neighborhood of Berne. When the authorities of the city had sought relief
from the bishop of Lausanne, Benoit de Montferrand, against this scourge,
he determined to issue a letter of excommunication, which was solemnly
read by a priest in the churchyard of Berne. "Thou irrational, imperfect
creature, thou may-bug," thus the letter commenced, "thou whose kind was
never enclosed in Noah's ark! in the name of my gracious lord, the bishop
of Lausanne, by the power of the glorified Trinity through the merits of
Jesus Christ, and by the obedience you owe the Holy Church, I command you
may-bugs, all in common and each one in particular, to depart from all
places where nourishment for men and cattle germinates and grows." The
letter ends with a summons to the insects, to present themselves on the
sixth day thereafter, if they do not disappear before that time, at one
o'clock, P. M., at Wivelsburg, and assume the responsibility before the
court of the gracious lord of Lausanne. This letter was likewise read from
the pulpit while the congregation, kneeling, repeated "three Paternosters
and three Ave Marias." Arrangements were made beforehand for a legal trial
with strict attention to all professional forms. Among these was of course
that the accused should have a lawyer. But when no advocate in Berne would
consent to appear in behalf of the insects, the bishop devised the plan of
summoning from hell the shade of an infamous lawyer named Perrodet, who
had died a few years previously, and of directing him to plead the cause
of the may-bugs with the same diligence he had so often displayed in his
lifetime in defence of vile clients. But in spite of many summons, neither
Perrodet nor his clients deigned to appear. After the expiration of the
time fixed for beginning the defence, and when certain doubts concerning
the proper form of procedure had been removed, the episcopal tribunal
finally gave its verdict, which was excommunication in the name of the
Holy Trinity, "to you, accursed vermin, that are called may-bugs, and
which can not even be counted among the animals." The government ordered
the authorities of the afflicted district to report concerning the good
effects of the excommunication; "But," a chronicle of the time complains,
"no effect was observed, because of our sins."
Since any neglect of legal forms was thought to deprive a judgment of its
magical as well as legal power, the most scrupulous care was exercised in
the conduct of these frequently recurring processes against may-bugs,
grasshoppers, cabbage-worms, field-rats and other noxious vermin. There is
yet extant a detailed and luminous document by the learned Bartholomeus
Chassanaeus (born 1480), in which the question if, and how, such pests
should be proceeded against in the courts is carefully considered: whether
they should appear personally or by deputy; whether they are subject to a
spiritual or a secular tribunal, and if the penalty of excommunication can
be applied to them. He proves on many grounds that the jurisdiction to
which they are accountable is the spiritual, and that they may properly be
excommunicated. Still the question of jurisdiction remained unsettled, and
a civil prosecution of the field-rats in Tyrol, 1519-20, proves among
other things that a secular tribunal sometimes considered itself justified
in deciding such suits. The peasant Simon Fliss appeared before William of
Hasslingen, judge in Glurns and Mals (Ober-In-valley), as plaintiff
against the field-rats which were committing great depredations in his
parish. The court then appointed Hans Grinebner, a citizen of Glurns, to
be the advocate of the accused, and furnished him, before witnesses, with
the requisite commission. Thereupon the plaintiff chose as his advocate
Schwarz Minig, and obtained from the tribunal upon demand a warrant of
authority for him likewise. On the day of trial, the Wednesday after St.
Philip's and St. James's day, many witnesses were examined, establishing
that the rats had caused great destruction. Schwarz Minig then made his
final plea that the noxious animals should be charged to withdraw from
mischief, as otherwise the people of Stilf could not pay the annual tithes
to their high patron. Grinebner, counsel for the defence, could not and
would not make exception to the testimony, but tried to convince the court
that his clients "enjoyed a certain right of usufruct which could hardly
be denied them." If the court were of another opinion and considered it
best to eject them, he yet hoped they would first be granted another
place where they could support themselves. Besides there should be given
them at their departure a sufficient escort to protect them against their
enemies, whether cat, dog, or other adversaries; and he also hoped that,
if any of the rats were pregnant, time might be allowed them to be
delivered and afterwards depart in safety with their progeny. The decision
was rendered in the following terms: "After accusation and defence, after
statement and contradiction, and after due consideration of all that
pertains to justice, it is by this sentence determined that those noxious
animals which are called field-rats must, within two weeks after the
promulgation of this judgment, depart and forever remain far aloof from
the fields and the meadows of Stilf. But if one or several of the animals
are pregnant, or unable on account of their youth to follow, then shall
they enjoy during further two weeks safety and protection from every body,
and after these two weeks depart."
We can form some impression of the immense power of prayer and exorcism
when we consider that the influence of the will and the idea expressed in
the word co-operate in them with the power of the word itself as a mere
form. For the material word, the sound caught by the ear, the formula, as
such, exercises a magical effect without one's knowing its meaning. The
mass of the people with their ignorance of the official language of the
Church and of learning, would be badly off if those "Paternosters" and
"Ave Marias," committed to memory without understanding them, should be
spiritually ineffectual,--if the Latin mass to which the congregation
listens should be wanting in edifying and sanctifying power because it is
not comprehended. The formularies of the Church established at different
times and for various purposes are for this reason of high importance and
must be followed conscientiously.[24] A single proof of their
extraordinary power may be instanced here. In the year 1532 the devil
brought into the heavens a huge comet, which threatened earth and man
with drought and pestilence; but the pope solemnly banished the forbidding
omen,--and behold! in a short time it disappeared, having day by day
diminished through the power of the papal anathema. What a holy word may
avail by virtue of its sound (_flatus vocis_) alone, is indicated in the
legend of the tame starling, which was saved from the claws of the hawk
just at the moment its death-agony had forced from it the words it had
learned to repeat "Ave Maria."
Upon the power of the word as its foundation, rests the papal custom of
consecrating bread, wine, oil, salt, tapers, water, bells, fields,
meadows, houses, standards and weapons. "With such abuses, such
superstition, and diabolical arts was the priesthood filled during papal
ascendency"--thus complains an old Protestant theologian who had an eye to
that surplus of magic which the Catholic Church possessed over and above
that of the Lutheran, but who was blind to the common welfare--"and
therefore such things are in vogue even among common men. What was the
chief thing in the mass if not the wonder-working words of blessing, when
the priest pronounced the four words or the six syllables '_Hoc est corpus
meum_' (this is my body) over the bread, breathed upon it, and made the
sign of the cross three times over it, pretending that the bread was
thereby converted into the flesh of Christ? In the same way he transformed
the wine in the chalice into the blood of Christ, though no such power is
given to syllables and words. He bound the Holy Ghost in the water, the
salt, the oil, the tapers, the spices, the stone, wood or earth, when he
consecrated churches, altars, churchyards, when he blessed the meat, the
eggs, and the like, and when on Easter Eve he consecrated the fire that it
should do no damage (though I, God save me, have found out that our
village was utterly consumed four days after such consecration), when he
baptized and sanctified bells that their ringing might dispel evil
influences, quiet tempests, and the like."
The organization of monasteries is to be regarded as the defensive system
of the Church, guarding and protecting the territory it has conquered from
the devil. As the Mongolian on his irruption into Europe found innumerable
steeps crowned with strongly fortified castles, the very number of which
deterred from any attempt at siege, so Satan and his hosts find the
Christian world strewn with spiritual strongholds, each of which encloses
an arsenal filled with mighty weapons for offensive as well as defensive
warfare. Every monastery has its master magician, who sells _agni Dei_,
conception-billets, magic incense, salt and tapers which have been
consecrated on Candlemas Day, palms consecrated on Palm Sunday, flowers
besprinkled with holy water on Ascension Day, and many other appliances
belonging to the great magical apparatus of the Church.
This consecrated enginery being so various and complete, it might have
been expected that the people would be content, and seek no further
expedients than these constantly at hand. But, alas! a people's magic of
infernal origin is abroad, and rampant by the side of the holy magic of
the Church; and by it Satan tempts the careless, the curious and the
irresolute. Even many priests are tainted with it. The holy Boniface, and
many popes and monkish chroniclers after him, bitterly lament that the
lower clergy compound love-potions and practice divinatory arts, using
even the holy appurtenances of the Church, as the host, to fortify the
efficacy of their diabolical charms.
Since the Church tries to reduce all conditions of life to harmony with
itself, it naturally follows that it sets its seal also to human
jurisprudence. The ordeals which it has found employed by some of the
nations it has converted, exactly suit its system. It receives them,
consequently, as resting on a right idea,[25] makes them what they were
not before, a common practice, and gives detailed rules concerning the
chants, prayers, conjurations and masses with which they should be
accompanied. When a person under accusation or suspicion is to undergo the
ordeal by water, for example, the priest is to lead him to the church, and
cause him kneeling to pronounce three formulas in which God is implored
for protection. Then follow mass and the holy communion. When the accused
receives the wafer the priest says: "Be this flesh of our Lord thy test
to-day." Then in solemn procession the throng of witnesses repair to the
spot where the test is to take place. The priest conjures the water,
expelling the demons common to this element, and commands it to be an
obedient instrument of God for revealing innocence or crime. The accused
is dressed in clean garments, kisses the cross and the gospel, recites a
Paternoster and makes the sign of the cross. Then (in the ordeal by hot
water) his hand is held in a boiling cauldron: or he is thrown with his
hands pinioned and a rope about his waist, into a river. If he does not
then sink, his guilt is proved. The ordeal by fire consists in walking
over glowing coals, or carrying red-hot iron, or in being dragged through
flames clad in a shirt saturated with wax. By the test of fire the
genuineness of relics is also sometimes tested. When in A. D. 1010 some
monks who had returned from Jerusalem exhibited the towel with which the
disciples had wiped the feet of Christ, some doubts of its genuine
character were raised, but were all removed by this test. One of the most
common of all ordeals is the duel.
God, invoked by the servants of the Church, keeps his protecting hand over
innocence. Every doubt of this truth argues faint-heartedness bordering on
atheism. This thought lies at the foundation not only of the different
kinds of ordeals, but also of the torture, which, constantly extended and
intensified under the auspices of the Church, was a form of trial sparing
the judge much labor, and leading to the goal more surely than the
collation of testimony, which, besides being irksome, hardly ever brings
full assurance. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego felt no pain in the fiery
furnace. God gives to innocence upon the rack, if not insensibility to
pain, at least strength to endure it. But even the arch-fiend, to a
certain extent, can protect his subjects. In the case of heretics and
witches it is therefore needful to resort to the intensest torture; to
exhaust, so to speak, to the last drop, the springs of pain in human
nerves, under the hand of skilled tormentors. If then the instruments of
torture are previously conjured and sanctified by the priest, and if he
stands at the side of the accused ready to interrupt with constant
question the diabolic formulas of alleviation which undoubtedly the
sufferer murmurs inwardly, then a candid and reliable confession may
reasonably be expected, in spite of all efforts to the contrary by the
devil. In the "Witch-hammer" (Malleus Malificarum) the ecclesiastical and
magical plan of justice celebrates its triumph. This work, bearing the
sanction of the pope, contains full directions for the judge presiding in
witch-trials. It is, in fact, a hammer which crushes whatever it falls
upon. The judge who carefully follows these directions may be confident
that Satan himself can not save any one who is under accusation; only God
and his holy angels can rescue him, by direct miracle, from death in the
flames.[26]
He who finds a judicial system which appeals constantly to the
intercession of God of questionable value, may consider that the history
of the Church, the experiences of its saints and servants are a succession
of divine miracles. God is not chary of his miracles when recognized, and
the servants of the Church are in possession of the apostolic power and
mandate to perform them.
Another question is, how are the divine miracles to be distinguished from
the infernal? All attempts of the acutest scholastics to establish a rule
of definite separation for these two kinds of miracles have failed. They
are revealed under identical forms, and even the moral perceptions can
detect no difference, since Satan is able to transform himself into an
angel of light. Reason must also acknowledge its incapacity even in this
respect, and rely on the Holy Ghost ever active in the Church and
especially in its head. The power of divine truth and inspiration which
was poured out upon the apostles on the day of Pentecost, has been
transmitted like a magnetic stream from Peter, the first bishop of Rome,
to his successors by the laying on of hands, and is in a certain measure
imparted, by the sacrament of ordination, to every member of the clerical
hierarchy.
* * * * *
The survey of the magic of the Church which has been presented above,
ought perhaps to be completed, not by pursuing the tedious path which lies
before us through continued description of ecclesiastical customs and
opinion, but by simply formulating the general truth: _Every symbol, every
external token, to which is attributed an independent power for
sanctification and an immediate moral influence, is Magic._ May the
Protestant reader, for whom we are here writing, examine with this maxim
in how far the Reformation, which aims to restore to internal
authority--the reason and free-will of the individual--its rights, has
succeeded in its task. Luther and Calvin assailed many magical usages, and
pruned many branches from the tree of dualism, but still allowed its
vigorous trunk to remain unscathed. But a dualistic religious system must,
on account of the unreasonable cosmical theory on which it rests, sooner
or later attack again the inner authority and make itself the sole and
absolute external one. It must of necessity degenerate to a statuary
fetichism or fall before a complete unitarian reformation. Our day
witnesses the conflict between these opposite ideas. On the one side, the
belief in a personal spiritual adversary of mankind, preached to the
masses from a thousand pulpits, hangs suspended like a sword of Damocles
over the head of civilization; on the other side, philosophy and the
science of nature diffuse a rational and unitarian theory of the universe
and human existence through a constantly enlarging circle. To him who
wishes to take part in this all-important struggle, we would commend these
words of the noble Bunsen:[27] "Wherever in religion, or state, or
civilization, in art or science, the inner is developed more strenuously,
and the spiritual earnestly sought after, be it with more or less
transformation of what is existing, there progress is at hand; for from
the inner, life comes to the external, from the centre to the
circumference. There is also the way which leads to life. There new paths
are opened to the soul, and genius lifts its wings with divine assurance.
If this is true, the contrary must take place wherever the external life
is more and more exalted, where the token supersedes more and more the
essence, the symbol and the external work the inner act and conscience,
where the superficies is taken for the content, the outer monotony for
life's uniformity, and appearances for truth. There a luckless future is
in waiting, whatever be the aspect of the present."
III.
THE MAGIC OF THE LEARNED.
We find ourselves in a dismal labyrinth of narrow, winding streets, now
and then issuing into some open space before a guild-hall or a church. The
objects which meet our gaze in this strange city do not solicit pause or
reflection; for we have seen essentially the same type of homes and
humanity in many another city which we have wandered through in our search
for the stone of wisdom. We therefore continue on our way. The buildings
of the university are said to be in the neighborhood, and we turn the
corner to the right, and again to the left, until we come upon it. The
lecture-hour approaches. Professors draped in stiff mantles and wearing
the scholastic cap on their supremely wise foreheads, wend their way to
the temples of knowledge at the portals of which flocks of students wait.
We recognize their various and familiar types: the new-matriculated look
as usual, their cheeks still retaining the glow of early youth, their
hearts still humble, perhaps still held captive by the sweet delusion that
the walls by which they wait are the propylaea to all the secrets of earth
and heaven. Just as readily recognized are the parchment-worms, destined
one day to shine as lights in the Church and in the domain of science,
whether they now toil themselves pale and melancholic over their _catenae_,
their _summae_ and _sententiae_, or bear with unfeigned self-satisfaction
the precious weight of _terms_ which lifts them so conspicuously above the
ignorant mass of mortals. And among the throng of the first named still
fresh with youth, and these already dried pedants, we find also the
far-famed third class of students, adventurers assembled from all quarters
under the protection of university-privileges,--those gentlemen with
bearded cheek, and faces swelled by drinking and scarred by combat, with
terribly long and broad swords dangling at their side,--the heroes of
that never ending Iliad which the apprentices of learning and the guilds
enact nightly in the darkness of the lanes, who may yet turn out some day
the most pious of conventical priors, the gravest doctors and the very
severest burgomasters in Christendom, unless before that time they meet
their fate upon the gallows, or on the field of battle, or as _scholares
vagantes_ in the ditch or by the roadside.
Shall we enter and listen to some of these lectures which are about to be
delivered? Our letter of academic membership will open the doors to us, if
we desire. To the left in the vaulted hall the professor of medicine has
commenced his lecture. With astonishing subtlety and penetration he
discusses the highly important question, before propounded by Petrus de
Abano, but not as yet fully solved,--"_an caput sit factum propter
cerebrum vel oculos_" (whether the head was formed for the sake of the
brain or the eyes). To the right the professor of theology leads us into
one of the dim mysteries of the Church by ventilating the question what
Peter would have done with the bread and wine, had he distributed the
elements while the body of Christ in unchanged reality was yet hanging on
the cross.[28] A little farther on in this mouldy vault we find the
workshop of philosophy, where a master in the art of abstract reasoning
deduces the distinction between _universalia ante rem_ and _universalia in
re_. In yonder furthest room a jurisconsult expounds a passage in the
pandects.--Or perhaps you would rather not choose at all? You smile sadly.
Alas! like myself you have good reason for complaining with Faust:--
I have, alas! Philosophy,
Med'cine, and Jurisprudence too,
And to my cost Theology,
With ardent labor studied through.
And here I stand, with all my lore,
Poor fool, no wiser than before.
and if you add like him,
Hence have I now applied myself to magic,
we shall bring back to our minds the object of our burning desires, the
hope which cheers us that finally the veil will be torn from the face of
the Isis-image, and that we shall behold the unspeakable face to face,
even though her looks burn us to ashes. Let us turn our back upon this
tragi-comic seat of learning, where, as everywhere else, hoary-headed
fools are teaching young chicken-heads to admire nonsense, and young
eagle-souls to despair of knowledge. It is not far hence direct--as direct
as the winding lanes permit--to that great magician who has taken up his
abode in this city. At the feet of that master let us seat ourselves. We
shall there slake our burning thirst with at least a few drops of that
knowledge which through by-gone ages has been flowing in a subterranean
channel, though from the same sources as the streams of Paradise. And if
we are disappointed there,--well, then _you_, if you so choose, can quench
your longing for truth in the whirlpool of pleasure and adventure. _I_
shall go into a monastery, seek the narrowest of its cells, watch, pray,
scourge forth my blood in streams; or I shall go to India, sit down upon
the ground and stare at the tip of my nose,--stare at it and never cease,
year out and year in, until all consciousness is extinguished. Agreed,
then, is it not?....
We are arrived in the very loneliest quarter of the town, and the most
dreary limits of the quarter, where old crumbling houses group themselves
in inextricable confusion along the city wall, and from their gable
windows fix their vacant, hypochondriacal looks upon the open fields
beyond. A tower, crowning the wall of the fort upon this side, now serves
the great scientist as an observatory and dwelling, given him by the
burgomaster and the council of the city. He was for a long time private
physician to the Queen of France, but has now retired to this lonely place
from the pleasures, the distinctions, and the dangers of life at court, in
order to devote himself quietly to research and study. He has a protector
in the prince-archbishop resident in the city; and as the professor of
theology has certified at the request of this same prince-bishop to his
strict orthodoxy, the city authorities thought to persuade him to receive
the honorable and lucrative position of town-astrologer, not heeding the
assertion of the monks that he was a wizard, and that his black spaniel
was in reality none other than the devil himself.