THE PURE OF LIFE
Here is a little problem in mathematics which is not out of place in a
book of history. Take a piece of string and make it into a circle, like
this:
[Illustration: I]
In this circle all diameters will of course be equal.
AB = CD = EF = GH and so on, ad infinitum.
But turn the circle into an ellipse by slightly pulling two sides. Then
the perfect balance is at once disturbed. The diameters are thrown out
of gear. A few like AB and EF have been greatly shortened. Others, and
especially CD, have been lengthened.
[Illustration: II]
Now transfer the problem from mathematics to history. Let us for the sake
of argument suppose that
AB represents politics
CD ” trade
EF ” art
GH ” militarism
In the figure I the perfectly balanced state, all lines are equally long
and quite as much attention is paid to politics as to trade and art and
militarism.
But in figure II (which is no longer a perfect circle) trade has got an
undue advantage at the expense of politics and art has almost entirely
disappeared, while militarism shows a gain.
Or make GH (militarism) the longest diameter, and the others will tend to
disappear altogether.
[Illustration: III]
You will find this a handy key to a great many historical problems.
Try it on the Greeks.
For a short time the Greeks had been able to maintain a perfect circle
of all-around accomplishments. But the foolish quarrels between the
different political parties soon grew to such proportions that all the
surplus energy of the nation was being absorbed by the incessant civil
wars. The soldiers were no longer used for the purpose of defending the
country against foreign aggression. They were turned loose upon their own
neighbors, who had voted for a different candidate, or who believed in a
slightly modified form of taxation.
Trade, that most important diameter of all such circles, at first became
difficult, then became entirely impossible and fled to other parts of the
world, where business enjoyed a greater degree of stability.
The moment poverty entered through the front gate of the city, the arts
escaped by way of the back door, never to be seen again. Capital sailed
away on the fastest ship it could find within a hundred miles, and since
intellectualism is a very expensive luxury, it was henceforth impossible
to maintain good schools. The best teachers hastened to Rome and to
Alexandria.
What remained was a group of second-rate citizens who subsisted upon
tradition and routine.
And all this happened because the line of politics had grown out of all
proportion, because the perfect circle had been destroyed, and the other
lines, art, science, philosophy, etc., etc., had been reduced to nothing.
If you apply the circular problem to Rome, you will find that there the
particular line called “political power” grew and grew and grew until
there was nothing left of any of the others. The circle which had spelled
the glory of the Republic disappeared. All that remained was a straight,
narrow line, the shortest distance between success and failure.
And if, to give you still another example, you reduce the history of the
medieval Church to this sort of mathematics, this is what you will find.
The earliest Christians had tried very hard to maintain a circle of
conduct that should be perfect. Perhaps they had rather neglected the
diameter of science, but since they were not interested in the life of
the world, they could not very well be expected to pay much attention to
medicine or physics or astronomy, useful subjects, no doubt, but of small
appeal to men and women who were making ready for the last judgment and
who regarded this world merely as the ante-room to Heaven.
But for the rest, these sincere followers of Christ endeavored (however
imperfectly) to lead the good life and to be as industrious as they were
charitable and as kindly as they were honest.
As soon, however, as their little communities had been united into a
single powerful organization, the perfect balance of the old spiritual
circle was rudely upset by the obligations and duties of the new
international responsibilities. It was easy enough for small groups of
half-starved carpenters and quarry workers to follow those principles of
poverty and unselfishness upon which their faith was founded. But the
heir to the imperial throne of Rome, the Pontifex Maximus of the western
world, the richest landowner of the entire continent, could not live
as simply as if he were a sub-deacon in a provincial town somewhere in
Pomerania or Spain.
Or, to use the circular language of this chapter, the diameter
representing “worldliness” and the diameter representing “foreign policy”
were lengthened to such an extent that the diameters representing
“humility” and “poverty” and “self-negation” and the other elementary
Christian virtues were being reduced to the point of extinction.
It is a pleasant habit of our time to speak patronizingly of the
benighted people of the Middle Ages, who, as we all know, lived in utter
darkness. It is true they burned wax tapers in their churches and went
to bed by the uncertain light of a sconce, they possessed few books,
they were ignorant of many things which are now being taught in our
grammar schools and in our better grade lunatic asylums. But knowledge
and intelligence are two very different things and of the latter, these
excellent burghers, who constructed the political and social structure in
which we ourselves continue to live, had their full share.
If a good deal of the time they seemed to stand apparently helpless
before the many and terrible abuses in their Church, let us judge them
mercifully. They had at least the courage of their convictions and they
fought whatever they considered wrong with such sublime disregard for
personal happiness and comfort that they frequently ended their lives on
the scaffold.
More than that we can ask of no one.
It is true that during the first thousand years of our era, comparatively
few people fell as victims to their ideas. Not, however, because the
Church felt less strongly about heresy than she did at a later date, but
because she was too much occupied with more important questions to have
any time to waste upon comparatively harmless dissenters.
In the first place, there remained many parts of Europe where Odin and
the other heathen gods still ruled supreme.
And in the second place, something very unpleasant had happened, which
had wellnigh threatened the whole of Europe with destruction.
This “something unpleasant” was the sudden appearance of a brand-new
prophet by the name of Mahomet, and the conquest of western Asia and
northern Africa by the followers of a new God who was called Allah.
The literature which we absorb in our childhood full of “infidel dogs”
and Turkish atrocities is apt to leave us under the impression that Jesus
and Mahomet represented ideals which were as mutually antagonistic as
fire and water.
But as a matter of fact, the two men belonged to the same race, they
spoke dialects which belonged to the same linguistic group, they both
claimed Abraham as their great-great-grandfather and they both looked
back upon a common ancestral home, which a thousand years before had
stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf.
And yet, the followers of those two great teachers who were such close
relatives have always regarded each other with bitter scorn and have
fought a war which has lasted more than twelve centuries and which has
not yet come to an end.
At this late day and age it is useless to speculate upon what might have
happened, but there was a time when Mecca, the arch-enemy of Rome, might
have easily been gained for the Christian faith.
The Arabs, like all desert people, spent a great deal of their time
tending their flocks and therefore were much given to meditation.
People in cities can drug their souls with the pleasures of a perennial
county-fair. But shepherds and fisher folk and farmers lead solitary
lives and want something a little more substantial than noise and
excitement.
In his quest for salvation, the Arab had tried several religions, but had
shown a distinct preference for Judaism. This is easily explained, as
Arabia was full of Jews. In the tenth century B.C., a great many of King
Solomon’s subjects, exasperated by the high taxes and the despotism of
their ruler, had fled into Arabia and again, five hundred years later in
586 B.C., when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah, there had been a second
wholesale exodus of Jews towards the desert lands of the south.
Judaism, therefore, was well known and furthermore the quest of the Jews
after the one and only true God was entirely in line with the aspirations
and ideals of the Arabian tribes.
Any one in the least familiar with the work of Mahomet will know how much
the Medinite had borrowed from the wisdom contained in some of the books
of the Old Testament.
Nor were the descendants of Ishmael (who together with his mother Hagar
lay buried in the Holy of Holies in the heart of Arabia) hostile to the
ideas expressed by the young reformer from Nazareth. On the contrary,
they followed Jesus eagerly when he spoke of that one God who was a
loving father to all men. They were not inclined to accept those miracles
of which the followers of the Nazarene carpenter made so much. And as for
the resurrection, they flatly refused to believe in it. But generally
speaking, they felt very kindly disposed towards the new faith and were
willing to give it a chance.
But Mahomet suffered considerable annoyance at the hands of certain
Christian zealots who with their usual lack of discretion had denounced
him as a liar and a false prophet before he had fairly opened his
mouth. That and the impression which was rapidly gaining ground that
the Christians were idol worshipers who believed in three Gods instead
of one, made the people of the desert finally turn their backs upon
Christianity and declare themselves in favor of the Medinese camel driver
who spoke to them of one and only one God and did not confuse them with
references to three deities that were “one” and yet were not one, but
were one or three as it might please the convenience of the moment and
the interests of the officiating priest.
Thus the western world found itself possessed of two religions, each of
which proclaimed its own God to be the One True God and each of which
insisted that all other Gods were impostors.
Such conflicts of opinion are apt to lead to warfare.
Mahomet died in 632.
Within less than a dozen years, Palestine, Syria, Persia and Egypt had
been conquered and Damascus had become the capital of a great Arab empire.
Before the end of 656 the entire coast of northern Africa had accepted
Allah as its divine ruler and in less than a century after the flight of
Mahomet from Mecca to Medina, the Mediterranean had been turned into a
Moslem lake, all communications between Europe and Asia had been cut off
and the European continent was placed in a state of siege which lasted
until the end of the seventeenth century.
Under those circumstances it had been impossible for the Church to carry
her doctrines eastward. All she could hope to do was to hold on to what
she already possessed. Germany and the Balkans and Russia and Denmark and
Sweden and Norway and Bohemia and Hungary had been chosen as a profitable
field for intensive spiritual cultivation and on the whole, the work was
done with great success. Occasionally a hardy Christian of the variety
of Charlemagne, well-intentioned but not yet entirely civilized, might
revert to strong-arm methods and might butcher those of his subjects
who preferred their own Gods to those of the foreigner. By and large,
however, the Christian missionaries were well received, for they were
honest men who told a simple and straightforward story which all the
people could understand and because they introduced certain elements of
order and neatness and mercy into a world full of bloodshed and strife
and highway robbery.
But while this was happening along the frontier, things had not gone so
well in the heart of the pontifical empire. Incessantly (to revert to
the mathematics explained in the first pages of this chapter) the line
of worldliness had been lengthened until at last the spiritual element
in the Church had been made entirely subservient to considerations of a
purely political and economic nature and although Rome was to grow in
power and exercise a tremendous influence upon the development of the
next twelve centuries, certain elements of disintegration had already
made their appearance and were being recognized as such by the more
intelligent among the laity and the clergy.
We modern people of the Protestant north think of a “church” as a
building which stands empty six days out of every seven and a place
where people go on a Sunday to hear a sermon and sing a few hymns. We
know that some of our churches have bishops and occasionally these
bishops hold a convention in our town and then we find ourselves
surrounded by a number of kindly old gentlemen with their collars turned
backwards and we read in the papers that they have declared themselves
in favor of dancing or against divorce, and then they go home again and
nothing has happened to disturb the peace and happiness of our community.
We rarely associate this church (even if it happens to be our own) with
the sum total of all our experiences, both in life and in death.
The State, of course, is something very different. The State may take
our money and may kill us if it feels that such a course is desirable
for the public good. The State is our owner, our master, but what is now
generally called “the Church” is either our good and trusted friend or,
if we happen to quarrel with her, a fairly indifferent enemy.
But in the Middle Ages this was altogether different. Then, the Church
was something visible and tangible, a highly active organization which
breathed and existed, which shaped man’s destiny in many more ways than
the State would ever dream of doing. Very likely those first Popes who
accepted pieces of land from grateful princes and renounced the ancient
ideal of poverty did not foresee the consequences to which such a policy
was bound to lead. In the beginning it had seemed harmless enough and
quite appropriate that faithful followers of Christ should bestow upon
the successor of the apostle Peter a share of their own worldly goods.
Besides, there was the overhead of a complicated administration which
reached all the way from John o’Groat’s to Trebizond and from Carthage
to Upsala. Think of all the thousands of secretaries and clerks
and scribes, not to mention the hundreds of heads of the different
departments, that had to be housed and clothed and fed. Think of the
amount spent upon a courier service across an entire continent; the
traveling expenses of diplomatic agents now going to London, then
returning from Novgorod; the sums necessary to keep the papal courtiers
in the style that was expected of people who foregathered with worldly
princes on a footing of complete equality.
All the same, looking back upon what the Church came to stand for and
contemplating what it might have been under slightly more favorable
circumstances, this development seems a great pity. For Rome rapidly grew
into a gigantic super-state with a slight religious tinge and the pope
became an international autocrat who held all the nations of western
Europe in a bondage compared to which the rule of the old emperors had
been mild and generous.
And then, when complete success seemed within certain reach, something
happened which proved fatal to the ambition for world dominion.
The true spirit of the Master once more began to stir among the masses
and that is one of the most uncomfortable things that can happen to any
religious organization.
Heretics were nothing new.
There had been dissenters as soon as there had been a single rule of
faith from which people could possibly dissent and disputes, which
had divided Europe and Africa and western Asia into hostile camps for
centuries at a time, were almost as old as the Church herself.
But these sanguinary quarrels between Donatists and Sabellianists and
Monophysites and Manichaeans and Nestorians hardly come within the
scope of this book. As a rule, one party was quite as narrow-minded as
the other and there was little to choose between the intolerance of a
follower of Arius and the intolerance of a follower of Athanasius.
Besides, these quarrels were invariably based upon certain obscure points
of theology which are gradually beginning to be forgotten. Heaven forbid
that I should drag them out of their parchment graves. I am not wasting
my time upon the fabrication of this volume to cause a fresh outbreak of
theological fury. Rather, I am writing these pages to tell our children
of certain ideals of intellectual liberty for which some of their
ancestors fought at the risk of their lives and to warn them against that
attitude of doctrinary arrogance and cock-sureness which has caused such
a terrible lot of suffering during the last two thousand years.
But when I reach the thirteenth century, it is a very different story.
Then a heretic ceases to be a mere dissenter, a disputatious fellow with
a pet hobby of his own based upon the wrong translation of an obscure
sentence in the Apocalypse or the mis-spelling of a holy word in the
gospel of St. John.
Instead he becomes the champion of those ideas for which during the reign
of Tiberius a certain carpenter from the village of Nazareth went to his
death, and behold! he stands revealed as the only true Christian!