a child. Children were withered blossoms blown to oblivion. The
soft breezes that fanned the Blessed Isles and played through the
perennial summer of Elysium blew upon no infant brows. The grave
held all the children very fast. By the memorable words, "Of such
is the kingdom of heaven," Christ unbarred the portals of the
future world and revealed therein hosts of angelic children. Ever
since then children have been seen in heaven. The poet has sung
that the angel child is first on the wing to welcome the parent
home. Painters have shown us, in their visions of the blessed
realms, crowds of cherubs, have shown us
"How at the Almighty Father's hand,
Nearest the throne of living light,
The choirs of infant seraphs stand,
And dazzling shine where all are bright."
Fifthly, the triumphant establishment of Christianity in the world
has thrown the prestige of public opinion, the imposing authority
of general affirmation and acceptance, around its component
doctrines chief among which is the doctrine of immortality and
secured in their behalf the resistless influences of current
custom and education. From the time the gospel was acknowledged by
a nation as the true religion, each generation grew up by habitual
tutelage to an implicit belief in the future life. It became a
dogma not to be questioned. And the reception of it was made more
reasonable and easy by the great superiority of its moral features
over those of the relative superstitions embodied in the ethnic
religions which Christianity displaced.
Finally, Christianity has exerted no small influence both in
expressing and imparting faith in immortality by means of the art
to which it has given birth. The Christian ritual and symbolism,
which culminated in the Middle Age, from the very first had their
vitality and significance in the truth of another life. Every
phase and article of them implied, and with mute or vocal
articulation proclaimed, the superiority and survival of mind and
heart, the truth of the gospel history, the reality of the opened
heaven. Who, in the excited atmosphere, amidst the dangers, living
traditions, and dramatic enactments of that time, could behold the
sacraments of the Church, listen to a mighty chant, kneel beside a
holy tomb, or gaze on a painting of a gospel scene, without
feeling that the story of Christ's ascent to God was true, being
assured that elsewhere than on earth there was a life for the
believer, and in rapt imagination seeing visions of the
supernatural kingdom unveiled?
The inmost thought or sentiment of mediaval art to adapt a
remarkable passage from Heine6 was the depression of the body and
the elevation of the soul. Statues of martyrs, pictures of
crucifixions, dying saints, pale, faint sufferers, drooping heads,
long, thin arms, meager bones, poor, awkwardly hung dresses,
emaciated features celestially illuminated by faith and love,
expressed the Christian self denial and unearthliness.
Architecture enforced the same lesson as sculpture and painting.
Entering a cathedral, we at once feel the soul exalted, the flesh
degraded. The inside of the dome is itself a hollow cross, and we
walk there within the very witness work of martyrdom. The gorgeous
windows fling their red and green lights upon us like drops of
blood and decay. Funereal music wails and fades away along the dim
arches. Under our feet are gravestones and corruption. With the
colossal columns the soul climbs aloft, loosing itself from the
body, which sinks to the floor as a weary weed. And when we look
on one of these vast Gothic structures from without, so airy,
graceful, tender, transparent, it seems cut out of one piece, or
may be taken for an ethereal lace work of marble.
6 Die Romantische Schule, buch i.
Then only do we feel the power of the inspiration which
could so subdue even stone that it shines spectrally possessed,
and make the most insensate of materials voice forth the grand
teaching of Christianity, the triumph of the spirit over the
flesh.
In these six ways, therefore, by placing a tangible image of it in
the imagination through the resurrection of Christ, by the
powerful stirring of the springs of moral faith through the
persecutions that attended its confession, by the apparent
inspiration of the martyrs who died in its strength, by calling
out the latent force of the heart's affections that crave it, by
the moulding power of establishment, custom, and education, by the
spiritualizing, vision conjuring effect of its worship and art,
has Christianity done a work of incalculable extent in
strengthening the world's belief in a life to come.7
A remarkable evidence of the impression Christianity carried
before it is furnished by an incident in the history of the
missionary Paulinus. He had preached before Edwin, King of
Northumbria. An old earl stood up and said, "The life of man
seems, when compared with what is hidden, like the sparrow, who,
as you sit in your hall, with your thanes and attendants, warmed
by the blazing fire, flies through. As he flies through from door
to door, he enjoys a brief escape from the chilling storms of rain
and snow without. Again he goes forth into the winter and
vanishes. So seems the short life of man. If this new doctrine
brings us something more certain, in my mind it is worthy of
adoption."8
The most glorious triumph of Christianity in regard to the
doctrine of a future life was in imparting a character of
impartialness and universality to the proud, oligarchic faith
which had previously excluded from it the great multitude of men.
The lofty conceptions of the fate of the soul cherished by the
illustrious philosophers of Greece and Rome were not shared by the
commonalty until the gospel its right hand touching the throne of
God, its left clasping humanity announced in one breath the
resurrection of Jesus and the brotherhood of man.
"Their highest lore was for the few conceived, By schools
discuss'd, but not by crowds believed. The angel ladder clomb the
heavenly steep, But at its foot the priesthoods lay, asleep. They
did not preach to nations, 'Lo, your God!' No thousands follow'd
where their footsteps trod: Not to the fishermen they said,
'Arise!' Not to the lowly offer'd they the skies. Wisdom was
theirs: alas! what men most need Is no sect's wisdom, but the
people's creed. Then, not for schools, but for the human kind, The
uncultured reason, the unletter'd mind, The poor, the oppress'd,
the laborer, and the slave, God said, 'Be light!' and light was on
the grave! No more alone to sage and hero given, For all wide oped
the impartial gates of heaven." 9
7 Compare Bengal's essay, Quid Doctrina de Animarum Immortalitate
Religioni Christiana debeat.
8 Venerable Bede, book ii. ch. xiv.
9 Bulwer, New Timon, part iv.
PART FOURTH
CHRISTIAN THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
PATRISTIC DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
WITH reference to the present subject, we shall consider the
period of the Church Fathers as including the nine centuries
succeeding the close of the apostolic age. It extends from
Clement, Barnabas, and Hermas to OEcumenius and Gerbert.
The principal components of the doctrine of the future life held
during this period, though showing some diversities and changes,
are in their prevailing features of one consistent type,
constituting the belief which would in any of those centuries have
been generally recognised by the Church as orthodox.
For reasons previously given, we believe that Jesus himself taught
a purely moral doctrine concerning the future life, a doctrine
free from arbitrary, mechanical, or sacerdotal peculiarities. With
experimental knowledge, with inspired insight, with fullest
authority, he set forth conclusions agreeing with the wisest
philosophy and confirmatory of our noblest hopes, namely, that a
conscious immortality awaits the soul in the many mansions of the
Father's house, which it enters on leaving the body, and where its
experience will depend upon ethical and spiritual conditions. To
this simple and sublime doctrine announced by Jesus, so rational
and satisfactory, we believe for reasons already explained that
the apostles joined various additional and modifying notions,
Judaic and Gentile, such as the local descent of Christ into the
prison world of the dead, his mission there, his visible second
coming, a bodily resurrection, a universal scenic judgment, and
other kindred views. The sum of results thus reached the Fathers
developed in greater detail, distinguishing and emphasizing them,
and also still further corrupting them with some additional
conceptions and fancies, Greek and Oriental, speculative and
imaginative. The peculiar theological work of the apostles in
regard to this subject was the organizing of the Persian Jewish
doctrine of the Pharisees, with a Christian complement and
modifications, around the person of Christ, and fixing so near in
the immediate future the period when it was to be consummated that
it might be looked for at any time. The peculiar theological work
of the Fathers in regard to the doctrine thus formed by the
apostles was twofold. First, being disappointed of the expected
speedy second coming of Christ, they developed the intermediate
state of the dead more fully, and made it more prominent.
Secondly, in the course of the long and vehement controversies
which sprang up, they were led to complete and systematize their
theology, to define their terms, to explain and defend their
doctrines, comparing them together and attempting to harmonize
them with history, reason, and ethics, as well as with Scripture
and tradition. In this way the patristic mind became familiar with
many processes of thought, with many special details, and with
some general principles, quite foreign to the apostolic mind.
Meanwhile, defining and systematizing went on, loose notions
hardened into rigid dogmas, free thought was hampered by
authority, the scheme generally received assumed the title of
orthodox, anathematizing all who dared to dissent, and the
fundamental outlines of the patristic eschatology were firmly
established.1
In seeking to understand and to give an exposition of this scheme
of faith, we have, besides various collateral aids, three chief
guidances. First, we possess the symbols or confessions of faith
put forth by several of the leading theologians of those times, or
by general councils, and openly adopted as authority in many of
the churches, the creed falsely called the Apostles', extant as
early as the close of the third century, the creed of Arius, that
of Cyril, the Nicene creed, the creed falsely named the
Athanasian, and others. Secondly, we have the valuable assistance
afforded by the treatises of Irenaus, Tertullian, Epiphanius,
Augustine, and others still later, on the heresies that had arisen
in the Church, treatises which make it easy to infer, by contrast
and construction, what was considered orthodox from the statement
of what was acknowledged heretical. And, thirdly, abundant
resources are afforded us in the extant theological dissertations,
and historical documents of the principal ecclesiastical authors
of the time in review, a cycle of well known names, sweeping from
Theophilus of Antioch to Photius of Byzantium, from Cyprian of
Carthage to Maurus of Mentz. We think that any candid person,
mastering these sources of information in the illustrating and
discriminating light of a sufficient knowledge of the previous and
the succeeding related opinions, will recognise in the following
abstract a fair representation of the doctrine of a future life as
it was held by the orthodox Fathers of the Christian Church in the
period extending from the first to the tenth century.
Before proceeding to set forth the common patristic scheme, a few
preliminary remarks are necessary in relation to some of the
peculiar, prominent features of Origen's theology, and in relation
to the rival systems of Augustine and Pelagius. Origen was a man
of vast learning, passionately fond of philosophy; and he
modifyingly mingled a great many Oriental and Platonic notions
with his theology. He imagined that innumerable worlds like this
had existed and perished before it, and that innumerable others
will do so after it in endless succession.2 He held that all souls
whether devils, men, angels, or of whatever rank were of the same
nature; that all who exist in material bodies are imprisoned in
them as a punishment for sins committed in a previous state; the
fig leaves in which Adam and Eve were dressed after their sin were
the fleshly bodies they were compelled to assume on being expelled
from the Paradise of their previous existence; that in proportion
to their sins they are confined in subtile or gross bodies of
adjusted grades until by penance and wisdom they slowly win their
1 Bretschneider, Was lehren die altesten Kirchenvater uber die
Entstehung der Sude und des Todes, Adam's Vergehen und die
Versohnung durch Christum. Oppositionsschrift, band viii. hft. 3,
ss. 380-407.
2 De Principiis, lib. lit. cap. 5.
deliverance, this gradual descent and ascent of souls being
figuratively represented by Jacob's ladder; that all punishments
and rewards are exactly fitted to the degree of sin or merit,
without possibility of failure; that all suffering even that in
the lowest hell is benevolent and remedial, so that even the worst
spirits, including Satan himself, shall after a time be restored
to heaven; that this alternation of fall and restoration shall be
continued so often as the cloy and satiety of heavenly bliss, or
the preponderant power of temptation, pervert free will into sin.3
He declared that it was impossible to explain the phenomena and
experience of human life, or to justify the ways of God, except by
admitting that souls sinned in a pre existent state. He was
ignorant of the modern doctrine of vicarious atonement, considered
as placation or satisfaction, and regarded Christ's suffering not
as a substitute for ours, but as having merely the same efficacy
in kind as the death of any innocent person, only more eminent in
degree. He represents the mission of Christ to be to show men that
God can forgive and recall them from sin, banishment, and hell,
and to furnish them, in various ways, helps and incitements to win
salvation. The foregoing assertions, and other kindred points, are
well established by Mosheim, in his exposition of the characteristic
views of Origen.4
The famous controversy between Augustine and Pelagius shook
Christendom for a century and a half, and has rolled its echoing
results even to the theological shores of to day. Augustine was
more Calvinistic in his doctrines than the Fathers before him, and
even than most of those after him. In a few particulars perhaps a
majority of the Fathers really agreed more nearly with Pelagius
than with him. But his system prevailed, and was publicly adopted
for all Christendom by the third general council at Ephesus in the
year 431. Yet some of its principles, in their full force, were
actually not accepted. For instance, his dogma of unconditional
election that some were absolutely predestinated to eternal
salvation, others to eternal damnation has never been taught by
the Roman Catholic Church. When Gottschalk urged it in the ninth
century, it was condemned as a heresy;5 and among the Protestants
in the sixteenth century Calvin was obliged to fight for it
against odds. Augustine's belief must therefore be taken as a
representation of the general patristic belief only with caution
and with qualifications. The distinctive views of Augustine as
contrasted with those of Pelagius were as follow.6 Augustine held
that, by Adam's fault, a burden of sin was entailed on all souls,
dooming them, without exception, to an eternal banishment in the
infernal world. Pelagius denied the doctrine of "original sin,"
and made each one responsible only for his own personal sins.
Augustine taught that baptism was necessary to free its subject
from the power which the devil had over the soul on account of
original sin, and that all would infallibly be doomed to hell who
were not baptized, except, first, the ancient saints, who foreknew
the evangelic doctrines and believed, and, secondly, the martyrs,
whose blood was their baptism. Pelagius claimed that Christian
baptism was only necessary to secure an
3 Ibid. lib. ii. cap. 9, 10.
4 Commentaries on the Affairs of the Christians in the First Three
Centuries: Third Century sects. 27-29.
5 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 183.
6 Wiggers, Augustinism and Pelagianism, trans. from the German by
R. Emerson, ch. xix.; also pp. 62, 68, 75, 79.
entrance into heaven: infants and good men, if unbaptized; would
enjoy a happy immortality in Paradise, but they never could enter
the kingdom of heaven. Augustine affirmed that Adam's sin
destroyed the freedom of the will in the whole human race.
Pelagius asserted the freedom of the individual will. Augustine
declared that a few were arbitrarily elected to salvation from
eternity, and that Christ died only for them. Pelagius taught that
salvation or reprobation depended on personal deserts, and that
the Divine election was merely through prescience of merits.
Augustine said that saving grace was supernatural, irresistible,
unattainable by human effort. Pelagius said it might be won or
resisted by conformity to certain conditions in each person's
power. Augustine believed that bodily death was inflicted as a
punishment for sin;7 Pelagius, that it was the result of a natural
law. The extensive, various learning, massive, penetrating mind,
and remorseless logical consistency, of Augustine, enabled him to
gather up the loose, floating theological elements and notions of
the time, and generalize them into a complete system, in striking
harmony, indeed, with the general character and drift of patristic
thought, but carried out more fully in its details and applied
more unflinchingly in its principles than had been done before,
and therefore in some of its dogmas outstripping the current
convictions of his contemporaries. His dogma of election was too
revolting and immoral ever to win universal assent; and few could
have the heart to unite with him in stigmatizing the whole human
race in their natural state as "one damned batch and mass of
perdition!" (conspersio damnata, massa perditionis.) With these
hints, we are ready to advance to the general patristic scheme of
eschatology. The exceptional variations and heresies will be
referred to afterwards.
First, in regard to the natural state of men under the law, from
the time of Adam's sin to the time of Christ's suffering, their
moral condition and destination, no one can deny that the Fathers
commonly supposed that the dissolution of the body and the descent
of the soul to the under world were a penalty brought on all men
through the sin of the first man. Wherever the lengthening line of
human generations wandered, the trail of the serpent, stamp of
depravity, was on them, sealing them as Death's and marking them
for the Hadean prison. This was the indiscriminate and the
inevitable doom. There is no need of citing proofs of this
statement, as it is well known that the writings of the Fathers
are thronged both with indirect implications and with explicit
avowals of it.
Secondly, they thought that Christ came from heaven to redeem men
from their lost state and subterranean bondage and to guide them
to heaven. Augustine, and perhaps some others, maintained that he
came merely to effectuate the salvation of a foreordained few; but
undoubtedly the common belief was that he came to redeem all who
would conform to certain conditions which he proposed and made
feasible. The important question here is, What did the Fathers
suppose the essence of Christ's redemptive work to be? and how, in
their estimation, did he achieve that work? Was it the renewal and
sanctification of human character by the melting power of a
proclamation of mercy and love from God, by the regenerating
influences and motives of the truths and appeals spoken by his
lips, illustrated
7 In Gen. lib. ix. cap. 10, 11: "Parents would have yielded to
children not by death, but by translation, and would have become
as the angels."
in his life, and brought to a focus in his martyr death? Certainly
this was too plainly and prominently a part of the mission of
Christ ever to be wholly overlooked. And yet one acquainted with
the writings of the Fathers can hardly mistake so widely as to
think that they esteemed this the principal element in Christ's
redemptive work. Was the essence of that work, then, the making of
a vicarious atonement, according to the Calvinistic interpretation
of that phrase, the offering of a substitutional anguish
sufficient to satisfy the claims of inexorable justice, so that
the guilty might be pardoned? No. The modern doctrine of the
atonement the satisfaction theory, as it is called was unknown to
the Fathers. It was developed, step by step, after many
centuries.8 It did not receive its acknowledged form until it came
from the mind of the great Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, as
late as the twelfth century. No scholar will question this
confessed fact. What, then, were the essence and method of
Christ's redemptive mission according to the Fathers? In brief,
they were these. He was, as they believed, a superangelic being,
the only begotten Son of God, possessing a nature, powers, and
credentials transcending those delegated to any other being below
God himself. He became flesh, to seek and to save the lost. This
saving work was done not by his mortal sufferings alone, but by
the totality of labors extending through the whole period of his
incarnation. The subjective or moral part of his redemptive
mission was to regenerate the characters of men and fit them for
heaven by his teachings and example; the objective or physical
part was to deliver their souls from the fatal confinement of the
under world and secure for them the gracious freedom of the sky,
by descending himself as the suppressing conqueror of death and
then ascending as the beckoning pioneer of his followers. The
Fathers did not select the one point or act of Christ's death as
the pivot of human redemption; but they regarded that redemption
as wrought out by the whole of his humiliation, instruction,
example, suffering, and triumph, as the resultant of all the
combined acts of his incarnate drama. Run over the relevant
writings of Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius,
Cyril, Ambrose, Augustine himself, Jerome, Chrysostom, and the
rest of the prominent authors of the first ten centuries, and you
cannot fail to be struck with the fact that they invariably speak
of redemption, not in connection with Christ's death alone, but
emphatically in connection with the group of ideas, his
incarnation, death, descent, resurrection, and ascension! For the
most part, they received it by tradition as a fact, without much
philosophizing, that, in consequence of the sin of Adam, all men
were doomed to die, that is, to leave their bodies and descend
into the shadowy realm of death. They also accepted it as a fact,
without much attempt at theoretical explanation, that when Christ,
the sinless and resistless Son of God, died and went thither,
before his immaculate Divinity the walls fell, the devils fled,
the prisoners' chains snapped, and the power of Satan was broken.
They received it as a fact that through the mediation of Christ
the original boon forfeited by Adam was to be restored, and that
men, instead of undergoing death and banishment to Hades, should
be translated to heaven. So far as they had a theory about the
cause, it turned on two simple points: first, the free grace and
love of God; second, the self sacrifice and sufficient power of
8 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 68.
Christ. In the progressive course of dogmatic controversy,
metaphysical speculation, and desire for system, explanations have
been devised in a hundred different forms, from that of Aquinas to
that of Calvin; from that of Anselm to that of Grotius; from that
of Socinus to that of Bushnell. Tertullian describes the profound
abyss beneath the grave, in the bowels of the earth, where, he
says, all the dead are detained unto the day of judgment, and
where Christ in his descent made the patriarchs and prophets his
companions.9 Augustine says that nearly the whole Church agreed in
believing that Christ delivered Adam from the under world when he
rose thence himself.10 One must be very ignorant on the subject to
doubt that the Fathers attributed unrivalled importance to the
literal descent of Christ into the abode of the departed.11
Thirdly, after the advent of Christ, what were the conditions
proposed for the actual attainment of personal salvation? It was
the orthodox belief that Christ led up into Paradise with him the
ancient saints who were awaiting his appearance in the under
world:12 but with this exception it was not supposed that he saved
any outright: he only put it in their power to save themselves,
removing the previously insuperable obstacles. In the faith of
those who accepted the dogma of predestination, of course, the
presupposed condition of actual personal salvation was that the
given individual should become one of the elect number. But it
seems to have been usually believed that baptism was indispensable
to give final efficacy to the decree of election in each
individual case.13 Augustine says, "All are born under the power
of the devil, held in chains by him as a jailer: baptism alone,
through the force of Christ's redemptive work, breaks these chains
and secures heaven." In regard to this necessity of baptism
Pelagius agreed with his great adversary, saving an unessential
modification, as we have seen before. The same may be said of
Cyprian, Tertullian, and many other leading Fathers. Again, the so
called Athanasian Creed, which shows the prevalent opinion of the
Church in the fifth and sixth centuries, asserts that whoso
believes not in the Trinity and kindred dogmas as therein laid
down "without doubt shall perish everlastingly." In other words,
assent of mind to the established creed of the Church is a vital
condition of salvation. Finally, in the writings of nearly all of
the Fathers we find frequent declarations of the necessity of
moral virtue, righteous conduct, and piety, as a condition of
admission into the kingdom of heaven. For example, Augustine says,
"Such as have been baptized, partaken of the sacraments, and
remained always in the catholic faith, but have led wicked lives,
can have no hope of escaping eternal damnation." 14 These points
were not sharply defined, authoritatively established, and
consistently adhered to; and yet there was a pretty general
agreement among the body of the Fathers that for actual salvation
there were three practical necessary conditions, baptism, a sound
faith, a good life.
9 De Anima, sects. 7 et 55.
10 Epist. CLXIV.
11 Huidekoper, Belief of the First Three Centuries concerning
Christ's Mission to the Under World.
12 Augustine, De Civ. Del. lib. xx. cap. xv. Wiedenfeld, De
Exorcismi Origine, Mutatione, deque hujus Actus peragendi Ratione
Neander, Church History, vol. i. p. 3
13 Torrey's trans.
14 De Civ. Dei., lib. xxi. cap. xxv.
Fourthly, the Fathers believed that none of the righteous dead
could be admitted into heaven itself, the abode of God and his
angels, until after the second coming of Christ and the holding of
the general judgment; neither were any of the reprobate dead,
according to their view, to be thrust into hell itself until after
those events; but meanwhile all were detained in an intermediate
state, the justified in a peaceful region of the under world
enjoying some foretaste of their future blessedness, the condemned
in a dismal region of the same under world suffering some
foretaste of their future torment.15 After the numerous evidences
given in previous chapters of the prevalence of this view among
the Fathers, it would be superfluous to cite further authorities
here. We will only reply to an objection which may be urged. It
may be said, the Fathers believed that Enoch and Elijah were
translated to heaven, also that the patriarchs, whom Christ
rescued on his descent to Hades, were admitted thither, and,
furthermore, that the martyrs by special privilege were granted
entrance there. The point is an important one. The reply turns on
the broad distinction made by the Fathers between heaven and
Paradise. Some of the Fathers regarded Paradise as one division of
the under world; some located it in a remote and blessed region of
the earth; others thought it was high in the air, but below the
dwelling place of God.16 Now, it was to "Paradise," not to heaven,
that the dying thief, penitent on the cross, was promised
admission. It was of "Paradise," not of heaven, that Tertullian
said "the blood of the martyrs is the perfect key." So, too, when
Jerome, Chrysostom, and others speak of a few favored ones
delivered from the common fate before the day of judgment, it is
"Paradise," and not heaven, that is represented as being thrown
open to them. Irenaus says, "Those who were translated were
translated to the Paradise whence disobedient Adam was driven into
the world."17
A notable attempt has been repeatedly made for example, by the
famous Dr. Coward, by Dodwell, and by some other more obscure
writers to prove that the Fathers of the Greek Church, in
opposition to the Latin Fathers, denied the consciousness of the
soul during the interval from death to the resurrection, and
maintained that the soul died with the body and would be restored
with it at the last day. But this is an error arising from the
misinterpretation of the figurative terms in which the Greek
Fathers express themselves. Tatian, Justin, Theophilus, and
Irenaus do not differ from the others in reality, but only in
words. The opinion that the soul is literally mortal is
erroneously attributed to those Greek Fathers, who in truth no
more held it than Tertullian did. "The death" they mean is, to
borrow their own language, "deprived of the rays of Divine light,
to bear a deathly immortality," (in immortalitate mortem
tolerantes,) an eternal existence in the ghostly under world.18
The con
15 They feel, as Novatian says, (De Trinitate, 1,) a prajudicium
futuri judicii. See also Ernesti, Excurs. de Veter. Patrum
Opinione de Statu Medio Animor. a Corpore sejunctorum. In his
Lect. Acad. in Ep. ad Hebr.
16 E. g., see Ambrose, De Paradiso.
17 Adv. Hares., lib. v. cap. v.
18 See this point ably argued in an academic dissertation
published at Konigsberg, 1827, bearing the title "Antiquissimorum
Ecclesia Grsecte Patrum de Immortalitate Anima Sententia
Recensentur."
They held that the inner man was originally a spirit [non-ASCII
characters omitted] and a soul [non-ASCII characters omitted]
blended and immortal, that is, indestructibly united and blessed.
But by sin the soul loses the spirit and becomes subject to death.
that is, to ignorance of its Divine origin, alienation from God,
darkness, and an abode in Hades. By the influences flowing from the
mission of Christ, man is elevated again to conscious communion with
God, and the spirit is restored to the soul. "Si restituitur, manet
[non-ASCII characters omitted] fit autem [non-ASCII characters
omitted]; si non restituitur, manet [non-ASCII characters omitted],
fit autem [non-ASCII characters omitted], quod haud differt a morte."
cordant doctrine of the Fathers as to the intermediate state of the
dead was that, with the exception of a few admitted to Paradise,
they were in the under world waiting the fulness of time, when the
world should be judged and their final destination be assigned to them.
As Tertullian says, "constituimus omnem animam apud inferos
seguestrari in diem Domini."
Finally, the Fathers expected that Christ would return from
heaven, hold a general day of judgment, and consummate all things.
The earliest disciples seem to have looked anxiously, almost from
hour to hour, for that awful crisis. But, as years rolled on and
the last apostle died, and it came not, the date was fixed more
remotely; and, as other years passed away, and still no clear
signs of its arrival appeared, the date grew more and more
indefinite. Some still looked for the solemn dawn speedily to
break; others assigned it to the year 1000; others left the time
utterly vague; but none gave up the doctrine. All agreed that
sooner or later a time would come when the deep sky would open,
and Christ, clothed in terrors and surrounded by pomp of angels,
would alight on the globe, when:
"The angel of the trumpet Shall split the charnel earth With his
blast so clear and brave, And quicken the charnel birth At the
roots of the grave, Till the dead all stand erect."
Augustine, representing the catholic faith, says, "The coming of
Elias, the conversion of the Jews, Antichrist's persecution, the
setting up of Christ's tribunal, the raising of the dead, the
severing of the good and the bad, the burning of the world, and
its renovation, this is the destined order of events."19 The saved
were to be transported bodily to the eternal bliss of heaven; the
damned, in like manner, were to be banished forever to a fiery
hell in the centre of the earth, there to endure uncomprehended
agonies, both physical and spiritual, without any respite, without
any end. There were important, and for a considerable period quite
extensive, exceptions, to the belief in this last dogma:
nevertheless, such was undeniably the prevailing view, the
orthodox doctrine, of the patristic Church. The strict literality
with which these doctrines were held is strikingly shown in
Jerome's artless question: "If the dead be not raised with flesh
and bones, how can the damned, after the judgment, gnash their
teeth in hell?"
During the period now under consideration there were great
fluctuations, growths, changes, of opinion on three subjects in
regard to which the public creeds did not prevent all freedom of
thought by laying down definite propositions. We refer to baptism,
the millennium, and purgatory. Christian baptism was first simply
a rite of initiation into the Christian religion. Then it became
more distinctly a symbol of faith in Christ and in his gospel, and
an emblem of a new birth. Next it was imagined to be literally
efficacious to
19 De Civ. Del, lib. xx. cap. 30, sect. 5.
personal salvation, solving the chains of the devil, washing off
original sin, and opening the door of heaven.20 To trace the
doctrine through its historical variations and its logical
windings would require a large volume, and is not requisite for
our present purpose.
Almost all the early Fathers believingly looked for a millennium,
a reign of Christ on earth with his saints for a thousand years.
Daille has shown that this belief was generally held, though with
great diversities of conception as to the form and features of the
doctrine.21 It was a Jewish notion which crept among the
Christians of the first century and has been transmitted even to
the present day. Some supposed the millennium would precede the
destruction of the world, others that it would follow that
terrible event, after a general renovation. None but the faithful
would have part in it; and at its close they would pass up to
heaven. Irenaus quotes a tradition, delivered by Papias, that "in
the millennium each vine will bear ten thousand branches, each
branch ten thousand twigs, each twig ten thousand clusters, each
cluster ten thousand grapes, each grape yielding a hogshead of
wine; and if any one plucks a grape its neighbors will cry, Take
me: I am better!" This, of course, was a metaphor to show what the
plenty and the joy of those times would be. According to the
heretics Cerinthus and Marcion, the millennium was to consist in
an abundance of all sorts of sensual riches and delights. Many of
the orthodox Fathers held the same view, but less grossly; while
others made its splendors and its pleasures mental and moral.22
Origen attacked the whole doctrine with vehemence and cogency. His
admirers continued the warfare after him, and the belief in this
celestial Cocaigne suffered much damage and sank into comparative
neglect. The subject rose into importance again at the approaching
close of the first chiliad of Christianity, but soon died away as
the excitement of that ominous epoch passed with equal
disappointment to the hopes and the fears of the believers. A
galvanized controversy has been carried on about it again in the
present century, chiefly excited by the modern sect of Second
Adventists. Large volumes have recently appeared, principally
aiming to decide whether the millennium is to precede or to follow
the second coming of Christ! 23 The doctrine itself is a Jewish
Christian figment supported only by a shadowy basis of fancy. The
truth contained in it, though mutilated and disguised, is that
when the religion of Christ is truly enthroned over the earth,
when his real teachings and life are followed, the kingdom of God
will indeed cover the world, and not for a thousand years only,
but unimaginable glory and happiness shall fill the dwellings of
the successive generations of men forever.24
The doctrine of a purgatory a place intermediate between Paradise
and hell, where souls not too sinful were temporarily punished,
and where their condition and stay were in the power of the Church
on earth, a doctrine which in the Middle Age became practically
20 Neander, Planting and Training, Eng. trans. p. 102.
21 De Usu Patrum, lib. ii. cap. 4.
22 Munscher, Entwickelung der Lehre vom Tausendjahrigen Reiche in
den Drei Ersten Jahrhunderten. In Henke's Magaz. b. vi. ss. 233
254.
23 See e. g. The End, by Dr. Cumming. The Second Advent, by D.
Brown.
24 Bush, On the Millennium. Bishop Russell, Discourses on the
Millennium. Carroll, Geschichte des Chiliasmus.
the foremost instrument of ecclesiastical influence and income was
through the age of the Fathers gradually assuming shape and
firmness. It seems to have been first openly avowed as a Church
dogma and effectively organized as a working power by Pope Gregory
the Great, in the latter part of the sixth century.25 No more
needs to be said here, as the subject more properly belongs to the
next chapter.
It but remains in close to notice those opinions relating to the
future life which were generally condemned as heresies by the
Fathers. One of the earliest of these was the destruction of the
intermediate state and the denial of the general judgment by the
assertion, which Paul charges so early as in his day upon Hymeneus
and Philetus, "that the resurrection has passed already;" that is,
that the soul, when it leaves the body, passes immediately to its
final destination. This opinion reappeared faintly at intervals,
but obtained very little prevalence in the early ages of the
Church. Hierax, an author who lived at Leontopolis in Egypt early
in the fourth century, denied the resurrection of the body, and
excluded from the kingdom of heaven all who were married and all
who died before becoming moral agents.
Another heretical notion which attracted some attention was the
opposite extreme from the foregoing, namely, that the soul totally
dies with the body, and will be restored to life with it in the
general resurrection at the end of the world; an opinion held by
an Arabian sect of Christians, who were vanquished in debate upon
it by Origen, and renounced it.26
Still another doctrine known among the Fathers was the belief that
Christ, when he descended into the under world, saved and led away
in triumph all who were there, Jews, pagans, good, bad, all,
indiscriminately. This is number seventy nine in Augustine's list
of the heresies. And there is now extant among the writings of
Pope Boniface VI, of the ninth century, a letter furiously
assailing a man who had recently maintained this "damnable
doctrine."
The numerous Gnostic sects represented by Valentinus, Cerinthus,
Marcion, Basilides, and other less prominent names, held a system
of speculation copious, complex, and of intensely Oriental
character. That portion of it directly connected with our subject
may be stated in few words. They taught that all souls pre existed
in a world of pure light, but, sinning through the instigation and
craft of demons, they fell, were mixed with darkness and matter,
and bound in bodies. Through sensual lusts and ignorance, they
were doomed to suffer after death in hell for various periods, and
then to be born again. Jehovah was the enemy of the true God, and
was the builder of this world and of hell, wherein he contrives to
keep his victims imprisoned by deceiving them to worship him and
to live in errors and indulgences. Christ came, they said, to
reveal the true God, unmask the infernal character and wiles of
Jehovah, rescue those whom he had cruelly shut up in hell, and
teach men the real way of salvation. Accordingly, Marcion declared
that when Christ descended into the under world he released and
took into his own kingdom Cain, and the Sodomites, and all the
25 Flugge, Geschichte der Lehre vom Zustande des Menschen nach dem
Tode in der Christlichen Kirche, absch. v. ss. 320-352.
26 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. lib. vi. cap. 37.
Gentiles who had refused to obey the demon worshipped by the Jews,
but left there, unsaved, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and the other
patriarchs, together with all the prophets.27 The Gnostics agreed
in attributing evil to matter, and made the means of redemption to
consist in fastings and scourgings of the flesh, with denial of
all its cravings, and in lofty spiritual contemplations. Of
course, with one accord they vehemently assailed the dogma of the
resurrection of the flesh. Their views, too, were inconsistent
with the strict eternity of future hell punishments. The
fundamental basis of their system was the same as that of nearly
all the Oriental philosophies and religions, requiring an ascetic
war against the world of sense. The notion that the body is evil,
and the cause of evil, was rife even among the orthodox Fathers;
but they stopped guardedly far short of the extreme to which the
Gnostics carried it, and indignantly rejected all the strange
imaginations which those heretics had devised to explain the
subject of evil in a systematic manner.28 Augustine said, "If we
say all sin comes from the flesh, we make the fleshless devil
sinless!" Hermogenes, some of whose views at least were tinged
with Gnosticism, believed the abyss of hell was formed by the
confluence of matter, and that the devil and all his demons would
at last be utterly resolved into matter.29
The theological system of the Manichaan sect was in some of its
cardinal principles almost identical with those of the Gnostics,
but it was still more imaginative and elaborate.30 It started with
the Persian doctrine of two antagonist deities, one dwelling with
good spirits in a world of light and love, the other with demons
in a realm of darkness and horror. Upon a time the latter,
sallying forth, discovered, far away in the vastness of space, the
world of light. They immediately assailed it. They were conquered
after a terrible struggle and driven back; but they bore with them
captive a multitude of the celestial souls, whom they instantly
mixed with darkness and gross matter. The good God built this
world of mingled light and darkness to afford these imprisoned
souls an opportunity to purge themselves and be restored to him.
In arranging the material substances to form the earth, a mass of
evil fire, with no particle of good in it, was found. It had been
left in their flight by the vanquished princes of darkness. This
was cast out of the world and shut up somewhere in the dark air,
and is the Manichaan hell, presided over by the king of the
demons. If a soul, while in the body, mortify the flesh, observe a
severe ascetic moral discipline, fix its thoughts, affections, and
prayers on God and its native home, it will on leaving the body
return to the celestial light. But if it neglect these duties and
become more deeply entangled in the toils of depraved matter, it
is cast into the awful fire of hell, where the cleansing flames of
torture partially purify it; and then it is born again and put on
a new trial. If after ten successive births twice in each of five
different forms the soul be still unreclaimed, then it is
permanently remanded to the furnace of hell. At last, when all the
celestial souls seized by the princes of darkness have returned to
God, save those just mentioned, this world will be burned. Then
the children
27 Irenaus, Adv. Herres., lib. i. cap. 22.
28 Account of the Gnostic Sects, in Moshelm's Comm., II. Century,
sect. 65.
29 Lardner, Hist. of Heretics, ch. xviii. sect. 9.
30 Baur, Das Manichaische Religionssystem.
of God will lead a life of everlasting blessedness with him in
their native land of light; the prince of evil, with his fiends,
will exist wretchedly in their original realm of darkness. Then
all those souls whose salvation is hopeless shall be drawn out of
hell and be placed as a cordon of watchmen and a phalanx of
soldiers entirely around the world of darkness, to guard its
frontiers forever and to see that its miserable inhabitants never
again come forth to invade the kingdom of light.31
The Christian after Christ's own pattern, trusting that when the
soul left the body it would find a home in some other realm of
God's universe where its experience would be according to its
deserts, capacity, and fittedness, sought to do the Father's will
in the present, and for the future committed himself in faith and
love to the Father's disposal. The apostolic Christian, conceiving
that Christ would soon return to raise the dead and reward his
own, eagerly looked for the arrival of that day, and strove that
he might be among the saints who, delivered or exempt from the
Hadean imprisonment, should reign with the triumphant Messiah on
earth and accompany him back to heaven. The patristic Christian,
looking forward to the divided under world where all the dead must
spend the interval from their decease to the general resurrection,
shuddered at the thought of Gehenna, and wrestled and prayed that
his tarrying might be in Paradise until Christ should summon his
chosen ones, justified from the great tribunal, to the Father's
presence. The Manichaan Christian, believing the soul to be
imprisoned in matter by demons who fought against God in a
previous life, struggled, by fasting, thought, prayer, and
penance, to rescue the spirit from its fleshly entanglements, from
all worldly snares and illusions, that it might be freed from the
necessity of any further abode in a material body, and, on the
dissolution of its present tabernacle, might soar to its native
light in the blissful pleroma of eternal being.
31 Mosheim, Comm., III. Century, sects. 44-52.
CHAPTER II.
MEDIAVAL DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
THE period of time covered by the present chapter reaches from the
close of the tenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, from
the first full establishment of the Roman Catholic theology and
the last general expectation of the immediate end of the world to
the commencing decline of mediaval faith and the successful
inauguration of the Protestant Reformation. The principal mental
characteristic of that age, especially in regard to the subject of
the future life, was fear. "Never," says Michelet, "can we know in
what terrors the Middle Age lived." There was all abroad a living
fear of men, fear of the State, fear of the Church, fear of God,
fear of the devil, fear of hell, fear of death. Preaching
consisted very much in the invitation, "Submit to the guidance of
the Church while you live," enforced by the threat, "or you shall
go to hell when you die." Christianity was practically reduced to
some cruel metaphysical dogmas, a mechanical device for rescuing
the devil's captives from him, and a system of ritual magic in the
hands of a priesthood who wielded an authority of supernatural
terrors over a credulous and shuddering laity. It is true that the
genuine spirit and contents of Christianity were never wholly
suppressed. The love of God, the blessed mediation of the
benignant Jesus, the lowly delights of the Beatitudes, the
redeeming assurance of pardon, the consoling, triumphant
expectation of heaven, were never utterly banished even from the
believers of the Dark Age. Undoubtedly many a guilty but repentant
soul found forgiveness and rest, many a meek and spotless breast
was filled with pious rapture, many a dying disciple was comforted
and inspired, by the good tidings proclaimed from priestly lips
even then. No doubt the sacred awe and guarded peace surrounding
their precincts, the divine lessons inculcated within their walls,
the pathetic prayers breathed before their altars, the traditions
of saintly men and women who had drawn angelic visitants down to
their cells and had risen long ago to be angels themselves, the
strains of unearthly melody bearing the hearts of the kneeling
crowd into eternity, no doubt these often made cathedral and
convent seem "islands of sanctity amidst the wild, roaring,
godless sea of the world." Still, the chief general feeling of the
time in relation to the future life was unquestionably fear
springing from belief, the wedlock of superstitious faith and
horror.
During the six centuries now under review the Roman Catholic
Church and theology were the only Christianity publicly
recognised. The heretics were few and powerless, and the papal
system had full sway. Since the early part of the period
specified, the working theology of the Roman Church has undergone
but few, and, as pertaining to our subject, unimportant, changes
or developments. Previous to that time her doctrinal scheme was
inchoate, gradually assimilating foreign elements and developing
itself step by step. The principal changes now concerning us to
notice in the passage from patristic eschatology as deducible, for
instance, from the works of Chrysostom, or as seen in the
"Apostles' Creed" to mediaval eschatology as displayed in the
"Summa" of Thomas Aquinas or in the Catechism of Trent are these.
The supposititious details of the under world have been definitely
arranged in greater subdivision; heaven has been opened for the
regular admission of certain souls; the loose notions about
purgatory have been completed and consolidated; and the whole
combined scheme has been organized as a working instrument of
ecclesiastical power and profit.
These changes seem to have been wrought out, first, by
continual assimilations of Christianity to paganism,1 both in
doctrine and ceremony, to win over the heathen; and, secondly, by
modifications and growths to meet the exigencies of doctrinal
consistency and practical efficiency, exigencies repeatedly
arising from philosophical discussion and political opposition.
The degree in which papal Christianity was conformed to the
prejudices and customs of the heathen believers, whose allegiance
was sought, is astonishing. It extended to hundreds of
particulars, from the most fundamental principles of theological
speculation to the most trivial details of ritual service. We
shall mention only a few instances of this kind immediately
belonging to the subject we are treating. In the first place, the
hierophant in the pagan Mysteries, and the initiatory rites, were
the prototypes of the Roman Catholic bishop and the ceremonies
under his direction.2 Christian baptism was made to be the same as
the pagan initiation: both were supposed to cleanse from sin and
to secure for their subject a better fate in the future life: they
were both, therefore, sometimes delayed until just before death.3
The custom of initiating children into the Mysteries was also
common, as infant baptism became.4 When the public treasury was
low, the magistrates sometimes raised a fund by recourse to the
initiating fees of the Mysteries, as the Christian popes
afterwards collected money from the sale of pardons.
In the second place, the Roman Catholic canonization was the same
as the pagan apotheosis. Among the Gentiles, the mass of mankind
were supposed to descend to Hades at death; but a few favored ones
were raised to the sky, deified, and a sort of worship paid to
them. So the Roman Church taught that nearly all souls passed to
the subterranean abodes, but that martyrs and saints were admitted
to heaven and might lawfully be prayed to.5
Thirdly, the heathen under world was subdivided into several
regions, wherein different persons were disposed according to
their deserts. The worst criminals were in the everlasting penal
fire of Tartarus; the best heroes and sages were in the calm
meadows of Elysium; the hapless children were detained in the
dusky borders outside the grim realm of torture; and there was a
purgatorial place where those not too guilty were cleansed from
their stains. In like manner, the Romanist theologians divided the
under world into four parts: hell for the final abode of the
stubbornly wicked; one limbo for the painless, contented tarrying
of the good patriarchs who died before the advent of Christ had
made salvation possible, and another limbo for the sad and pallid
resting place of those children who died unbaptized; purgatory, in
which expiation is offered in agony for sins committed on earth
and unatoned for.6
1 Middleton, Letter from Rome, showing an exact conformity between
Popery and Paganism.
2 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, lib. i. sect. 6. Mosheim's Comm., ch. i.
sect. 13.
3 Warburton, Div. Leg., book ii. sect. 4.
4 Terence, Phormio, act i scene 1.
5 Council of Trent, sess. vi. can. xxx. Sess. xxv.: Decree on
Invocation of Saints.
6 See Milman, Hist. Latin Christianity, book xiv. ch. ii.
Before proceeding further, we must trace the prevalence and
progress of the doctrine of purgatory a little as it was known
before its embodiment in mediaval mythology, and then as it was
embodied there. The fundamental doctrine of the Hindu hell was
that a certain amount of suffering undergone there would expiate a
certain amount of guilt incurred here. When the disembodied soul
had endured a sufficient quantity of retributive and purifying
pain, it was loosed, and sent on earth in a new body. It was
likewise a Hindu belief that the souls of deceased parents might
be assisted out of this purgatorial woe by the prayers and
offerings of their surviving children.7 The same doctrine was held
by the Persians. They believed souls could be released from
purgatory by the prayers, sacrifices, and good deeds of righteous
surviving descendants and friends. "Zoroaster said he could, by
prayer, send any one he chose to heaven or to hell." 8 Such
representations are found obscurely in the Vendidad and more fully
in the Bundehesh. The Persian doctrine that the living had power
to affect the condition of the dead is further indicated in the
fact that, from a belief that married persons were peculiarly
happy in the future state, they often hired persons to be espoused
to such of their relatives as had died in celibacy.9 The doctrine
of purgatory was known and accepted among the Jews too. In the
Second Book of Maccabees we read the following account: "Judas
sent two thousand pieces of silver to Jerusalem to defray the
expense of a sin offering to be offered for the sins of those who
were slain, doing therein very well and honestly, in that he was
mindful of the resurrection. For if he had not hoped that they who
were slain should rise again, it had been superfluous and vain to
pray for the dead. Whereupon he made an atonement for the dead,
that they might be delivered from sin."10 The Rabbins taught that
children by sin offerings could help their parents out of their
misery in the infernal world.11 They taught, furthermore, that all
souls except holy ones, like those of Rabbi Akiba and his
disciples, must lave themselves in the fire river of Gehenna; that
therein they shall be like salamanders; that the just shall soon
be cleansed in the fire river, but the wicked shall be lastingly
burned.12 Again, we find this doctrine prevailing among the
Romans. In the great Forum was a stone called "Lapis Manalis,"
described by Festus, which was supposed to cover the entrance to
hell. This was solemnly lifted three times a year, in order to let
those souls flow up whose sins had been purged away by their
tortures or had been remitted in consideration of the offerings
and services paid for them by the living. Virgil describes how
souls are purified by the action of wind, water, and fire.13 The
feast day of purgatory observed by papal Rome corresponds to the
Lemuria celebrated by pagan Rome, and rests on the same doctrinal
basis. In the Catholic countries of Europe at the present time, on
All Saints' Day, festoons of sweet smelling flowers are hung on
the tomb stones, and the people kneeling there repeat the prayer
prescribed for releasing the souls of their relatives and friends
from the plagues of purgatory. There is a notable coincidence
between the Buddhist
7 See references to "Sraddha" in index to Vishnu Purana.
8 Atkinson's trans. of the Shah Nameh, p. 386.
9 Richardson, Dissertation on the Language, Literature, and
Manners of the Eastern Nations, p. 347.
10 Cap. xii. 42-45.
11 Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, th. ii. kap. vi. s. 357.
12 Kabbala Denudata, tom ii. pars. i. pp. 108, 109, 113.
13 Aneid, lib. vi. 1. 739.
and the Romanist usages. Throughout the Chinese Empire, during the
seventh moon of every year, prayers are offered up accompanied by
illuminations and other rites for the release of souls in
purgatory. At these times the Buddhist priests hang up large
pictures, showing forth the frightful scenes in the other world,
to induce the people to pay them money for prayers in behalf of
their suffering relatives and friends in purgatory.14
Traces of belief in a purgatory early appear among the Christians.
Many of the gravest Fathers of the first five centuries naturally
conceived and taught, as is indeed intrinsically reasonable, that
after death some souls will be punished for their sins until they
are cleansed, and then will be released from pain. The Manichaans
imagined that all souls, before returning to their native heaven,
must be borne first to the moon, where with good waters they would
be washed pure from outward filth, and then to the sun, where they
would be purged by good fires from every inward stain.15 After
these lunar and solar lustrations, they were fit for the eternal
world of light. But the conception of purgatory as it was held by
the early Christians, whether orthodox Fathers or heretical sects,
was merely the just and necessary result of applying to the
subject of future punishment the two ethical ideas that punishment
should partake of degrees proportioned to guilt, and that it
should be restorative. Jeremy Taylor conclusively argues that the
prayers for the dead used by the early Christians do not imply any
belief in the Papal purgatory.16 The severity and duration of the
sufferings of the dead were not supposed to be in the power of the
living, either their relatives or the clergy, but to depend on the
moral and physical facts of the case according to justice and
necessity, qualified only by the mercy of God.
Pope Gregory the Great, in the sixth century, either borrowing
some of the more objectionable features of the purgatory doctrine
previously held by the heathen, or else devising the same things
himself from a perception of the striking adaptedness of such
notions to secure an enviable power to the Church, constructed,
established, and gave working efficiency to the dogmatic scheme of
purgatory ever since firmly defended by the papal adherents as an
integral part of the Roman Catholic system.17 The doctrine as
matured and promulgated by Gregory, giving to the representatives
of the Church an almost unlimited power over purgatory, rapidly
grew into favor with the clergy and sank with general conviction
into the hopes and fears of the laity. Venerable Bede, in the
eighth century, gives a long account of the fully developed
doctrine concerning purgatory, hell, paradise, and heaven. It is
narrated in the form of a vision seen by Drithelm, who, in a
trance, visits the regions which, on his return, he describes. The
whole thing is gross, literal, horrible, closely resembling
several well known descriptions given under similar circumstances
and preserved in ancient heathen writers.18 The Church, seeing how
admirably this instrument was calculated to promote her interest
and deepen her power, left hardly any means untried to enlarge its
sweep and intensify its operation. Accordingly, from the ninth to
the sixteenth century, no doctrine was so central, prominent, and
effective in the common teaching and
14 Asiatic Journal, 1840, p. 210, note.
15 Mosheim, Comm., III. Century, sect. 49, note 3.
16 Dissuasive from Popery, part ii. book ii. sect. 2.
17 Edgar, Variations of Popery, ch. xvi.
18 Hist. Ecc., lib. v. cap. xii. See also lib. iii. cap. xix.
practice of the Church, no fear was so widely spread and vividly
felt in the bosom of Christendom, as the doctrine and the fear of
purgatory.
The Romanist theory of man's condition in the future life is this,
in brief. By the sin of Adam, heaven was closed against him and
all his posterity, and the devil acquired a right to shut up their
disembodied souls in the under world. In consequence of the
"original sin" transmitted from Adam, every human being, besides
suffering the other woes flowing from sin, was helplessly doomed
to the under world after death. In addition to this penalty, each
one must also answer for his own personal sins. Christ died to
"deliver mankind from sin," "discharge the punishment due them,"
and "rescue them from the tyranny of the devil." He "descended
into the under world," "subdued the devil," "despoiled the
depths," "rescued the Fathers and just souls," and "opened
heaven."19 "Until he rose, heaven was shut against every child of
Adam, as it still is to those who die indebted." "The price paid
by the Son of God far exceeded our debts." The surplus balance of
merits, together with the merits accruing from the supererogatory
good works of the saints and from the Divine sacrifice continually
offered anew by the sacrament of the mass, constituted a reserved
treasure upon which the Church was authorized to draw in behalf of
any one she chose to favor. The localities of the future life were
these:20 Limbus Patrum, or Abraham's Bosom, a place of peace and
waiting, where the good went who died before Christ; Limbus
Infantum, a mild, palliated hell, where the children go who, since
Christ, have died unbaptized; Purgatory, where all sinners suffer
until they are purified, or are redeemed by the Church, or until
the last day; Hell, or Gehenna, whither the hopelessly wicked have
always been condemned; and Heaven, whither the spotlessly good
have been admitted since the ascension of Jesus. At the day of
judgment the few human souls who have reached Paradise, together
with the multitudes that crowd the regions of Gehenna, Purgatory,
and Limbo, will reassume their bodies: the intermediate states
will then be destroyed, and when their final sentence is
pronounced all will depart forever, the acquitted into heaven,
the condemned into hell. In the mean time, the poor victims of
purgatory, by the prayers of the living for them, by the transfer
of good works to their account, above all, by the celebration of
masses in their behalf, may be relieved, rescued, translated to
paradise. The words breathed by the spirit of the murdered King of
Denmark in the ears of the horror stricken Hamlet paint the
popular belief of that age in regard to the grisly realm where
guilty souls were plied with horrors whereof, but that they were
forbidden:
"To tell the secrets of their prison house, They could a tale
unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy
young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their
spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each
particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful
porcupine."
19 Catechism of the Council of Trent.
20 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, pars Suppl. Quast. 69.
A few specimens of the stories embodying the ideas and
superstitions current in the Middle Age may better illustrate the
characteristic belief of the time than much abstract description.
An unquestioning faith in the personality, visibility, and
extensive agency of the devil was almost universal. Ascetics,
saints, bishops, peasants, philosophers, kings, Gregory the Great,
Martin Luther, all testified that they had often seen him. The
mediaval conception of the devil was sometimes comical, sometimes
awful. Grimm says, "He was Jewish, heathenish, Christian,
idolatrous, elfish, titanic, spectral, all at once." He was "a
soul snatching wolf," a "hell hound," a "whirlwind hammer;" now an
infernal "parody of God" with "a mother who mimics the Virgin
Mary," and now the "impersonated soul of evil."21 The well known
story of Faust and the Devil, which in so many forms spread
through Christendom, is so deeply significant of the faith and
life of the age in which it arose that a volume would be required
to unfold all its import. There was an old tradition that the
students of necromancy or the black art, on reaching a certain
pitch of proficiency, were obliged to run through a subterranean
hall, where the devil literally caught the hindmost unless he sped
so swiftly that the arch enemy could only seize his shadow, and in
that case, a veritable Peter Schlemihl, he never cast a shadow
afterwards! A man stood by his furnace one day casting eyes for
buttons. The devil came up and asked what he was doing. "Casting
eyes," replied the man. "Can you cast a pair for me?" quoth the
devil. "That I can," says the man: "will you have them large or
small?" "Oh, very large," answered the devil. He then ties the
fiend on a bench and pours the molten lead into his eyes. Up jumps
the devil, with the bench on his back, flees howling, and has
never been seen since! There was also in wide circulation a wild
legend to the effect that a man made a compact with the devil on
the condition that he should secure a new victim for hell once in
a century. As long as he did this he should enjoy life, riches,
power, and a limited ubiquity; but failing a fresh victim at the
end of each hundred years his own soul should be the forfeit. He
lived four or five centuries, and then, in spite of his most
desperate efforts, was disappointed of his expected victim on the
last night of the century; and when the clock struck twelve the
devil burst into his castle on a black steed and bore him off in a
storm of lightning amidst the crash of thunders and the shrieks of
fiends. St. Britius once during mass saw the devil in church
taking account of the sins the congregation were committing. He
covered the parchment all over, and, afraid of forgetting some of
the offences, seized the scroll in his teeth and claws to stretch
it out. It snapped, and his head was smartly bumped against the
wall. St. Britius laughed aloud. The officiating priest rebuked
him, but, on being told what had happened, improved the accident
for the edification of his hearers.22 On the bursting of a certain
glacier on the Alps, it is said the devil was seen swimming down
the Rhone, a drawn sword in one hand, a golden ball in the other:
opposite the town of Martigny, he cried, "Rise," and instantly the
obedient river swelled above its banks and destroyed the town.
Ignes fatui, hovering about marshes and misty places, were thought
to be the spirits of unbaptized children endeavoring to guide
travellers to the nearest water. A kindred fancy
21 Deutsche Mythologie, cap. xxxiii.: Teufel.
22 Quarterly Review, Jan. 1820: Pop. Myth. of the Middle Ages.
also heard a spectral pack, called "yell hounds," afterwards
corrupted to "hell hounds," composed of the souls of unbaptized
children, which could not rest, but roamed and howled through the
woods all night.23 A touching popular myth said, the robin's
breast is so red because it flies into hell with drops of water in
its bill to relieve the children there, and gets scorched.
In 1171, Silo, a philosopher, implored a dying pupil of his to
come back and reveal his state in the other world. A few days
after his death the scholar appeared in a cowl of flames covered
with logical propositions. He told Silo that he was from
purgatory, that the cowl weighed on him worse than a tower, and
said he was doomed to wear it for the pride he took in sophisms.
As he thus spoke he let fall a drop of sweat on his master's hand,
piercing it through. The next day Silo said to his scholars, "I
leave croaking to frogs, cawing to crows, and vain things to the
vain, and hie me to the logic which fears not death."
"Linquo coax ranis, cras corvis, vanaque vanis, Ad logicen pergo
qua mortis non timet ergo." 24
In the long, quaint poem, "Vision of William concerning Piers
Ploughman," written probably by Robert Langland about the year
1362, there are many things illustrative of our subject. "I,
Trojanus, a true knight, after death was condemned to hell for
dying unbaptized. But, on account of my mercy and truth in
administering the laws, the pope wished me to be saved; and God
mercifully heard him and saved me without the help of masses."25
"Ever since the fall of Adam, Age has shaken the Tree of Human
Life, and the devil has gathered the fruit into hell."26 The
author gives a most spirited account of Christ's descent into the
under world after his death, his battle with the devils there, his
triumph over them, his rescue of Adam, and other particulars.27 In
this poem, as in nearly all the extant productions of that period,
there are copious evidences of the extent and power of the popular
faith in the devil and in purgatory, and in their close connection
with the present life, a faith nourishingly embodied in thousands
of singular tales. Thomas Wright has collected many of these in
his antiquarian works. He relates an amusing incident that once
befell a minstrel who had been borne into hell by a devil. The
devils went forth in a troop to ensnare souls on earth. Lucifer
left the minstrel in charge of the infernal regions, promising, if
he let no souls escape, to treat him on the return with a fat monk
roasted, or a usurer dressed with hot sauce. But while the fiends
were away St. Peter came, in disguise, and allured the minstrel to
play at dice, and to stake the souls which were in torture under
his care. Peter won, and carried them off in triumph. The devils,
coming back and finding the fires all out and hell empty, kicked
the hapless minstrel out, and Lucifer swore a big oath that no
minstrel should ever darken the door of hell again!
The mediaval belief in a future life was practically concentrated,
for the most part, around the ideas of Satan, purgatory, the last
judgment, hell. The faith in Christ, God,
23 Allies, Antiquities of Worcestershire, 2d ed. p. 256.
24 Michelet, Hist. de France, livre iv. chap. ix.
25 Vision of Dowell, part iii.
26 Vision of Dobet, part ii.
27 Ibid., part iv.
heaven, was much rarer and less influential. Neander says, "The
inmost distinction of mediaval experience was an awful sense of
another life and an invisible world." A most piteous illustration
of the conjoined faith and fear of that age is furnished by an old
dialogue between the "Soul and the Body" recently edited by
Halliwell, an expression of humble trust and crouching horror
irresistibly pathetic in its simplicity.28 A flood of revealing
light is given as to the energy with which the doctrine of
purgatory impressed itself on the popular mind, by the two facts,
first, that the Council of Auxerre, in 1578, prohibited the
administration of the eucharist to the dead; and, secondly, that
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries "crosses of absolution" that
is, crosses cut out of sheet lead, with the formula of absolution
engraved on them were quite commonly buried with the dead.29 The
eager sincerity of the mediaval belief in another life is
attested, too, by the correspondence of the representations of the
dead in their legends to the appearance, disposition, and pursuits
they had in life. No oblivious draught, no pure spiritualization,
had freed the departed souls from earthly bonds and associations.
Light pretexts drew them back to their wonted haunts. A buried
treasure allowed them no rest till they had led some one to raise
it. An unfinished task, an uncancelled obligation, forced them
again to the upper world. In ruined castles the ghosts of knights,
in their accustomed habiliments, held tournaments and carousals.
The priest read mass; the hunter pursued his game; the spectre
robber fell on the benighted traveller.30 It is hard for us now to
reproduce, even in imagination, the fervid and frightful
earnestness of the popular faith of the Middle Age in the
ramifying agency of the devil and in the horrors of purgatory. We
will try to do it, in some degree, by a series of illustrations
aiming to show at once how prevalent such a belief and fear were,
and how they became so prevalent.
First, we may specify the teaching of the Church whose authority
in spiritual concerns bore almost unquestioned sway over the minds
of more than eighteen generations. By the logical subtleties of
her scholastic theologians, by the persuasive eloquence of her
popular preachers, by the frantic ravings of her fanatic devotees,
by the parading proclamation of her innumerable pretended
miracles, by the imposing ceremonies of her dramatic ritual,
almost visibly opening heaven and hell to the over awed
congregation, by her wonder working use of the relics of martyrs
and saints to exorcise demons from the possessed and to heal the
sick, and by her anathemas against all who were supposed to be
hostile to her formulas, she infused the ideas of her doctrinal
system into the intellect, heart, and fancy of the common people,
and nourished the collateral horrors, until every wave of her wand
convulsed the world. In a pastoral letter addressed to the
Carlovingian prince Louis, the grandson of Charlemagne, a letter
probably composed by the famous Hincmar, bearing date 858, and
signed by the Bishops of Rheims and Rouen, a Gallic synod
authoritatively declared that Charles Martel was damned; "that on
the opening of his tomb the spectators were affrighted by a smell
of fire and the aspect of a horrid dragon, and that a saint of the
times was indulged with a pleasant vision of the soul and body of
this great hero burning to all eternity in the abyss of hell."
28 Early English Miscellanies, No. 2.
29 London Antiquaries' Archaologis, vol. xxxv. art. 22.
30 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, vol. i., appendix.
A tremendous impulse, vivifying and emphasizing the eschatological
notions of the time, an impulse whose effects did not cease when
it died, was imparted by that frightful epidemic expectation of
the impending end of the world which wellnigh universally
prevailed in Christendom about the year 1000. Many of the charters
given at that time commence with the words, "As the world is now
drawing to a close." 31 This expectation drew additional strength
from the unutterable sufferings famine, oppression, pestilence,
war, superstition then weighing on the people. "The idea of the
end of the world," we quote from Michelet, "sad as that world was,
was at once the hope and the terror of the Middle Age. Look at
those antique statues of the tenth and eleventh centuries, mute,
meager, their pinched and stiffened lineaments grinning with a
look of living suffering allied to the repulsiveness of death. See
how they implore, with clasped hands, that desired yet dreaded
moment when the resurrection shall redeem them from their
unspeakable sorrows and raise them from nothingness into existence
and from the grave to God."
Furthermore, this superstitious character of the mediaval belief
in the future life acquired breadth and intensity from the
profound general ignorance and trembling credulousness of that
whole period on all subjects. It was an age of marvels, romances,
fears, when every landscape of life "wore a strange hue, as if
seen through the sombre medium of a stained casement." While
congregations knelt in awe beneath the lifted Host, and the image
of the dying Savior stretched on the rood glimmered through clouds
of incense, perhaps an army of Flagellants would march by the
cathedral, shouting, "The end of the world is at hand!" filling
the streets with the echoes of their torture as they lashed their
naked backs with knotted cords wet with blood; and no soul but
must shudder with the infection of horror as the dreadful notes of
the "Dies Iioe" went sounding through the air. The narratives of
the desert Fathers, the miracles wrought in convent cells, the
visions of pillar saints, the thrilling accompaniments of the
Crusades, and other kindred influences, made the world a perpetual
mirage. The belching of a volcano was the vomit of uneasy hell.
The devil stood before every tempted man, Ghosts walked in every
nightly dell. Ghastly armies were seen contending where the aurora
borealis hung out its bloody banners. The Huns under Attila,
ravaging Southern Europe, were thought to be literal demons who
had made an irruption from the pit. The metaphysician was in peril
of the stake as a heretic, the natural philosopher as a magician.
A belief in witchcraft and a trust in ordeals were universal, even
from Pope Eugenius, who introduced the trial by cold water, and
King James, who wrote volumes on magic, to the humblest monk who
shuddered when passing the church crypt, and the simplest peasant
who quaked in his homeward path at seeing a will o' the wisp.
"Denounced by the preacher and consigned to the flames by the
judge, the wizard received secret service money from the Cabinet
to induce him to destroy the hostile armament as it sailed before
the wind." As a vivid writer has well said, "A gloomy mist of
credulity enwrapped the cathedral and the hall of justice, the
cottage and the throne. In the dank shadows of the universal
ignorance a thousand superstitions, like foul animals of night,
were propagated and nourished."
31 Hallam, Middle Ages, ch. ix.
The beliefs and excitements of the mediaval period partook of a
sort of epidemic character, diffusing and working like a
contagion.32 There were numberless throngs of pilgrims to famous
shrines, immense crowds about the localities of popular legends,
relics, or special grace. In the magnetic sphere of such a fervid
and credulous multitude, filled with the kindling interaction of
enthusiasm, of course prodigies would abound, fables would
flourish, and faith would be doubly generated and fortified. In
commemoration of a miraculous act of virtue performed by St.
Francis, the pope offered to all who should enter the church at
Assisi between the eve of the 1st and the eve of the 2d of August
each year that being the anniversary of the saint's achievement a
free pardon for all the sins committed by them since their
baptism. More than sixty thousand pilgrims sometimes flocked
thither on that day. Every year some were crushed to death in the
suffocating pressure at the entrance of the church. Nearly two
thousand friars walked in procession; and for a series of years
the pilgrimage to Portiuncula might have vied with that to the
temple of Juggernaut.33
Nothing tends more to strengthen any given belief than to see it
everywhere carried into practice and to act in accordance with it.
Thus was it with the mediaval doctrine of the future life. Its
applications and results were constantly and universally thrust
into notice by the sale of indulgences and the launching of
excommunications. Early in the ninth century, Charlemagne
complained that the bishops and abbots forced property from
foolish people by promises and threats: "Suadendo de coelestis
regni beatitudine, comminando de oeterno supplicio inferni."34 The
rival mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans,
acquired great riches and power by the traffic in indulgences.
They even had the impudence to affirm that the members of their
orders were privileged above all other men in the next world.
Milton alludes to those who credited these monstrous assumptions:
"And they who, to be sure of Paradise, Dying, put on the weeds of
Dominic, Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised."
The Council of Basle censured the claim of the Franciscan monks
that their founder annually descended to purgatory and led thence
to heaven the souls of all those who had belonged to his order.
The Carmelites also asserted that the Virgin Mary appeared to
Simon Stockius, the general of their order, and gave him a solemn
promise that the souls of such as left the world with the
Carmelite scapulary upon their shoulders should be infallibly
preserved from eternal damnation. Mosheim says that Pope Benedict
XIV. was an open defender of this ridiculous fiction.35
If any one would appreciate the full mediaval doctrine of the
future life, whether with respect to the hair drawn scholastic
metaphysics by which it was defended, or with respect to the
concrete forms in which the popular apprehension held it, let him
read the Divina Commedia of Dante; for it is all there. Whoso with
adequate insight and sympathy peruses
32 Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages.
33 Quarterly Review, July, 1819: article on Monachism.
34 Perry, History of the Franks, p. 467.
35 Eccl. Hist., XIII. Century, part ii. ch. 2, sect. 29.
the pages of the immortal Florentine at whom the people pointed as
he walked the streets, and said, "There goes the man who has been
in hell" will not fail to perceive with what a profound sincerity
the popular breast shuddered responsive to ecclesiastical threats
and purgatorial woes.
The tremendous moral power of this solitary work lies in the fact
that it is a series of terrific and fascinating tableaux,
embodying the idea of inflexible poetic justice impartially
administered upon king and varlet, pope and beggar, oppressor and
victim, projected amidst the unalterable necessities of eternity,
and moving athwart the lurid abyss and the azure cope with an
intense distinctness that sears the gazer's eyeballs. The Divina
Commedia, with a wonderful truth, also reflects the feeling of the
age when it was written in this respect, that there is a grappling
force of attraction, a compelling realism, about its "Purgatory"
and "Hell" which are to be sought in vain in the delineations of
its "Paradise." The mediaval belief in a future life had for its
central thought the day of judgment, for its foremost emotion
terror.36
The roots of this faith were unquestionably fertilized, and the
development of this fear quickened, to a very great extent, by
deliberate and systematic delusions. One of the most celebrated of
these organized frauds was the gigantic one perpetrated under the
auspices of the Dominican monks at Berne in 1509, the chief actors
in which were unmasked and executed. Bishop Burnet has given an
extremely interesting account of this affair in his volume of
travels. Suffice it to say, the monks appeared at midnight in the
cells of various persons, now impersonating devils, in horrid
attire, breathing flames and brimstone, now claiming to be the
souls of certain sufferers escaped from purgatory, and again
pretending to be celebrated saints, with the Virgin Mary at their
head. By the aid of mechanical and chemical arrangements, they
wrought miracles, and played on the terror and credulity of the
spectators in a frightful manner.37 There is every reason to
suppose that such deceptions miracles in which secret speaking
tubes, asbestos, and phosphorus were indispensable38 were most
frequent in those ages, and were as effective as the actors were
unscrupulous and the dupes unsuspicious. Here is revealed one of
the foremost of the causes which made the belief of the Dark Age
in the numerous appearances of ghosts and devils so common and so
intense that it gave currency to the notion that the swarming
spirits of purgatory were disembogued from dusk till dawn. So the
Danish monarch, revisiting the pale glimpses of the moon, says to
Hamlet, "I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain time to walk the
night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul
crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away."
36 If any one would see in how many forms the faith in hell and in
the devil appeared, let him look over the pages of the
"Dictionnaire Infernal," by J. Collin de Plancy.
37 Maclaine's trans, of Mosheim's Eccl. Hist., vol. ii. p. 10,
note.
38 Manufactures of the Ancients, pub. by Harper and Brothers,
1845, part iv. ch. 3.
When the shadows began to fall thick behind the sunken sun, these
poor creatures were thought to spring from their beds of torture,
to wander amidst the scenes of their sins or to haunt the living;
but at the earliest scent of morn, the first note of the cock,
they must hie to their fire again. Midnight was the high noon of
ghostly and demoniac revelry on the earth. As the hour fell with
brazen clang from the tower, the belated traveller, afraid of the
rustle of his own dress, the echo of his own footfall, the
wavering of his own shadow, afraid of his own thoughts, would
breathe the suppressed invocation, "Angels and ministers of grace
defend us!" as the idea crept curdling over his brain and through
his veins, "It is the very witching time of night, When
churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this
world."
Working in alliance with the foregoing forces of superstition was
the powerful influence of the various forms of insanity which
remarkably abounded in the Middle Age. The insane person, it was
believed, was possessed by a demon. His ravings, his narratives,
were eagerly credited; and they were usually full of infernal
visions, diabolical interviews, encounters with apparitions, and
every thing that would naturally arise in a deranged and
preternaturally sensitive mind from the chief conceptions then
current concerning the invisible world.39
The principal works of art exposed to the people were such as
served to impress upon their imaginations the Church doctrine of
the future life in all its fearfulness, with its vigorous dramatic
points. In the cathedral at Antwerp there is a representation of
hell carved in wood, whose marvellous elaborateness astonishes,
and whose painful expressiveness oppresses, every beholder. With
what excruciating emotions the pious crowds must have contemplated
the harrowingly vivid paintings of the Inferno, by Orcagna, still
to be seen in the Campo Santo of Pisa! In the cathedral at
Canterbury there was a window on which was painted a detailed
picture of Christ vanquishing the devils in their own domain; but
we believe it has been removed. However, the visitor still sees on
the fine east window of York Cathedral the final doom of the
wicked, hell being painted as an enormous mouth; also in the west
front of Lincoln Cathedral an ancient bas relief representing hell
as a monstrous mouth vomiting flame and serpents, with two human
beings walking into it. The minster at Freyburg has a grotesque
bas relief over its main portal, representing the Judgment. St.
Nicholas stands in the centre, and the Savior is seated above him.
On the left, an angel weighs mankind in a huge pair of scales, and
a couple of malicious imps try to make the human scale kick the
beam. Underneath, St. Peter is ushering the good into Paradise. On
the right is shown a devil, with a pig's head, dragging after him
a throng of the wicked. He also has a basket on his back filled
with figures whom he is in the act of flinging into a reeking
caldron stirred by several imps. Hell is typified, on one side, by
the jaws of a monster crammed to the teeth with reprobates, and
Satan is seen sitting on his throne above them. A recent traveller
writes from
39 De Boismont, Rational Hist. of Hallucivatious, ch. xiv.
Naples, "The favorite device on the church walls here is a
vermilion picture of a male and a female soul, respectively up to
the waist [the waist of a soul!] in fire, with an angel over each
watering them from a water pot. This is meant to get money from
the compassionate to pay for the saying of masses in behalf of
souls in purgatory." Ruskin has described some of the church
paintings of the Last Judgment by the old masters as possessing a
power even now sufficient to stir every sensibility to its depths.
Such works, gazed on day after day, while multitudes were kneeling
beneath in the shadowy aisles, and clouds of incense were floating
above, and the organ was pealing and the choir chanting in full
accord, must produce lasting effects on the imagination, and thus
contribute in return to the faith and fear which inspired them.
Villani as also Sismondi gives a description of a horrible
representation of hell shown at Florence in 1304 by the
inhabitants of San Priano, on the river Arno. The glare of flames,
the shrieks of men disguised as devils, scenes of infernal
torture, filled the night. Unfortunately, the scaffolding broke
beneath the crowd, and many spectators were burned or drowned, and
that which began as an entertaining spectacle ended as a direful
reality. The whole affair is a forcible illustration of the
literality with which the popular mind and faith apprehended the
notion of the infernal world.
Another means by which the views we have been considering were
both expressed and recommended to the senses and belief of the
people was those miracle plays that formed one of the most
peculiar features of the Middle Age. These plays, founded on, and
meant to illustrate, Scripture narratives and theological
doctrines, were at first enacted by the priests in the churches,
afterwards by the various trading companies or guilds of
mechanics. In 1210, Pope Gregory "forbade the clergy to take any
part in the plays in churches or in the mummings at festivals." A
similar prohibition was published by the Council of Treves, in
1227. The Bishop of Worms, in 1316, issued a proclamation against
the abuses which had crept into the festivities of Easter, and
gives a long and curious description of them.40 There were two
popular festivals, of which Michelet gives a full and amusing
description, one called the "Fete of the Tipsy Priests," when they
elected a Bishop of Unreason, offered him incense of burned
leather, sang obscene songs in the choir, and turned the altar
into a dice table; the other called the "Fete of the Cuckolds,"
when the laymen crowned each other with leaves, the priests wore
their surplices wrong side out and threw bran in each others'
eyes, and the bell ringers pelted each other with biscuits. There
is a religious play by Calderon, entitled "The Divine Orpheus," in
which the entire Church scheme of man's fall the devil's empire,
Christ's descent there, and the victorious sequel is embodied in a
most effective manner. In the priestly theology and in the popular
heart of those times there was no other single particular one
tenth part so prominent and vivid as that of Christ's entrance
after his death into hell to rescue the old saints and break down
Satan's power.41
40 Early Mysteries and Latin Poems of the XII. and XIII.
Centuries, edited by Thomas Wright. See the eloquent sermon on
this subject preached by Luis de Granada in the sixteenth century.
Ticknor's Hist. Spanish Lit., vol. iii. pp. 123-127.
Peter Lombard says, "What did the Redeemer do to the despot who
had us in his bonds? He offered him the cross as a mouse trap, and
put his blood on it as bait." 42 About that scene there was an
incomparable fascination for every believer. Christ laid aside his
Godhead and died. The devil thought he had secured a new victim,
and humanity swooned in grief and despair. But, lo! the Crucified,
descending to the inexorable dungeons, puts on all his Divinity,
and suddenly "The captive world awakt, and founde The pris'ner
loose, the jailer bounde!" 43
A large proportion of the miracle plays, or Mysteries, turned on
this event. In the "Mystery of the Resurrection of Christ" occurs
the following couplet: "This day the angelic King has risen,
Leading the pious from their prison." 44
The title of one of the principal plays in the Towneley Mysteries
is "Extractio Animarum ab Inferno." It describes Christ descending
to the gates of hell to claim his own. Adam sees afar the gleam of
his coming, and with his companions begins to sing for joy. The
infernal porter shouts to the other demons, in alarm, "Since first
that hell was made and I was put therein, Such sorrow never ere I
had, nor heard I such a din. My heart begins to start; my wit it
waxes thin; I am afraid we can't rejoice, these souls must from
us go. Ho, Beelzebub! bind these boys: such noise was never heard
in hell."
Satan vows he will dash Beelzebub's brains out for frightening him
so. Meanwhile, Christ draws near, and says, "Lift up your gates,
ye princes, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the
King of glory shall come in." The portals fly asunder. Satan
shouts up to his friends, "Dyng the dastard down;" but Beelzebub
replies, "That is easily said." Jesus and the devil soon meet,
face to face. A long colloquy ensues, in the course of which the
latter tells the former that he knew his Father well by sight! At
last Jesus frees Adam, Eve, the prophets, and others, and ascends,
leaving the devil in the lowest pit, resolving that hell shall
soon be fuller than before; for he will walk east and he will walk
west, and he will seduce thousands from their allegiance. Another
play, similar to the foregoing, but much more extensively known
and acted, was called the "Harrowing of Hell." Christ and Satan
appear on the stage and argue in the most approved scholastic
style for the right of possession in the human race. Satan says,
"Whoever purchases any thing, It belongs to him and to his
children. Adam, hungry, came to me;
42 Sententia, lib. iii. distinctio 19.
43 Hone, Ancient Mysteries.
44 "Resurrexit hodie Rex angelorum Ducitur de tenebris turba
piorum."
I made him do me homage: For an apple, which I gave him, He and
all his race belong to me." But Christ instantly puts a different
aspect on the argument, by replying, "Satan! it was mine, The
apple thou gavest him. The apple and the apple tree Both were made
by me. As he was purchased with my goods, With reason will I have
him." 45
In a religious Mystery exhibited at Lisbon as late as the close of
the eighteenth century, the following scene occurs. Cain kicks his
brother Abel badly and kills him. A figure like a Chinese
mandarin, seated in a chair, condemns Cain and is drawn up into
the clouds. The mouth of hell then appears, like the jaws of a
great dragon: amid smoke and lightning it casts up three devils,
one of them having a wooden leg. These take a dance around Cain,
and are very jocose, one of them inviting him to hell to take a
cup of brimstone coffee, and another asking him to make up a party
at whist. Cain snarls, and they tumble him and themselves headlong
into the squib vomiting mouth.
Various books of accounts kept by the trading companies who
celebrated these Mysteries of the expenses incurred have been
published, and are exceedingly amusing. "Item: payd for kepyng of
fyer at hellmothe, four pence." "For a new hoke to hang Judas, six
pence." "Item: payd for mendyng and payntyng hellmouthe, two
pence." "Girdle for God, nine pence." "Axe for Pilatte's son, one
shilling." "A staff for the demon, one penny." "God's coat of
white leather, three shillings." The stage usually consisted of
three platforms. On the highest sat God, surrounded by his angels.
On the next were the saints in Paradise, the intermediate state of
the good after death. On the third were mere men yet living in the
world. On one side of the lowest stage, in the rear, was a fearful
cave or yawning mouth filled with smoke and flames, and denoting
hell. From this ever and anon would issue the howls and shrieks of
the damned. Amidst hideous yellings, devils would rush forth and
caper about and snatch hapless souls into this pit to their
doom.46 The actors, in their mock rage, sometimes leaped from the
pageant into the midst of the laughing, screaming, trembling
crowd. The dramatis personoe included many queer characters, such
as a "Worm of Conscience," "Deadman," (representing a soul
delivered from hell at the descent of Christ,) numerous "Damned
Souls," dressed in flame colored garments, "Theft," "Lying,"
"Gluttony." But the devil himself was the favorite character; and
often, when his personified vices jumped on him and pinched and
cudgelled him till he roared, the mirth of the honest audience
knew no bounds. For there were in the Middle Age two sides to the
popular idea of the devil and of all appertaining to him. He was a
soul harrowing bugbear or a rib shaking jest according to the hour
and one's
45 Halliwell's edition of the Harrowing of Hell, p. 18.
46 Sharp, Essay on the Dramatic Mysteries, p. 24.
humor. Rabelais's Pantagruel is filled with irresistible
burlesques of the doctrine of purgatory. The ludicrous side of
this subject may be seen by reading Tarlton's "Jests" and his
"Newes out of Purgatorie." 47 Glimpses of it are also to be caught
through many of the humorous passages in Shakspeare. Dromio says
of an excessively fat and greasy kitchen wench, "If she lives till
doomsday she'll burn a week longer than the whole world!" And
Falstaff, cracking a kindred joke on Bardolph's carbuncled nose,
avows his opinion that it will serve as a flaming beacon to light
lost souls the way to purgatory! Again, seeing a flea on the same
flaming proboscis, the doughty knight affirmed it was "a black
soul burning in hell fire." In this element of mediaval life, this
feature of mediaval literature, a terrible belief lay under the
gay raillery. Here is betrayed, on a wide scale, that natural
reaction of the faculties from excessive oppression to sportive
wit, from deep repugnance to superficial jesting, which has often
been pointed out by philosophical observers as a striking fact in
the psychological history of man.
One more active and mighty cause of the dreadful faith and fear
with which the Middle Age contemplated the future life was the
innumerable and frightful woes, crimes, tyrannies, instruments of
torture, engines of persecution, insane superstitions, which then
existed, making its actual life a hell. The wretchedness and
cruelty of the present world were enough to generate frightful
beliefs and cast appalling shadows over the future. If the earth
was full of devils and phantoms, surely hell must swarm worse with
them. The Inquisition sat shrouded and enthroned in supernatural
obscurity of cunning and awfulness of power, and thrust its
invisible daggers everywhere. The facts men knew here around them
gave credibility to the imagery in which the hereafter was
depicted. The flaming stakes of an Auto da Fe around which the
victims of ecclesiastical hatred writhed were but faint emblems of
what awaited their souls in the realm of demons whereto the tender
mercies of the Church consigned them. Indeed, the fate of myriads
of heretics and traitors could not fail to project the lurid
vision of hell with all its paraphernalia into the imaginations of
the people of the Dark Age. The glowing lava of purgatory heated
the soil they trod, and a smell of its sulphur surcharged the air.
A stupendous revelation of terror, bearing whole volumes of
direful meaning, is given in the single fact that it was a common
belief of that period that the holy Inquisitors would sit with
Christ in the judgment at the last day.48 If king or noble took
offence at some uneasy retainer or bold serf, he ordered him to be
secretly buried in the cell of some secluded fortress, and he was
never heard of more. So, if pope or priest hated or feared some
stubborn thinker, he straightway, "Would banish him to wear a
burning chain In the great dungeons of the unforgiven, Beneath
the space deep castle walls of heaven."
It was an age of cruelty, never to be restored, when the world was
boiling in tempest and men rode on the crests of fear.
47 Recently edited by Halliwell and published by the Shakspeare
Society.
48 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 205.
Researches made within the last century among the remains of
famous mediaval edifices, both ecclesiastic and state, have
brought to light the dismal records of forgotten horrors. In many
a royal palace, priestly building, and baronial castle, there were
secret chambers full of infernal machinery contrived for
inflicting tortures, and under them concealed trap doors opening
into rayless dungeons with no outlet and whose floors were covered
with the mouldering bones of unfortunate wretches who had
mysteriously disappeared long ago and tracelessly perished there.
Sometimes these trap doors were directly above profound pits of
water, in which the victim would drown as he dropped from the
mangling hooks, racks, and pincers of the torture chamber. There
were horrible rumors current in the Middle Age of a machine called
the "Virgin," used for putting men to death; but little was known
about it, and it was generally supposed to be a fable, until, some
years ago one of the identical machines was discovered in an old
Austrian castle. It was a tall wooden woman, with a painted face,
which the victim was ordered to kiss. As he approached to offer
the salute, he trod on a spring, causing the machine to fly open,
stretch out a pair of iron arms, and draw him to its breast
covered with a hundred sharp spikes, which pierced him to death.49
Ignorance and alarm, in a suffering and benighted age, surrounded
by sounds of superstition and sights of cruelty, must needs breed
and foster a horrid faith in regard to the invisible world.
Accordingly, the common doctrine of the future life prevailing in
Christendom from the ninth century till the sixteenth was as we
have portrayed it. Of course there are exceptions to be admitted
and qualifications to be made; but, upon the whole, the picture is
faithful. Fortunately, intellect and soul could not slumber
forever, nor the mediaval nightmares always keep their torturing
seat on the bosom of humanity. Noble men arose to vindicate the
rights of reason and the divinity of conscience. The world was
circumnavigated, and its revolution around the sun was
demonstrated. A thousand truths were discovered, a thousand
inventions introduced. Papacy tottered, its prestige waned, its
infallibility sunk. The light of knowledge shone, the simplicity
of nature was seen, and the benignity of God was surmised.
Thought, throwing off many restrictions and accumulating much
material, began to grow free, and began to grow wise. And so,
before the calm, steady gaze of enlightened and cheerful reason,
the live and crawling smoke of hell, which had so long enwreathed
the mind of the time with its pendent and breathing horrors,
gradually broke up and dissolved, "Like a great superstitious
snake, uncurled From the pale temples of the awakening world."
49 The Kiss of the Virgin, in the Archaologia published by the
Antiquaries of London, vol. xxviii.
CHAPTER III.
MODERN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
THE folly and paganism of some of the Church dogmas, the rapacious
haughtiness of its spirit, the tyranny of its rule, and the
immoral character of many of its practices, had often awakened the
indignant protests and the determined opposition of men of
enlightened minds, vigorous consciences, and generous hearts, both
in its bosom and out of it. Many such men, vainly struggling to
purify the Church from its iniquitous errors or to relieve mankind
from its outrageous burdens, had been silenced and crushed by its
relentless might. Arnold, Wickliffe, Wessel, Savonarola, and a
host of others, are to be gratefully remembered forever as the
heroic though unsuccessful forerunners of the mighty monk of
Wittenberg.1 The corruption of the mediaval Church grew worse, and
became so great as to stir a very extensive disgust and revulsion.
Wholesale pardons for all their sins were granted indiscriminately
to those who accepted the terms of the papal officials; while
every independent thinker, however evangelical his faith and
exemplary his character, was hopelessly doomed to hell. Especially
were these pardons given to pilgrims and to the Crusaders. Bernard
of Clairvaux, exhorting the people to undertake a new Crusade,
tells them that "God condescends to invite into his service
murderers, robbers, adulterers, perjurers, and those sunk in other
crimes; and whosoever falls in this cause shall secure pardon for
the sins which he has never confessed with contrite heart."2 At
the opening of "Piers the Ploughman's Crede" a person is
introduced saying, "I saw a company of pilgrims on their way to
Rome, who came home with leave to lie all the rest of their
lives!" Nash, in his "Lenten Stuff," speaks of a proclamation
which caused "three hundred thousand people to roam to Rome for
purgatorie pills." Ecclesiasticism devoured ethics. Allegiance to
morality was lowered into devotion to a ritual. The sale of
indulgences at length became too impudent and blasphemous to be
any longer endured, when John Tetzel, a Dominican monk, travelled
over Europe, and, setting up his auction block in the churches,
offered for sale those famous indulgences of Leo X. which
promised, to every one rich enough to pay the requisite price,
remission of all sins, however enormous, and whether past,
present, or future!3 This brazen but authorized charlatan boasted
that "he had saved more souls from hell by the sale of indulgences
than St. Peter had converted to Christianity by his preaching." He
also said that "even if any one had ravished the Mother of God he
could sell him a pardon for it!" The soul of Martin Luther took
fire. The consequence to which a hundred combining causes
contributed was the Protestant Reformation. This great movement
produced, in relation to our subject, three important results. It
noticeably modified the practice and the popular preaching of the
Roman Catholic Church.
1 Ullmann, Reformatoren vor der Reformation.
2 Epist. CCCLXIII. ad Orientalis Francia Clerum et Populum.
3 D'Aubigne, Hist. Reformation, book iii.
The dogmas of the Romanist theology remained as they were before.
But a marked change took place in the public conduct of the papal
functionaries. Morality was made more prominent, and mere
ritualism less obtrusive. Comparatively speaking, an emphasis was
taken from ecclesiastic confession and indulgence, and laid upon
ethical obedience and piety. The Council of Trent, held at this
time, says, in its decree concerning indulgences, "In granting
indulgences, the Church desires that moderation be observed, lest,
by excessive facility, ecclesiastical discipline be enervated."
Imposture became more cautious, threats less frequent and less
terrible; the teeth of persecution were somewhat blunted; miracles
grew rarer; the insufferable glare of purgatory and hell faded,
and the open traffic in forgiveness of sins, or the compounding
for deficiencies, diminished. But among the more ignorant papal
multitudes the mediaval superstition holds its place still in all
its virulence and grossness. "Heaven and hell are as much a part
of the Italian's geography as the Adriatic and the Apennines; the
Queen of Heaven looks on the streets as clear as the morning star;
and the souls in purgatory are more readily present to conception
than the political prisoners immured in the dungeons of Venice."
A second consequence of the Reformation is seen in the numerous
dissenting sects to which its issues gave rise. The chief
peculiarities of the Protestant doctrines of the future life are
embodied in the four leading denominations commonly known as
Lutheran, Calvinistic, Unitarian, and Universalist. Each of these
includes a number of subordinate parties bearing distinctive
names, (such as Arminian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist,
Restorationist, and many others;) but these minor differences are
too trivial to deserve distinctive characterization here. The
Lutheran formula is that, through the sacrifice of Christ,
salvation is offered to all who will accept it by a sincere faith.
Some will comply with these terms and secure heaven; others will
not, and so will be lost forever. Luther's views were not firmly
defined and consistent throughout his career; they were often
obscure, and they fluctuated much. It is true he always insisted
that there was no salvation without faith, and that all who had
faith should be saved. But, while he generally seems to believe in
the current doctrine of eternal damnation, he sometimes appears to
encourage the hope that all will finally be saved. In a remarkable
letter to Hansen von Rechenberg, dated 1522, he says, in effect,
"Whoso hath faith in Christ shall be saved. God forbid that I
should limit the time for acquiring this faith to the present
life! In the depths of the Divine mercy, there may be opportunity
to win it in the future state."