EUROPE DURING THE DARK AGES.
UPON THE OCEAN.--DESOLATE EUROPE.--LONGING AFTER CORDOVA.--SOUTHERN
SPAIN CONTRASTED WITH THE REST OF EUROPE.--REVOLTING
UNCLEANLINESS.--ASCETIC MONKS ESTABLISH THE BELIEF THAT CLEANLINESS
OF BODY LEADS TO POLLUTION OF SOUL.--INTELLECT FETTERED HAND AND
FOOT.--CLERGY RETARDING PROGRESS.--SECULAR KNOWLEDGE SPURNED.
On, on, we glide upon the smooth, broad bosom of the majestic
Guadalquivir, along graceful groves and parks and palaces, through
woods and meads, hills and dales, shades and sun. A last glance, and
beauteous Cordova hides her proud head behind the sun-kissed horizon.
* * * * *
Fair Cordova, fair Andalusia, fair Southern lands of Spain, fare ye
well, take our brief adieu, till we visit you anew.
* * * * *
On, on, we sail, towards the Atlantic now we speed.
* * * * *
We have reached the shores of the interminable ocean. Its wild waves
dash fiercely against the rock-ribbed shores, as if impatient for our
return. Our goodly ship, staunch and strong, raises and lowers its
festooned bow upon the heaving billows of the waters vast, and its
pendant is playing in the wind, and its sails from the foreroyal to the
mizzenroyal, and up to the very top of the mainroyal are furled to the
full, in its hearty welcome to our return. We embark, and--
"On, on the vessel flies, the land is gone.
Four days are sped, but with the fifth, anon,
New shores descried, make every bosom gay,"
For we are to visit beautiful France, and learned Germany, and busy
England, and Italy, of classic fame.
Once more we are on the continent. Once more our observations are to be
put to the task. Once more we think ourselves some six and eight and
ten centuries back in the world's history. Once more the eye is to be
made to see what the mind has refused to credit.
Dreary and chilling and appalling are the scenes that now break upon
our view. Longingly we think of thee, fair Cordova, thou pride of
beauteous Andalusia. We think of thy pavements of marble, of thy
fountains of jasper, of thy wondrous artistic skill, of thy exquisite
gardens, of thy famous poets and musicians, artists and writers,
philosophers and scientists, of thy chivalrous knights and enchanting
ladies. Longingly we think of thy wondrous beauty, that would, indeed,
in our present surroundings, have sounded fabulous had not our own
eyes seen it. Had we been suddenly transplanted from the midst of
blossoming and ripening summer, joyous because of its balmy breath
and the melodious song of its birds, and the fragrant breath of its
flowers, and the gladdening sight of its ripening fruit into the
midst of the barren winter, where nature is frozen dead, and the
storm rides on the gale, and the earth is bare and naked, and the air
is cold and dreary, and the sun shines gloomily through the bleak
and murky skies, that sudden change could not have been more keenly
nor more painfully felt than that which marked the contrast between
the southern lands of Spain and the countries of France and Germany
and England and Italy, during the same age of the world's history.
Scarcely a city anywhere, save those few that had been erected along
the Rhine and the Danube by the Romans. Nothing that could, even with
the broadest stretch of leniency, be designated as agricultural.
Everywhere pathless forests, howling wastes, ill-boding wildernesses,
death-exhaling swamps, pestiferous fens. Prussia, and many more of
to-day's proudest stars in the galaxy of European provinces, we find
still uncivilized, still roaming about in the very costumes of native
barbarians, in the spirits--and vampires--and nixes--and gnomes--and
kobolds--inhabited pathless forests. Nowhere a street or highway, save
those the Romans had built. Everywhere we must make our way, amidst
indescribable difficulties, through almost impassable mud and clay.
The people crowded together in miserable hamlets, inhabit wretched
homesteads, crudely and bunglingly put together of undressed timber,
or of twigs wattled together and covered with clays or thatched with
straw or reeds, consisting seldom of more than one room, which shelters
alike man, woman, child, man servant, maid servant, fowl and beast,
a commingling of sex and species not altogether conducive to modesty
or morality. The floor, for the main part is composed of the hard
bare ground, or at best is covered with dry leaves or with filthy
rushes. Nowhere a window, nowhere a chimney, the smoke of the ill-fed,
cheerless fire escaping through a hole in the roof. Straw pellets
constitute the bed, and a round log serves the place of bolster and
pillow, one platter of treen stands in the center of the table--if
"table" it might be called--from which man, woman and child, master and
servant, maid and mistress, eat with spoons of wood. Fingers serve the
place of knives and forks, and a wooden trencher makes the round to
quench the thirst.
Everywhere we meet with men with squalid beards, and women with hair
unkempt and matted with filth, and both, clothed in garments of
untanned skin, or, at best, of leather or hair cloth, that are not
changed till they drop in pieces of themselves, a loathsome mass of
vermin, stench and rags. No attempt at drainage; the putrefying slops
and garbage and rubbish are unceremoniously thrown out of the door.
The most revolting uncleanness abounds, and we cannot help thinking of
the scrupulous cleanliness that distinguished Cordova, for cleanness
is one of the most rigorous injunctions and requirements with both
the religion of Mohammed and the religion of Moses. Here, on the
contrary, personal uncleanliness, the renunciation of every personal
comfort, the branding of every effort for better surroundings, we
are told, upon inquiry, has the highest sanction of the church. The
sordid example set by the Ascetic monks has established the belief
that cleanliness of the body leads to the pollution of the soul, that
in the past those saints were most admired who had become one hideous
mass of clotted filth. With a thrill of admiration a priest informs us
that St. Jerome had seen a monk who for thirty years had lived in a
hole, and who never washed his clothes, nor changed his tunic till it
fell to pieces; that St. Ammon had never seen himself naked; that the
famous virgin, named Silvia, had resolutely refused for sixty years, on
religious principles, to wash any part of her body, except her fingers;
that St. Euphraxia had joined a convent of 130 nuns, who shuddered
at the mention of a bath; that an anchorite had once imagined that
he was mocked by an illusion of the devil, as he saw gliding before
him through the desert a naked creature black with filth and years of
exposure; it was the once beautiful St. Mary of Egypt, who had thus
during forty-seven years been expiating her sins of Asceticism.
We have seen enough to lead us to the conclusion, that when we enter
into an examination of the mental and moral and religious state of the
people, whose personal and domestic life hold so low a rank in the
history of civilization, we must not place our expectations too high.
But low as we picture it to ourselves, the reality we find is infinitly
lower than even our most lenient imagination had pictured it. Only a
week ago we found Cordova proud, and distinguished, and peerless in the
realm of culture, and art, and philosophy, and science, and now, during
the same period of the world's history, we find a deep black cloud of
appalling ignorance overhanging France, and Italy, and Germany and
England, here and there only broken by a few, a very few, glimmering
lights. Intellect, fettered hand and foot, lies bleeding at the feet of
benighted barbarism, writhing in pain beneath the lashes of degrading
superstitions, and groveling credulity. We search for the cause of this
stupendous ignorance, and we soon find that to the clergy, more than
to all other causes combined, belongs the very ignoble distinction
of having ushered into Europe this stolid ignorance, and for being
responsible for the unatonable crime of having retarded the advance of
civilization by many centuries.
To the all powerful and all controlling influence of the Church is
to be ascribed the universal paralysis of the mind during the very
same period, when art and science and independent research flourished
in Southern Spain under Moorish and Jewish influence. Whomsoever
we approach, be they dignitaries of the Church or Church menials,
distinguished luminaries or obscure parish priests, a conversation
with them soon proves to us the sad truth, that their stock of
knowledge exhausts itself with an enumeration of some monstrous legends
or with the practice and teaching of some degrading and repulsive
superstitions.
Secular knowledge is spurned. Physical science is held in avowed
contempt and persecuted upon the ground of its inconsistency with
revealed truth. Philosophical research is prohibited, under the
severest punishment, as pernicious to piety. Upon inquiry as to the
cause of this persecution of learning on the part of the church, which,
as we modestly dare to suggest, has nothing to lose, but everything
to gain from rational research and diligent pursuit of knowledge, a
bishop emphatically informs us that they did this with the sanction
and authority of the fourth council of Carthage, which had prohibited
the reading of secular books by bishops, and with the authority of
Jerome who had condemned the study of secular subjects, except for
pious ends, and as there was no lack of piety (so they artlessly
thought) they saw little use in preserving the learning and literature
of the accursed Jews and heathens, and fearing lest they fall into the
hands of others, not so pious as they, and not so protected against
their pernicious influence by the knowledge of legends, or by the
skillful use of magic spells, or exorcising charms, as they were. Or
perhaps secretly fearing, lest an intimate knowledge of the learning
of the ancients might open the eyes of the people to the ignorance and
extortions and crimes and corruptions of the Church, they condemn that
whole literature to the flames. Hundreds and thousands of valuable
manuscripts are thus pitilessly destroyed. We fain would stay their
cruel hand, but we fear for our lives. We see them erase the writing
from hundreds and thousands of parchment copies of ancient priceless
lore, and substitute in its stead legends of saints, and ecclesiastical
rubbish, occasioning thus the loss of many an ancient author that is
now so painfully missed.
We turn away from this revolting stupidity, but nowhere a pleasing sign
to allay our anguish, or appease our grief-stricken heart.
"Oh, thou monstrous ignorance, how deformed dost thou look."
Nowhere freedom of humane thought. Everyone compelled to think as
ecclesiastical authority orders him to think. In Germany, France and
Northern Spain we find scarcely one priest out of a thousand who can
write his name. In Rome itself, once the city of art and culture and
learning, as late as 992, a reliable authority informs us, there is
not a priest to be found who knows the first elements of letters. In
England, King Alfred informs us that he cannot recollect a single
priest south of the Thames (then the most civilized part of England)
who at the time of his accession understood or could translate the
ordinary Latin prayer, and that the homilies which they preached were
compiled for their use by some bishop from former works of the same
kind, or from the early Patristic writings. Throughout Christendom we
find no restraint on the ordination of persons absolutely illiterate,
no rules to exclude the ignorant from ecclesiastical preferment, no
inclination and no power to make it obligatory upon even the mitred
dignitaries, to be able to read a line from those Scriptures which they
are to teach and preach as the rule of right and the guide to moral
conduct. Darkness, intense darkness, stupendous ignorance everywhere.
We shudder as we think of the cruelties which this ignorance will
bequeath as its curse upon mankind. We shudder as we think of how this
ignorance needs must check the advance of civilization. We know that
knowledge will not be fettered forever, but before it shall be able
to assert its right to sway over the mind of men, countless giant
minds will have to be crushed and indescribable suffering will have
to be endured. We know that "ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge,
but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even
as night into day through twilight." We tremble for those independent
spirits that shall live during that transitory period. That twilight
will be reddened by the reflection of streams of human blood.
We fain would speed away from these European lands, for we
instinctively feel that we are in lands under the curse of God, and
smitten with darkness, because their people had laid cruel hands upon
the lands and the people of learning and culture and art.
But we must stay. We must note, distressing though the duty be, the
terrible influence which this ignorance exercised upon the morals of
the Church itself, and upon the mental and moral and political and
social and industrial state of the people.
[Illustration]