Part 46 (1/2)
28 Early English Miscellanies, No. 2.
29 London Antiquaries' Archaologis, vol. x.x.xv. art. 22.
30 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, vol. i., appendix.
A tremendous impulse, vivifying and emphasizing the eschatological notions of the time, an impulse whose effects did not cease when it died, was imparted by that frightful epidemic expectation of the impending end of the world which wellnigh universally prevailed in Christendom about the year 1000. Many of the charters given at that time commence with the words, ”As the world is now drawing to a close.” 31 This expectation drew additional strength from the unutterable sufferings famine, oppression, pestilence, war, superst.i.tion then weighing on the people. ”The idea of the end of the world,” we quote from Michelet, ”sad as that world was, was at once the hope and the terror of the Middle Age. Look at those antique statues of the tenth and eleventh centuries, mute, meager, their pinched and stiffened lineaments grinning with a look of living suffering allied to the repulsiveness of death. See how they implore, with clasped hands, that desired yet dreaded moment when the resurrection shall redeem them from their unspeakable sorrows and raise them from nothingness into existence and from the grave to G.o.d.”
Furthermore, this superst.i.tious character of the mediaval belief in the future life acquired breadth and intensity from the profound general ignorance and trembling credulousness of that whole period on all subjects. It was an age of marvels, romances, fears, when every landscape of life ”wore a strange hue, as if seen through the sombre medium of a stained cas.e.m.e.nt.” While congregations knelt in awe beneath the lifted Host, and the image of the dying Savior stretched on the rood glimmered through clouds of incense, perhaps an army of Flagellants would march by the cathedral, shouting, ”The end of the world is at hand!” filling the streets with the echoes of their torture as they lashed their naked backs with knotted cords wet with blood; and no soul but must shudder with the infection of horror as the dreadful notes of the ”Dies Iioe” went sounding through the air. The narratives of the desert Fathers, the miracles wrought in convent cells, the visions of pillar saints, the thrilling accompaniments of the Crusades, and other kindred influences, made the world a perpetual mirage. The belching of a volcano was the vomit of uneasy h.e.l.l.
The devil stood before every tempted man, Ghosts walked in every nightly dell. Ghastly armies were seen contending where the aurora borealis hung out its b.l.o.o.d.y banners. The Huns under Attila, ravaging Southern Europe, were thought to be literal demons who had made an irruption from the pit. The metaphysician was in peril of the stake as a heretic, the natural philosopher as a magician.
A belief in witchcraft and a trust in ordeals were universal, even from Pope Eugenius, who introduced the trial by cold water, and King James, who wrote volumes on magic, to the humblest monk who shuddered when pa.s.sing the church crypt, and the simplest peasant who quaked in his homeward path at seeing a will o' the wisp.
”Denounced by the preacher and consigned to the flames by the judge, the wizard received secret service money from the Cabinet to induce him to destroy the hostile armament as it sailed before the wind.” As a vivid writer has well said, ”A gloomy mist of credulity enwrapped the cathedral and the hall of justice, the cottage and the throne. In the dank shadows of the universal ignorance a thousand superst.i.tions, like foul animals of night, were propagated and nourished.”
31 Hallam, Middle Ages, ch. ix.
The beliefs and excitements of the mediaval period partook of a sort of epidemic character, diffusing and working like a contagion.32 There were numberless throngs of pilgrims to famous shrines, immense crowds about the localities of popular legends, relics, or special grace. In the magnetic sphere of such a fervid and credulous mult.i.tude, filled with the kindling interaction of enthusiasm, of course prodigies would abound, fables would flourish, and faith would be doubly generated and fortified. In commemoration of a miraculous act of virtue performed by St.
Francis, the pope offered to all who should enter the church at a.s.sisi between the eve of the 1st and the eve of the 2d of August each year that being the anniversary of the saint's achievement a free pardon for all the sins committed by them since their baptism. More than sixty thousand pilgrims sometimes flocked thither on that day. Every year some were crushed to death in the suffocating pressure at the entrance of the church. Nearly two thousand friars walked in procession; and for a series of years the pilgrimage to Portiuncula might have vied with that to the temple of Juggernaut.33
Nothing tends more to strengthen any given belief than to see it everywhere carried into practice and to act in accordance with it.
Thus was it with the mediaval doctrine of the future life. Its applications and results were constantly and universally thrust into notice by the sale of indulgences and the launching of excommunications. Early in the ninth century, Charlemagne complained that the bishops and abbots forced property from foolish people by promises and threats: ”Suadendo de coelestis regni beat.i.tudine, comminando de oeterno supplicio inferni.”34 The rival mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, acquired great riches and power by the traffic in indulgences.
They even had the impudence to affirm that the members of their orders were privileged above all other men in the next world.
Milton alludes to those who credited these monstrous a.s.sumptions: ”And they who, to be sure of Paradise, Dying, put on the weeds of Dominic, Or in Franciscan think to pa.s.s disguised.”
The Council of Basle censured the claim of the Franciscan monks that their founder annually descended to purgatory and led thence to heaven the souls of all those who had belonged to his order.
The Carmelites also a.s.serted that the Virgin Mary appeared to Simon Stockius, the general of their order, and gave him a solemn promise that the souls of such as left the world with the Carmelite scapulary upon their shoulders should be infallibly preserved from eternal d.a.m.nation. Mosheim says that Pope Benedict XIV. was an open defender of this ridiculous fiction.35
If any one would appreciate the full mediaval doctrine of the future life, whether with respect to the hair drawn scholastic metaphysics by which it was defended, or with respect to the concrete forms in which the popular apprehension held it, let him read the Divina Commedia of Dante; for it is all there. Whoso with adequate insight and sympathy peruses
32 Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages.
33 Quarterly Review, July, 1819: article on Monachism.
34 Perry, History of the Franks, p. 467.
35 Eccl. Hist., XIII. Century, part ii. ch. 2, sect. 29.
the pages of the immortal Florentine at whom the people pointed as he walked the streets, and said, ”There goes the man who has been in h.e.l.l” will not fail to perceive with what a profound sincerity the popular breast shuddered responsive to ecclesiastical threats and purgatorial woes.
The tremendous moral power of this solitary work lies in the fact that it is a series of terrific and fascinating tableaux, embodying the idea of inflexible poetic justice impartially administered upon king and varlet, pope and beggar, oppressor and victim, projected amidst the unalterable necessities of eternity, and moving athwart the lurid abyss and the azure cope with an intense distinctness that sears the gazer's eyeb.a.l.l.s. The Divina Commedia, with a wonderful truth, also reflects the feeling of the age when it was written in this respect, that there is a grappling force of attraction, a compelling realism, about its ”Purgatory”
and ”h.e.l.l” which are to be sought in vain in the delineations of its ”Paradise.” The mediaval belief in a future life had for its central thought the day of judgment, for its foremost emotion terror.36
The roots of this faith were unquestionably fertilized, and the development of this fear quickened, to a very great extent, by deliberate and systematic delusions. One of the most celebrated of these organized frauds was the gigantic one perpetrated under the auspices of the Dominican monks at Berne in 1509, the chief actors in which were unmasked and executed. Bishop Burnet has given an extremely interesting account of this affair in his volume of travels. Suffice it to say, the monks appeared at midnight in the cells of various persons, now impersonating devils, in horrid attire, breathing flames and brimstone, now claiming to be the souls of certain sufferers escaped from purgatory, and again pretending to be celebrated saints, with the Virgin Mary at their head. By the aid of mechanical and chemical arrangements, they wrought miracles, and played on the terror and credulity of the spectators in a frightful manner.37 There is every reason to suppose that such deceptions miracles in which secret speaking tubes, asbestos, and phosphorus were indispensable38 were most frequent in those ages, and were as effective as the actors were unscrupulous and the dupes unsuspicious. Here is revealed one of the foremost of the causes which made the belief of the Dark Age in the numerous appearances of ghosts and devils so common and so intense that it gave currency to the notion that the swarming spirits of purgatory were disembogued from dusk till dawn. So the Danish monarch, revisiting the pale glimpses of the moon, says to Hamlet, ”I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain time to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away.”
36 If any one would see in how many forms the faith in h.e.l.l and in the devil appeared, let him look over the pages of the ”Dictionnaire Infernal,” by J. Collin de Plancy.
37 Maclaine's trans, of Mosheim's Eccl. Hist., vol. ii. p. 10, note.