Part 16 (1/2)
”By no means,” says Sprenger.
”I mark a difference. He who cuts wood does not cause it to burn: he only does so indirectly. The woodcutter is Love; see Denis the Areopagite, Origen, John of Damascus. Therefore, love is but the indirect cause of love.”
What a thing, you see, to have studied! No weak school could have turned out such a man. Only Paris, Louvain, or Cologne, had machinery fit to mould the human brain. The school of Paris was mighty: for dog-Latin who can be matched with the _Janotus_ of Gargantua?[73] But mightier yet was Cologne, glorious queen of darkness, whence Hutten drew the type of his _Obscuri viri_, that thriving and fruitful race of obscurantists and ignoramuses.[74]
[73] A character in Rabelais. ”Date n.o.bis clochas nostras, &c.”--_Gargantua_, ch. 19.--TRANS.
[74] Ulrich von Hutten, friend of Luther, and author of the witty _Epistolae obscurorum virorum_.--TRANS.
This ma.s.sive logician, so full of words, so devoid of meaning, sworn foe of nature as well as reason, takes his seat with a proud reliance on his books and gown, on his dirt and dust. On one side of his judgement-table lies the _Sum_, on the other the _Directory_. Beyond these he never goes: at all else he only smiles. On such a man as he there is no imposing: he is not the man to utter anent astrology or alchemy nonsense not so foolish but that others might be led thereby to observe truly. And yet Sprenger is a freethinker: he is sceptical about old receipts! Albert the Great may aver, that some sage in a spring of water will suffice to raise a storm, but Sprenger only shakes his head. Sage indeed! Tell that to others, I beg. For all my little experience, I see herein the craft of One who would put us on the wrong scent, that cunning Prince of the Air; but he will fare ill, for he has to deal with a doctor more subtle than the Subtle One himself.
I should have liked to see face to face this wonderful specimen of a judge, and the people who were brought before him. The creatures that G.o.d might bring together from two different worlds would not be more unlike, more strange to each other, more utterly wanting in a common language. The old hag, a skeleton in tatters, with an eye flas.h.i.+ng forth evil things, a being thrice cooked in h.e.l.l-fire; and the ill-looking hermit shepherd of the Black Forest or the upper Alpine wastes--such are the savages offered to the leaden gaze of a scholarling, to the judgement of a schoolman.
Not long will they let him toil in his judgment-seat. They will tell all without being tortured. Come the torture will indeed, but afterwards, by way of complement and crown to the law-procedure. They explain and relate to order whatever they have done. The Devil is the Witch's bedfellow, the shepherd's intimate friend. She, for her part, smiles triumphantly, feels a manifest joy in the horror of those around.
Truly, the old woman is very mad, and equally so the shepherd. Are they foolish? Not at all, but far otherwise. They are refined, subtle, skilled in growing herbs, and seeing through walls. Still more clearly do they see those monumental a.s.s's ears that overshadow the doctor's cap. Clearest of all is the fear he has of them, for in vain does he try to bear him boldly; he does nought but tremble. He himself owns that, if the priest who adjures the demon does not take care, the Devil will change his lodging only to pa.s.s into the priest himself, feeling all the more proud of dwelling in a body dedicated to G.o.d. Who knows but these simple Devils of Witches and shepherds might even aspire to inhabit an inquisitor? He is far from easy in mind when in his loudest voice he says to the old woman, ”If your master is so mighty, why do I not feel his blows?”
”And, indeed I felt them but too strongly,” says the poor man in his book. ”When I was in Ratisbon, how often he would come knocking at my windowpanes! How often he stuck pins in my cap! A hundred visions too did I have of dogs, monkeys,” &c.
The dearest delight of that great logician, the Devil, is, by the mouth of the seeming old woman, to push the doctor with awkward arguments, with crafty questions, from which he can only escape by acting like the fish who saves himself by troubling the water and turning it black as ink. For instance, ”The Devil does no more than G.o.d allows him: why, then, punish his tools?” Or again, ”We are not free. As in the case of Job, the Devil is allowed by G.o.d to tempt and beset us, to urge us on by blows. Should we, then, punish him who is not free?” Sprenger gets out of that by saying, ”We are free beings.”
Here come plenty of texts. ”You are made serfs only by covenant with the Evil One.” The answer to this would be but too ready: ”If G.o.d allows the Evil One to tempt us into making covenants, he renders covenants possible,” &c.
”I am very good,” says he, ”to listen to yonder folk. He is a fool who argues with the Devil.” So say all the rest likewise. They all cheer the progress of the trial: all are strongly moved, and show in murmurs their eagerness for the execution. They have seen enough of men hanged. As for the Wizard and the Witch, 'twill be a curious treat to see those two f.a.ggots crackling merrily in the flames.
The judge has the people on his side, so he is not embarra.s.sed.
According to his _Directory_ three witnesses would be enough. Are not three witnesses readily found, especially to witness a falsehood? In every slanderous town, in every envious village teeming with the mutual hate of neighbours, witnesses abound. Besides, the _Directory_ is a superannuated book, a century old. In that century of light, the fifteenth, all is brought to perfection. If witnesses are wanting, we are content with the _public voice_, the general clamour.[75]
[75] Faustin Helie, in his learned and luminous _Traite de l'Instruction Criminelle_ (vol. i. p. 398), has clearly explained the manner in which Pope Innocent III., about 1200, suppressed the safeguards theretofore required in any prosecution, especially the risk incurred by prosecutors of being punished for slander. Instead of these were established the dismal processes of _Denunciation and Inquisition_. The frightful levity of these latter methods is shown by Soldan.
Blood was shed like water.
A genuine outcry, born of fear; the piteous cry of victims, of the poor bewitched. Sprenger is greatly moved thereat. Do not fancy him one of those unfeeling schoolmen, the lovers of a dry abstraction. He has a heart: for which very reason he is so ready to kill. He is compa.s.sionate, full of lovingkindness. He feels pity for yon weeping woman, but lately pregnant, whose babe the witch had smothered by a look. He feels pity for the poor man whose land she wasted with hail.
He pities the husband, who though himself no wizard, clearly sees his wife to be a witch, and drags her with a rope round her neck before Sprenger, who has her burnt.
From a cruel judge escape was sometimes possible; but from our worthy Sprenger it was hopeless. His humanity is too strong: it needs great management, a very large amount of ready wit, to avoid a burning at his hands. One day there was brought before him the plaint of three good ladies of Strasburg who, at one same hour of the same day, had been struck by an arm unseen. Ah, indeed! They are fain to accuse a man of evil aspect, of having laid them under a spell. On being brought before the inquisitor, the man vows and swears by all the saints that he knows nothing about these ladies, has never so much as seen them. The judge is hard of believing: nor tears nor oaths avail aught with him. His great compa.s.sion for the ladies made him inexorable, indignant at the man's denials. Already he was rising from his seat. The man would have been tortured into confessing his guilt, as the most innocent often did. He got leave to speak, and said: ”I remember, indeed, having struck some one yesterday at the hour named; but whom? No Christian beings, but only three cats which came furiously biting at my legs.” The judge, like a shrewd fellow, saw the whole truth of the matter; the poor man was innocent; the ladies were doubtless turned on certain days into cats, and the Evil One amused himself by sending them at the legs of Christian folk, in order to bring about the ruin of these latter by making them pa.s.s for wizards.
A judge of less ability would never have hit upon this. But such a man was not always to be had. It was needful to have always handy on the table of the Inquisition a good fool's guide, to reveal to simple and inexperienced judges the tricks of the Old Enemy, the best way of baffling him, the clever and deep-laid tactics employed with such happy effect by the great Sprenger in his campaigns on the Rhine. To that end the _Malleus_, which a man was required to carry in his pocket, was commonly printed in small 18mo, a form at that time scarce. It would not have been seemly for a judge in difficulties to open a folio on the table before his audience. But his handbook of folly he might easily squint at from the corner of his eye, or turn over its leaves as he held it under the table.
This _Malleus_ (or Mallet), like all books of the same cla.s.s, contains a singular avowal, namely, that the Devil is gaining ground; in other words, that G.o.d is losing it; that mankind, after being saved by Christ, is becoming the Devil's prey. Too clearly indeed does he step forward from legend to legend. What a way he has made between the time of the Gospels, when he was only too glad to get into the swine, and the days of Dante, when, as lawyer and divine, he argues with the saints, pleads his cause, and by way of closing a successful syllogism, bears away the soul he was fighting for, saying, with a triumphant laugh, ”You didn't know that I was a logician!”
In the earlier days of the Middle Ages he waits till the last pangs to seize the soul and bear it off. Saint Hildegarde, about 1100, thinks that ”_he cannot enter the body of a living man_, for else his limbs would fly off in all directions: it is but the shadow and the smoke of the Devil which pa.s.s therein.” That last gleam of good sense vanishes in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth we find a suppliant so afraid of being caught alive that he has himself watched day and night by two hundred armed men.
Then begins a period of increasing terror, in which men trust themselves less and ever less to G.o.d's protection. The Demon is no longer a stealthy sprite, no longer a thief by night, gliding through the gloom. He becomes the fearless adversary, the daring ape of Heaven, who in broad daylight mimics G.o.d's creation under G.o.d's own sun. Is it the legends tell us this? Nay, it is the greatest of the doctors. ”The Devil,” says Albert the Great, ”transforms all living things.” St. Thomas goes yet further. ”All changes that may occur naturally by means of seeds, can be copied by the Devil.” What an astounding concession, which coming from the mouth of so grave a personage, means nothing short of setting up one Creator face to face with another! ”But in things done without the germinal process,” he adds, ”such as the changing of men into beasts or the resurrection of the dead, there the Devil can do nothing.” Thus to G.o.d is left the smaller part of His work! He may only perform miracles, a kind of action alike singular and infrequent. But the daily miracle of life is not for Him alone: His copyist, the Devil, shares with Him the world of nature!