WHAT THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES THOUGHT OF THE WORLD IN WHICH
THEY HAPPENED TO LIVE
Dates are a very useful invention. We could not do without them but
unless we are very careful, they will play tricks with us. They are
apt to make history too precise. For example, when I talk of the
point-of-view of mediæval man, I do not mean that on the 31st of
December of the year 476, suddenly all the people of Europe said, “Ah,
now the Roman Empire has come to an end and we are living in the Middle
Ages. How interesting!”
You could have found men at the Frankish court of Charlemagne who
were Romans in their habits, in their manners, in their out-look upon
life. On the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some
of the people in this world have never passed beyond the stage of the
cave-man. All times and all ages overlap, and the ideas of succeeding
generations play tag with each other. But it is possible to study the
minds of a good many true representatives of the Middle Ages and then
give you an idea of the average man’s attitude toward life and the many
difficult problems of living.
First of all, remember that the people of the Middle Ages never thought
of themselves as free-born citizens, who could come and go at will and
shape their fate according to their ability or energy or luck. On the
contrary, they all considered themselves part of the general scheme of
things, which included emperors and serfs, popes and heretics, heroes
and swashbucklers, rich men, poor men, beggar men and thieves. They
accepted this divine ordinance and asked no questions. In this, of
course, they differed radically from modern people who accept nothing
and who are forever trying to improve their own financial and political
situation.
To the man and woman of the thirteenth century, the world
hereafter—a Heaven of wonderful delights and a Hell of brimstone and
suffering—meant something more than empty words or vague theological
phrases. It was an actual fact and the mediæval burghers and knights
spent the greater part of their time preparing for it. We modern people
regard a noble death after a well-spent life with the quiet calm of the
ancient Greeks and Romans. After three score years of work and effort,
we go to sleep with the feeling that all will be well.
But during the Middle Ages, the King of Terrors with his grinning skull
and his rattling bones was man’s steady companion. He woke his victims
up with terrible tunes on his scratchy fiddle—he sat down with them at
dinner—he smiled at them from behind trees and shrubs when they took
a girl out for a walk. If you had heard nothing but hair-raising yarns
about cemeteries and coffins and fearful diseases when you were very
young, instead of listening to the fairy stories of Andersen and Grimm,
you, too, would have lived all your days in a dread of the final hour
and the gruesome day of Judgment. That is exactly what happened to the
children of the Middle Ages. They moved in a world of devils and spooks
and only a few occasional angels. Sometimes, their fear of the future
filled their souls with humility and piety, but often it influenced
them the other way and made them cruel and sentimental. They would
first of all murder all the women and children of a captured city and
then they would devoutly march to a holy spot and with their hands gory
with the blood of innocent victims, they would pray that a merciful
heaven forgive them their sins. Yea, they would do more than pray, they
would weep bitter tears and would confess themselves the most wicked
of sinners. But the next day, they would once more butcher a camp of
Saracen enemies without a spark of mercy in their hearts.
Of course, the Crusaders were Knights and obeyed a somewhat different
code of manners from the common men. But in such respects the common
man was just the same as his master. He, too, resembled a shy horse,
easily frightened by a shadow or a silly piece of paper, capable of
excellent and faithful service but liable to run away and do terrible
damage when his feverish imagination saw a ghost.
In judging these good people, however, it is wise to remember the
terrible disadvantages under which they lived. They were really
barbarians who posed as civilised people. Charlemagne and Otto the
Great were called “Roman Emperors,” but they had as little resemblance
to a real Roman Emperor (say Augustus or Marcus Aurelius) as “King”
Wumba Wumba of the Upper Congo has to the highly educated rulers of
Sweden or Denmark. They were savages who lived amidst glorious ruins
but who did not share the benefits of the civilisation which their
fathers and grandfathers had destroyed. They knew nothing. They were
ignorant of almost every fact which a boy of twelve knows to-day. They
were obliged to go to one single book for all their information. That
was the Bible. But those parts of the Bible which have influenced the
history of the human race for the better are those chapters of the New
Testament which teach us the great moral lessons of love, charity and
forgiveness. As a handbook of astronomy, zoölogy, botany, geometry and
all the other sciences, the venerable book is not entirely reliable. In
the twelfth century, a second book was added to the mediæval library,
the great encyclopædia of useful knowledge, compiled by Aristotle,
the Greek philosopher of the fourth century before Christ. Why the
Christian church should have been willing to accord such high honors to
the teacher of Alexander the Great, whereas they condemned all other
Greek philosophers on account of their heathenish doctrines, I really
do not know. But next to the Bible, Aristotle was recognized as the
only reliable teacher whose works could be safely placed into the
hands of true Christians.
His works had reached Europe in a somewhat roundabout way. They had
gone from Greece to Alexandria. They had then been translated from
the Greek into the Arabic language by the Mohammedans who conquered
Egypt in the seventh century. They had followed the Moslem armies
into Spain and the philosophy of the great Stagirite (Aristotle was a
native of Stagira in Macedonia) was taught in the Moorish universities
of Cordova. The Arabic text was then translated into Latin by the
Christian students who had crossed the Pyrenees to get a liberal
education and this much travelled version of the famous books was at
last taught at the different schools of northwestern Europe. It was not
very clear, but that made it all the more interesting.
With the help of the Bible and Aristotle, the most brilliant men of
the Middle Ages now set to work to explain all things between Heaven
and Earth in their relation to the expressed will of God. These
brilliant men, the so-called Scholiasts or Schoolmen, were really very
intelligent, but they had obtained their information exclusively from
books, and never from actual observation. If they wanted to lecture on
the sturgeon or on caterpillars, they read the Old and New Testaments
and Aristotle, and told their students everything these good books had
to say upon the subject of caterpillars and sturgeons. They did not go
out to the nearest river to catch a sturgeon. They did not leave their
libraries and repair to the backyard to catch a few caterpillars and
look at these animals and study them in their native haunts. Even such
famous scholars as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas did not inquire
whether the sturgeons in the land of Palestine and the caterpillars
of Macedonia might not have been different from the sturgeons and the
caterpillars of western Europe.
When occasionally an exceptionally curious person like Roger Bacon
appeared in the council of the learned and began to experiment with
magnifying glasses and funny little telescopes and actually dragged the
sturgeon and the caterpillar into the lecturing room and proved that
they were different from the creatures described by the Old Testament
and by Aristotle, the Schoolmen shook their dignified heads. Bacon
was going too far. When he dared to suggest that an hour of actual
observation was worth more than ten years with Aristotle and that the
works of that famous Greek might as well have remained untranslated for
all the good they had ever done, the scholiasts went to the police and
said, “This man is a danger to the safety of the state. He wants us to
study Greek that we may read Aristotle in the original. Why should he
not be contented with our Latin-Arabic translation which has satisfied
our faithful people for so many hundred years? Why is he so curious
about the insides of fishes and the insides of insects? He is probably
a wicked magician trying to upset the established order of things by
his Black Magic.” And so well did they plead their cause that the
frightened guardians of the peace forbade Bacon to write a single word
for more than ten years. When he resumed his studies he had learned a
lesson. He wrote his books in a queer cipher which made it impossible
for his contemporaries to read them, a trick which became common as the
Church became more desperate in its attempts to prevent people from
asking questions which would lead to doubts and infidelity.
[Illustration: THE MEDIÆVAL WORLD]
This, however, was not done out of any wicked desire to keep people
ignorant. The feeling which prompted the heretic hunters of that
day was really a very kindly one. They firmly believed—nay, they
knew—that this life was but the preparation for our real existence
in the next world. They felt convinced that too much knowledge made
people uncomfortable, filled their minds with dangerous opinions
and led to doubt and hence to perdition. A mediæval Schoolman who
saw one of his pupils stray away from the revealed authority of the
Bible and Aristotle, that he might study things for himself, felt as
uncomfortable as a loving mother who sees her young child approach a
hot stove. She knows that he will burn his little fingers if he is
allowed to touch it and she tries to keep him back, if necessary she
will use force. But she really loves the child and if he will only
obey her, she will be as good to him as she possibly can be. In the
same way the mediæval guardians of people’s souls, while they were
strict in all matters pertaining to the Faith, slaved day and night to
render the greatest possible service to the members of their flock.
They held out a helping hand whenever they could and the society
of that day shows the influence of thousands of good men and pious
women who tried to make the fate of the average mortal as bearable as
possible.
A serf was a serf and his position would never change. But the Good
Lord of the Middle Ages who allowed the serf to remain a slave all
his life had bestowed an immortal soul upon this humble creature and
therefore he must be protected in his rights, that he might live and
die as a good Christian. When he grew too old or too weak to work he
must be taken care of by the feudal master for whom he had worked.
The serf, therefore, who led a monotonous and dreary life, was never
haunted by fear of to-morrow. He knew that he was “safe”—that he could
not be thrown out of employment, that he would always have a roof over
his head (a leaky roof, perhaps, but a roof all the same), and that he
would always have something to eat.
This feeling of “stability” and of “safety” was found in all classes
of society. In the towns the merchants and the artisans established
guilds which assured every member of a steady income. It did not
encourage the ambitious to do better than their neighbours. Too often
the guilds gave protection to the “slacker” who managed to “get by.”
But they established a general feeling of content and assurance among
the labouring classes which no longer exists in our day of general
competition. The Middle Ages were familiar with the dangers of what we
modern people call “corners,” when a single rich man gets hold of all
the available grain or soap or pickled herring, and then forces the
world to buy from him at his own price. The authorities, therefore,
discouraged wholesale trading and regulated the price at which
merchants were allowed to sell their goods.
The Middle Ages disliked competition. Why compete and fill the world
with hurry and rivalry and a multitude of pushing men, when the Day of
Judgement was near at hand, when riches would count for nothing and
when the good serf would enter the golden gates of Heaven while the bad
knight was sent to do penance in the deepest pit of Inferno?
In short, the people of the Middle Ages were asked to surrender part
of their liberty of thought and action, that they might enjoy greater
safety from poverty of the body and poverty of the soul.
And with a very few exceptions, they did not object. They firmly
believed that they were mere visitors upon this planet—that they were
here to be prepared for a greater and more important life. Deliberately
they turned their backs upon a world which was filled with suffering
and wickedness and injustice. They pulled down the blinds that the rays
of the sun might not distract their attention from that chapter in the
Apocalypse which told them of that heavenly light which was to illumine
their happiness in all eternity. They tried to close their eyes to most
of the joys of the world in which they lived that they might enjoy
those which awaited them in the near future. They accepted life as a
necessary evil and welcomed death as the beginning of a glorious day.
The Greeks and the Romans had never bothered about the future but had
tried to establish their Paradise right here upon this earth. They had
succeeded in making life extremely pleasant for those of their fellow
men who did not happen to be slaves. Then came the other extreme of
the Middle Ages, when man built himself a Paradise beyond the highest
clouds and turned this world into a vale of tears for high and low, for
rich and poor, for the intelligent and the dumb. It was time for the
pendulum to swing back in the other direction, as I shall tell you in
my next chapter.