Were I asked to name the four most refining influences in modern
civilisation I would answer: Women, Beauty, Love, and Marriage. Were I
asked to name the essence of the early mediæval spirit I would say:
Deadly Enmity toward Women, Beauty, Love, and Marriage.
This pathologic attitude of the mediæval mind was at first a natural
reaction against the incredible depravity and licentiousness that
prevailed under the Roman Empire. But the reaction went to such
preposterous extremes that the resulting state of affairs was even more
degrading and deplorable than the original evil. It was like inoculating
a man with leprosy to cure him of smallpox. It was bad enough to treat
marriage as a _farce_, as did the later Romans, among whom there were
women who had their eighth and tenth husband, while one case is related
of a woman “who was married to her twenty-third husband, she herself
being his twenty-first wife”; while the public looked upon this case as
a “match” in a double sense, the survivor being publicly crowned and
feted as champion. But a thousand times worse was the mediæval notion
that marriage is a _crime_. And this preposterous notion—that a relation
on which all civilisation is based, which is sanctioned even by many
animals and ignored by only the very lowest of the savages—this criminal
notion was foisted on the world by the fanatical priesthood in whose
hands unfortunately Christianity was placed for centuries, to be
distorted, vitiated, and utilised for political, criminal, and selfish
purposes.
“The services rendered,” says Mr. Lecky, “by the ascetics in imprinting
on the minds of men a profound and enduring conviction of the importance
of chastity, though extremely great, were seriously counterbalanced by
their noxious influence upon marriage. Two or three beautiful
descriptions of this institution have been culled out of the immense
mass of patristic writings; but in general it would be difficult to
conceive anything more coarse and more repulsive than the manner in
which they regarded it.... The tender love which it elicits, the holy
and beautiful domestic qualities that follow in its train, were almost
absolutely omitted from consideration. The object of the ascetic was to
attract men to a life of virginity, and, as a necessary consequence,
marriage was treated as an inferior state.”
“The days of Chivalry were not yet,” we read in Smith’s _Dictionary of
Christian Antiquities_, “and we cannot but notice even in the greatest
of the Christian fathers a lamentably low estimate of woman, and,
consequently, of the marriage relationship.”
What an inexhaustible source of mediæval immorality this contemptuous
treatment of marriage by the most influential class of society proved,
has been so often depicted in glaring colours that these pages need not
be tainted with illustrations.