perso-Arabic just alluded to, the second derived from the
north of Europe. This element was witchcraft; for, though long before,
among Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, decrepit women were known as
witches--as the Thessalian crone who raised a corpse from the dead for
Sextus by lashing it with a snake--it was not until a later period that
this element was fairly developed. [Sidenote: The persecutions for
witchcraft.] A bull of Pope Innocent VIII., published A.D. 1484, says,
"It has come to our ears that numbers of both sexes do not avoid to have
intercourse with the infernal fiends, and that by their sorceries they
afflict both man and beast. They blight the marriage-bed; destroy the
births of women and the increase of cattle; they blast the corn on the
ground, the grapes in the vineyard, the fruits of the trees, and the
grass and herbs of the field." At this time, therefore, the head of the
Church had not relinquished a belief in these delusions. The
consequences of the punishment he ordained were very dreadful. In the
valleys of the Alps many hundred aged women were committed to the flames
under an accusation of denying Christ, dishonouring the crucifix, and
solemnizing a devil's sabbath in company with the fiend. Such
persecutions, begun by papal authority, continued among illiterate
zealots till late times, and, as is well known, were practised even in
America. Very masculine minds fell into these delusions. Thus Luther, in
his work on the abuses attendant on private masses, says that he had
conferences with the Devil on that subject, passing many bitter nights
and much restless and wearisome repose; that once, in particular, Satan
came to him in the dead of the night, when he was just awakened out of
sleep. [Sidenote: Experiences of Luther.] "The Devil," says Luther,
"knows well enough how to construct his arguments, and to urge them with
the skill of a master. He delivers himself with a grave and yet with a
shrill voice. Nor does he use circumlocutions and beat about the bush,
but excels in forcible statements and quick rejoinders. I no longer
wonder that the persons whom he assails in this way are occasionally
found dead in their beds. He is able to compress and throttle, and more
than once he has so assaulted me and driven my soul into a corner that I
have felt as if the next moment it must leave my body. I am of opinion
that Gesner and OEcolampadius came in that manner to their deaths. The
Devil's manner of opening a debate is pleasant enough, but he soon urges
things so peremptorily that the respondent in a short time knows not how
to acquit himself."
[Sidenote: English wizards--Scotch witches.] Social eminence is no
preservative from social delusion. When it was affirmed that Agnes
Sampson, with two hundred other Scotch witches, had sailed in sieves
from Leith to North Berwick church to hold a banquet with the Devil,
James I. had the torture applied to the wretched woman, and took
pleasure in putting appropriate questions to her after the racking had
been duly prolonged. It then came out that the two hundred crones had
baptized and drowned a black cat, thereby raising a dreadful storm in
which the ship that carried the king narrowly escaped being wrecked.
Upon this Agnes was condemned to the flames. She died protesting her
innocence, and piteously calling on Jesus to have mercy on her, for
Christian men would not. On the accession of James to the English throne
he procured an act of Parliament against any one convicted of
witchcraft, sorcery, or enchantment, or having commerce with the Devil.
Under this monstrous statute many persons suffered. At this time England
was intellectually in a very backward state. [Sidenote: French and
English legal proceedings.] The statute remained until 1736 unrepealed.
The French preceded the English in putting a stop to these atrocities;
for Louis XIV., A.D. 1672, by an order in council, forbade the tribunals
from inflicting penalty in accusations of sorcery.
Can the reader of the preceding paragraphs here pause without demanding
of himself the value of human testimony? All these delusions, which
occupied the minds of our forefathers, and from which not even the
powerful and learned were free, have totally passed away. [Sidenote: The
total disappearance of these delusions.] The moonlight has now no
fairies; the solitude no genius; the darkness no ghost, no goblin. There
is no necromancer who can raise the dead from their graves--no one who
has sold his soul to the Devil and signed the contract with his
blood--no angry apparition to rebuke the crone who has disquieted him.
Divination, agromancy, pyromancy, hydromancy, cheiromancy, augury,
interpreting of dreams, oracles, sorcery, astrology, have all gone. It
is 350 years since the last sepulchral lamp was found, and that was near
Rome. There are no gorgons, hydras, chimaeras; no familiars; no incubus
or succubus. The housewives of Holland no longer bring forth sooterkins
by sitting over lighted chauffers. No longer do captains buy of Lapland
witches favourable winds; no longer do our churches resound with prayers
against the baleful influences of comets, though there still linger in
some of our noble old rituals forms of supplication for dry weather and
rain, useless but not unpleasing reminiscences of the past. The
apothecary no longer says prayers over the mortar in which he is
pounding to impart a divine afflatus to his drugs. Who is there now that
pays fees to a relic or goes to a saint-shrine to be cured? These
delusions have vanished with the night to which they appertained, yet
they were the delusions of fifteen hundred years. In their support might
be produced a greater mass of human testimony than probably could be
brought to bear on any other matter of belief in the entire history of
man; and yet, in the nineteenth century, we have come to the conclusion
that the whole, from the beginning to the end, was a deception.
[Sidenote: Value of human testimony.] Let him, therefore, who is
disposed to balance the testimony of past ages against the dictates of
his own reason ponder on this strange history; let him who relies on the
authority of human evidence in the guidance of his opinions now settle
with himself what that evidence is worth.
[Sidenote: Supernaturalism appertains to a period of life.] But, though
in one sense this history is humiliating to the philosopher, in another
it is full of interest. Supernaturalism, both in the individual and in
society, appertains to a definite period of life. It is shaken off as
men and nations approach maturity. The child and the youth people
solitude and darkness with unrealities. The adult does not so much
convince himself of their fictitious nature by reasoning on the results
of his experience--he grows out of them, as we see that society has
done. Nevertheless, his emancipation is quickened if he is among those
who instruct his curiosity and deride his fears. It was in this manner
that the decline of supernaturalism in the West was very much
accelerated by Jewish physicians. They, more than the lawyers, were
concerned in the ending of these delusions. [Sidenote: Influence of the
Jews on supernaturalism.] These apparitions, as is the nature of their
kind, vanished as soon as the crowing of the Aesculapian cock announced
that the intellectual day of Europe was on the point of breaking. The
Jews held in their hands much of the trade of the world; they were in
perpetual movement and commercial intercommunication. Locomotion--for
such is always its result--tended to make them intellectual. The
persecutions under which they had long suffered bound their distant
communities together. The Spanish Jews knew very well what was going on
among their co-religionists beyond the Euphrates. As Cabanis says, "They
were our factors and bankers before we knew how to read; they were also
our first physicians." To this it may be added that they were, for
centuries, the only men in Europe who saw the course of human affairs
from the most general point of view.
The Hellenizing Jewish physicians inoculated the Arabs with learning on
their first meeting with them in Alexandria, obtaining a private and
personal influence with many of khalifs, and from that central point of
power giving an intellectual character to the entire Saracenic movement.
We have already seen that in this they were greatly favoured by the
approximation of their unitarianism to that of the Mohammedans. The
intellectual activity of the Asiatic and African Jews soon communicated
an impulse to those of Europe. The Hebrew doctor was viewed by the
vulgar with wonder, fear, and hatred; no crime could be imputed to him
too incredible. Thus Zedekias, the physician to Charles the Bald, was
asserted to have devoured at one meal, in the presence of the court, a
waggon-load of hay, together with its horses and driver. [Sidenote:
Writings of Jewish physicians.] The titles of some of the works that
appeared among them deserve mention, as displaying a strong contrast
with the mystical designations in vogue. Thus Isaac Ben Soleiman, an
Egyptian, wrote "On Fevers," "On Medicine," "On Food and Remedies," "On
the Pulse," "On Philosophy," "On Melancholy," "An Introduction to
Logic." The simplicity of these titles displays an intellectual
clearness and a precision of thought which have ever been shown by the
Israelites. They are in themselves sufficient to convince us of the
strong common sense which these men were silently infusing into the
literature of Western Europe in ages of concealment and mystification.
Roger Bacon, at a much later time, gave to one of his works the title of
"The Green Lion;" to another, "The Treatise of Three Words."
Since it was by the power and patronage of the Saracens that the Jewish
physicians were acting, it is not surprising that the language used in
many of their compositions was Arabic. Translations were, however,
commonly made into Hebrew, and, at a subsequent period, into Latin.
Through the ninth century the Asiatic colleges maintained their previous
celebrity in certain branches of knowledge. Thus the Jew Shabtai Donolo
was obliged to go to Bagdad to complete his studies in astronomy.
[Sidenote: Foundation of colleges.] As Arabian influence extended itself
into Sicily and Italy, Jewish intelligence accompanied it, and schools
were founded at Tarentum, Salerno, Bari, and other places. Here the Arab
and Jew Orientalists first amalgamated with a truly European
element--the Greek--as is shown by the circumstance that in the college
at Salerno instruction was given through the medium of all three
languages. At one time, Pontus taught in Greek, Abdallah in Arabic, and
Elisha in Hebrew. A similar influence of the Arab and Jew combined
founded the University of Montpellier.
[Sidenote: Medical studies among the Jews.] After the foundation of
medical colleges, the progress of medicine among the Jews was very
rapid. Judged by our standard, in some respects it was peculiar. Thus,
they looked upon the practice of surgery as altogether mechanical, and
therefore ignoble. A long list of eminent names might be extracted from
the tenth and eleventh centuries. In it we should find Haroun of
Cordova, Jehuda of Fez, Amram of Toledo. Already it was apparent that
the Saracenic movement would aid in developing the intelligence of
barbarian Western Europe through Hebrew physicians, in spite of
opposition encountered from theological ideas imported from
Constantinople and Rome. Mohammedanism had all along been the patron of
physical science; paganizing Christianity not only repudiated it, but
exhibited towards it sentiments of contemptuous disdain and hatred.
[Sidenote: Imposture-medicine.] Hence physicians were viewed by the
Church with dislike, and regarded as atheists by the people, who held
firmly to the lessons they had been taught that cures must be wrought by
relics of martyrs and bones of saints, by prayers and intercessions, and
that each region of the body was under some spiritual charge--the first
joint of the right thumb being in the care of God the Father, the second
under that of the blessed Virgin, and so on of other parts. For each
disease there was a saint. A man with sore eyes must invoke St. Clara,
but if it were an inflammation elsewhere he must turn to St. Anthony. An
ague would demand the assistance of St. Pernel. For the propitiating of
these celestial beings it was necessary that fees should be paid, and
thus the practice of imposture-medicine became a great source of profit.
In all this there was no other intention than that of extracting money
from the illiterate. With men of education and position it was
different. Bishops, princes, kings, and popes had each in private his
Hebrew doctor, though all understood that he was a contraband luxury, in
many countries pointedly and absolutely prohibited by the law.
[Sidenote: The rabbis cultivate medicine and other sciences.] In the
eleventh century nearly all the physicians in Europe were Jews. This was
due to two different causes: the Church would tolerate no interference
with her spiritual methods of treating disease, which formed one of her
most productive sources of gain; and the study of medicine had been
formally introduced into the rabbinical schools. The monk was prohibited
a pursuit which gave to the rabbi an honourable emolument. From the
older institutions offshoots in quick succession appeared, particularly
in France. Thus the school at Narbonne was under the presidency of
Doctor Rabbi Abou. There was also a flourishing school at Arles. In
these institutions instruction was given through the medium of Hebrew
and Arabic, the Greek element present at Salerno being here wanting. In
the French schools, to the former languages Latin and Provencal were, in
the course of time, added. The versatility of acquirement among the
physicians, who were taking the lead in this intellectual movement, is
illustrated both by the Spanish and French Jews. Some, like Djanah, a
native of Cordova, acquired reputation in grammar, criticism, astronomy;
others in poetry or theology.
If thus the social condition of the rabbis, who drew no income from
their religious duties, induced them to combine the practice of medicine
with their pursuits, great facilities had arisen for mental culture
through the establishment of so many schools. Henceforth the Jewish
physician is recognised as combining with his professional skill a
profound knowledge of theology, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy,
music, law. In a singular manner he stands aloof in the barbarian
societies among whom he lives, looking down like a philosopher upon
their idolatries, permitting, or even excusing them, like a statesman.
[Sidenote: Writings of the Spanish-Jewish physicians.] Of those who thus
adorned the eleventh century was Rabbi Solomon Ben Isaac, better known
under the abbreviation Raschi--called by his countrymen the Prince of
Commentators. He was equally at home in writing commentaries on the
Talmud, or in giving instructions for great surgical operations, as the
Caesarean section. He was the greatest French physician of his age. Spain
during the same century, produced a worthy competitor to him, Ebn Zohr,
physician to the court of Seville. His writings were in Hebrew, Arabic,
Syriac, and both in prose and verse. He composed a treatise on the cure
of diseases, and two on fevers. In singular contrast with the
superstitious notions of the times, he possessed a correct view of the
morbific nature of marsh miasm. He was followed by Ben Ezra, a Jew of
Toledo, who was at once a physician, philosopher, mathematician,
astronomer, critic, poet. He travelled all over Europe and Asia, being
held in captivity for some time in India. Among his medical writings was
a work on theoretical and practical medicine, entitled "Book of Proofs."
Through the wars arising in Spain between the Mohammedans and
Christians, many learned Jews were driven into France, imparting to that
country, by their presence, a new intellectual impulse. Of such were
Aben Tybbon, who gave to his own profession a pharmaceutical tendency by
insisting on the study of botany and art of preparing drugs. Ben Kimchi,
a Narbonnese physician and grammarian, wrote commentaries on the Bible,
sacred and moral poems, a Hebrew grammar. Notwithstanding the opposition
of the ecclesiastics, William, the Lord of Montpellier, passed an edict
authorizing all persons, without exception, to profess medicine in the
university of his city. This was specially meant for the relief of the
Jews, though expressed in a general way. [Sidenote: Maimonides.] Spain,
though she had thus lost many of her learned men, still continued to
produce others of which she had reason to be proud. Moussa Ben Maimon,
known all over Europe as Maimonides, was recognized by his countrymen as
"the Doctor, the Great Sage, the Glory of the West, the Light of the
East, second only to Moses." He is often designated by the four initials
R. M. B. M., that is Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, or briefly Rambam. His
biography presents some points of interest. He was born at Cordova A.D.
1135, and, while yet young, wrote commentaries on the Talmuds both of
Babylon and Jerusalem, and also a work on the Calendar; but, embracing
Mohammedanism, he emigrated to Egypt, and there became physician to the
celebrated Sultan Saladin. Among his works are medical aphorisms,
derived from former Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic sources; an
abridgment of Galen; and of his original treatises, which were very
numerous, may be mentioned those "On Hemorrhoids," "On Poisons and
Antidotes," "On Asthma," "On the Preservation of Health,"--the latter
being written for the benefit of the son of Saladin--"On the Bites of
Venomous Animals"--written by order of the sultan--"On Natural History."
His "Moreh Nevochim," or "Teacher of the Perplexed," was an attempt to
reconcile the doctrines of the Old Testament with reason. In addition to
these, he had a book on Idolatry, and one on Christ. Besides Maimonides,
the sultan had another physician, Ebn Djani, the author of a work on the
medical topography of the city of Alexandria. From the biographies of
these learned men of the twelfth century it would seem that their
religious creed hung lightly upon them. Not unfrequently they became
converted to Mohammedanism.
[Sidenote: Later Jewish physicians.] It might be tedious if I should
record the names and writings of the learned European Jews of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a period more prolific of these great
men than even the preceding ages. But I cannot pass these later
centuries without mentioning the Alphonsine Tables, calculated for
Alphonso, the King of Castile, by Mascha, his Hebrew physician. The
irreligious tendency of the times is illustrated by the well-known
sarcasm uttered by that Spanish monarch respecting the imperfect
construction of the heavens, according to the Ptolemaic hypothesis. For
long, however, the Jews had been dabbling in free-thinking speculations.
Thus Aben Tybbon, above-mentioned, anticipating that branch of science
which has drawn upon itself, in later years, so much opprobrium, wrote a
work containing a discussion of the causes which prevent the waters of
the sea from encroaching on the land. Abba Mari, a Marseillese Jew,
translated the Almagest of Ptolemy and the Commentary of Averroes upon
it. The school of Salerno was still sending forth its doctors. In Rome,
Jewish physicians were very numerous, the popes themselves employing
them. Boniface VIII. had for his medical adviser Rabbi Isaac. At this
period Spain and France were full of learned Jews; and perhaps partly by
their exerting upon the higher classes with whom they came in contact
too much influence, for the physician of a Christian prince was very
often the rival of his confessor, and partly because the practice of
medicine, as they pursued it, interfered with the gains of the Church,
the clergy took alarm, and caused to be re-enacted or enforced the
ancient laws. The Council of Beziers, A.D. 1246, and the Council of
Alby, A.D. 1254, prohibited all Christians from resorting to the
services of an Israelitish physician. It would appear that these
enactments had either fallen into desuetude or had failed to be
enforced. The faculty of Paris, awakening at last to the danger of the
case, caused, A.D. 1301, a decree to be published prohibiting either man
or woman of the religion of Moses from practising medicine upon any
person of the Catholic religion. A similar course was also taken in
Spain. At this time the Jews were confessedly at the head of French
medicine. It was the appointment of one of their persuasion, Profatius,
as regent of the faculty of Montpellier A.D. 1300, which drew upon them
the wrath of the faculty of Paris. This learned man was a skilful
astronomer; he composed tables of the moon; of the longitudes of many
Asiatic and African towns; he determined the obliquity of the ecliptic,
his result being honourably alluded to by Copernicus. [Sidenote: The
University of Paris causes the expulsion of the Jews from France.] The
animosity of the French ecclesiastics against the Jewish physicians at
last led to the banishment of all the Jews from France, A.D. 1306. "It
was," say the historians of this event, "a most revolting spectacle to
see so many learned men, who had adorned and benefited France,
proscribed, wanderers without a country or an asylum. Some of them
expired of grief upon the road. Abba Mari gives in his work
heart-rending details of the expulsion of the Jews from Montpellier, at
the head of whom were the professors and doctors of the faculty."
[Sidenote: Result that they had accomplished.] But, though thus driven
into exile, these strangers had accomplished their destiny. They had
silently deposited in France their ideas. They had sapped the credulity
of the higher classes in Europe, and taught them to turn away from the
supernatural. A clear recognition of their agency in this matter
fastened upon them the watchful eye of Inquisition, and made them the
victims of its tyranny.
And so it might well be. Out of the Spanish peninsula there had come
across the Pyrenees an intellectual influence, which reached the
populace under the form of a fresh and pleasing literature, and the
better classes by novel but unorthodox ideas. To a very great extent the
Jews had been its carriers. The result was the overthrow of
supernaturalism. [Sidenote: Destruction of fairies by tobacco.] We shall
hardly accept the affirmation of good Catholics that fairies disappeared
on account of the Reformation, unable to bear the morose sectarianism
with which it was accompanied, or the still more material explanation of
the rustics that it was through the introduction of tobacco. However
that may be, no longer is Robin Goodfellow the compeller of household
duties--no longer do bad elves sit by the dying embers of the
hearth-stone at night, in the shape of shrivelled frogs, after the
family have gone to bed. For a long time there have been no miracles in
Europe. Even Rome, the workshop of those artifices, has ceased to be the
seat of that trade.
From human institutions of any kind, a great principle, firmly inwrought
and inwoven at the beginning, can never be removed. It will show itself
whenever occasion permits. The animosity between the Byzantine
ecclesiastical system and all true wisdom was inextinguishable, though
it was utterly foreign to Christianity. [Sidenote: Causes of the
ecclesiastical opposition.] It was fastened by imperial violence on the
nations, and made its appearance, with unabated force, at intervals of
ages. The same evil instinct which tore Hypatia piecemeal in the church
at Alexandria brought Galileo into the custody of the familiars of the
holy office at Rome. The necessary consequence of this upholding
ignorance by force was the emergence of ideas successively more and more
depraved. [Sidenote: Degraded state of Italy.] Whoever will ingenuously
compare the religious state of Italy in the fourteenth century with its
state in the fourth--that is, the recent Italian with the old
Roman--will find that among the illiterate classes nothing whatever had
been accomplished. There were no elevated thoughts of holy things. From
practical devotion God had altogether disappeared; the Saviour had been
supplanted by the blessed Virgin; and she herself--such was the
increasing degradation--had been abandoned for the ignoble worship of
apotheosized men, who, under the designation of saints, had engrossed
all the votaries. There had been a rapid descent to the last degree of
more than African abasement in bleeding statues and winking pictures.
[Sidenote: Rise of a new social system.] In Europe there had been
incorporated old forms of worship and old festivals with Christian ones;
the local gods and goddesses had been replaced by saints; for
deification canonization had been substituted. There had been produced a
civilization, the character of which was its extraordinary intolerance.
A man could not be suspected of doubting the popular belief without risk
to his goods, his body, or his life. As a necessary consequence, there
could be no great lawgivers, no philosophers, no poets. Society was
pervaded by a systematic hypocrisy. This tyranny over others sometimes
led to strange results. It caused the Jews to discover the art of making
wealth invisible by bills of exchange and other such like means, so that
money might be imperceptibly but instantaneously moved.
[Sidenote: Influence of that new system,] Thus, after the dying out of
Greek science, there followed, among the new populations, an
intellectual immobility, which soon became the centre of a vast number
of growing interests quickly and firmly crystallizing round it. For them
it was essential that there should be no change--no advance. In the
midst of jarrings and conflicts between those interests, that condition
was steadfastly maintained, as if through instinct, by them all. It
mattered not how antiquated were the forms insisted on, nor how far they
outraged common sense. New life was given to decaying illusions, and, in
return, strength was gathered from them. [Sidenote: and degradation by
African ideas.] Isis, with the moon beneath her feet, was planted, under
a new name, on the Bosphorus and the Tiber. African theology, African
ecclesiastical machinery, and African monasticism were made objects of
reverence to unsuspecting Europe. Juvenal says that the Roman painters
of his day lived on the goddess Isis. The Italian painters of a later
day lived on her modernized form.
[Sidenote: No literature in the Age of Faith.] In such a condition of
things the literary state could be no other than barren. Political
combinations had not only prescribed an intellectual terminus, but had
even laid down a rail upon which mental excursions were to be made, and
from which there was no departing; or, if a turn-out was permitted, it
was managed by a tonsured man. For centuries together, if we exclude
theological writings, there was absolutely no literature worth the name.
Life seems to have been spent in the pursuit of mere physical enjoyment,
and that enjoyment of a very low kind. When in the South of France and
Sicily literature began to dawn, it is not to be overlooked how much of
it was of an amatory kind; and love is the strongest of the passions.
The first aspect of Western literature was animal, not intellectual.
[Sidenote: Its critical innocence.] A taste for learning excited, there
reappeared in the schools the old treatises written a thousand years
before--the Elements of Euclid, the Geography of Ptolemy. Long after the
Reformation there was an intellectual imbecility which might well excite
our mirth, if it were not the index of a stage through which the human
mind must pass. Often enough we see it interestingly in the interweaving
of the new with the old ideas. If we take up a work on metallurgy, it
commences with Tubal Cain; if on music, with Jubal. The history of each
country is traced back to the sons of Noah, or at least to the fugitives
from the siege of Troy. An admiration for classical authors may perhaps
be excused. It exhibited itself amusingly in the eccentricity of
interlarding compositions of every kind with Greek and Latin quotations.
This was an age of literary innocence, when no legend was too stupendous
for credulity; when there was no one who had ever suspected that Tully,
as they delighted to call him, was not a great philosopher, and Virgil
not a great poet.
[Sidenote: Disuse of patristic works.] Of those ponderous, those massive
folios on ecclesiastical affairs, at once the product and
representatives of the time, but little needs here to be said. They
boasted themselves as the supreme effort of human intellect; they laid
claim to an enduring authority; to many they had a weight little less
than the oracles of God. But if their intrinsic value is to be measured
by their pretensions, and their pretensions judged of by their present
use, what is it that must be said? Long ago their term was reached, long
ago they became obsolete. They have no reader. Such must be the issue of
any literature springing from an immovable, an unexpanding basis, the
offspring of thought that has been held in subjugation by political
formulas, or of intellectual energies that have been cramped.
[Sidenote: Spread of science in France.] The Roman ecclesiastical
system, like the Byzantine, had been irrevocably committed in an
opposition to intellectual development. It professed to cultivate the
morals, but it crushed the mind. Yet, in the course of events, this
state of things was to come to an end through the working of other
principles equally enduring and more powerful. They constitute what we
may speak of under the title of the Arabian element. On preceding pages
it has been shown that, when the Saracens conquered Egypt, they came
under the influence of the Nestorians and Hellenizing Jews, acquiring
from them a love of philosophy, which soon manifested itself in full
energy from the banks of the Euphrates to those of Guadalquivir. The
hammer of Charles Martel might strike down the ranks of the Saracens on
the field of Tours, but there was something intangible, something
indestructible accompanying them, which the Frank chivalry could not
confront. To the Church there was an evil omen. It has been well
remarked that in the Provencal poetry there are noble bursts of
crusading religious sentiment, but they are incorporated with a
sovereign contempt for the clergy.
The biography of any of the physicians or alchemists of the thirteenth
century would serve the purpose of illustrating the watchfulness of the
Church, the unsound condition of the universities, the indirect
patronage extended to heretics by eminent men, and the manner in which
the rival powers, ecclesiasticism and philosophy, were preparing for
their final conflict. [Sidenote: Illustration from the biography of
Arnold.] As an example of the kind, I may present briefly that of Arnold
de Villa Nova, born about A.D. 1250. He enjoyed a great reputation for
his knowledge of medicine and alchemy. For some years he was physician
to the King of Aragon. Under an accusation of defective orthodoxy he
lost his position at court, his punishment being rendered more effective
by excommunication. Hoping to find in Paris more liberality than he had
met with in Spain, he fled to that city, but was pursued by an adverse
ecclesiastical influence with a charge of having sold his soul to the
Devil, and of having changed a plate of copper into gold. In
Montpellier, to which he was obliged to retire, he found a more
congenial intellectual atmosphere, and was for long one of the regents
of the faculty of medicine. In succession, he subsequently resided in
Florence, Naples, Palermo, patronized and honoured by the Emperor
Frederick II.--at that time engaged in the attempt to unite Italy into
one kingdom and give it a single language--on account of his
extraordinary reputation as a physician. Even the pope, Clement V.,
notwithstanding the unfortunate attitude in which Arnold stood toward
the Church, besought a visit from him in hopes of relief from the stone.
On his voyage for the purpose of performing the necessary operation,
Arnold suffered shipwreck and was drowned. His body was interred at
Genoa. The pope issued an encyclic letter, entreating those who owed him
obedience to reveal where Arnold's Treatise on the Practice of Medicine
might be found, it having been lost or concealed. It appears that the
chief offences committed by Arnold against the Church were that he had
predicted that the world would come to an end A.D. 1335; that he had
said the bulls of the pope were only the work of a man, and that the
practice of charity is better than prayer, or even than the mass. If he
was the author of the celebrated book "De Tribus Impostoribus," as was
suspected by some, it is not remarkable that he was so closely watched
and disciplined. Like many of his contemporaries, he mingled a great
deal of mysticism with his work, recommending, during his alchemical
operations, the recitation of psalms, to give force to the materials
employed. Among other such things, he describes a seal, decorated with
scriptural phrases, of excellent use in preserving one from sudden
death. It appears, however, to have failed of its effect on the night
when Arnold's ship was drifting on an Italian lee-shore, and he had most
need of it.
[Sidenote: Two impulses--intellectual and moral--in operation.] The two
antagonistic principles--ecclesiastical and intellectual--were thus
brought in presence of each other. On other occasions they had already
been in partial collision, as at the iconoclastic dispute which
originated in the accusations of the Mohammedans, and ended in the
tearing of Christendom asunder.
[Sidenote: Struggle of ecclesiasticism against the intellectual
principle.] Again there was a collision, a few centuries later, when the
Spanish Moors and Jews began to influence the higher European classes.
Among the bishops, sovereigns, and even popes thus affected, there were
many men of elevated views, who saw distinctly the position of Europe,
and understood thoroughly the difficulties of the Church. It had already
become obvious to them that it would be impossible to restrain the
impulse arising from the vigorous movements of the Saracens, and that it
was absolutely necessary so to order things that the actual condition of
faith in Europe might be accommodated to or even harmonized with these
philosophical conceptions, which it was quite clear would, soon or late,
pervade the whole Continent. This, as we have seen, is the explanation
of the introduction of Scholasticism from the Arabian schools, and its
accommodation to the Christian code, on which authority looked with so
much favour at first. But hardly had this attempt been entered upon
before it became manifest that the risks to be incurred through the
remedy itself were as great as the anticipated dangers. There was then
no other course than for the Church to retrace her steps, ostensibly
maintaining her consistency by permitting scholastic literature, though
declining scholastic theology. She thus allured the active intellect,
arising in all directions in the universities, to fruitless and
visionary pursuits. This policy, therefore, threw her back upon a system
of repression; it was the only course possible; yet there can be no
doubt that it was entered upon with reluctance. [Sidenote: The
difficulty was in the system, not in the men.] We do injustice to the
great men who guided ecclesiastical policy in those times when we
represent them as recklessly committing themselves to measures at once
violent and indefensible. They did make the attempt to institute an
opposite policy; it proved not only a failure, but mischievous. They
were then driven to check the spread of knowledge--driven by the
necessities of their position. The fault was none of theirs; it dated
back to the time of Constantine the Great; and the impossibility of
either correcting or neutralizing it is only an example, as has been
said, of the manner in which a general principle, once introduced, will
overbear the best exertions of those attempting to struggle against it.
We can appreciate the false position into which those statesmen were
thrown when we compare their personal with their public relations. Often
the most eminent persons lived in intimacy and friendship with Jewish
physicians, who, in the eye of the law, were enemies of society; often
those who were foremost in the cultivation of knowledge--who, indeed,
suffered excommunication for its sake--maintained amicable relations of
a private kind with those who in public were the leaders of their
persecutors. The systems were in antagonism, not the men. Arnold de
Villa Nova, though excommunicated, was the physician of one pope; Roger
Bacon, though harshly imprisoned, was the friend and correspondent of
another. These incidents are not to be mistaken for that compassion
which the truly great are ever ready to show to erring genius. They are
examples of what we often see in our own day, when men engaged in the
movements of a great political party loyally carry out its declared
principles to their consequences, though individually they may find in
those consequences many things to which they could mentally object.
Their private objection they thus yield for the sake of what appears to
them, in a general way, a practical good.
Such was the state of affairs when the Arab element, having pervaded
France and Italy, made its formal intellectual attack. It might almost
have been foreseen in what manner that attack would be made, and the
shape it would be likely to assume. Of the sciences, astronomy was the
oldest and most advanced. [Sidenote: The intellectual impulse makes its
attack through astronomy,] Its beginning dates earlier than the historic
period, and both in India and in Egypt it had long reached correctness,
so far as its general principles were concerned. The Saracens had been
assiduous cultivators of it in both its branches, observation and
mathematical investigation. Upon one point, the figure and relations of
the earth, it is evident that not the slightest doubt existed among
them. Nay, it must be added that no learned European ecclesiastic or
statesman could deny the demonstrated truths. Nevertheless, it so fell
out that upon this very point the conflict broke out. In India the
Brahmans had passed through the same trial--for different nations walk
through similar paths--with a certain plausible success, by satisfying
the popular clamour that there was, in reality, nothing inconsistent
between the astronomical doctrine of the globular form and movement of
the earth, and the mythological dogma that it rests upon a succession of
animals, the lowest of which is a tortoise. But the strong common sense
of Western Europe was not to be deluded in any such idle way. It is not
difficult to see the point of contact, the point of pressure with the
Church. The abstract question gave her no concern; it was the
consequences that might possibly follow. The memorable battle was fought
upon the question thus sharply defined: Is the earth a moving globe, a
small body in the midst of suns and countless myriads of worlds, or is
it the central and greatest object in the universe, flat, and canopied
over with a blue dome, motionless while all is in movement around it?
[Sidenote: and the Church is defeated.] The dispute thus definitely put,
its issue was such as must always attend a controversy in which he who
is defending is at once lukewarm and conscious of his own weakness.
Never can moral interests, however pure, stand against intellect
enforcing truth. On this ill-omened question the Church ventured her
battle and lost it.
[Sidenote: The moral impulse.] Though this great conflict is embodied in
the history of Galileo, who has become its historical representative,
the prime moving cause must not be misunderstood. From the Pyrenees had
passed forth an influence which had infected all the learned men of
Western Europe. Its tendency was altogether unfavourable to the Church.
Moreover, the illiterate classes had been touched, but in a different
way. To the first action the designation of the intellectual impulse may
be given; to the latter, the moral. It is to be especially observed that
in their directions these impulses conspired. We have seen how, through
the Saracens and Jews conjointly, the intellectual impulse came into
play. [Sidenote: Origin of the moral impulse.] The moral impulse
originated in a different manner, being due partly to the Crusades and
partly to the state of things in Rome. On these causes it is therefore
needful for us to reflect.
First, of the Crusades. There had been wrenched from Christendom its
fairest and most glorious portions. Spain, the north of Africa, Egypt,
Syria, Asia Minor, were gone. The Mohammedans had been repeatedly under
the walls of Constantinople; its fall was only a question of time. They
had been in the streets of Rome. They had marched across Italy in every
direction. [Sidenote: Loss of the holy places.] But perhaps the
geographical losses, appalling as they were, did not appear so painful
as the capture of the holy places; the birthplace of our Redeemer; the
scene of His sufferings; the Mount of Olives; the Sea of Galilee; the
Garden of Gethsemane; Calvary; the Sepulchre. Too often in their day of
strength, while there were Roman legions at their back, had the bishops
taunted Paganism with the weakness of its divinities, who could not
defend themselves, their temples, or their sacred places. That logic was
retaliated now. To many a sincere heart must many an ominous reflexion
have occurred. In Western Europe there was a strong common sense which
quickly caught the true position of things--a common sense that could
neither be blinded nor hoodwinked. The astuteness of the Italian
politicians was insufficient to conceal altogether the great fact,
though it might succeed in dissembling its real significance for a time.
The Europe of that day was very different from the Europe of ours. It
was in its Age of Faith. Recently converted, as all recent converts do,
it made its belief a living rule of action. In our times there is not
upon that continent a nation which, in its practical relations with
others, carries out to their consequences its ostensible, its avowed
articles of belief. Catholics, Protestants, Mohammedans, they of the
Greek communion, indiscriminately consort together under the expediences
of the passing hour. Statesmanship has long been dissevered from
religion--a fact most portentous for future times. But it was not so in
the Middle Ages. Men then believed their form of faith with the same
clearness, the same intensity with which they believed their own
existence or the actual presence of things upon which they cast their
eyes. The doctrines of the Church were to them no mere inconsequential
affair, but an absolute, an actual reality, a living and a fearful
thing. It would have passed their comprehension if they could have been
assured that a day would come when Christian Europe, by a breath, could
remove from the holy places the scandal of an infidel intruder, but,
upon the whole, would consider it not worth her while to do so. How
differently they acted. [Sidenote: Effect of the Crusades.] When, by the
preaching of Peter the Hermit and his collaborators, who had received a
signal from Rome, a knowledge had come to their ears of the reproach
that had befallen Jerusalem and the sufferings of the pilgrims, their
plain but straightforward common sense taught them at once what was the
right remedy to apply, and forthwith they did apply it, and Christendom,
precipitated headlong upon the Holy Land, was brought face to face with
Mohammedanism. But what a scene awaited the zealous, the religious
barbarians--for such they truly were--when Constantinople, with its
matchless splendours, came in view! What a scene when they had passed
into Asia Minor, that garden of the world, presenting city after city,
with palaces and edifices, the pride of twenty centuries! [Sidenote:
Change of opinion in the Crusaders.] How unexpected the character of
those Saracens, whom they had been taught, by those who had incited them
to their enterprise, to regard as no better than bloodthirsty fiends,
but whom they found valiant, merciful, just! When Richard the
Lion-hearted, King of England, lay in his tent consumed by a fever,
there came into the camp camels laden with snow, sent by his enemy, the
Sultan Saladin, to assuage his disease, the homage of one brave soldier
to another. But when Richard was returning to England, it was by a
Christian prince that he was treacherously seized and secretly confined.
This was doubtless only one of many such incidents which had often
before occurred. Even down to the meanest camp-follower, every one must
have recognized the difference between what they had anticipated and
what they had found. They had seen undaunted courage, chivalrous
bearing, intellectual culture far higher than their own. They had been
in lands filled with the prodigies of human skill. They did not melt
down into the populations to whom they returned without imparting to
them a profound impression destined to make itself felt in the course of
time.
[Sidenote: They discover the immoralities of Italy.] But, secondly, as
to the state of things in Rome. The movement into which all Europe had
been thrown by these wars brought to light the true condition of things
in Italy as respects morality. Locomotion in a population is followed by
intellectual development. The old stationary condition of things in
Europe was closed by the Crusades. National movement gave rise to better
observation, better information, and could not but be followed by
national reflexion. And though we are obliged to speak of the European
population as being in one sense in a barbarous state, it was a moral
population, earnestly believing the truth of every doctrine it had been
taught, and sincerely expecting that those doctrines would be carried to
their practical application, and that religious profession must, as a
matter of course, be illustrated by religious life. The Romans
themselves were an exception to this. They had lived too long behind the
scenes. Indeed, it may be said that all the Italian peninsula had
emancipated itself from that delusion, as likewise certain classes in
France, who had become familiar with the state of things during the
residence of the popes at Avignon. It has been the destiny of Southern
France to pass, on a small scale, under the same influence, and to
exhibit the same results as were appointed for all Europe at last.
And now, what was it that awakening Europe found to be the state of
things in Italy? I avert my eyes from looking again at the biography of
the popes; it would be only to renew a scene of sin and shame. Nor can
I, without injustice to truth, speak of the social condition of the
inhabitants of that peninsula without relating facts which would compel
my reader to turn over the page with a blush. I prefer to look at the
maxims of political life which had been followed for many centuries, and
which were first divulged by one of the greatest men that Italy has
produced, in a work--A.D. 1513--truly characterized as a literary
prodigy. Certainly nothing can surpass in atrocity the maxims therein
laid down.
[Sidenote: The principles of Italian statesmanship--Machiavelli.]
Machiavelli, in that work, tells us that there are three degrees of
capacity among men. That one understands things by his own natural
powers; another, when they are explained to him; a third, not at all.
In dealing with these different classes different methods must be
used. The last class, which is by far the most numerous, is so simple
and weak that it is very easy to dupe those who belong to it. If they
cease to believe of their own accord they ought to be constrained by
force, in the application of which, though there may be considerable
difficulties at first, yet, these once overcome by a sufficient
unscrupulousness--veneration, security, tranquillity, and happiness
will follow. That, if a prince is constrained to make his choice, it
is better for him to be feared than loved; he should remember that all
men are ungrateful, fickle, timid, dissembling, and self-interested;
that love depends on them, but fear depends on him, and hence it is
best to prefer the latter, which is always in his own hands. The great
aim of statesmanship should be permanence, which is worth everything
else, being far more valuable than freedom. That, if a man wants to
ruin a republic, his proper course is to set it on bold undertakings,
which it is sure to mismanage; that men, being naturally wicked,
incline to good only when they are compelled; they think a great deal
more of the present than the past, and never seek change so long as
they are made comfortable.
He recommends a ruler to bear in mind that, while the lower class of men
may desert him, the superior will not only desert, but conspire. If such
cannot with certainty be made trustworthy friends, it is very clearly
necessary to put it out of their power to be enemies. Thus it may be
observed that the frequent insurrections in Spain, Gaul, and Greece
against the Romans were entirely due to the petty chiefs inhabiting
those countries; but that, after these had been put to death, everything
went on very well. Up to a certain point, it should be the grand maxim
of a wise government to content the people and to manage the nobles; but
that, since hatred is just as easily incurred by good actions as by bad
ones, there will occasionally arise the necessity of being wicked in
order to maintain power, and, in such a case, there should be no
hesitation; for, though it is useful to persevere in the path of
rectitude while there is no inconvenience, we should deviate from it at
once if circumstances so advise. A prudent prince ought not keep his
word to his own injury; he ought to bear in mind that one who always
endeavours to act as duty dictates necessarily insures his own
destruction; that new obligations never extinguish the memory of former
injuries in the minds of the superior order of men; that liberality, in
the end, generally insures more enemies than friends; that it is the
nature of mankind to become as much attached to one by the benefits they
render as by the favours they receive; that, where the question is as to
the taking of life or the confiscation of property, it is useful to
remember that men forget the death of their relatives, but not the loss
of their patrimony; that, if cruelties should become expedient, they
should be committed thoroughly and but once--it is very impolitic to
resort to them a second time; that there are three ways of deciding any
contest--by fraud, by force, or by law, and a wise man will make the
most suitable choice; that there are also three ways of maintaining
control in newly-conquered states that have once been free--by ruining
them, by inhabiting them, or by permitting them to keep their own laws
and to pay tribute. Of these the first will often be found the best, as
we may see from the history of the Romans, who were experienced judges
of such cases. That, as respects the family of a rival but conquered
sovereign, the greatest pains should be taken to extinguish it
completely; for history proves, what many fabulous traditions relate,
that dangerous political consequences have originated in the escape of
some obscure or insignificant member; that men of the highest order, who
are, therefore, of sound judgment--who seek for actual social truths for
their guidance rather than visionary models which never existed--will
conform to the decisions of reason, and never be influenced by feelings
of sentiment, unless it is apparent that some collateral advantage will
arise from the temporary exhibition thereof; and that they will put a
just estimate on the delusions in which the vulgar indulge, casting
aside the so-called interventions of Divine Providence, which are, in
reality, nothing more than the concatenation of certain circumstances
following the ordinary law of cause and effect, but which, by
interfering with the action of each other, have assumed a direction
which the judgment of the wisest could not have foreseen.
Europe has visited with its maledictions the great political writer by
whom these atrocious maxims have been recommended, forgetting that his
offence consists not in inventing, but in divulging them. His works thus
offer the purest example we possess of physical statesmanship. They are
altogether impassive. He views the management of a state precisely as he
might do the construction of a machine, recommending that such a wheel
or such a lever should be introduced, his only inquiry being whether it
will accomplish his intention. As to any happiness or misery it may
work, he gives himself no concern, unless, indeed, they evidently ought
to enter into the calculation. He had suffered the rack himself under a
charge of conspiracy, and borne it without flinching. But, before
Machiavelli wrote, his principles had all been carried into practice;
indeed, it would not be difficult to give abundant examples in proof of
the assertion that they had been for ages regarded in Italy as rules of
conduct.
[Sidenote: Conjoined effect of the intellectual and moral impulses.]
Such was the morality which Europe detected as existing in Italy,
carried out with inconceivable wickedness in public and private life;
and thus the two causes we have been considering--contact with the
Saracens in Syria and a knowledge of the real state of things in
Rome--conspired together to produce what may be designated as the moral
impulse, which, in its turn, conspired with the intellectual. Their
association foreboded evil to ecclesiastical authority, thus taken at
great disadvantage. Though, from its very birthday, that authority had
been in absolute opposition to the intellectual movement, it might,
doubtless, for a much longer time have successfully maintained its
conflict therewith had the conditions remained unchanged. Up to this
time its chief strength reposed upon its moral relations. It could
point, and did point the attention of those whose mental culture enabled
them to understand the true position of affairs, to Europe brought out
of barbarism, and beginning a course of glorious civilization. That
achievement was claimed by the Church. If it were true that she had thus
brought it to pass, it had been altogether wrought by the agency of her
moral power, intellectual influence in no manner aiding therein, but
being uniformly, from the time of Constantine the Great to that of the
Reformation, instinctively repulsed. When, now, the moral power suffered
so great a shock, and was not only ready to go over to, but had actually
allied itself with the intellectual, there was great danger to
ecclesiastical authority. And hence we need not be surprised that an
impression began to prevail among the clear-thinking men of the time
that the real functions of that authority were completed in producing
the partially-civilized condition to which Europe had attained, the
course of events tending evidently to an elimination of that authority
as an active element in the approaching European system. [Sidenote: The
excuses of ecclesiasticism.] To such the Church might emphatically
address herself, pointing out the signal and brilliant results to which
she had given rise, and displaying the manifest evils which must
inevitably ensue if her relations, as then existing, should be touched.
For it must have been plain that the first effect arising from the
coalition of the intellectual with the moral element would be an
assertion of the right of private judgment in the individual--a
condition utterly inconsistent with the dominating influence of
authority. It was actually upon that very principle that the battle of
the Reformation was eventually fought. She might point out--for it
needed no prophetic inspiration--that, if once this principle was
yielded, there could be no other issue in Christendom than a total
decomposition; that though, for a little while, the separation might be
limited to a few great confessions, these, under the very influence of
the principle that had brought themselves into existence, must, in their
turn, undergo disintegration, and the end of it be a complete anarchy of
sects. [Sidenote: Her feeble resistance.] In one sense it may be said
that it was in wisdom that the Church took her stand upon this point,
determining to make it her base of resistance; unwisely in another, for
it was evident that she had already lost the initiative of action, and
that her very resistance would constitute the first stage in the process
of decomposition.
[Sidenote: Contemporaneous changes in Europe.] Europe had made a vast
step during its Age of Faith. Spontaneously it had grown through its
youth; and the Italians, who had furnished it with many of its ideas,
had furnished it also with many of its forms of life. In that respect
justice has still to be done them. When Rome broke away from her
connexions with Constantinople, a cloud of more than Cimmerian darkness
overshadowed Europe. It was occupied by wandering savages. Six hundred
years organized it into families, neighbourhoods, cities. Those
centuries found it full of bondmen; they left it without a slave. They
found it a scene of violence, rapine, lust; they left it the abode of
God-fearing men. Where there had been trackless forests, there were
innumerable steeples glittering in the sun; where there had been bloody
chieftains, drinking out of their enemies' skulls, there were grave
ecclesiastics, fathoming the depths of free-will, predestination,
election. Investing the clergy with a mysterious superiority, the Church
asserted the equality of the laity from the king to the beggar before
God. It disregarded wealth and birth, and opened a career for all. Its
influence over the family and domestic relations was felt through all
classes. It fixed paternity by a previous ceremony; it enforced the rule
that a wife passes into the family of her husband, and hence it followed
that legitimate children belong to the father, illegitimate to the
mother. It compelled women to domestic life, shut them out from the
priesthood, and tried to exclude them from government. In a worldly
sense, the mistake that Rome committed was this: she attempted to
maintain an intellectual immobility in the midst of an advancing social
state. She saw not that society could no more be stopped in its career
through her mere assertion that it could not and should not move, than
that the earth could be checked in its revolution merely because she
protested that it was at rest. She tried, first by persuasion and then
by force, to arrest the onward movement, but she was overborne,
notwithstanding her frantic resistance, by the impetuous current. Very
different would it have been had the Italian statesmen boldly put
themselves in the van of progress, and, instead of asserting an
immutability and infallibility, changed their dogmas and maxims as the
progress of events required. Europe need not have waited for Arabs and
Jews.
[Sidenote: Loss of power in Church organizations.] In describing these
various facts, I have endeavoured to point out impressively how the
Church, so full of vigour at first, contained within itself the seeds of
inevitable decay. From the period when it came into collision with the
intellectual and moral elements, the origin of which we have traced, and
which conspired together for its overthrow, it exhibited a gradual
decline; first losing its influence upon nations, and ceasing to be in
them a principle of public action; next, witnessing the alienation of
the higher and educated classes, the process descending downward through
the social scale, therein retracing the steps of its advance. When
ecclesiasticism became so weak as to be unable to regulate international
affairs, and was supplanted by diplomacy, in the castle the physician
was more than a rival for the confessor, in the town the mayor was a
greater man than the abbot. There remained a lingering influence over
individuals, who had not yet risen above a belief that it could control
their state after death. This decline of its ancient influence should be
a cause of rejoicing to all intelligent men, for an ecclesiastical
organization allying itself to political power can never now be a source
of any good. In America we have seen the bond that held the Church and
State together abruptly snapped. [Sidenote: Return of things to the
ancient Christian times.] It is therefore well that, since the close of
the Age of Faith, things have been coming back with an accelerated pace,
to the state in which they were in the early Christian times, before the
founder of Constantinople beguiled the devotional spirit to his personal
and family benefit--to the state in which they were before ambitious men
sought political advancement and wealth by organizing hypocrisy--when
maxims of morality, charity, benevolence, were rules of life for
individual man--when the monitions of conscience were obeyed without the
suggestions of an outward, often an interested and artful prompter--when
the individual lived not under the sleepless gaze, the crushing hand of
a great overwhelming hierarchical organization, surrounding him on all
sides, doing his thinking for him, directing him in his acts, making him
a mere automaton, but in simplicity, humility, and truthfulness guiding
himself according to the light given him, and discharging the duties of
this troublesome and transitory life "as ever in his great Taskmaster's
eye."
For the progressive degradations exhibited by the Roman Church during
the Age of Faith, something may be offered as at once an explanation and
an excuse. Machiavelli relates, in his "History of Florence"--a work
which, if inferior in philosophical penetration to his "Prince," is of
the most singular merit as a literary composition--that Osporco, a
Roman, having become pope, exchanged his unseemly name for the more
classical one Sergius, and that his successors have ever since observed
the practice of assuming a new name. [Sidenote: Connexion of religious
ideas in Italy with its ethnical state.] This incident profoundly
illustrates the psychical progress of that Church. During the fifteen
centuries that we have had under consideration--counting from a little
before the Christian era--the population of Italy had been constantly
changing. The old Roman ethnical element had become eliminated partly
through the republican and imperial wars, and partly through the slave
system. The degenerated half-breeds, of whom the Peninsula was full
through repeated northern immigrations, degenerated, as time went on,
still more and more. After that blood admixture had for the most part
ceased, it took a long time for the base ethnical element which was its
product to come into physiological correspondence with the country, for
the adaptation of man to a new climate is a slow, a secular change.
But blood-degeneration implies thought-degeneration. It is nothing more
than might be expected that, in this mongrel race, customs, and
language, and even names should change--that rivers, and towns, and men
should receive new appellations. As the great statesman to whom I have
referred observes, Caesar and Pompey had disappeared; John, Matthew, and
Peter had come in their stead. Barbarized names are the outward and
visible signs of barbarized ideas. Those early bishops of Rome whose
dignified acts have commanded our respect, were men of Roman blood, and
animated with sentiments that were truly Latin; but the succeeding
pontiffs, whose lives were so infamous and thoughts so base, were
engendered of half-breeds. Nor was it until the Italian population had
re-established itself in a physiological relation with the country--not
until it had passed through the earlier stages of national life--that
manly thoughts and true conceptions could be regained.
Ideas and dogmas that would not have been tolerated for an instant in
the old, pure, homogeneous Roman race, found acceptance in this
adulterated, festering mass. This was the true cause of the increasing
debasement of Latin Christianity. Whoever will take the trouble of
constructing a chart of the religious conceptions as they successively
struggled into light, will see how close was their connexion with the
physiological state of the Italian ethnical element at the moment.
[Sidenote: Successive steps in the religious decline.] It is a sad and
humiliating succession. Mariolatry; the invocation of saints; the
supreme value of virginity; the working of miracles by relics; the
satisfaction of moral crimes by gifts of money or goods to the clergy;
the worship of images; Purgatory; the sale of benefices;
transubstantiation, or the making of God by the priest; the
materialization of God--that He has eyes, feet, hands, toes; the virtue
of pilgrimages; vicarious religion, the sinner paying the priest to pray
for him; the corporeality of spirits; the forbidding of the Bible to the
laity; the descent to shrine-worship and fetichism; the doctrine that
man can do more than his duty, and hence have a claim upon God; the sale
by the priests of indulgences in sin for money.
But there is another, a very different aspect under which we must regard
this Church. Enveloped as it was with the many evils of the times, the
truly Christian principle which was at its basis perpetually vindicated
its power, giving rise to numberless blessings in spite of the
degradation and wickedness of man. [Sidenote: Statement of what the
Church had actually done.] As I have elsewhere (Physiology, Book II.,
Chap. VIII.) remarked, "The civil law exerted an exterior power in human
relations; Christianity produced an interior and moral change. The idea
of an ultimate accountability for personal deeds, of which the old
Europeans had an indistinct perception, became intense and precise. The
sentiment of universal charity was exemplified not only in individual
acts, the remembrance of which soon passes away, but in the more
permanent institution of establishments for the relief of affliction,
the spread of knowledge, the propagation of truth. Of the great
ecclesiastics, many had risen from the humblest ranks of society, and
these men, true to their democratic instincts, were often found to be
the inflexible supporters of right against might. Eventually coming to
be the depositaries of the knowledge that then existed, they opposed
intellect to brute force, in many instances successfully, and by the
example of the organization of the Church, which was essentially
republican, they showed how representative systems may be introduced
into the state. Nor was it over communities and nations that the Church
displayed her chief power. Never in the world before was there such a
system. From her central seat at Rome, her all-seeing eye, like that of
Providence itself, could equally take in a hemisphere at a glance, or
examine the private life of any individual. Her boundless influences
enveloped kings in their palaces, and relieved the beggar at the
monastery gate. In all Europe there was not a man too obscure, too
insignificant, or too desolate for her. Surrounded by her solemnities,
every one received his name at her altar; her bells chimed at his
marriage, her knell tolled at his funeral. She extorted from him the
secrets of his life at her confessionals, and punished his faults by her
penances. In his hour of sickness and trouble her servants sought him
out, teaching him, by her exquisite litanies and prayers, to place his
reliance on God, or strengthening him for the trials of life by the
example of the holy and just. Her prayers had an efficacy to give repose
to the souls of his dead. When, even to his friends, his lifeless body
had become an offence, in the name of God she received it into her
consecrated ground, and under her shadow he rested till the great
reckoning-day. From little better than a slave she raised his wife to be
his equal, and, forbidding him to have more than one, met her recompense
for those noble deeds in a firm friend at every fireside.
Discountenancing all impure love, she put round that fireside the
children of one mother, and made that mother little less than sacred in
their eyes. In ages of lawlessness and rapine, among people but a step
above savages, she vindicated the inviolability of her precincts against
the hand of power, and made her temples a refuge and sanctuary for the
despairing and oppressed. Truly she was the shadow of a great rock in
many a weary land!"
[Sidenote: Analysis of the career of the Church.] This being the point
which I consider the end of the Italian system as a living force in
European progress, its subsequent operation being directed to the senses
and not to the understanding, it will not be amiss if for a moment we
extend our view to later times and to circumstances beyond the strict
compass of this book, endeavouring thus to ascertain the condition of
the Church, especially as to many devout persons it may doubtless appear
that she has lost none of her power.
[Sidenote: Four revolts against the Italian system.] On four occasions
there have been revolts against the Italian Church system: 1st, in the
thirteenth century, the Albigensian; 2nd, in the fourteenth, the
Wiclifite; 3rd, in the sixteenth, the Reformation; 4th, in the
eighteenth, at the French Revolution. On each of these occasions
ecclesiastical authority has exerted whatever offensive or defensive
power it possessed. Its action is a true indication of its condition at
the time. Astronomers can determine the orbit of a comet or other
celestial meteor by three observations of its position as seen from the
earth, and taken at intervals apart.
[Sidenote: The Albigensian revolt.] 1st. Of the Albigensian revolt. We
have ascertained that the origin of this is distinctly traceable to the
Mohammedan influence of Spain, through the schools of Cordova and
Granada, pervading Languedoc and Provence. Had these agencies produced
only the gay scenes of chivalry and courtesy as their material results,
and, as their intellectual, war-ballads, satires, and amorous songs,
they had been excused; but, along with such elegant frivolities, there
was something of a more serious kind. A popular proverb will often
betray national belief, and there was a proverb in Provence, "Viler than
a priest." The offensive sectaries also quoted, for the edification of
the monks, certain texts, to the effect that, "if a man will not work
neither let him eat." The event, in the hands of Simon de Montfort,
taught them that there is such a thing as wresting Scripture to one's
own destruction.
How did the Church deal with this Albigensian heresy? As those do who
have an absolutely overwhelming power. She did not crush it--that would
have been too indulgent; she absolutely annihilated it. Awake to what
must necessarily ensue from the imperceptible spread of such opinions,
she remorselessly consumed its birthplace with fire and sword; and,
fearful that some fugitives might have escaped her vigilant eye, or that
heresy might go wherever a bale of goods might be conveyed, she
organized the Inquisition with its troops of familiars and spies. Six
hundred years have elapsed since these events, and the south of France
has never recovered from the blow.
That was a persecution worthy of a sovereign--a persecution conducted on
sound Italian principles of policy--to consider clearly the end to be
attained, and adopt the proper means without any kind of concern as to
their nature. But it was a persecution that implied the possession of
unlimited and irresponsible power.
[Sidenote: The revolt of Wiclif.] 2nd. Of the revolt of Wiclif. We have
also considered the state of affairs which aroused the resistance of
Wiclif. It is manifested by legal enactments early in the fourteenth
century, such as that ecclesiastics shall not go armed, nor join
themselves with thieves, nor frequent taverns, nor chambers of
strumpets, nor visit nuns, nor play at dice, nor keep concubines--by the
Parliamentary bill of 1376, setting forth that the tax paid in England
to the pope for ecclesiastical dignities is fourfold as much as that
coming to the king from the whole realm; that alien clergy, who have
never seen nor care to see their flocks, convey away the treasure of the
country--by the homely preaching of John Ball, that all men are equal in
the sight of God. Wiclif's opposition was not only directed against
corruptions of discipline in the Church, but equally against doctrinal
errors. His dogma that "God bindeth not men to believe any thing they
cannot understand" is a distinct embodiment of the rights of reason, and
the noble purpose he carried into execution of translating the Bible
from the Vulgate shows in what direction he intended the application of
that doctrine to be made. Through the influence of the queen of Richard
the Second, who was a native of that country, his doctrines found an
echo in Bohemia--Huss not only earnestly adopting his theological views,
but also joining in his resistance to the despotism of the court of Rome
and his exposures of the corruptions of the clergy. The political point
of this revolt in England occurs in the refusal of Edward III., at the
instigation of Wiclif, to do homage to the pope; the religious, in the
translation of the Bible.
Though a bull was sent to London requiring the arch-heretic to be seized
and put in irons, Wiclif died in his bed, and his bones rested quietly
in the grave for forty-four years. Ecclesiastical vengeance burned them
at last, and scattered them to the winds.
There was no remissness in the ecclesiastical authority, but there were
victories won by the blind hero, John Zisca. After the death of that
great soldier--whose body was left by the road-side to the wolves and
crows, and his skin dried and made into a drum--in vain was all that
perfidy could suggest and all that brutality could execute resorted
to--in vain the sword and fire were passed over Bohemia, and the last
effort of impotent vengeance tried in England--the heretics could not be
exterminated nor the detested translation of the Bible destroyed.
[Sidenote: The revolt of Luther.] 3rd. Of the revolt of Luther. As we
shall have, in a subsequent chapter, to consider the causes that led to
the Reformation, it is not necessary to anticipate them in any detail
here. The necessities of the Roman treasury, which suggested the
doctrine of supererogation and the sale of indulgences as a ready means
of relief, merely brought on a crisis which otherwise could not have
been long postponed, the real point at issue being the right of
interpretation of the Scriptures by private judgment.
The Church did not restrict her resistance to the use of ecclesiastical
weapons--those of a carnal kind she also employed. Yet we look in vain
for the concentrated energy with which she annihilated the Albigenses,
or the atrocious policy with which the Hussites were met. The times no
longer permitted those things. But the struggle was maintained with
unflinching constancy through the disasters and successes of one hundred
and thirty years. Then came the peace of Westphalia, and the result of
the contest was ascertained. The Church had lost the whole of northern
Europe.
[Sidenote: The revolt of the philosophers.] 4th. Of the revolt of the
philosophers. Besides the actual loss of the nations who openly fell
away to Protestantism, a serious detriment was soon found to have
befallen those still remaining nominally faithful to the Church. The
fact of secession or adherence depending, in a monarchy, on the personal
caprice or policy of the sovereign, is by no means a true index of the
opinions or relations of the subjects; and thus it happened that in
several countries in which there was an outward appearance of agreement
with the Church because of the attitude of the government, there was, in
reality, a total disruption, so far as the educated and thinking classes
were concerned. This was especially the case in France.
When the voyage of circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan had for
ever settled all such questions as those of the figure of the earth and
the existence of the antipodes, the principles upon which the contest
was composed between the conflicting parties are obvious from the most
superficial perusal of the history of physics. Free thought was extorted
for science, and, as its equivalent, an unmolested state for theology.
It was an armed truce.
It was not through either of the parties to that conflict that new
troubles arose, but through the action of a class fast rising into
importance--literary men. From the beginning to the middle of the last
century these philosophers became more and more audacious in their
attacks. Unlike the scientific, whose theological action was by
implication rather than in a direct way, these boldly assaulted the
intellectual basis of faith. The opportune occurrence of the American
Revolution, by bringing forward in a prominent manner social evils and
political methods for their cure, gave a practical application to the
movement in Europe, and the Church was found unable to offer any kind of
resistance.
[Sidenote: Summary of the Italian system.] From these observations of
the state of the Church at four different epochs of her career we are
able to determine her movement. There is a time of abounding strength, a
time of feebleness, a time of ruinous loss, a time of utter exhaustion.
What a difference between the eleventh and the eighteenth centuries! It
is the noontide and evening of a day of empire.