Part 17 (1/2)

LATIN Christianity is responsible for the condition and progress of Europe from the fourth to the sixteenth century. We have now to examine how it discharged its trust.

It will be convenient to limit to the case of Europe what has here to be presented, though, from the claim of the papacy to superhuman origin, and its demand for universal obedience, it should strictly be held to account for the condition of all mankind. Its inefficacy against the great and venerable religions of Southern and Eastern Asia would furnish an important and instructive theme for consideration, and lead us to the conclusion that it has impressed itself only where Roman imperial influences have prevailed; a political conclusion which, however, it contemptuously rejects.

Doubtless at the inception of the Reformation there were many persons who compared the existing social condition with what it had been in ancient times. Morals had not changed, intelligence had not advanced, society had little improved. From the Eternal City itself its splendors had vanished. The marble streets, of which Augustus had once boasted, had disappeared. Temples, broken columns, and the long, arcaded vistas of gigantic aqueducts bestriding the desolate Campagna, presented a mournful scene. From the uses to which they had been respectively put, the Capitol had been known as Goats' Hill, and the site of the Roman Forum, whence laws had been issued to the world, as Cows' Field. The palace of the Caesars was hidden by mounds of earth, crested with flowering shrubs. The baths of Caracalla, with their porticoes, gardens, reservoirs, had long ago become useless through the destruction of their supplying aqueducts. On the ruins of that grand edifice, ”flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous trees extended in ever-winding labyrinths upon immense platforms, and dizzy arches suspended in the air.” Of the Coliseum, the most colossal of Roman ruins, only about one-third remained. Once capable of accommodating nearly ninety thousand spectators, it had, in succession, been turned into a fortress in the middle ages, and then into a stone-quarry to furnish material for the palaces of degenerate Roman princes. Some of the popes had occupied it as a woollen-mill, some as a saltpetre factory; some had planned the conversion of its magnificent arcades into shops for tradesmen. The iron clamps which bound its stones together had been stolen. The walls were fissured and falling. Even in our own times botanical works have been composed on the plants which have made this n.o.ble wreck their home. ”The Flora of the Coliseum” contains four hundred and twenty species.

Among the ruins of cla.s.sical buildings might be seen broken columns, cypresses, and mouldy frescoes, dropping from the walls. Even the vegetable world partic.i.p.ated in the melancholy change: the myrtle, which once flourished on the Aventine, had nearly become extinct; the laurel, which once gave its leaves to encircle the brows of emperors, had been replaced by ivy--the companion of death.

But perhaps it may be said the popes were not responsible for all this.

Let it be remembered that in less than one hundred and forty years the city had been successively taken by Alaric, Genseric, Rieimer, Vitiges, Totila; that many of its great edifices had been converted into defensive works. The aqueducts were destroyed by Vitiges, who ruined the Campagna; the palace of the Caesars was ravaged by Totila; then there had been the Lombard sieges; then Robert Guiscard and his Normans had burnt the city from the Antonine Column to the Flaminian Gate, from the Lateran to the Capitol; then it was sacked and mutilated by the Constable Bourbon; again and again it was flooded by inundations of the Tiber and shattered by earthquakes. We must, however, bear in mind the accusation of Machiavelli, who says, in his ”History of Florence,” that nearly all the barbarian invasions of Italy were by the invitations of the pontiffs, who called in those hordes! It was not the Goth, nor the Vandal, nor the Norman, nor the Saracen, but the popes and their nephews, who produced the dilapidation of Rome! Lime-kilns had been fed from the ruins, cla.s.sical buildings had become stone-quarries for the palaces of Italian princes, and churches were decorated from the old temples.

Churches decorated from the temples! It is for this and such as this that the popes must be held responsible. Superb Corinthian columns bad been chiseled into images of the saints. Magnificent Egyptian obelisks had been dishonored by papal inscriptions. The Septizonium of Severus had been demolished to furnish materials for the building of St.

Peter's; the bronze roof of the Pantheon had been melted into columns to ornament the apostle's tomb.

The great bell of Viterbo, in the tower of the Capitol, had announced the death of many a pope, and still desecration of the buildings and demoralization of the people went on. Papal Rome manifested no consideration, but rather hatred, for cla.s.sical Rome, The pontiffs had been subordinates of the Byzantine sovereigns, then lieutenants of the Frankish kings, then arbiters of Europe; their government had changed as much as those of any of the surrounding nations; there had been complete metamorphoses in its maxims, objects, claims. In one point only it had never changed--intolerance. Claiming to be the centre of the religious life of Europe, it steadfastly refused to recognize any religious existence outside of itself, yet both in a political and theological sense it was rotten to the core. Erasmus and Luther heard with amazement the blasphemies and witnessed with a shudder the atheism of the city.

The historian Ranke, to whom I am indebted for many of these facts, has depicted in a very graphic manner the demoralization of the great metropolis. The popes were, for the most part, at their election, aged men. Power was, therefore, incessantly pa.s.sing into new hands. Every election was a revolution in prospects and expectations. In a community where all might rise, where all might aspire to all, it necessarily followed that every man was occupied in thrusting some other into the background. Though the population of the city at the inception of the Reformation had sunk to eighty thousand, there were vast crowds of placemen, and still greater ones of aspirants for place. The successful occupant of the pontificate had thousands of offices to give away--offices from many of which the inc.u.mbents had been remorselessly ejected; many had been created for the purpose of sale. The integrity and capacity of an applicant were never inquired into; the points considered were, what services has he rendered or can he render to the party? how much can he pay for the preferment? An American reader can thoroughly realize this state of things. At every presidential election he witnesses similar acts. The election of a pope by the Conclave is not unlike the nomination of an American president by a convention. In both cases there are many offices to give away.

William of Malmesbury says that in his day the Romans made a sale of whatever was righteous and sacred for gold. After his time there was no improvement; the Church degenerated into an instrument for the exploitation of money. Vast sums were collected in Italy; vast sums were drawn under all manner of pretenses from surrounding and reluctant countries. Of these the most nefarious was the sale of indulgences for the perpetration of sin. Italian religion had become the art of plundering the people.

For more than a thousand years the sovereign pontiffs had been rulers of the city. True, it had witnessed many scenes of devastation for which they were not responsible; but they were responsible for this, that they had never made any vigorous, any persistent effort for its material, its moral improvement. Instead of being in these respects an exemplar for the imitation of the world, it became an exemplar of a condition that ought to be shunned. Things steadily went on from bad to worse, until at the epoch of the Reformation no pious stranger could visit it without being shocked.

The papacy, repudiating science as absolutely incompatible with its pretensions, had in later years addressed itself to the encouragement of art. But music and painting, though they may be exquisite adornments of life, contain no living force that can develop a weak nation into a strong one; nothing that can permanently a.s.sure the material well-being or happiness of communities; and hence at the time of the Reformation, to one who thoughtfully considered her condition, Rome had lost all living energy. She was no longer the arbiter of the physical or the religious progress of the world. For the progressive maxims of the republic and the empire, she had subst.i.tuted the stationary maxims of the papacy. She had the appearance of piety and the possession of art.

In this she resembled one of those friar-corpses which we still see in their brown cowls in the vaults of the Cappuccini, with a breviary or some withered flowers in its hands.

From this view of the Eternal City, this survey of what Latin Christianity had done for Rome itself, let us turn to the whole European Continent. Let us try to determine the true value of the system that was guiding society; let us judge it by its fruits.

The condition of nations as to their well-being is most precisely represented by the variations of their population. Forms of government have very little influence on population, but policy may control it completely.

It has been very satisfactorily shown by authors who have given attention to the subject, that the variations of population depend upon the interbalancing of the generative force of society and the resistances to life.

By the generative force of society is meant that instinct which manifests itself in the multiplication of the race. To some extent it depends on climate; but, since the climate of Europe did not sensibly change between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries, we may regard this force as having been, on that continent, during the period under consideration, invariable.

By the resistances to life is meant whatever tends to make individual existence more difficult of support. Among such may be enumerated insufficient food, inadequate clothing, imperfect shelter.

It is also known that, if the resistances become inappreciable, the generative force will double a population in twenty-five years.

The resistances operate in two modes: 1. Physically; since they diminish the number of births, and shorten the term of the life of all. 2.

Intellectually; since, in a moral, and particularly in a religious community, they postpone marriage, by causing individuals to decline its responsibilities until they feel that they are competent to meet the charges and cares of a family. Hence the explanation of a long-recognized fact, that the number of marriages during a given period has a connection with the price of food.

The increase of population keeps pace with the increase of food; and, indeed, such being the power of the generative force, it overpa.s.ses the means of subsistence, establis.h.i.+ng a constant pressure upon them. Under these circ.u.mstances, it necessarily happens that a certain amount of dest.i.tution must occur. Individuals have come into existence who must be starved.

As ill.u.s.trations of the variations that have occurred in the population of different countries, may be mentioned the immense diminution of that of Italy in consequence of the wars of Justinian; the depopulation of North Africa in consequence of theological quarrels; its restoration through the establishment of Mohammedanism; the increase of that of all Europe through the feudal system, when estates became more valuable in proportion to the number of retainers they could supply. The crusades caused a sensible diminution, not only through the enormous army losses, but also by reason of the withdrawal of so many able-bodied men from marriage-life. Similar variations have occurred on the American Continent. The population of Mexico was very quickly diminished by two million through the rapacity and atrocious cruelty of the Spaniards, who drove the civilized Indians to despair. The same happened in Peru.

The population of England at the Norman conquest was about two million.

In five hundred years it had scarcely doubled. It may be supposed that this stationary condition was to some extent induced by the papal policy of the enforcement of celibacy in the clergy. The ”legal generative force” was doubtless affected by that policy, the ”actual generative force” was not. For those who have made this subject their study have long ago been satisfied that public celibacy is private wickedness. This mainly determined the laity, as well as the government in England, to suppress the monasteries. It was openly a.s.serted that there were one hundred thousand women in England made dissolute by the clergy.

In my history of the ”American Civil War,” I have presented some reflections on this point, which I will take the liberty of quoting here: ”What, then, does this stationary condition of the population mean? It means, food obtained with hards.h.i.+p, insufficient clothing, personal uncleanness, cabins that could not keep out the weather, the destructive effects of cold and heat, miasm, want of sanitary provisions, absence of physicians, uselessness of shrine-cure, the deceptiveness of miracles, in which society was putting its trust; or, to sum up a long catalogue of sorrows, wants, and sufferings, in one term--it means a high death-rate.

”But more; it means deficient births. And what does that point out?

Marriage postponed, licentious life, private wickedness, demoralized society.