was at home with his companions. But these demons did not like their
abode; they preferred to roam the earth and play jokes on men and women.
As the angels from above were kind and helpful to man, so the devils
were cunning and malicious. But many a time the devil showed himself
stupid; a clever boy might easily cheat him. The devil's aim was to
capture the frivolous and to seduce the pious in order to bring them
all into hell. Here the various categories of sinners had their
separate compartments, where they were punished according to the varying
nature of their sins. Mediaeval writers describe these various tortures,
and they know more about the geography of hell than they usually know
about the geography of the earth.
Now, according to the view of that time this is all Biblical. A modern
reader would find difficulties in looking for it in his Bible; but he
will recognise some of the motives as clearly Biblical. Further
investigation will show him that other notions are brought in from the
late classical philosophy, and finally he will discover a large amount
of folk-lore, German folk-lore. All this mingled together made a very
curious combination, and the most curious point was that this
combination was regarded as Biblical. It was upon the authority of the
Bible that the church accepted this whole view of the world and put it
before the people, judging all doubts and divergences from its teaching
as intolerable heresy. It is this naive way of reading between the
lines, this allegorical method of making the Bible say what it does not
say, which we have already found in the Greek fathers of the fourth
century when, in commenting upon the _hexaemeron_, the six days' work of
creation, they introduced whatever they had read about the world and
nature in the works of Plato and Aristotle. In the time of which we are
speaking these great Greek philosophers were known only indirectly, but
nevertheless they exercised much influence through later imitators.
Boethius was the one great authority of this time, besides the Bible.
The Bible's influence is still more evident if we turn to the mediaeval
view of history. What was history? People at this time had few notions
about what was happening in the world; there were no means of
communication, nor had they a conception of history as a coherent series
of events in which each link is the effect of what precedes as well as
the cause of what comes after. They simply registered the facts which
chance made known to them. The chronicle is the form of record which
prevails at this period. There was no history of the world; what passed
for such was the history of the Jewish people as given in the Bible and
the history of the Christian church as recorded by certain chronicles.
Both together made up the history of mankind. The first part, the
history of the Old Testament, was not regarded as the history of the
Jews, but as the history of the people of God; it was the history of our
fathers the patriarchs, the history of the first covenant finding its
direct continuation in the history of the new covenant and the
Christian church. There was only a very slight conception of chronology;
everything was arranged according to the system of a week, the duration
of the present world corresponding to one week, whose days, according to
the 90th Psalm, each counted a thousand years. The world was not
expected to endure beyond six thousand years, the seventh day being
reserved for the millennium. Into this history of the world a few
fragments of Greek and Roman history found their way by means of an odd
synchronism: David was said to have been a contemporary of the Trojan
War, and a correspondence was invented between the king of Troy and the
king of Israel, in which the latter excuses himself for not coming to
join the Trojan army. It was in the beginning of the twelfth century
that a famous professor of the university of Paris called Petrus
Comestor wrote his _Historia Scholastica_, which for all the Middle Ages
served as the text-book of Biblical history.
But, like the mediaeval aspect of the world, so the history of the world
was not purely Biblical. The Bible always had to suffer the strong
rivalry of apocryphal and legendary fiction. Already the Jews had
invented a life of Adam, full of miraculous events, which appealed to
the taste of the average man much more than the simple and severe story
of the Bible itself; the lives of Abraham, of Moses, of Solomon were
enriched in the same way. Christianity continued this kind of fancy. The
story of the holy root was traced back into paradise; it was a branch
from the tree of life, given to Adam's son Seth and planted by him on
his father's tomb. It had been used as a bridge over the Kidron until
the queen of Sheba arrived at Jerusalem. Being a prophetess, she
worshipped this holy root; consequently Solomon tried to use it in his
temple, but the carpenter did not succeed in cutting it to the necessary
length; therefore it lay unused, "rejected by the builders," until the
time came when a tree was wanted to crucify Jesus; so Jesus died--on the
cross which was the tree of life--a splendid symbolism, indeed, but set
forth in a strange legend. Or they investigated the earlier history of
the thirty pieces of silver given to Judas Iscariot as the reward for
the betrayal of his master, tracing the money back as far as Abraham.
The life of Christ was surrounded by apocryphal legends of all kinds:
the story of his birth and of his childhood; his stay in Egypt; how in
their flight lions and all kinds of wild beasts accompanied the holy
family; how a palm-tree bowed down before them in order to provide them
with its fruits; how at Jesus' arrival in Egypt all the idols of the
Egyptians fell down; how he helped his father Joseph in his carpenter
shop; and so on. Again the miracles at his death, the descent to hell,
the resurrection and ascension, everything was covered with an abundance
of miraculous narratives, partly enlargements, developments of the
canonical accounts, partly mere fiction. In addition to this apocryphal
life of Jesus there is the life of the Virgin, giving a most curious
description of her birth and childhood and again of her death, making
every detail parallel to the life of Christ himself and yet keeping hers
subordinate. The mediaeval life of Christ begins--one may say--with the
birth of Mary (or with the story of her parents, Joachim and Anna) and
ends with the death and assumption of Mary. The history of the apostles
as read in this period is nearly all apocryphal except the few data
taken from the canonical book of Acts. Then the history of Christianity
is continued as the history of the church according to the scheme of
Saint Augustine's _De civitate dei_ (the City of God): the church is the
city of God and beside it is the city of this age, the kingdom of this
world, the one spiritual, the other secular, with two parallel lines of
development. This is best shown by the mural decoration in Charlemagne's
palace at Ingelheim on the Rhine, where two series of pictures, one
giving the Biblical history according to the Old and New Testaments, the
other tracing the profane history from Ninus, king of Babylon, down to
Charlemagne himself, were painted on opposite walls. That is the
mediaeval view of history. We may add that, according to this view,
history begins in heaven when the holy Trinity conceives the idea of
creation, and ends in heaven at the last judgment. Our view of history
is a different one, but we cannot help agreeing that this is a
magnificent conception and that it is Biblical, too, in its main points.
It is partly built upon the Apocrypha, of course. Regarding these
Apocrypha the attitude of the church changed a good deal during our
period. The early view is set forth in several utterances from the Roman
bishops of the fifth and sixth centuries, and is represented in its
sharpest form in the so-called decree of Pope Gelasius, which condemns
all Apocrypha as heretical writings totally to be rejected and detested
and not to be used in any way by a Catholic Christian. We found this
Puritan view prevailing in Charlemagne's _Libri Carolini_. It is
predominant among the theologians of the Carolingian time. They scarcely
use apocryphal books, and when they do they always refer to them as to
doubtful books devoid of all authority. But gradually the Apocrypha
came into favour; they are used freely alongside the canonical books.
They are very much of the same kind as the legends of the saints; and
those legends of the saints are favoured by the people, too. At last, in
the thirteenth century, even theologians do not distinguish between
canonical and apocryphal books. They quote the Gospel of Nicodemus
alongside the Gospel of Matthew or of John; they call it the fifth
Gospel and have it copied in their Bible manuscripts. So they have a
letter from Saint Paul to the Laodiceans and other Apocrypha inserted in
or attached to the Bible. And the common people were fond of these
Apocrypha and delighted to hear the preacher quote them because the
bizarre miracles appealed to their taste.
There was almost no science, no medicine in this time; the world seemed
to be full of miracles having no rational connection with one another.
There was no causality, no law of nature. This was exactly the same view
that we have in most parts of the Bible. Therefore people did not feel
any difficulty in identifying their own notions about miracle and nature
with the Biblical ones. Nay, we may say that many of the legendary
miracle stories are copied after Biblical patterns. Even the wording is
often modelled according to Biblical phraseology. "Healing all manner of
disease and all manner of sickness," from Matt. 9 : 35, is repeated in
many a saint's life.
Bible history in the embellished form which we have just now observed
inspired mediaeval art. In the first place, there were the inner walls of
the churches, usually painted from top to bottom. If we remember that a
Romanesque church had only very small windows, we understand what a
large space was given to painting. Pictures are the text-book for those
who cannot read; so Pope Gregory the Great had said, and this dictum was
repeated many a time. It is true, of course. These plain mural
paintings, awkward as they often are, make a greater impression on a
simple mind than even the best written account could produce. The art is
nothing but illustration; the painter tries to bring before the people
who view his work the main features of the Biblical text. One must,
indeed, know the text in order to understand the pictures. Sometimes the
spectator is helped by additional inscriptions. To the illiterates these
may be read and explained by the priest; and then even the simplest
peasant will understand and always remember the story. Some churches
were decorated in this way twice or even oftener, the first painting
being covered with lime and whitewashed and then another painting being
put upon it, according to the style of the later time. Here, again, we
see the Biblical history, pure and plain at the beginning, but by and by
combined with motives taken from the apocryphal sources and the lives of
the saints. At the annunciation the angel meets the Virgin Mary at a
well; it is to his mother Mary that the risen Christ appears before he
reveals himself to his disciples.
In the Gothic period sculpture is more favoured, the walls being broken
up into groups of columns and large windows. This arrangement lent
itself more to the representation of individual figures of saints; but
even so Biblical personalities, and sometimes even Biblical scenes, were
chosen, and the large windows, with their stained glass, offered another
possibility for decoration based on Bible stories. Besides, the whole
building is directed by a scheme of Biblical symbolism difficult for us
to understand but dear to the men of that period. They loved symbolism.
The cult of the Virgin Mary was surrounded by it. She was the queen of
heaven, she was paradise, she was the tower, she was the unicorn, she
was the well, and so on, and all these symbols were taken from or
related to the Bible.
The growing wealth and the higher standard of civilisation created a new
demand for illuminated manuscripts. The artists of this period did not
follow the classical scheme of filling the lower margin with
representations in water-colour; they put little pictures, framed like
those on the walls, into the text itself, or they decorated the initials
of each book or chapter (Plate XIII). In turning over the pages we
admire the skill of these artists, their simplicity, and sometimes their
sense of humour. We seldom recognise what an amount of reading and
interpretation of the Bible is contained in these little pictures; and
how, on the other hand, they helped and stimulated Bible reading. We are
told of King Charles V of France (1364-80), that he read the Bible all
through once a year during his reign. This means a period of sixteen
years. We are quite sure that he had a beautifully illuminated copy, and
we may assume that the pictures helped him in performing this religious
exercise.
The art of painting is often accompanied by the art of making verses, as
I would rather call this mediaeval poesy. And again it is the Bible or,
to speak more accurately, the Biblical history which finds its
expression in this art. Besides the inscriptions added to the pictures
and often given in versified form, there are a number of rhymed Bibles,
as these versifications of the Biblical history are called. There are
short verses giving the content of each book or chapter of the Bible for
mnemonic purposes. There are some real poems, too, dealing with Biblical
subjects.
[Illustration: PLATE XIII--ENGLISH MINIATURE
(Latin Bible, Brit. Mus. Royal I D I)
Written in England, early thirteenth century. Initial I, Gen. 1 : 1,
shows creation, fall, and redemption.
The three upper little compartments give each of them the work of
two days: Christ is the creator; the fourth brings the seventh
day's rest: Christ on the throne; the next three compartments
contain the story of Adam and Eve: temptation, expulsion, and their
working under the curse; the eighth compartment shows the
Redemption as prophesied in Gen. 3 : 15.
The grotesque little figures are a beautiful illustration of
mediaeval sense of humour.
From "Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of the
Trustees of the British Museum.]
* * * * *
The Bible and mediaeval art brings before us another feature of
civilisation, which is important, indeed, in our own time and which one
would scarcely think of as originating with the Bible. I mean the
theatre. The old classical drama and comedy had entirely died out.
Plautus and Terence were read in the monasteries, not played, and so
were the Biblical comedies by Hrotswitha, of which we have spoken,
intended to be read only, not played. There was nothing but jugglers,
jesters, and dancers. On festival days people amused themselves by
frivolous masquerades, which were looked upon by the church authorities
with suspicion and contempt as survivals of heathen rites and therefore
to be frowned upon and abolished. Things took quite a different turn
when some of the clergy began at Christmas and at Easter to present the
sacred story in acted form in order to illustrate the lesson. They did
it inside the church, directly before the altar. It was nothing but a
dialogue, developed out of the lessons from the Scripture, the angel
addressing Mary, the shepherds coming to see the child, the three Marys
at the tomb and the angel speaking to them, and so on, as simply and
plainly as it was told in the Bible and as it was usually painted on
the walls of the church. The people took delight in these
representations and they were soon enlarged. They had to be removed from
the choir to the front of the church, the steps of the entrance forming
the stage. Soon more and more persons appeared on the stage; the laity
joined the performers; the guilds (the trade-unions) undertook the
performance of the play, and out of these naive little representations
of the birth of Christ or his passion and resurrection sprang gorgeous
miracle-plays which sometimes lasted four days and brought the whole
story from the creation to the last judgment before the bewildered eyes
of the spectators. Nothing could make the Biblical history so familiar
to the people as these plays, in which hundreds took part as performers
and thousands attended as onlookers. There was but little art. They had
no scenery; the actors simply moved about in the open space. But it was
highly realistic. We are told that they nearly killed the man who was
acting Judas Iscariot. It was also amusing. Mediaeval piety did not
refrain from putting in just before the crucifixion a sarcastic dialogue
between the blacksmith, who had to provide the nails, and his wife,
ending in a scuffle between them. People liked to see this. It was on
account of these undignified scenes, which kept increasing, that the
plays were abolished by secular and ecclesiastical authorities in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when through humanism and the
Reformation taste and piety had been refined. There are still a few
survivals, such as the Passion Play of Oberammergau, which, however, has
undergone a thorough change. There is now a revival of these popular
plays, but I doubt if it will be successful. Possibly the film will take
the place, as it has entered some churches already.
Men nearly always like to travel and the Germans liked it exceedingly
well. This tendency received a special direction from the Bible; there
were so many sacred sites in Palestine which a Christian wanted to see.
So since the fourth century we see many people from the West--from Gaul,
Spain, later on from Germany and England--travelling to the Holy Land in
order to visit all the places connected with the sacred history of the
Bible. At the end of the eleventh century the pilgrims suddenly turned
into crusaders, sailing by thousands, fighting, settling down for a
while, going back again. Then after a period of nearly two centuries of
vain struggle for the possession of the Holy Land they changed again
into pilgrims. Meanwhile, the Holy Land had changed also, and Christian
piety, too. They were now not so much interested in visiting the sacred
sites themselves as in gaining the indulgences which were granted in
abundance to the visitors to each of these places. We still possess a
long series of descriptions of these pilgrimages, increasing from
century to century not only in number but also in size. The pilgrims did
not rest until they had fixed upon a certain location in Palestine for
every event in the Bible. Sometimes we seem to catch the process of
fixation. The hermit or monk who served as guide had just told the
company everything he himself knew about the resurrection of Lazarus.
Then suddenly some one broke in with the question, "And where was it
that Jesus met Martha?" and the poor hermit would be sure to show him a
rock or a doorway, of which he had never thought before. They showed the
pilgrims the place where Abraham and Melchisedek met, the tomb of
Rachel, the monastery of Elijah on Mount Carmel. They would show also
the mantle Elijah left to Elisha or the widow's cruse of oil which was
always full. At Nazareth one could see the rock from which the citizens
tried to throw down Jesus headlong, and one could see on the rock the
imprint of his body, which he left there--according to a legendary
addition to the story--when passing through the crowd unhurt. On the
Mount of Olives was the Chapel of the Ascension. Here the pilgrims
could see and worship the footprints made by Jesus when he leaped up
toward heaven. Nay, we are told that people used to carry away dust from
this place to use for charms, and yet the footprints never disappeared.
I am giving these examples in order to show how even here sacred history
and legend were mixed together. It is obvious, however, from what I have
said that the pilgrimages contributed a great deal to make people
familiar with the Bible stories; for not only the pilgrims themselves
but all their people at home were mightily interested in what they had
seen and heard in the Holy Land. We see them build churches representing
the Holy Sepulchre. In the later centuries they make calvaries and
stations on the way to them, representing the main points on Jesus' way
to the cross, on the so-called Via Dolorosa at Jerusalem. There is even
(as I have pointed out in my book on _Christusbilder_) a mutual
influence between the pilgrimages and the passion plays, which accounts
for some changes in the order of scenes and the fixing of places at
Jerusalem.
The Bible continued to exercise its influence upon the Law. As King
Alfred of England when collecting the laws of his people put the ten
commandments at the beginning, so likewise the German collections,
_Schwabenspiegel_, _Sachsenspiegel_, and so on, have prefaces which
present the national law as an emanation from the law of God as
contained in the Old and New Testaments. Still more important than these
national laws was the so-called canon law, the collection of
ecclesiastical canons and decrees of the Roman bishops. It is remarkable
that this canon law, while incorporating naturally a good deal of
Biblical matter, such as the degrees of relationship within which
marriage is forbidden, does not make so much use of Biblical authority
as one might expect. The decrees of the popes, it is true, usually begin
with a quotation from the Bible, but that is more for the sake of
appearances. The fact that the law of the church, in spite of all
references to the Bible, was derived essentially from other sources, and
that the study and the knowledge of this law were appreciated as the
most important attainment of a bishop or even a clergyman, is very
striking.