Part 3 (2/2)

_Enjoy the agreeable sight of your pictures_; but we shall find our delight in the Word of G.o.d. _Seek after figures which cannot either see, or hear, or __ taste_; but we shall diligently seek after the law of G.o.d, which is irreprehensible.” He further says:-”I see images which have such inscriptions, as for instance St Paul, and I ask, therefore, those who are involved in this great error, why they do call images _holy (sanctus)_, and why they do not say, conformably to the tradition of the fathers, that these are images of the _saints_? Let them say in what consists the sanct.i.ty of the images? Is it in the wood which had been brought from a forest in order to make them? Is it in the colours with which they are painted, and which are often composed of impure substances? Is it in the wax, which gets dirty?” He taunts the wors.h.i.+ppers of images, pointing out an abuse which even now is as inevitable as it was then. ”If,” says he, ”two pictures perfectly alike, but of which one is meant for the Virgin and the other for Venus, are presented to you, you will inquire which of them is the image of the Virgin and which is that of Venus, because you cannot distinguish them. The painter will call one of these pictures the image of the Virgin, and it will be immediately put up in a _high place, honoured, and kissed_; whilst the other, representing Venus, will be thrown away with horror. These two pictures are, however, made by the same hand, with the same brush, with the same colours; they have the same features, and the whole difference between them lies in their inscriptions. Why is the one received and the other rejected? It is not on account of the sanct.i.ty which one of them has, and the other has not; it is, then, on account of its inscription; and yet certain letters attached to a picture cannot give it a sanct.i.ty which it otherwise had not.”

This work was published for the first time in 1549, by Tillet, Roman Catholic bishop of Meaux in France, though under an a.s.sumed name, and it has been reprinted several times. Its authenticity, which had been at first impugned by some Roman Catholic writers, was finally established beyond every dispute, and acknowledged by the most eminent writers of the Roman Catholic Church, such as Mabillon, Sirmond, &c. It is a very remarkable production, for it most positively rejects every kind of wors.h.i.+p offered to images, without making any difference between _Latria_ and _Dulia_, and I think that its republication might be of considerable service at the present time.(68)

The Pope sent a long letter in answer to the protest of Charlemagne, which did not, however, satisfy that monarch, because he convened in 794 a council at Frankfort, at which he presided himself. This synod, composed of three hundred bishops of France, Germany, and Spain, and at which two legates of the Pope were present, condemned the enactment of the second Council of Nice respecting the wors.h.i.+p of images.

This decree of the Council of Frankfort is very important, because it not only condemned the wors.h.i.+p of images, but it virtually rejected the infallibility of the Popes, as well as of the General Councils, since it condemned what they had established.

The opposition to the wors.h.i.+p of images continued amongst the Western churches for some time after the death of Charlemagne. Thus an a.s.sembly of the French clergy, held at Paris in 825, condemned the decree of the second Council of Nice as decidedly as it was done by the work of Charlemagne and the Council of Frankfort. Claudius, bishop of Turin, who lived about that time, opposed the wors.h.i.+p of images, which he removed from his churches, calling those idolaters who adhered to this practice; he also condemned the adoration of relics, of the figure of the cross, &c.; and he was not inaptly called, on this account, by the Jesuit historian Maimbourg, the first Protestant minister.

There are other traces of a similar opposition during the ninth century, but it seems to have entirely disappeared in the tenth, and it was again renewed by the Albigenses in the eleventh century. Their history, however, is foreign to the object of the present essay; and I shall endeavour to give in my next chapter a short sketch of the legends of the saints, composed during the middle ages.

Chapter VI. Origin And Development Of The Pious Legends, Or Lives Of Saints, During The Middle Ages.

A collection of the lives of the saints of the Roman Catholic calendar has been accomplished by the Jesuits, and is well known as that of the Bollandists, from the name of its first originator Bollandus. It extends to fifty-three huge folios, though it has reached only to the middle of October,(69) each day having a number of saints a.s.signed to it for commemoration. It contains, among a ma.s.s of the greatest absurdities, a good deal of valuable information relating to the history of the middle ages, particularly in respect to the customs and prevailing ideas of that period. A great, if not the greatest part of the saints whose lives are described in that collection have never existed, except in the imagination of their biographers; and the best proof of this is that the learned Benedictine monk, Dom Ruinart, an intimate friend and collaborator of the celebrated Mabillon, has reduced the acts of martyrs, whom he considers as true, to one moderate quarto, though the same work contains a refutation of the Protestant Dodwell, who maintained that the number of the primitive martyrs had been greatly exaggerated by their historians.(70)

The Christian church was already, at an early period of her existence, disturbed by a great number of forgeries, relating to the history and doctrine of our Lord and his disciples;(71) but the spirit in which they were written, so contrary to that of the true Gospel, and the gross absurdities which they contain, were convincing proofs of the apocryphal character of those writings, which, consequently, were rejected as such from the canon of Scripture. If the church could not escape such abuses at a time when she was not yet infected by Pagan ideas and practices, she became still more exposed to them after the abovementioned corruptions, and when, as has already been said, p. 20, the Christian society was invaded by whole populations, who, notwithstanding their abjuration of heathenism, were Pagans in their manners, their tastes, their prejudices, and their ignorance. There were, moreover, very great difficulties in obtaining authentic information about the lives of the martyrs. I have said, p. 3, that their memory was usually preserved in the churches to which they had belonged. This was, however, entirely a local affair, and though the report of such events had undoubtedly circulated amongst other Christian congregations, there was no general register of martyrs preserved by the whole church, which had no central point of union. The means of communication between various places were, moreover, at that time very imperfect, and this difficulty was increased by the persecutions to which the primitive churches were often exposed. These persecutions dispersed many churches, destroying their registers and other doc.u.ments belonging to them, whilst even a much greater number of them experienced a similar calamity from the barbarian nations who successively invaded the Roman empire. The accounts of the sufferings and death of the martyrs rest, therefore, with the exception of some comparatively few well-authenticated cases, upon the authority of vague and uncertain traditions. These traditions were generally collected and put in writing only centuries after the time when the event to which they relate had, or is supposed to have taken place. It was therefore no wonder that the subjects of many such accounts are purely imaginary. The nature of the generality of these legends, or lives of martyrs and other saints, may be judged of best from the following opinion expressed on this subject by a Roman Catholic clergyman of unsuspected orthodoxy:-

”What shall I say of those saints of whose life we don't know either the beginning or the progress,-of those saints to whom so many praises are given, though n.o.body knows anything about their end? Who may pray to them to intercede for him, when it is impossible to know what degree of credit they enjoy with G.o.d? We shall be obliged, indeed, to consider the most part of the acts of martyrs, which are now produced with so much confidence, as so many fables, and reject them as nothing better than romances. It is true that their lives are written, like that of St Ovidius, St Felicissimus, and St Victor! But, O G.o.d! what lives! what libels! lives deserving a place in the Index of the Prohibited Books, since they are filled with falsehoods, vain conjectures, or, to say the least, are ascribing to unknown and apocryphal saints the true acts of the most ill.u.s.trious martyrs. Such things cannot but bring about a great confusion in the history of the church, not to say in religion itself. It is in this manner that the actions of St Felicissimus, who is generally believed to have been a deacon to St Sixtus, are ascribed to a new Felicissimus; and the virtues of St Victor of Milan are now given to a new Victor, who has been recently brought to Paris. As regards the life of St Ovidius, is there anything in it more than words and words? and can we find in it anything solid? This little book speaks of a leaden plate upon which the senatorial dignity and the year of this saint's martyrdom are inscribed. Why is not this inscription given? Why is not at least the precise date of his martyrdom named? It is said that St Ovidius suffered towards the end of the second century; is this the manner of fixing the year of his death? No, no; the ancients did not mark the time in such a manner; they did not take an uncertain century for the certain epoch of a year. I am much afraid that this inscription is by no means so authentic as people wish to persuade us. But there was found in his grave a little gla.s.s vessel; a palm is engraved upon his sepulchre; and his skull has the appearance of being pierced with a lance. Well, these marks may prove that St Ovidius was a martyr; but are they sufficient to establish the truth of his life, such as it has been published?”(72)

I would, however, observe, that many writers of the lives of saints, without excepting those who are considered legitimate, have rendered themselves guilty of something worse than the plagiarism of which the learned Mabillon complains in the pa.s.sage given above. They may be accused of having blasphemously parodied the Scriptures, and particularly the Gospels, by ascribing many of the miracles recorded in the Bible to the subjects of their biographies. M. Maury, the French savant whom I have already quoted (p. 11), has traced a great number of miracles ascribed to various saints, which are nothing but imitations of this kind. This sacrilegious plagiarism is not confined to the middle ages, but has been practised in modern times, as is evident from the two following miracles ascribed to the celebrated Jesuit saint, Francis Xavier, who died in 1552.

It is said that during his residence in j.a.pan a woman of his acquaintance lost her daughter, after having sought in vain during her illness for St Francis, who was absent on some journey. At his return the bereaved mother fell at his feet, and said, weeping, like Martha to our Saviour, ”Lord, if thou hadst been here, my daughter had not died,”-(John xi. 21.) The saint, moved by the entreaties of the mother, ordered her to open the grave of her daughter, and restored her to life. Another time the same saint said to a father whose daughter had died, in the same manner as Jesus Christ said to the centurion whose servant was sick, ”Go thy way; thy daughter is healed.”(73)

Had these miracles been performed in our part of the world, they would have converted crowds of Protestants, and thus greatly advanced the princ.i.p.al object of the order to which St Francis Xavier belonged; but the air of Europe seems to have been unfavourable for such wonderful experiments, since the good saint was obliged to betake himself to j.a.pan in order successfully to perform them.

It is true that the legend writers make no attempt at concealing these imitations, but, on the contrary, insist upon the likeness of the miracles performed by their saint to those of our Saviour, as a proof of the high degree of sanct.i.ty attained by the former. No saint, however, of the Roman Catholic or Graeco-Russian calendar had so many miracles ascribed to him, particularly of the kind mentioned above, as St Francis of a.s.sisi, the celebrated founder of the mendicant monks, and who, considering the immense influence which his disciples have exercised on the Catholic world, was perhaps one of the most extraordinary characters which the middle ages produced.

It has been frequently observed, that genius is akin to madness, and that the part.i.tion by which the two are separated is so thin that it occasionally becomes quite imperceptible. Such a condition of the human mind has perhaps never been exemplified in a more striking manner than by the life of this famous saint, which presents a strange mixture of the n.o.blest acts of charity and self-devotion, the wildest freaks of a madman, and of genial conceptions worthy of the most eminent statesman and philosopher. The best proof of his genius is the great influence which the order inst.i.tuted by him has exercised during several centuries in many countries, and which even now has not yet lost its vitality. It must also be admitted, that neither St Francis nor his disciples can be charged with any of those atrocities by which the life of his contemporary St Dominic, of b.l.o.o.d.y memory, the founder of the inquisition, and the preacher of the crusade against the Albigenses, as well as the annals of his order, are stained. Neither can it be denied that Francis, as well as his followers, have on many occasions mitigated the barbarity of their age. His immense popularity is, however, as I think, chiefly due to the circ.u.mstance that his order, princ.i.p.ally destined to act upon the lower cla.s.ses, was recruited from the most numerous and most ignorant part of the population; and is it necessary to observe that the less men are educated, the more they are p.r.o.ne to credulity and exaggeration? Much learning was not required for the admission to this democratic order, and its ranks were increased by the creation of a cla.s.s whose members remained in the world, binding themselves only to the observation of some devotional practices and moral precepts. All this contributed to spread the order of St Francis, to which both s.e.xes are admitted, with a marvellous rapidity over many countries; at the same time its members were extolling the virtues and supposed miracles of their founder in the most exaggerated and often ludicrous manner, of which the following anecdote may serve as a specimen:-A Franciscan monk, who was one day preaching about the merits of the founder of his order, began his sermon in the following manner: ”Where shall I place the great St Francis? Amongst the saints? This is not enough for his merits. Amongst the angels? no, 'tis not enough. Amongst the archangels? 'tis not enough. Amongst the seraphims? 'tis not enough.

Amongst the cherubims? 'tis not enough.” He was, however, on a sudden released, by one of his hearers, from his perplexity about a proper location for his saint, who, rising from his seat, said, ”Reverend father, as I see that you cannot find for St Francis a proper place in heaven, I shall give up to him mine on this bench;” which having said, he left the church.

The story does not say whether this good monk was satisfied with the place so unexpectedly offered to his saint, or where he would have stopped without this timely interruption; but we know, from many other cases, that St Francis was compared by his disciples to our Saviour. Thus, in a work published by the Father Bartholomeus of Pisa, and ent.i.tled ”The Golden Book of the Conformities of the Life of St Francis with that of Jesus Christ,”(74) the author maintains that the birth of St Francis was announced by prophets; that he had twelve disciples, one of whom, called John Capella, was rejected by him, like Judas Iscariot by our Lord; that he had been tempted by the devil, but without success; that he was transfigured; that he had suffered the same pa.s.sion as our Saviour, though he never was subject to any persecution or ill-usage, but died quietly, in 1218, amidst his devoted admirers. Other writers pushed even farther the blasphemous comparison, boasting that St Francis had performed many more miracles than our Lord, because Christ changed water into wine but once, whilst St Francis did it thrice; and that instead of the few miraculous cures mentioned in the Gospels, St Francis and his disciples had opened the eyes of more than a thousand blind, cured more than a thousand lame, and restored to life more than a thousand dead.

The greatest miracle, however, that has ever been wrought by St Francis has taken place in our own days, and its authenticity admits of no doubt whatever. It is a life of this famous saint, published by M. Chavin de Malan; and my readers may form an adequate idea of its contents by the following extract from an admirable article in the ”Edinburgh Review” for July 1847:-”Though amongst the most pa.s.sionate and uncompromising devotees of the Church of Rome, M. Chavin de Malan also is in one sense a Protestant. He protests against any exercise of human reason in examining any dogma which that church inculcates, or any fact which she alleges. The most merciless of her cruelties affect him with no indignation, the silliest of her prodigies with no shame, the basest of her superst.i.tions with no contempt. Her veriest dotage is venerable in his eyes. Even the atrocities of Innocent III. seem to this all-extolling eulogist but to augment the triumph and the glories of his reign. If the soul of the confessor of Simon de Montfort, retaining all the pa.s.sions and all the prejudices of that era, should transmigrate into a doctor of the Sorbonne, conversant with the arts and literature of our own times, the result might be the production of such an ecclesiastical history as that of which we have here a specimen,-elaborate in research, glowing in style, vivid in portraiture, utterly reckless and indiscriminate in belief, extravagant up to the very verge of idolatry in applause, and familiar far beyond the verge of indecorum with the most awful topics and objects of the Christian faith.”-(Pp. 1, 2.)(75)

Now, I ask my reader whether the publication of such a work, in the year of grace 1845, at Paris, is not a perfect miracle, and undoubtedly much more genuine than all those which it describes?

We live indeed in an age of wonders, physical as well as moral, and neither of them have escaped the all-powerful influence of the great moving spring of our time, and the princ.i.p.al cause of its rapid advance,-_i.e._, compet.i.tion. England, which is foremost in many, and not behind in any, inventions and discoveries of the day, has maintained her rank, and even perhaps gone ahead, in the production of such moral miracles as that of which I have given a specimen above. And, indeed, the lives of the English saints, published in the years 1844 and 1845, in the capital of this Protestant country, may fearlessly challenge a comparison with the work of M. Chavin de Malan. They are, moreover, ascribed to a clergyman of the Church of England, who, though he has since gone over to Rome, was at that time receiving the wages of the Protestant Establishment of this country as one of its servants and defenders.(76) The few following extracts from this curious work will enable my readers to judge whether I have over-estimated the capabilities of this work for a successful compet.i.tion with its French rival:-

”Many of these (legends) are so well fitted to ill.u.s.trate certain principles which should be borne in mind in considering mediaeval miracles, that they deserve some attention. Not that any thing here said is intended to _prove_ that the stories of miracles, said to be wrought in the middle ages, are true. Men will always believe or disbelieve their truth, in proportion as they are disposed to admit or reject the antecedent probability of the existence of a perpetual church, endowed with unfailing divine powers. And the reason of this is plain. Ecclesiastical miracles presuppose Catholic faith, just as Scripture miracles, and Scripture itself, presuppose the existence of G.o.d. Men, therefore, who disbelieve the faith, will of course disbelieve the story of the miracles, which, if it is not appealed to as a proof of the faith, at least takes it for granted. For instance, the real reason for rejecting the account of the vision which appeared to St Waltheof in the holy Eucharist, must be disbelief of the Catholic doctrine.”(77)

The miracle alluded to above, and which cannot be rejected without disbelief in the Catholic doctrine, is as follows:-”On Christmas-day, when the convent was celebrating the nativity of our Lord, as the friar was elevating the host, in the blessed sacrifice of the ma.s.s, he saw in his hand a child fairer than the children of men, having on his head a crown of gold studded with jewels. His eyes beamed with light, and his face was more radiant than the whitest snow; and so ineffably sweet was his countenance, that the friar kissed the feet and the hands of the heavenly child. After this the divine vision disappeared, and Waltheof found in his hands the consecrated water.”(78)

The whole collection is full of similar stories, some of which are really outrageous; as, for instance, that which it relates about St Augustine, the great apostle of England.

This saint was, during his peregrinations about the country, received with great honours in the north of England; ”but,” says the work in question, ”very different from this are the accounts of his travels in Dorsets.h.i.+re.

While there, we hear of his having come to one village, where he was received with every species of insult. The wretched people, not content with heaping abusive words upon the holy visitors, a.s.sailed them with missiles, in which work, the place being probably a sea-port, the sellers of fish are related to have been peculiarly active. Hands, too, were laid upon the archbishop and his company. Finding all efforts useless, the G.o.dly company shook the dust from their feet, and withdrew. The inhabitants are said to have suffered the penalty of their impieties, even to distant generations. All the children born from that time bore and transmitted the traces of their parents' sins in the shape of a loathsome deformity.”(79)

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