THE CURIOUS ONES
Modern intolerance, like ancient Gaul, is divided into three parts; the
intolerance of laziness, the intolerance of ignorance and the intolerance
of self-interest.
The first of these is perhaps the most general. It is to be met with in
every country and among all classes of society. It is most common in
small villages and old-established towns, and it is not restricted to
human beings.
Our old family horse, having spent the first twenty-five years of his
placid life in a warm stable in Coley Town, resents the equally warm barn
of Westport for no other reason than that he has always lived in Coley
Town, is familiar with every stick and stone in Coley Town and knows
that no new and unfamiliar sights will frighten him on his daily ambles
through that pleasant part of the Connecticut landscape.
Our scientific world has thus far spent so much time learning the defunct
dialects of Polynesian islands that the language of dogs and cats and
horses and donkeys has been sadly neglected. But could we know what Dude
says to his former neighbors of Coley Town, we would hear an outburst
of the most ferocious equine intolerance. For Dude is no longer young
and therefore is “set” in his ways. His horsey habits were all formed
years and years ago and therefore all the Coley Town manners, customs and
habits seem right to him and all the Westport customs and manners and
habits will be declared wrong until the end of his days.
It is this particular variety of intolerance which makes parents shake
their heads over the foolish behavior of their children, which has caused
the absurd myth of “the good old days”; which makes savages and civilized
creatures wear uncomfortable clothes; which fills the world with a great
deal of superfluous nonsense and generally turns all people with a new
idea into the supposed enemies of mankind.
Otherwise, however, this sort of intolerance is comparatively harmless.
We are all of us bound to suffer from it sooner or later. In ages past it
has caused millions of people to leave home, and in this way it has been
responsible for the permanent settlement of vast tracts of uninhabited
land which otherwise would still be a wilderness.
The second variety is much more serious.
An ignorant man is, by the very fact of his ignorance, a very dangerous
person.
But when he tries to invent an excuse for his own lack of mental
faculties, he becomes a holy terror. For then he erects within his soul a
granite bulwark of self-righteousness and from the high pinnacle of this
formidable fortress, he defies all his enemies (to wit, those who do not
share his own prejudices) to show cause why they should be allowed to
live.
People suffering from this particular affliction are both uncharitable
and mean. Because they live constantly in a state of fear, they easily
turn to cruelty and love to torture those against whom they have a
grievance. It was among people of this ilk that the strange notion
of a predilected group of a “chosen people” first took its origin.
Furthermore, the victims of this delusion are forever trying to bolster
up their own courage by an imaginary relationship which exists between
themselves and the invisible Gods. This, of course, in order to give a
flavor of spiritual approbation to their intolerance.
For instance, such citizens never say, “We are hanging Danny Deever
because we consider him a menace to our own happiness, because we hate
him with a thousand hates and because we just love to hang him.” Oh,
no! They get together in solemn conclave and deliberate for hours and
for days and for weeks upon the fate of said Danny Deever. When finally
sentence is read, poor Danny, who has perhaps committed some petty sort
of larceny, stands solemnly convicted as a most terrible person who has
dared to offend the Divine Will (as privately communicated to the elect
who alone can interpret such messages) and whose execution therefore
becomes a sacred duty, bringing great credit upon the judges who have the
courage to convict such an ally of Satan.
That good-natured and otherwise kind-hearted people are quite as apt to
fall under the spell of this most fatal delusion as their more brutal and
blood-thirsty neighbors is a commonplace both of history and psychology.
The crowds that gaped delightedly at the sad plight of a thousand poor
martyrs were most assuredly not composed of criminals. They were decent,
pious folk and they felt sure that they were doing something very
creditable and pleasing in the sight of their own particular Divinity.
Had one spoken to them of tolerance, they would have rejected the idea as
an ignoble confession of Moral weakness. Perhaps they were intolerant,
but in that case they were proud of the fact and with good right. For
there, out in the cold dampness of early morning, stood Danny Deever,
clad in a saffron colored shirt and in a pair of pantaloons adorned with
little devils, and he was going, going slowly but surely, to be hanged in
the Market Place. While they themselves, as soon as the show was over,
would return to a comfortable home and a plentiful meal of bacon and
beans.
Was not that in itself proof enough that they were acting and thinking
correctly?
Otherwise would they be among the spectators? Would not the rôles be
reversed?
A feeble argument, I confess, but a very common one and hard to answer
when people feel sincerely convinced that their own ideas are the ideas
of God and are unable to understand how they could possibly be mistaken.
There remains as a third category the intolerance caused by
self-interest. This, of course, is really a variety of jealousy and as
common as the measles.
When Jesus came to Jerusalem, there to teach that the favor of Almighty
God could not be bought by the killing of a dozen oxen or goats, all
those who made a living from the ceremonial sacrifices in the temple
decried him as a dangerous revolutionist and caused him to be executed
before he could do any lasting damage to their main source of income.
When Saint Paul, a few years later, came to Ephesus and there preached
a new creed which threatened to interfere with the prosperity of the
jewelers who derived great profit from the sale of little images of the
local Goddess Diana, the Guild of the Goldsmiths almost lynched the
unwelcome intruder.
And ever since there has been open warfare between those who depend for
their livelihood upon some established form of worship and those whose
ideas threaten to take the crowd away from one temple in favor of another.
When we attempt to discuss the intolerance of the Middle Ages, we must
constantly remember that we have to deal with a very complicated problem.
Only upon very rare occasions do we find ourselves confronted with only
one manifestation of these three separate forms of intolerance. Most
frequently we can discover traces of all three varieties in the cases of
persecution which are brought to our attention.
That an organization, enjoying great wealth, administering thousands
of square miles of land and owning hundreds of thousands of serfs,
should have turned the full vigor of its anger against a group of
peasants who had undertaken to reëstablish a simple and unpretentious
Kingdom-of-Heaven-on-Earth was entirely natural.
And in that case, the extermination of heretics became a matter
of economic necessity and belonged to class C, the intolerance of
self-interest.
But when we begin to consider another group of men who were to feel
the heavy hand of official disapprobation, the scientists, the problem
becomes infinitely more complicated.
And in order to understand the perverse attitude of the Church
authorities towards those who tried to reveal the secrets of nature, we
must go back a good many centuries and study what had actually happened
in Europe during the first six centuries of our era.
The invasion of the Barbarians had swept across the continent with the
ruthless thoroughness of a flood. Here and there a few pieces of the old
Roman fabric of state had remained standing erect amidst the wastes of
the turbulent waters. But the society that had once dwelled within these
walls had perished. Their books had been carried away by the waves. Their
art lay forgotten in the deep mud of a new ignorance. Their collections,
their museums, their laboratories, their slowly accumulated mass of
scientific facts, all these had been used to stoke the camp-fires of
uncouth savages from the heart of Asia.
We possess several catalogues of libraries of the tenth century. Of
Greek books (outside of the city of Constantinople, then almost as far
removed from central Europe as the Melbourne of today) the people of the
west possessed hardly any. It seems incredible, but they had completely
disappeared. A few translations (badly done) of a few chapters from the
works of Aristotle and Plato were all the scholar of that time could find
when he wanted to familiarize himself with the thoughts of the ancients.
If he desired to learn their language, there was no one to teach it to
him, unless a theological dispute in Byzantium had driven a handful of
Greek monks from their customary habitats and had forced them to find a
temporary asylum in France or Italy.
Latin books there were in great quantity, but most of those dated from
the fourth and fifth centuries. The few manuscripts of the classics
that survived had been copied so often and so indifferently that their
contents were no longer understandable to any one who had not made a life
study of paleography.
As for books of science, with the possible exception of some of the
simplest problems of Euclid, they were no longer to be found in any of
the available libraries and what was much more regrettable, they were no
longer wanted.
For the people who now ruled the world regarded science with a hostile
eye and discouraged all independent labor in the field of mathematics,
biology and zoology, not to mention medicine and astronomy, which had
descended to such a low state of neglect that they were no longer of the
slightest practical value.
It is exceedingly difficult for a modern mind to understand such a state
of affairs.
We men and women of the twentieth century, whether rightly or wrongly,
profoundly believe in the idea of progress. Whether we ever shall be able
to make this world perfect, we do not know. In the meantime we feel it to
be our most sacred duty to try.
Yea, sometimes this faith in the unavoidable destiny of progress seems to
have become the national religion of our entire country.
But the people of the Middle Ages did not and could not share such a view.
The Greek dream of a world filled with beautiful and interesting things
had lasted such a lamentably short time! It had been so rudely disturbed
by the political cataclysm that had overtaken the unfortunate country
that most Greek writers of the later centuries had been confirmed
pessimists who, contemplating the ruins of their once happy fatherland,
had become abject believers in the doctrine of the ultimate futility of
all worldly endeavor.
The Roman authors, on the other hand, who could draw their conclusions
from almost a thousand years of consecutive history, had discovered a
certain upward trend in the development of the human race and their
philosophers, notably the Epicureans, had cheerfully undertaken the task
of educating the younger generation for a happier and better future.
Then came Christianity.
The center of interest was moved from this world to the other. Almost
immediately people fell back into a deep and dark abyss of hopeless
resignation.
Man was evil. He was evil by instinct and by preference. He was conceived
in sin, born in sin, he lived in sin and he died repenting of his sins.
But there was a difference between the old despair and the new.
The Greeks were convinced (and perhaps rightly so) that they were more
intelligent and better educated than their neighbors and they felt rather
sorry for those unfortunate barbarians. But they never quite reached the
point at which they began to consider themselves as a race that had been
set apart from all others because it was the chosen people of Zeus.
Christianity on the other hand was never able to escape from its own
antecedents. When the Christians adopted the Old Testament as one of the
Holy Books of their own faith, they fell heir to the incredible Jewish
doctrine that their race was “different” from all others and that only
those who professed a belief in certain officially established doctrines
could hope to be saved while the rest were doomed to perdition.
This idea was, of course, of enormous direct benefit to those who
were lacking sufficiently in humility of spirit to believe themselves
predilected favorites among millions and millions of their fellow
creatures. During many highly critical years it had turned the Christians
into a closely-knit, self-contained little community which floated
unconcernedly upon a vast ocean of paganism.
What happened elsewhere on those waters that stretched far and wide
towards the north and the south and the east and the west was a subject
of the most profound indifference to Tertullian or St. Augustine, or any
of those other early writers who were busily engaged in putting the ideas
of their Church into the concrete form of written books. Eventually
they hoped to reach a safe shore and there to build their city of God.
Meanwhile, what those in other climes hoped to accomplish and to achieve
was none of their concern.
Hence they created for themselves entirely new conceptions about the
origin of man and about the limits of time and space. What the Egyptians
and Babylonians and the Greeks and the Romans had discovered about
these mysteries did not interest them in the least. They were sincerely
convinced that all the old values had been destroyed with the birth of
Christ.
There was for example the problem of our earth.
The ancient scientists held it to be one among a couple of billion of
other stars.
The Christians flatly rejected this idea. To them, the little round disk
on which they lived was the heart and center of the universe.
It had been created for the special purpose of providing one particular
group of people with a temporary home. The way in which this had been
brought about was very simple and was fully described in the first
chapter of Genesis.
When it became necessary to decide just how long this group of
predilected people had been on this earth, the problem became a little
more complicated. On all sides there were evidences of great antiquity,
of buried cities, of extinct monsters and of fossilized plants. But
these could be reasoned away or overlooked or denied or shouted out of
existence. And after this had been done, it was a very simple matter to
establish a fixed date for the beginning of time.
In a universe like that, a universe which was static, which had begun
at a certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, and would end at
another certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, which existed
for the exclusive benefit of one and only one denomination, in such a
universe there was no room for the prying curiosity of mathematicians
and biologists and chemists and all sorts of other people who only
cared for general principles and juggled with the idea of eternity and
unlimitedness both in the field of time and in the realm of space.
True enough, many of those scientific people protested that at heart they
were devout sons of the Church. But the true Christians knew better. No
man, who was sincere in his protestations of love and devotion for the
faith, had any business to know so much or to possess so many books.
One book was enough.
That book was the Bible, and every letter in it, every comma, every
semicolon and exclamation point had been written down by people who were
divinely inspired.
A Greek of the days of Pericles would have been slightly amused if he
had been told of a supposedly holy volume which contained scraps of
ill-digested national history, doubtful love poems, the inarticulate
visions of half-demented prophets and whole chapters devoted to the
foulest denunciation of those who for some reason or another were
supposed to have incurred the displeasure of one of Asia’s many tribal
deities.
But the barbarian of the third century had a most humble respect for
the “written word” which to him was one of the great mysteries of
civilization, and when this particular book, by successive councils of
his Church, was recommended to him as being without error, flaw or slip,
he willingly enough accepted this extraordinary document as the sum total
of everything that man had ever known, or ever could hope to know, and
joined in the denunciation and persecution of those who defied Heaven
by extending their researches beyond the limits indicated by Moses and
Isaiah.
The number of people willing to die for their principles has always been
necessarily limited.
At the same time the thirst for knowledge on the part of certain people
is so irrepressible that some outlet must be found for their pent up
energy. As a result of this conflict between curiosity and repression
there grew up that stunted and sterile intellectual sapling which came to
be known as Scholasticism.
It dated back to the middle of the eighth century. It was then that
Bertha, wife to Pépin the Short, king of the Franks, gave birth to a son
who has better claims to be considered the patron saint of the French
nation than that good King Louis who cost his countrymen a ransom of
eight hundred thousand Turkish gold pieces and who rewarded his subjects’
loyalty by giving them an inquisition of their own.
When the child was baptized it was given the name of Carolus, as you may
see this very day at the bottom of many an ancient charter. The signature
is a little clumsy. But Charles was never much of a hand at spelling. As
a boy he learned to read Frankish and Latin, but when he took up writing,
his fingers were so rheumatic from a life spent fighting the Russians and
the Moors that he had to give up the attempt and hired the best scribes
of his day to act as his secretaries and do his writing for him.
For this old frontiersman, who prided himself upon the fact that only
twice within fifty years had he worn “city clothes” (the toga of a Roman
nobleman), had a most genuine appreciation of the value of learning, and
turned his court into a private university for the benefit of his own
children and for the sons and daughters of his officials.
There, surrounded by the most famous men of his time, the new imperator
of the west loved to spend his hours of leisure. And so great was his
respect for academic democracy that he dropped all etiquette and as
simple Brother David took an active share in the conversation and allowed
himself to be contradicted by the humblest of his professors.
But when we come to examine the problems that interested this goodly
company and the questions they discussed, we are reminded of the list of
subjects chosen by the debating teams of a rural high school in Tennessee.
They were very naïve, to say the least. And what was true in the
year 800 held equally good for 1400. This was not the fault of the
medieval scholar, whose brain was undoubtedly quite as good as that of
his successors of the twentieth century. But he found himself in the
position of a modern chemist or doctor who is given complete liberty
of investigation, provided he does not say or do anything at variance
with the chemical and medical information contained in the volumes of
the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of the year 1768 when
chemistry was practically an unknown subject and surgery was closely akin
to butchery.
As a result (I am mixing my metaphors anyway) the medieval scientist
with his tremendous brain capacity and his very limited field of
experimentation reminds one somewhat of a Rolls-Royce motor placed upon
the chassis of a flivver. Whenever he stepped on the gas, he met with
a thousand accidents. But when he played safe and drove his strange
contraption according to the rules and regulations of the road he became
slightly ridiculous and wasted a terrible lot of energy without getting
anywhere in particular.
Of course the best among these men were desperate at the rate of speed
which they were forced to observe.
They tried in every possible way to escape from the everlasting
observation of the clerical policemen. They wrote ponderous volumes,
trying to prove the exact opposite of what they held to be true, in order
that they might give a hint of the things that were uppermost in their
minds.
They surrounded themselves with all sorts of hocus pocus; they wore
strange garments; they had stuffed crocodiles hanging from their
ceilings; they displayed shelves full of bottled monsters and threw evil
smelling herbs in the furnace that they might frighten their neighbors
away from their front door and at the same time establish a reputation
of being the sort of harmless lunatics who could be allowed to say
whatever they liked without being held too closely responsible for their
ideas. And gradually they developed such a thorough system of scientific
camouflage that even today it is difficult for us to decide what they
actually meant.
That the Protestants a few centuries later showed themselves quite as
intolerant towards science and literature as the Church of the Middle
Ages had done is quite true, but it is beside the point.
The great reformers could fulminate and anathematize to their hearts’
content, but they were rarely able to turn their threats into positive
acts of repression.
The Roman Church on the other hand not only possessed the power to crush
its enemies but it made use of it, whenever the occasion presented itself.
The difference may seem trivial to those of us who like to indulge
in abstract cogitations upon the theoretical values of tolerance and
intolerance.
But it was a very real issue to those poor devils, who were placed
before the choice of a public recantation or an equally public flogging.
And if they sometimes lacked the courage to say what they held to be
true, and preferred to waste their time on cross-word puzzles made up
exclusively from the names of the animals mentioned in the Book of
Revelations, let us not be too hard on them.
I am quite certain that I never would have written the present volume,
six hundred years ago.