Volume II Part 5 (2/2)

[Sidenote: Effect of the Turkish invasion.] The Turkish aggression led to the staying of the democratic outbreak in the bosom of the Church--the abstaining for a season from any farther sapping of the papal autocracy. It was necessary that ecclesiastical disputes, if they could not be ended, should, at all events, be kept for a time in abeyance, and so indeed they were, until the pent-up dissensions burst forth in ”the Reformation.” And thus, as we have related, by Mohammedan knowledge in the West, papal Christianity was well-nigh brought to ruin; thus, by a strange paradox, the Mohammedan sword in the East gave it for a little longer a renewed lease of political power, though never again of life.

[Sidenote: Nicolas V. a patron of art.] To Nicolas V., a learned and able pope, the catastrophe of Constantinople was the death-blow. He had been the intimate friend of Cosmo de' Medici, and from him had imbibed a taste for letters and art, but, like his patron, he had no love for liberty. It was thus through commerce that the papacy first learned to turn to art. The ensuing development of Europe was really based on the commerce of upper Italy, and not upon the Church. The statesmen of Florence were the inventors of the balance of power. A lover of literature, Nicolas was the founder of the Vatican Library. He clearly perceived the only course in which the Roman system could be directed; that it was unfit for, and, indeed, incompatible with science, but might be brought into unison with art. Its influence upon the reason was gone, but the senses yet remained for it. [Sidenote: Gradual rise of the fine arts.] In continuing his policy, the succeeding popes acted with wisdom.

They gratified the genius of their inst.i.tutions, of their country, and their age. In the abundant leisure of monasteries, the monks had found occupation in the illumination of ma.n.u.scripts. From the execution of miniatures they gradually rose to an undertaking of greater works. In that manner painting had originated in Italy in the twelfth century.

Sculpture, at first merged in architecture, had extricated herself from that bondage in the fourteenth. The mendicant orders, acquiring wealth, became munificent patrons. From caligraphic ill.u.s.trations to the grand works of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle is a prodigious advance, yet it took but a short time to accomplish it.

[Sidenote: Review of the Age of Faith.] I have now completed the history of the European Age of Faith as far as is necessary for the purposes of this book. It embraces a period of more than a thousand years, counting from the reign of Constantine. It remains to consider the intellectual peculiarity that marks the whole period--to review briefly the agents that exerted an influence upon it and conducted it to its close.

[Sidenote: Philosophical peculiarities of the Age of Faith.]

Philosophically, the most remarkable peculiarity is the employment of a false logic, a total misconception of the nature of evidence. It is ill.u.s.trated by miracle-proofs, trial by battle, ordeal tests, and a universal belief in supernatural agency even for objectless purposes. On the principles of this logic, if the authenticity of a thing or the proof of a statement be required, it is supposed to be furnished by an astounding ill.u.s.tration of something else. If the character of a princess is a.s.sailed, she offers a champion; he proves victorious, and therefore she was not frail. [Sidenote: The character of its logic.] If a national a.s.sembly, after a long discussion, cannot decide ”whether children should inherit the property of their father during the lifetime of their grandfather,” an equal number of equal combatants is chosen for each side; they fight; the champions of the children prevail, and therefore the law is fixed in their favour. A relic of some martyr is bought at a great price; no one seeks to criticize the channel through which it has come, but every one asks, Can it work a miracle? A vast inst.i.tution demands the implicit obedience of all men. It justifies its claim, not by the history of the past, but by promises and threats of the future. A decrepit crone is suspected of witchcraft. She is stripped naked and thrown into the nearest pond: if she sinks, she is innocent; if she swims, she is in commerce with the Devil. In all such cases the intrinsic peculiarity of the logic is obvious enough; it shows a complete misconception of the nature of evidence. [Sidenote: Its adoption of supernaturalism.] Yet this ratiocination governed Europe for a thousand years, giving birth to those marvellous and supernatural explanations of physical phenomena and events upon which we now look back with unfeigned surprise, half disbelieving that it was possible for our ancestors to have credited such things. [Sidenote: The Jews and Saracens destroy supernaturalism.] Against this preposterous logic the Mohammedans and Jews struck the first blows. We have already heard what Algazzali the Arabian says respecting the enchanter who would prove that three are more than ten by changing a stick into a serpent. The circ.u.mstances under which the Jewish physicians acted we shall consider presently.

It will not be useless to devote a little s.p.a.ce to this belief in the supernatural. It offers an opportunity of showing how false notions may become universal, embody themselves in law and practical life, and wonderful to be said, how they may, without anything being done to destroy them, vanish from sight of themselves, like night-spectres before the day. At present we only encounter them among the lowest peasant grades, or among those who have been purposely kept in the most abject state of ignorance. Less than a century ago the clergy of Spain wished to have the Opera prohibited, because that unG.o.dly entertainment had given rise to a want of rain; but now, in a country so intellectually backward as that--a witch was burnt there so lately as A.D. 1781--such an attempt would call up sly wit, and make the rabble of Madrid suspect that the archbishop was smarting under the rivalry of the prima donna, and that he was furbis.h.i.+ng up the rusty ecclesiastical enginery to sustain his cause.

[Sidenote: Respective influence of the clergy, the lawyers, and physicians.] In the day of their power the ecclesiastical profession were the supporters of this delusion. They found it suitable to their interests, and, by dint of at first persuading others to believe, they at last, by habit, came to believe in it themselves. The Mohammedans and Jews were the first to a.s.sail it philosophically and by sarcasm, but its final ruin was brought about by the action of the two other professions, the legal and the medical. The lawyers, whose advent to power is seen in the history of Philip the Fair, and whose rise from that time was very rapid, were obliged to introduce the true methods of evidence; the physicians, from their pursuits, were perpetually led to the material explanation of natural phenomena in contradistinction to the mystical.

It is to the honour of both these professions that they never sought for a perpetuation of power by schemes of vast organization, never attempted to delude mankind by stupendous impostures, never compelled them to desist from the expression of their thoughts, and even from thinking, by alliances with civil power. Far from being the determined antagonists of human knowledge, they uniformly fostered it, and, in its trials, defended it. The lawyers were hated because they replaced supernatural logic by philosophical logic; the physicians, because they broke down the profitable but mendacious system of miracle-cures.

[Sidenote: Position of the Church.] Yet the Church is not without excuse. In all her varied history it was impossible to disentangle her from the principles which at the beginning had entered into her political organization. For good or evil, right or wrong, her necessity required that she should put herself forth as the possessor of all knowledge within the reach of human intellect--the infallible arbitress of every question that should arise among men. Doubtless it was a splendid imposture, capable for a time of yielding great results, but sooner or later certain to be unmasked. Early discovering the antagonism of science, which could not fail, in due season, to subject her pretensions to investigation, she lent herself to a systematic delusion of the illiterate, and thereby tried to put off that fatal day when creeds engendered in the darkness would have to be examined in the light, enforcing her attempt with an unsparing, often with a b.l.o.o.d.y hand. [Sidenote: She could not extricate herself from her false position.] It was for this reason that, when the inevitable time of trial came, no intellectual defence could be made in her behalf, and hence there only remained a recourse to physical and political compulsion. But such a compulsion, under such circ.u.mstances, is not only a testimony to the intrinsic weakness of that for which it is invoked, it is also a token that they who resort to it have lost all faith in any inherent power of the system they are supporting, and that, in truth, it is fast coming to an end.

[Sidenote: Successive order in supernatural ideas.] The reader will remark, from the incidents connected with supernatural delusions now to be related, that they follow a law of continuous variation, the particular embodiment they a.s.sumed changing with the condition of the human mind at each epoch under examination. For ages they are implicitly believed in by all cla.s.ses; then, to a few, but the number perpetually increasing, they become an idle story of bare-faced imposture. At last humanity wakens from its delusion--its dream. The final rejection of the whole, in spite of the wonderful amount of testimony which for ages had acc.u.mulated, occurs spontaneously the moment that pyschical development has reached a certain point. There can be no more striking ill.u.s.tration of the definite advancement of the human mind. The boy who is terror-stricken in a dark room insensibly dismisses his idle fears as he grows up to be a man.

[Sidenote: Oriental magicians--Simon Magus.] Clemens Roma.n.u.s and Anastasius Sinaita, speaking of Simon Magus, say that he could make himself invisible; that he formed a man out of air; that he could pa.s.s bodily through mountains without being obstructed thereby; that he could fly and sit unharmed in flames; that he constructed animated statues and self-moving furniture, and not only changed his countenance into the similitude of many other men, but that his whole body could be transformed into the shape of a goat, a sheep, a snake; that, as he walked in the street, he cast many shadows in different directions; that he could make trees suddenly spring up in desert places; and, on one occasion, compelled an enchanted sickle to go into a field and reap twice as much in one day as if it had been used by a man. [Sidenote: Greek thaumaturgists.] Of Apollonius of Tyana we are told that, after an unbroken silence of five years, he comprehended the languages of all animals and all men; that, under circ.u.mstances very picturesquely related, he detected the genius of a plague at Ephesus, and dragged him, self-convicted, before the people; that, at the wedding-dinner of Menippus, he caused all the dishes and viands to vanish, thereby compelling the bride to acknowledge that she was a vampire, intending to eat the flesh and lap the blood of her husband in the night; that he exhibited the prodigy of being in many places at the same time; raised a young woman from the dead; and, finally, weary of the world, ascended bodily into heaven.

[Sidenote: Introduction of an Arabian element.] As Arabian influence spread, ideas of Oriental aspect appear. There are peris who live on perfumes, and divs who are poisoned by them; enchanted palaces; moving statues; veiled prophets, like Mokanna; brazen flying horses; charmed arrows; dervises who can project their soul into the body of a dead animal, giving it temporary life; enchanted rings, to make the wearer invisible, or give him two different bodies at the same time; ghouls who live in cemeteries, and at night eat the flesh of dead men. As the European counterpart of these Perso-Arabic ideas, there are fairies, and their dancing by moonlight, their tampering with children, and imposing changelings on horror-stricken mothers. [Sidenote: Introduction of European sorcery and witchcraft.] Every one believes that rain and wind may be purchased of wizards, and that fair weather may be obtained and storms abated by prayer. Whoever attains to wealth or eminence does so by a compact with Satan, signed with blood. The head of the Church, Sylvester II., makes a brazen head, which speaks to him prophetically.

He finds underground treasures in a subterranean magic palace beneath a mountain. The protestator of the Greek emperor is accused of a conspiracy against his master's life by making invisible men. Robert Grostete, the Bishop of Lincoln, makes another speaking head. Nay, more, Albertus Magnus constructs a complete brazen man, so cunningly contrived as to serve him for a domestic. This was at the time that Thomas Aquinas was living with him. The household trouble arising from the excessive garrulity of this simulacrum grew so intolerable--for it was incessantly making mischief among the other inmates--that Thomas, unable to bear it any longer, took a hammer and broke the troublesome android to pieces.

[Sidenote: These ideas infect all cla.s.ses.] This reverend father, known among his contemporaries as the ”seraphic doctor,” was not without experience in the mysterious craft. Annoyed by the frequent pa.s.sing of horses near his dwelling, he constructed a magical horse of bra.s.s, and buried it in the road. From that moment no animal could be made to pa.s.s his door. Among brazen heads of great celebrity is that of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungy. This oracle announced, ”Time is; time was; time is pa.s.sed;” perhaps it was some kind of clock. The alchemist Peter d'Apono had seven spirits in gla.s.s bottles. He had entrapped them by baiting with distilled dew, and imprisoned them safely by dexterously putting in the corks. He is the same who possessed a secret which it is greatly to be regretted that he did not divulge for the benefit of chemists who have come after him, that, whatever money he paid, within the s.p.a.ce of one hour's time came back of itself again into his pocket. That was better than even the philosopher's stone.

[Sidenote: Modifications of supernaturalism.] These supernatural notions were at different times modified by two intrusive elements, the first being the Perso-Arabic just alluded to, the second derived from the north of Europe. This element was witchcraft; for, though long before, among Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, decrepit women were known as witches--as the Thessalian crone who raised a corpse from the dead for s.e.xtus by las.h.i.+ng it with a snake--it was not until a later period that this element was fairly developed. [Sidenote: The persecutions for witchcraft.] A bull of Pope Innocent VIII., published A.D. 1484, says, ”It has come to our ears that numbers of both s.e.xes do not avoid to have intercourse with the infernal fiends, and that by their sorceries they afflict both man and beast. They blight the marriage-bed; destroy the births of women and the increase of cattle; they blast the corn on the ground, the grapes in the vineyard, the fruits of the trees, and the gra.s.s and herbs of the field.” At this time, therefore, the head of the Church had not relinquished a belief in these delusions. The consequences of the punishment he ordained were very dreadful. In the valleys of the Alps many hundred aged women were committed to the flames under an accusation of denying Christ, dishonouring the crucifix, and solemnizing a devil's sabbath in company with the fiend. Such persecutions, begun by papal authority, continued among illiterate zealots till late times, and, as is well known, were practised even in America. Very masculine minds fell into these delusions. Thus Luther, in his work on the abuses attendant on private ma.s.ses, says that he had conferences with the Devil on that subject, pa.s.sing many bitter nights and much restless and wearisome repose; that once, in particular, Satan came to him in the dead of the night, when he was just awakened out of sleep. [Sidenote: Experiences of Luther.] ”The Devil,” says Luther, ”knows well enough how to construct his arguments, and to urge them with the skill of a master. He delivers himself with a grave and yet with a shrill voice. Nor does he use circ.u.mlocutions and beat about the bush, but excels in forcible statements and quick rejoinders. I no longer wonder that the persons whom he a.s.sails in this way are occasionally found dead in their beds. He is able to compress and throttle, and more than once he has so a.s.saulted me and driven my soul into a corner that I have felt as if the next moment it must leave my body. I am of opinion that Gesner and OEcolampadius came in that manner to their deaths. The Devil's manner of opening a debate is pleasant enough, but he soon urges things so peremptorily that the respondent in a short time knows not how to acquit himself.”

[Sidenote: English wizards--Scotch witches.] Social eminence is no preservative from social delusion. When it was affirmed that Agnes Sampson, with two hundred other Scotch witches, had sailed in sieves from Leith to North Berwick church to hold a banquet with the Devil, James I. had the torture applied to the wretched woman, and took pleasure in putting appropriate questions to her after the racking had been duly prolonged. It then came out that the two hundred crones had baptized and drowned a black cat, thereby raising a dreadful storm in which the s.h.i.+p that carried the king narrowly escaped being wrecked.

Upon this Agnes was condemned to the flames. She died protesting her innocence, and piteously calling on Jesus to have mercy on her, for Christian men would not. On the accession of James to the English throne he procured an act of Parliament against any one convicted of witchcraft, sorcery, or enchantment, or having commerce with the Devil.

Under this monstrous statute many persons suffered. At this time England was intellectually in a very backward state. [Sidenote: French and English legal proceedings.] The statute remained until 1736 unrepealed.

The French preceded the English in putting a stop to these atrocities; for Louis XIV., A.D. 1672, by an order in council, forbade the tribunals from inflicting penalty in accusations of sorcery.

Can the reader of the preceding paragraphs here pause without demanding of himself the value of human testimony? All these delusions, which occupied the minds of our forefathers, and from which not even the powerful and learned were free, have totally pa.s.sed away. [Sidenote: The total disappearance of these delusions.] The moonlight has now no fairies; the solitude no genius; the darkness no ghost, no goblin. There is no necromancer who can raise the dead from their graves--no one who has sold his soul to the Devil and signed the contract with his blood--no angry apparition to rebuke the crone who has disquieted him.

Divination, agromancy, pyromancy, hydromancy, cheiromancy, augury, interpreting of dreams, oracles, sorcery, astrology, have all gone. It is 350 years since the last sepulchral lamp was found, and that was near Rome. There are no gorgons, hydras, chimaeras; no familiars; no incubus or succubus. The housewives of Holland no longer bring forth sooterkins by sitting over lighted chauffers. No longer do captains buy of Lapland witches favourable winds; no longer do our churches resound with prayers against the baleful influences of comets, though there still linger in some of our n.o.ble old rituals forms of supplication for dry weather and rain, useless but not unpleasing reminiscences of the past. The apothecary no longer says prayers over the mortar in which he is pounding to impart a divine afflatus to his drugs. Who is there now that pays fees to a relic or goes to a saint-shrine to be cured? These delusions have vanished with the night to which they appertained, yet they were the delusions of fifteen hundred years. In their support might be produced a greater ma.s.s of human testimony than probably could be brought to bear on any other matter of belief in the entire history of man; and yet, in the nineteenth century, we have come to the conclusion that the whole, from the beginning to the end, was a deception.

[Sidenote: Value of human testimony.] Let him, therefore, who is disposed to balance the testimony of past ages against the dictates of his own reason ponder on this strange history; let him who relies on the authority of human evidence in the guidance of his opinions now settle with himself what that evidence is worth.

[Sidenote: Supernaturalism appertains to a period of life.] But, though in one sense this history is humiliating to the philosopher, in another it is full of interest. Supernaturalism, both in the individual and in society, appertains to a definite period of life. It is shaken off as men and nations approach maturity. The child and the youth people solitude and darkness with unrealities. The adult does not so much convince himself of their fict.i.tious nature by reasoning on the results of his experience--he grows out of them, as we see that society has done. Nevertheless, his emanc.i.p.ation is quickened if he is among those who instruct his curiosity and deride his fears. It was in this manner that the decline of supernaturalism in the West was very much accelerated by Jewish physicians. They, more than the lawyers, were concerned in the ending of these delusions. [Sidenote: Influence of the Jews on supernaturalism.] These apparitions, as is the nature of their kind, vanished as soon as the crowing of the aesculapian c.o.c.k announced that the intellectual day of Europe was on the point of breaking. The Jews held in their hands much of the trade of the world; they were in perpetual movement and commercial intercommunication. Locomotion--for such is always its result--tended to make them intellectual. The persecutions under which they had long suffered bound their distant communities together. The Spanish Jews knew very well what was going on among their co-religionists beyond the Euphrates. As Cabanis says, ”They were our factors and bankers before we knew how to read; they were also our first physicians.” To this it may be added that they were, for centuries, the only men in Europe who saw the course of human affairs from the most general point of view.

The h.e.l.lenizing Jewish physicians inoculated the Arabs with learning on their first meeting with them in Alexandria, obtaining a private and personal influence with many of khalifs, and from that central point of power giving an intellectual character to the entire Saracenic movement.

We have already seen that in this they were greatly favoured by the approximation of their unitarianism to that of the Mohammedans. The intellectual activity of the Asiatic and African Jews soon communicated an impulse to those of Europe. The Hebrew doctor was viewed by the vulgar with wonder, fear, and hatred; no crime could be imputed to him too incredible. Thus Zedekias, the physician to Charles the Bald, was a.s.serted to have devoured at one meal, in the presence of the court, a waggon-load of hay, together with its horses and driver. [Sidenote: Writings of Jewish physicians.] The t.i.tles of some of the works that appeared among them deserve mention, as displaying a strong contrast with the mystical designations in vogue. Thus Isaac Ben Soleiman, an Egyptian, wrote ”On Fevers,” ”On Medicine,” ”On Food and Remedies,” ”On the Pulse,” ”On Philosophy,” ”On Melancholy,” ”An Introduction to Logic.” The simplicity of these t.i.tles displays an intellectual clearness and a precision of thought which have ever been shown by the Israelites. They are in themselves sufficient to convince us of the strong common sense which these men were silently infusing into the literature of Western Europe in ages of concealment and mystification.

Roger Bacon, at a much later time, gave to one of his works the t.i.tle of ”The Green Lion;” to another, ”The Treatise of Three Words.”

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