E-text prepared by Donald Lainson, charlie@idirect.com
Editorial note: Project Gutenberg has a later version of this work, which is titled Beacon Lights of History, Volume V: The Middle Ages. See E-Book#10531, https://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/5/3/10531/10531.txt, https://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/5/3/10531/10531.zip https://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/5/3/10531/10531-8.txt https://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/5/3/10531/10531-8.zip https://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/5/3/10531/10531/10531-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/5/3/10531/10531-h.zip The numbering of volumes in the earlier set reflected the order in which the lectures were given. In the later version, volumes were numbered to put the subjects in historical sequence.
Beacon Lights of History
by John Lord, LL.D.
Volume III.
Part I—The Middle Ages.
CONTENTS.
MOHAMMED.
SARACENIC CONQUESTS.
Change of public opinion about Mohammed
Astonishing triumph of Mohammedanism
Old religious systems of Arabia
Polytheism succeeds the doctrines of the Magians
The necessity of reform
Early life of Mohammed
Cadijeh
Mohammed's meditations and dreams
His belief in a personal God
He preaches his new doctrines
The opposition and ridicule of his countrymen
The perseverance of Mohammed amid obstacles
His flight to Medina
The Koran and its doctrines
Change in Mohammed's mode of propagating his doctrines
Polygamy and a sensual paradise
Warlike means to convert Arabia
Mohammed accommodates his doctrines to the habits of his countrymen
Encourages martial fanaticism
Conquest of Arabia
Private life of Mohammed, after his success
Carlyle's apology for Mohammed
The conquest of Syria and Egypt
Conquest of Persia and India
Deductions in view of Saracenic conquests
Necessity of supernatural aid in the conversion of the world
Authorities.
CHARLEMAGNE.
REVIVAL OF WESTERN EMPIRE.
Ancestry and early life of Charlemagne
The Merovingian princes
Condition of Europe on the accession of Charlemagne
Necessity for such a hero to arise
His perils and struggles
Wars with the Saxons
The difficulties of the Saxon conquest
Forced conversion of the Saxons
The Norman pirates
Conquest of the Avares
Unsuccessful war with the Saracens
The Lombard wars
Coronation of Charlemagne at Rome
Imperialism and its influences
The dismemberment of Charlemagne's empire
Foundation of Feudalism
Charlemagne as a legislator
His alliance with the clergy
His administrative abilities
Reasons why he patronized the clergy
Results of Charlemagne's policy
Hallam's splendid eulogy
Authorities
HILDEBRAND.
THE PAPAL EMPIRE.
Wonderful government of the Papacy
Its vitality
Its contradictions
Its fascinations
The crimes of which it is accused
General character of the popes
Gregory VII. the most famous
His personal history
His autocratic ideas
His reign at the right time
Society in Europe in the eleventh century
Character of the clergy
The monks, and the need of reform
Character of the popes before Gregory VII.
Celibacy of the clergy
Alliance of the Papacy and Monasticism
Opposition to the reforms of Hildebrand
Terrible power of excommunication
Simony and its evils
Secularization of the clergy
Separation of spiritual from temporal power
Henry IV. of Germany
Approaching strife between Henry and Hildebrand
Their respective weapons
Henry summoned to Rome
Excommunication of Henry
Henry deserted and disarmed
Compelled to yield to Hildebrand
His great mistake
Renewed contest
Humiliation of the Pope
Moral effects of the contest
Speculations about the Papal power
Authorities
SAINT BERNARD.
MONASTIC INSTITUTIONS
Antiquity of Monastic life
Causes which led to it
Oriental asceticism
Religious contemplation
Insoluble questions
Self-expiations
Basil the founder of Monasticism
His interesting history
Gregory Nazianzen
Vows of the monks
Their antagonism to prevailing evils
Vow of Poverty opposed to money-making
That of Chastity a protest against prevailing impurity
Origin of celibacy
Its subsequent corruption
Necessity of the vow of Obedience
Benedict and the Monastery of Monte Casino
His rules generally adopted
Lofty and useful life of the early monks
Growth and wealth of Monastic institutions
Magnificence of Mediaeval convents
Privileges of the monks
Luxury of the Benedictines
Relaxation of discipline
Degeneracy of the monks
Compared with secular clergy
Benefits which Monasticism conferred
Learning of the monks
Their common life
Revival of Learning
Rise of Scholasticism
Saint Bernard
His early piety and great attainments.
His vast moral influence
His reforms and labors
Rise of Dominicans and Franciscans.
Zeal of the mendicant friars
General benefits of Monastic institutions
Authorities
SAINT ANSELM.
MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY.
Birth and early life of Anselm
The Abbey of Bee
Scholarly life of Anselm
Visits of Anselm to England
Compared with Becket
Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury
Privileges of the Archbishop
Unwillingness of Anselm to be elevated
Lanfranc succeeded by Anselm
Quarrel between Anselm and William Rufus
Despotic character of William
Disputed claims of Popes Urban and Clement
Council of Rockingham
Royal efforts to depose Anselm
Firmness and heroism of Anselm
Duplicity of the king
His intrigues with the Pope
Pretended reconciliation with Anselm
Appeals to Rome
Inordinate claims of the Pope
Allegiance of Anselm to the Pope
Anselm at Rome
Death of William and Accession of Henry I.
Royal encroachments
Henry quarrels with Anselm
Results of the quarrel
Anselm as a theologian
Theology of the Middle Ages
Monks become philosophers
Gotschalk and predestination
John Scotus Erigena
Revived spirit of inquiry
Services of Anselm to theology
He brings philosophy to support theology
Combats Nominalism
His philosophical deductions
His devout Christian spirit
Authorities
THOMAS AQUINAS.
THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY.
Peter Abelard
Gives a new impulse to philosophy
Rationalistic tendency of his teachings
The hatreds he created
Peter Lombard
His "Book of Sentences"
Introduction of the writings of Aristotle into Europe
University of Paris
Character of the students
Their various studies
Aristotle's logic used
The method of the Schoolmen
The Dominicans and Franciscans
Innocent III.
Thomas Aquinas
His early life and studies
Albertus Magnus
Aquinas's first great work
Made Doctor of Theology
His "Summa Theologica"
Its vast learning
Parallel between Aquinas and Plato
Parallel between Plato and Aristotle
Influence of Scholasticism
Waste of intellectual life
Scholasticism attractive to the Middle Ages
To be admired like a cathedral
Authorities
THOMAS BECKET.
PRELATICAL POWER.
Becket a puzzle to historians
His early history
His gradual elevation
Friendship with Henry II.
Becket made Chancellor
Elevated to the See of Canterbury
Dignity of an archbishop of Canterbury
Lanfranc
Anselm
Theobald
Becket in contrast
His ascetic habits as priest
His high-church principles
Upholds the spiritual courts
Defends the privileges of his order
Conflict with the king
Constitutions of Clarendon
Persecution of Becket
He yields at first to the king
His repentance
Defection of the bishops
Becket escapes to the Continent
Supported by Louis VII. of France
Insincerity of the Pope
Becket at Pontigny in exile
His indignant rebuke of the Pope
Who excommunicates the Archbishop of York
Henry obliged to compromise
Hollow reconciliation with Becket
Return of Becket to Canterbury
His triumphal procession
Annoyance of Henry
Assassination of Becket
Consequences of the murder
Authorities
THE FEUDAL SYSTEM.
Anarchies of the Merovingian period
Society on the dissolution of Charlemagne's empire
Allodial tenure
Origin of Feudalism
Dependence and protection the principles of Feudalism
Peasants and their masters
The sentiment of loyalty
Contentment of the peasantry
Evils that cannot be redressed
Submission to them a necessity
Division of Charlemagne's empire
Life of the nobles
Pleasures and habits of feudal barons
Aristocratic character of Feudalism
Slavery of the people
Indirect blessings of Feudalism
Slavery not an unmixed evil
Influence of chivalry
Devotion to woman
The lady of the baronial castle
Reasons why women were worshipped
Dignity of the baronial home
The Christian woman contrasted with the pagan
Glory and beauty of Chivalry
Authorities
THE CRUSADES.
The Crusades the great external event of the Middle Ages
A semi-religious and semi-military movement
What gives interest to wars?
Wars the exponents of prevailing ideas
The overruling of all wars
The majesty of Providence seen in war
Origin of the Crusades
Pilgrimages to Jerusalem
Miseries and insults of the pilgrims
Intense hatred of Mohammedanism
Peter of Amiens
Council of Clermont
The First Crusade
Its miseries and mistakes
The Second Crusade
The Third Crusade
The Fourth, Children's, Fifth, and Sixth Crusades
The Seventh Crusade
All alike unsuccessful, and wasteful of life and energies
Peculiarities and immense mistakes of the Crusaders
The moral evils of the Crusades
Ultimate results of the Crusades
Barrier made against Mohammedan conquests
Political necessity of the Crusades
Their effect in weakening the Feudal system
Effect of the Crusades on the growth of cities
On commerce and art and literature
They scatter the germs of a new civilization
They centralize power
They ultimately elevate the European races
Authorities
WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM.
GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE.
Roman architecture
First form of a Christian church
The change to the Romanesque
Its peculiarities
Its connection with Monasticism
Gloomy aspect of the churches of the tenth and eleventh centuries
Effect of the Crusades on church architecture
Church architecture becomes cheerful
The Gothic churches of France and Germany
The English Mediaeval churches
Glories of the pointed arch
Effect of the Renaissance on architecture
Mongrel style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Revival of the pure gothic
Churches should be adapted to their uses
Incongruity of Protestantism with ritualistic architecture
Protestantism demands a church for preaching
Gothic vaults unfavorable to oratory
Authorities
JOHN WYCLIF.
DAWN OF THE REFORMATION.
Harmony of Protestant and Mediaeval creeds
The Reformation a moral movement
The evils of Papal institutions
The evils of monastic life
Quarrels and dissoluteness of monks
Birth of Wyclif
His scholastic attainments and honors
His political influence
The powers who have ruled the world
Wyclif sent on a mission to Bruges
Protection of John of Gaunt
Wyclif summoned to an ecclesiastical council
His defenders and foes
Triumph of Wyclif
He openly denounces the Pope
His translation of the Bible
Opposition to it by the higher clergy
Hostility of Roman Catholicism to the right of private judgment
Hostility to the Bible in vernacular tongues
Spread of the Bible in English
Wyclif as a doctrinal reformer
He attacks Transubstantiation
Deserted by the Duke of Lancaster
But dies peaceably in his parish
Wyclif contrasted with Luther
His great services to the church
Reasons why he escaped martyrdom
Authorities
MOHAMMED
A. D. 570-632.
SARACENIC CONQUESTS
The most extraordinary man who arose after the fall of the Roman Empire was doubtless Mohammed;* and his posthumous influence has been greater than that of any man since Christianity was declared, if we take into account the number of those who have received his doctrines. Even Christianity never had so rapid a spread. More than a sixth part of the human race are the professed followers of the Arabian prophet.
* Spelled also Mahomet, Mahommed; but I prefer Mohammed.
In regard to Mohammed himself, a great change has taken place in the opinions of critics within fifty years. It was the fashion half a century ago to speak of this man as a hypocrite, an impostor, even as Antichrist. Now he is generally regarded as a reformer; that is, as a man who introduced into Arabia a religion and a morality superior to what previously existed, and he is regarded as an impostor only so far as he was visionary. Few critics doubt his sincerity. He was no hypocrite, since he himself believed in his mission; and his mission was benevolent,—to turn his countrymen from a gross polytheism to the worship of one God. Although his religion cannot compare with Christianity in purity and loftiness, yet it enforced a higher morality than the old Arabian religions, and assimilated to Christianity in many important respects. The chief fault we have to find in Mohammed was, the propagation of his doctrines by the sword, and the use of wicked means to bring about a good end. The truths he declared have had an immense influence on Asiatic nations, and these have given vitality to his system, if we accept the position that truth alone has vitality.
One remarkable fact stands out for the world to ponder,—that, for more than fourteen hundred years, one hundred and eighty millions (more than a sixth part of the human race) have adopted and cherished the religion of Mohammed; that Christianity never had so astonishing a triumph; and that even the adherents of Christianity, in many countries, have not manifested the zeal of the Mohammedans in most of the countries where it has been acknowledged. Now these startling facts can be explained only on the ground that Mohammedanism has great vital religious and moral truths underlying its system which appeal to the consciousness of mankind, or else that these truths are so blended with dangerous errors which appeal to depraved passions and interests, that the religion spread in consequence of these errors rather than of the truth itself.
The question to be considered, then, is whether Mohammedanism spread in consequence of its truths or in consequence of its errors.
In order to appreciate the influence of the Arabian prophet, we are first led into the inquiry whether his religion was really an improvement on the old systems which previously prevailed in Arabia. If it was, he must be regarded as a benefactor and reformer, even if we admit the glaring evils of his system, when measured by the purer religion of the Cross. And it then simply becomes a question whether it is better to have a prevalent corrupted system of religion containing many important truths, or a system of downright paganism with few truths at all.
In examining the religious systems of Arabia in the age preceding the advent of the Prophet, it would seem that the most prominent of them were the old doctrines of the Magians and Sabaeans, blended with a gross idolatry and a senseless polytheism. Whatever may have been the faith of the ancient Sabaean sages, who noted the aspects of the stars, and supposed they were inhabited by angels placed there by Almighty power to supervise and govern the universe, yet history seems to record that this ancient faith was practically subverted, and that the stars, where were supposed to dwell deities to whom prayers were made, became themselves objects of worship, and even graven images were made in honor of them. Among the Arabs each tribe worshipped a particular star, and set up its particular idol, so that a degrading polytheism was the religion of the land. The object of greatest veneration was the celebrated Black Stone, at Mecca, fabled to have fallen from heaven at the same time with Adam. Over this stone was built the Kaabah, a small oblong stone building, around which has been since built the great mosque. It was ornamented with three hundred and sixty idols. The guardianship of this pagan temple was intrusted to the most ancient and honorable families of Mecca, and to it resorted innumerable pilgrims bringing precious offerings. It was like the shrine of Delphi, as a source of profit to its fortunate guardians.
Thus before Mohammed appeared polytheism was the prevalent religion of Arabia,—a degradation even from the ancient Sabaean faith. It is true there were also other religions. There were many Jews at Medina; and there was also a corrupted form of Christianity in many places, split up into hostile and wrangling sects, with but little of the spirit of the divine Founder, with innumerable errors and superstitions, so that in no part of the world was Christianity so feeble a light. But the great body of the people were pagans. A marked reform was imperatively needed to restore the belief in the unity of God and set up a higher standard of morality.
It is claimed that Mohammed brought such a reform. He was born in the year 570, of the family of Hashem and the tribe of Koreish, to whom was intrusted the keeping of the Black Stone. He therefore belonged to the highest Arabian aristocracy. Early left an orphan and in poverty, he was reared in the family of one of his uncles, under all the influences of idolatry. This uncle was a merchant, and the youth made long journeys with him to distant fairs, especially in Syria, where he probably became acquainted with the Holy Scriptures, especially with the Old Testament. In his twenty- fifth year he entered the service of Cadijeh, a very wealthy widow, who sent to the fairs and towns great caravans, which Mohammed accompanied in some humble capacity,—according to the tradition as camel-driver. But his personal beauty, which was remarkable, and probably also his intelligence and spirit, won the heart of this powerful mistress, and she became his wife.
He was now second to none in the capital of Arabia, and great thoughts began to fill his soul. His wife perceived his greatness, and, like Josephine and the wife of Disraeli, forwarded the fortunes of her husband, for he became rich as well as intellectual and noble, and thus had time and leisure to accomplish more easily his work. From twenty-five to forty he led chiefly a contemplative life, spending months together in a cave, absorbed in his grand reflections,—at intervals issuing from his retreat, visiting the marts of commerce, and gaining knowledge from learned men. It is seldom that very great men lead either a life of perpetual contemplation or of perpetual activity. Without occasional rest, and leisure to mature knowledge, no man can arm himself with the weapons of the gods. To be truly great, a man must blend a life of activity with a life of study,—like Moses, who matured the knowledge he had gained in Egypt amid the deserts of Midian.
With all great men some leading idea rules the ordinary life. The idea which took possession of the mind of Mohammed was the degrading polytheism of his countrymen, the multitude of their idols, the grossness of their worship, and the degrading morals which usually accompany a false theology. He set himself to work to produce a reform, but amid overwhelming obstacles. He talked with his uncles, and they laughed at him. They would not even admit the necessity of a reform. Only Cadijeh listened to him and encouraged him and believed in him. And Mohammed was ever grateful for this mark of confidence, and cherished the memory of his wife in his subsequent apostasy,—if it be true that he fell, like Solomon. Long afterwards, when she was dead, Ayesha, his young and favorite wife, thus addressed him: "Am I not better than Cadijeh? Do you not love me better than you did her? She was a widow, old and ugly." "No, by Allah!" replied the Prophet; "she believed in me when no one else did. In the whole world I had but one friend, and she was that friend." No woman ever retained the affections of a husband superior to herself, unless she had the spirit of Cadijeh,—unless she proved herself his friend, and believed in him. How miserable the life of Jane Carlyle would have been had she not been proud of her husband! One reason why there is frequent unhappiness in married life is because there is no mutual appreciation. How often have we seen a noble, lofty, earnest man fettered and chained by a frivolous woman who could not be made to see the dignity and importance of the labors which gave to her husband all his real power! Not so with the woman who assisted Mohammed. Without her sympathy and faith he probably would have failed. He told her, and her alone, his dreams, his ecstasies, his visions; how that God at different times had sent prophets and teachers to reveal new truths, by whom religion had been restored; how this one God, who created the heavens and the earth, had never left Himself without witnesses of His truth in the most degenerate times; how that the universal recognition of this sovereign Power and Providence was necessary to the salvation of society. He had learned much from the study of the Talmud and the Jewish Scriptures; he had reflected deeply in his isolated cave; he knew that there was but one supreme God, and that there could be no elevated morality without the sense of personal responsibility to Him; that without the fear of this one God there could be neither wisdom nor virtue.
Hence his soul burned to tell his countrymen his earnest belief in a supreme and personal God, to whom alone prayers should be made, and who alone could rescue by His almighty power. He pondered day and night on this single and simple truth. His perpetual meditations and ascetic habits induced dreams and ecstasies, such as marked primitive monks, and Loyala in his Manresan cave. He became a visionary man, but most intensely earnest, for his convictions were overwhelming. He fancied himself the ambassador of this God, as the ancient Jewish prophets were; that he was even greater than they, his mission being to remove idolatry,—to his mind the greatest evil under the sun, since it was the root of all vices and follies. Idolatry is either a defiance or a forgetfulness of God,—high treason to the majesty of Heaven, entailing the direst calamities.
At last, one day, in his fortieth year, after he had been shut up a whole month in solitude, so that his soul was filled with ecstasy and enthusiasm, he declared to Cadijeh that the night before, while wrapped in his mantle, absorbed in reverie, a form of divine beauty, in a flood of light, appeared to him, and, in the name of the Almighty who created the heavens and the earth, thus spake: "O, Mohammed! of a truth thou art the Prophet of God, and I am his angel Gabriel." "This," says Carlyle, "is the soul of Islam. This is what Mohammed felt and now declared to be of infinite moment, that idols and formulas were nothing; that the jargon of argumentative Greek sects, the vague traditions of Jews, the stupid routine of Arab idolatry were a mockery and a delusion; that there is but one God; that we must let idols alone and look to Him. He alone is reality; He made us and sustains us. Our whole strength lies in submission to Him. The thing He sends us, be it death even, is good, is the best. We resign ourselves to Him."
Such were the truths which Mohammed, with preternatural earnestness, now declared,—doctrines which would revolutionize Arabia. And why not? They are the same substantially which Moses declared, to those sensual and degraded slaves whom he led out of Egypt,—yea, the doctrines of David and of Job. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." What a grand and all-important truth it is to impress upon people sunk in forgetfulness and sensuality and pleasure-seeking and idle schemes of vanity and ambition, that there is a supreme Intelligence who overrules, and whose laws cannot be violated with impunity; from whom no one can escape, even though he "take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea." This is the one truth that Moses sought to plant in the minds of the Jews,—a truth always forgotten when there is slavery to epicurean pleasures or a false philosophy.
Now I maintain that Mohammed, in seeking to impress his degenerate countrymen with the idea of the one supreme God, amid a most degrading and almost universal polytheism, was a great reformer. In preaching this he was neither fanatic nor hypocrite; he was a very great man, and thus far a good man. He does not make an original revelation; he reproduces an old truth,—as old as the patriarchs, as old as Job, as old as the primitive religions,—but an exceedingly important one, lost sight of by his countrymen, gradually lost sight of by all peoples when divine grace is withheld; indeed practically by people in Christian lands in times of great degeneracy. "The fool has said in his heart there is no God;" or, Let there be no God, that we may eat and drink before we die. Epicureanism, in its pleasures or in its speculations, is virtually atheism. It was so in Greece. It is so with us.
Mohammed was now at the mature age of forty, in the fulness of his powers, in the prime of his life; and he began to preach everywhere that there is but one God. Few, however, believed in him. Why not acknowledge such a fundamental truth, appealing to the intellect as well as the moral sense? But to confess there is a supreme God, who rewards and punishes, and to whom all are responsible both for words and actions, is to imply a confession of sinfulness and the justice of retribution. Those degraded Arabians would not receive willingly such a truth as this, even as the Israelites ever sought to banish it from their hearts and minds, in spite of their deliverance from slavery. The uncles and friends of Mohammed treated his mission with scorn and derision. Nor do I read that the common people heard him gladly, as they listened to the teachings of Christ. Zealously he labored for three years with all classes; and yet in three years of exalted labor, with all his eloquence and fervor and sincerity, he converted only about thirteen persons, one of whom was his slave. Think of such a man declaring such a truth, and only gaining thirteen followers in three years! How sickened must have been his enthusiastic soul! His worldly relatives urged him to silence. Why attack idols; why quarrel with his own interests; why destroy his popularity? Then exclaimed that great hero: "If the sun stood on my right hand, and the moon on my left, ordering me to hold my peace, I would still declare there is but one God,"—a speech rivalled only by Luther at the Diet of Worms. Why urge a great man to be silent on the very thing which makes him great? He cannot be silent. His truth—from which he cannot be separated—is greater than life or death, or principalities or powers.
Buffeted and ridiculed, still Mohammed persevered. He used at first only moral means. He appealed only to the minds and hearts of the people, encouraged by his few believers and sustained by the fancied voice of that angel who appeared to him in his retreat. But his earnest voice was drowned by discordant noises. He was regarded as a lunatic, a demented man, because he professed to believe in a personal God. The angry mob covered his clothes with dust and ashes. They demanded miracles. But at this time he had only truths to declare,—those saving truths which are perpetual miracles. At last hostilities began. He was threatened and he was persecuted. They laid plots to take his life. He sought shelter in the castle of his uncle, Abu Taleh; but he died. Then Mohammed's wife Cadijeh died. The priests of an idolatrous religion became furious. He had laid his hands on their idols. He was regarded as a disorganizer, an innovator, a most dangerous man. His fortunes became darker and darker; he was hated, persecuted, and alone.
Thus thirteen years passed away in reproach, in persecution, in fear. At last forty picked men swore to assassinate him. Should he remain at Mecca and die, before his mission was accomplished, or should he fly? He concluded to fly to Medina, where there were Jews, and some nominal converts to Christianity,—a new ground. This was in the year 622, and the flight is called the Hegira,— from which the East dates its era, in the fifty-third year of the Prophet's life. In this city he was cordially welcomed, and he soon found himself surrounded with enthusiastic followers. He built a mosque, and openly performed the rites of the new religion.
At this era a new phase appears in the Prophet's life and teachings. Thus far, until his flight, it would seem that he propagated his doctrines by moral force alone, and that these doctrines, in the main, were elevated. He had earnestly declared his great idea of the unity of God. He had pronounced the worship of images to be idolatrous. He held idolatry of all kinds in supreme abhorrence. He enjoined charity, justice, and forbearance. He denounced all falsehood and all deception, especially in trade. He declared that humility, benevolence, and self-abnegation were the greatest virtues. He commanded his disciples to return good for evil, to restrain the passions, to bridle the tongue, to be patient under injuries, to be submissive to God. He enjoined prayer, fastings, and meditation as a means of grace. He laid down the necessity of rest on the seventh day. He copied the precepts of the Bible in many of their essential features, and recognized its greatest teachers as inspired prophets.
It was during these thirteen years at Mecca, amid persecution and ridicule, and with few outward successes, that he probably wrote the Koran,—a book without beginning and without end, disjecta membra, regardless of all rules of art, full of repetitions, and yet full of lofty precepts and noble truths of morality evidently borrowed from the Jewish Scriptures,—in which his great ideas stand out with singular eloquence and impressiveness: the unity of God, His divine sovereignty, the necessity of prayer, the soul's immortality, future rewards and punishments. His own private life had been blameless. It was plain and simple. For a whole month he did not light a fire to cook his food. He swept his chamber himself and mended his own clothes. His life was that of an ascetic enthusiast, profoundly impressed with the greatness and dignity of his mission. Thus far his greatest error and fault was in the supposition that he was inspired in the same sense as the ancient Jewish prophets were inspired,—to declare the will and the truth of God. Any man leading such a life of contemplative asceticism and retirement is prone to fall into the belief of special divine illumination. It characterized George Fox, the Anabaptists, Ignatius Loyola, Saint Theresa, and even, to some extent, Oliver Cromwell himself. Mohammed's supreme error was that he was the greatest as well as the last of the prophets. This was fanaticism, but he was probably honest in the belief. His brain was turned by dreams, ecstasies, and ascetic devotions. But with all his visionary ideas of his call, his own morality and his teachings had been lofty, and apparently unsuccessful. Possibly he was discouraged with the small progress he had made,—disgusted, irritated, fierce.
Certainly, soon after he was established at Medina, a great change took place in his mode of propagating his doctrines. His great ideas remained the same, but he adopted a new way to spread them. So that I can almost fancy that some Mephistopheles, some form of Satanic agency, some lying Voice whispered to him in this wise: "O Mohammed! of a truth thou art the Prophet of the living God. Thou hast declared the grandest truths ever uttered in Arabia; but see how powerless they are on the minds and hearts of thy countrymen, with all thy eloquence, sincerity, and fervor. By moral means thou hast effected comparatively nothing. Thou hast preached thirteen years, and only made a few converts. Thy truths are too elevated for a corrupt and wicked generation to accept. Even thine own life is in danger. Thou hast been obliged to fly to these barren rocks and sands. Thou hast failed. Why not pursue a new course, and adapt thy doctrines to men as they are? Thy countrymen are wild, fierce, and warlike: why not incite their martial passions in defence of thy doctrines? They are an earnest people, and, believing in the truths which thou now declarest, they will fight for them and establish them by the sword, not merely in Arabia, but throughout the East. They are a pleasure-loving and imaginative people: why not promise the victors of thy faith a sensual bliss in Paradise? They will not be subverters of your grand truths; they will simply extend them, and jealously, if they have a reward in what their passions crave. In short, use the proper means for a great end. The end justifies the means."
Whether influenced by such specious sophistries, or disheartened by his former method, or corrupted in his own heart, as Solomon was, by his numerous wives,—for Mohammed permitted polygamy and practised it himself,—it is certain that he now was bent on achieving more signal and rapid victories. He resolved to adapt his religion to the depraved hearts of his followers. He would mix up truth with error; he would make truth palatable; he would use the means which secure success. It was success he wanted, and success he thus far had not secured. He was ambitious; he would become a mighty spiritual potentate.
So he allowed polygamy,—the vice of Eastern nations from remote periods; he promised a sensual Paradise to those who should die in defence of his religion; he inflamed the imagination of the Arabians with visions of sensual joys. He painted heaven as a land whose soil was the finest wheaten flour, whose air was fragrant with perfumes, whose streams were of crystal water or milk or wine or honey, flowing over beds of musk and camphor,—a glorious garden of fruits and flowers, whose inhabitants were clothed in garments of gold, sparkling with rubies and diamonds, who reclined in sumptuous palaces and silken pavilions, and on couches of voluptuous ease, and who were served with viands which could be eaten without satiety, and liquors which could be drunk without inebriation; yea, where the blissful warrior for the faith should enjoy an unending youth, and where he would be attended by houris, with black and loving eyes, free from all defects, resplendent in beauty and grace, and rejoicing in perpetual charms.
Such were the views, it is maintained, with which he inflamed the faithful. And, more, he encouraged them to take up arms, and penetrate, as warlike missionaries, to the utmost bounds of the habitable world, in order to convert men to the faith of the one God, whose Prophet he claimed to be. Moreover, he made new and extraordinary "revelations,"—that he had ascended into the seventh heaven and held converse with Gabriel; and he now added to his creed that old lie of Eastern theogonies, that base element of all false religions,—that man can propitiate the Deity by works of supererogation; that man can purchase by ascetic labors and sacrifices his future salvation. This falsity enters largely into Mohammedanism. I need not add how discrepant it is with the cheerful teachings of the apostles, especially to the poor, as seen in the deeds of penance, prayers in the corners of the streets, the ablutions, the fasts, and the pilgrimages to which the faithful are exhorted. And moreover he accommodated his fasts and feasts and holidays and pilgrimages to the old customs of the people, thereby teaching lessons of worldly wisdom. Astarte, the old object of Sabaean idolatry, was particularly worshipped on a Friday; and this day was made the Mohammedan Sabbath. Again, the month Rhamadan, from time immemorial, had been set apart for fastings; this month the Prophet adopted, declaring that in it he had received his first revelations. Pilgrimages to the Black Stone were favorite forms of penance; and this was perpetuated in the pilgrimages to Mecca.
Thus it would appear that Mohammed, after his flight, accommodated his doctrines to the customs and tastes of his countrymen,— blending with the sublime truths he declared subtile and pernicious errors. The early missionaries did the same thing in China and Japan, thinking more of the number of their converts than of the truth itself. Expediency—the utterly fallacious principle of the end justifying the means—is seen in almost everything in this world which blazes with success. It is seen in politics, in philanthropy, in ecclesiasticism, and in education. So the earlier missionaries, disregarding their vows, made the cause to which they were consecrated subservient to their personal gain. What do you think of a man, wearing the livery of a gospel minister, devoting all his energies to money-making, versed in the ways of the "heathen Chinee,"—"ways that are dark, and tricks that are vain,"— all to succeed better in worldly thrift, using all means for that single end,—is he not a traitor to his God, his Church, and his fellowmen? "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne." What would you think of a college which lowered the standard of education in order to draw students, or selected, as the guardians of its higher interests, those men who would contribute the most money to its funds?
This spirit of expediency Mohammed entertained and utilized, in order to gain success. Most of what is false in Mohammedanism is based on expediency. The end was not lost sight of,—the conversion of his countrymen to the belief in the unity and sovereignty of God, but it was sought by means which would make them fanatics or pharisees. He was not such a miserable creature as one who seeks to make money by trading on the religious capital of the community; but he did adapt his religion to the passions and habits of the people in order that they might more readily be led to accept it. He listened to that same wicked Voice which afterwards appeared in the guise of an angel of light to mediaeval ritualists. And it is thus that Satan has contrived to pervert the best institutions of the world. The moment good men look to outward and superficial triumphs, to the disregard of inward purity, that moment do they accept the seductive lie of all ages,— "The end justifies the means."
But the worst thing which the Prophet did in order to gain his end was to make use of the sword. For thirteen years he appealed to conscience. Now he makes it an inducement for men to fight for his great idea. "Different prophets," said he, in his memorable manifesto, "have been sent by God to illustrate His different attributes: Moses, His providence; Solomon, His wisdom; Christ, His righteousness; but I, the last of the prophets, am sent with the sword. Let those who promulgate my faith enter into no arguments or discussions, but slay all who refuse obedience. Whoever fights for the true faith, whether he fall or conquer, will assuredly receive a glorious reward, for the sword is the key of heaven. All who draw it in defence of the faith shall receive temporal and future blessings. Every drop of their blood, every peril and hardship, will be registered on high as more meritorious than fasting or prayer. If they fall in battle their sins will be washed away, and they shall be transported into Paradise, to revel in eternal pleasures, and in the arms of black-eyed houris." Thus did he stimulate the martial fanaticism of a warlike and heroic people with the promise of future happiness. What a monstrous expediency,—worse than all the combined usurpations of the popes!
And what was the result? I need not point to the successive conquests of the Saracens with such a mighty stimulus. They were loyal to the truth for which they fought. They never afterwards became idolaters; but their religion was built up on the miseries of nations. To propagate the faith of Mohammed they overran the world. Never were conquests more rapid and more terrible.
At first Mohammed's followers in Medina sallied out and attacked the caravans of Arabia, and especially all belonging to Mecca (the city which had rejected him), until all the various tribes acknowledged the religion of the Prophet, for they were easily converted to a faith which flattered their predatory inclinations and promised them future immunities. The first cavalcade which entered Medina with spoils made Mussulmans of all the inhabitants, and gave Mohammed the control of the city. The battle of Moat gave him a triumphal entrance into Mecca. He soon found himself the sovereign of all Arabia; and when he died, at the age of 63, in the eleventh year after his Hegira, or flight from Mecca, he was the most successful founder of a religion the world has known, next to Buddha. A religion appealing to truth alone had made only a few converts in thirteen years; a religion which appealed to the sword had made converts of a great nation in eleven years.
It is difficult to ascertain what the private life of the Prophet was in these years of dazzling success. The authorities differ. Some represent him as sunk in a miserable sensuality which shortened his days. But I think this statement may be doubted. He never lost the veneration of his countrymen,—and no veneration can last for a man steeped in sensuality. Even Solomon lost his prestige and popularity when he became vain and sensual. Those who were nearest to the Prophet reverenced him most profoundly. With his wife Ayesha he lived with great frugality. He was kindly, firm in friendship, faithful and tender in his family, ready to forgive enemies, just in decision. The caliphs who succeeded him, for some time, were men of great simplicity, and sought to imitate his virtues. He was doubtless warlike and fanatical, but conquests such as he and his successors made are incompatible with luxury and effeminacy. He stands arraigned at the bar of eternal justice for perverting truth, for blending it with error, for making use of wicked means to accomplish what he deemed a great end.
I have no patience with Mr. Carlyle, great and venerable as is his authority, for seeming to justify Mohammed in assuming the sword. "I care little for the sword," says this sophistical writer. "I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has or can lay hold on. What is better than itself it cannot put away, but only what is worse. In this great life-duel Nature herself is umpire, and can do no wrong." That is, might makes right; only evil perishes in the conflict of principles; whatever prevails is just. In other words, if Mohammedanism, by any means it may choose to use, proves itself more formidable than other religions, then it ought to prevail. Suppose that the victories of the Saracens had extended over Europe, as well as Asia and Africa,—had not been arrested by Charles Martel,—would Carlyle then have preferred Mohammedanism to the Christianity of degenerate nations? Was Mohammedanism a better religion than the Christianity which existed in Asia Minor and in various parts of the Greek empire in the sixth and seventh centuries? Was it a good thing to convert the church of Saint Sophia into a Saracenic mosque, and the city of the later Christian emperors into the capital of the Turks? Is a united Saracenic empire better than a divided, wrangling Christian empire?
But I will not enter upon that discussion. I confine myself to facts. It is certain that Mohammedanism, by means of the sword, spread with marvellous and unprecedented rapidity. The successors of the Prophet carried their conquests even to India. Neither the Syrians nor the Egyptians could cope with men who felt that the sacrifice of life in battle would secure an eternity of bliss. The armies of the Greek emperor melted away before the generals of the caliph. The Cross waned before the Crescent. The banners of the Moslems floated over the proudest battlements of ancient Roman grandeur.
In the fifth year of the caliph Omar, only seventeen years from the Prophet's flight from Mecca, the conquest of Syria was completed. The Christians were forbidden to build churches, or speak openly of their religion, or sit in the presence of a Mohammedan, or to sell wine, or bear arms, or use the saddle in riding, or have a domestic who had been in the Mohammedan service. The utter prostration of all civil and religious liberty took place in the old scenes of Christian triumph. This was an instance in which persecution proved successful; and because it was successful it is a proof, in the eyes of Carlyle, that the persecuting religion was the better, because it was outwardly the stronger.
The conquest of Egypt rapidly followed that of Syria; and with the fall of Alexandria perished the largest library of the world, the thesaurus of all the intellectual treasures of antiquity.
Then followed the conquest of Persia. A single battle, as in the time of Alexander, decided its fate. The marvel is that the people should have changed their religion; but then, it was Mohammedanism or death. And a still greater marvel it is,—an utter mystery to me,—why that Oriental country should have continued faithful to the new religion. It must have had some elements of vitality almost worth fighting for, and which we do not comprehend.
Nor did Saracenic conquests end until the Arabs of the desert had penetrated southward into India farther than had Alexander the Great, and westward until they had subdued the northern kingdoms of Africa, and carried their arms to the Pillars of Hercules; yea, to the cities of the Goths in Spain, and were only finally arrested in Europe by the heroism of Charles Martel.
Such were the rapid conquests of the Saracens—and permanent conquests also—in Asia and Africa, under the stimulus of religious fanaticism, until they had reduced thirty-six thousand cities, towns, and castles, and built fourteen thousand mosques.
Now what are the deductions to be logically drawn from these stupendous victories and the consolidation of the various religions of the conquered into the creed of Mohammed,—not repudiated when the pressure was removed, but apparently cherished by one hundred and eighty millions of people for more than a thousand years?
We must take the ground that the religion of Mohammed has marvellous and powerful truths, which we have overlooked and do not understand, which appeal to the heart and conscience, and excite a great enthusiasm,—so great as to stimulate successive generations with an almost unexampled ardor, and to defend which they were ready to die; a religion which has bound diverse nations together for nearly fourteen hundred years. If so, it cannot be abused, or ridiculed, or sneered at, any more than can the dominion of the popes in the Middle Ages, but remains august in impressive mystery to us, and even to future ages.
But if, in comparison with Christianity, it is a corrupt and false religion, as many assume, then what deductions must we draw from its amazing triumphs? For the fact stares us in the face that it is rooted deeply in a large part of the Eastern world, or, at least, has prevailed victorious for more than a thousand years.
First, we must conclude that the external triumph of a religion, especially among ignorant or wicked people, is not so much owing to the purity and loftiness of its truths, as to its harmony with prevailing errors and corruptions. When Mohammed preached his sublimest doctrines, and appealed to reason and conscience, he converted about a score of people in thirteen years. When he invoked demoralizing passions, he converted all Arabia in eleven years. And does not this startling conclusion seem to be confirmed by the whole history of mankind? How slow the progress of Christianity for two hundred years, except when assisted by direct supernatural influences! How rapid its triumphs when it became adapted to the rude barbaric mind, or to the degenerate people of the Empire! How popular and prevalent and widespread are those religions which we are accustomed to regard as most corrupt! Buddhism and Brahmanism have had more adherents than even Mohammedanism. How difficult it was for Moses and the prophets to keep the Jews from idolatry! What caused the rapid eclipse of faith in the antediluvian world? Why could not Noah establish and perpetuate his doctrines among his own descendants before he was dead? Why was the Socratic philosophy unpopular? Why were the Epicureans so fashionable? Why was Christianity itself most eagerly embraced when its light was obscured by fables and superstitions? Why did the Roman Empire perish, with all the aid of a magnificent civilization; why did this civilization itself retrograde; why did its art and literature decline? Why did the grand triumphs of Protestantism stop in half a century after Luther delivered his message? What made the mediaeval popes so powerful? What gave such ascendency to the Jesuits? Why is the simple faith of the primitive Christians so obnoxious to the wise, the mighty, and the noble? What makes the most insidious heresies so acceptable to the learned? Why is modern literature, when fashionable and popular, so antichristian in its tone and spirit? Why have not the doctrines of Luther held their own in Germany, and those of Calvin in Geneva, and those of Cranmer in England, and those of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England? Is it because, as men become advanced in learning and culture, they are theologically wiser than Moses and Abraham and Isaiah?
I do not cite the rapid decline of modern civilized society, in a political or social view, in the most favored sections of Christendom; I do not sing dirges over republican institutions; I would not croak Jeremiads over the changes and developments of mankind. I simply speak of the marvellous similarity which the spread and triumph of Mohammedanism seem to bear to the spread and triumph of what is corrupt and wicked in all institutions and religions since the fall of man. Everywhere it is the frivolous, the corrupt, the false, which seem to be most prevalent and most popular. Do men love truth, or readily accept it, when it conflicts with passions and interests? Is any truth popular which is arrayed against the pride of reason? When has pure moral truth ever been fashionable? When have its advocates not been reviled, slandered, misrepresented, and persecuted, if it has interfered with the domination of prevailing interests? The lower the scale of pleasures the more eagerly are they sought by the great mass of the people, even in Christian communities. You can best make colleges thrive by turning them into schools of technology, with a view of advancing utilitarian and material interests. You cannot make a newspaper flourish unless you fill it with pictures and scandals, or make it a vehicle of advertisements,—which are not frivolous or corrupt, it is true, but which have to do with merely material interests. Your libraries would never be visited, if you took away their trash. Your Sabbath-school books would not be read, unless you made them an insult to the human understanding. Your salons would be deserted, if you entertained your guests with instructive conversation. There would be no fashionable gatherings, if it were not to display dresses and diamonds. Your pulpits would be unoccupied, if you sought the profoundest men to fill them.
Everything, even in Christian communities, shows that vanities and follies and falsehoods are the most sought, and that nothing is more discouraging than appeals to high intelligence or virtue, even in art. This is the uniform history of the race, everywhere and in all ages. Is it darkness or light which the world loves? I never read, and I never heard, of a great man with a great message to deliver, who would not have sunk under disappointment or chagrin but for his faith. Everywhere do you see the fascination of error, so that it almost seems to be as vital as truth itself. When and where have not lies and sophistries and hypocrisies reigned? I appeal to history. I appeal to the observation and experience of every thoughtful and candid mind. You cannot get around this truth. It blazes and it burns like the fires of Sinai. Men left to themselves will more and more retrograde in virtue.
What, then, is the hope of the world? We are driven to this deduction,—that if truth in itself is not all-conquering, the divine assistance, given at times to truth itself, as in the early Church, is the only reason why truth conquers. This divine grace, promised in the Bible, has wrought wonders whenever it has pleased the Almighty to bestow it, and only then. History teaches this as impressively as revelation. Christianity itself, unaided, would probably die out in this world. And hence the grand conclusion is, that it is the mysterious, or, as some call it, the super-natural, spirit of Almighty power which is, after all, the highest hope of this world. This is not discrepant with the oldest traditions and theogonies of the East,—the hidden wisdom of ancient Indian and Persian and Egyptian sages, concealed from the vulgar, but really embraced by the profoundest men, before corruptions perverted even their wisdom. This certainly is the earliest revelation of the Bible. This is the power which Moses recognized, and all the prophets who succeeded him. This is the power which even Mohammed, in the loftiness of his contemplations, more dimly saw, and imperfectly taught to the idolaters around him, and which gives to his system all that was really valuable. Ask not when and where this power shall be most truly felt. It is around us, and above us, and beneath us. It is the mystery and grandeur of the ages. "It is not by might nor by power, but by my spirit," saith the Lord; Man is nothing, his aspirations are nothing, the universe itself is nothing, without the living, permeating force which comes from this supernal Deity we adore, to interfere and save. Without His special agency, giving to His truths vitality, this world would soon become a hopeless and perpetual pandemonium. Take away the necessity of this divine assistance as the one great condition of all progress, as well as the highest boon which mortals seek,—then prayer itself, recognized even by Mohammedans as the loftiest aspiration and expression of a dependent soul, and regarded by prophets and apostles and martyrs as their noblest privilege, becomes a superstition, a puerility, a mockery, and a hopeless dream.
AUTHORITIES.
The Koran; Dean Prideaux's Life of Mohammed; Vie de Mahomet, by the
Comte de Boulainvilliers; Gagnier's Life of Mohammed; Ockley's
History of the Saracens; Gibbon, fiftieth chapter; Hallam's Middle
Ages; Milman's Latin Christianity; Dr. Weil's Mohammed der
Prophet, sein Leben und seine Lehre; Renan, Revue des Deux Mondes,
1851; Bustner's Pilgrimage to El Medina and Mecca; Life of
Mahomet, by Washington Irving; Essai sur l'Histoire des Arabes, par
A. P. Caussin de Perceval; Carlyle's Lectures on Heroes and Hero
Worship; E. A. Freeman's Lectures on the History of the Sararens;
Forster's Mahometanism Unveiled; Maurice on the Religions of the
World; Life and Religion of Mohammed., translated from the Persian,
by Rev. I. L. Merrick.
CHARLEMAGNE.
A. D. 742-814.
REVIVAL OF WESTERN EMPIRE.
The most illustrious monarch of the Middle Ages was doubtless Charlemagne. Certainly he was the first great statesman, hero, and organizer that looms up to view after the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Therefore I present him as one with whom is associated an epoch in civilization. To him we date the first memorable step which Europe took out of the anarchies of the Merovingian age. His dream was to revive the Empire that had fallen, he was the first to labor, with giant strength, to restore what vice and violence had destroyed. He did not succeed in realizing the great ends to which he aspired, but his aspirations were lofty. It was not in the power of any man to civilize semi-barbarians in a single reign; but if he attempted impossibilities he did not live in vain, since he bequeathed some permanent conquests and some great traditions. He left a great legacy to civilization. His life has not dramatic interest like that of Hildebrand, nor poetic interest like the lives of the leaders of the Crusades; but it is very instructive. He was the pride of his own generation, and the boast of succeeding ages, "claimed," says Sismondi, "by the Church as a saint, by the French as the greatest of their kings, by the Germans as their countryman, and by the Italians as their emperor."
His remote ancestors, it is said, were ecclesiastical magnates. His grandfather was Charles Martel, who gained such signal victories over the Mohammedan Saracens; his father was Pepin, who was a renowned conqueror, and who subdued the southern part of France, or Gaul. He did not rise, like Clovis, from the condition of a chieftain of a tribe of barbarians; nor, like the founder of his family, from a mayor of the palace, or minister of the Merovingian kings. His early life was spent amid the turmoils and dangers of camps, and as a young man he was distinguished for precocity of talent, manly beauty, and gigantic physical strength. He was a type of chivalry, before chivalry arose. He was born to greatness, and early succeeded to a great inheritance. At the age of twenty-six, in the year 768, he became the monarch of the greater part of modern France, and of those provinces which border on the Rhine. By unwearied activities this inheritance, greater than that of any of the Merovingian kings, was not only kept together and preserved, but was increased by successive conquests, until no so great an empire has ever been ruled by any one man in Europe, since the fall of the Roman Empire, from his day to ours. Yet greater than the conquests of Charlemagne was the greatness of his character. He preserved simplicity and gentleness amid all the distractions attending his government.
His reign affords a striking contrast to that of all his predecessors of the Merovingian dynasty,—which reigned from the immediate destruction of the Roman Empire. The Merovingian princes, with the exception of Clovis and a few others, were mere barbarians, although converted to a nominal Christianity. Some of them were monsters, and others were idiots. Clotaire burned to death his own son and wife and daughters. Fredegunde armed her assassins with poisoned daggers. "Thirteen sovereigns reigned over the Franks in one hundred and fourteen years, only two of whom attained to man's estate, and not one to the full development of intellectual powers. There was scarcely one who did not live in a state of perpetual intoxication, or who did not rival Sardanapalus in effeminacy, and Commodus in cruelty." As these sovereigns were good churchmen, their iniquities were glossed over by Gregory of Tours. In HIS annals they may pass for saints, but history consigns them to an infamous immortality.
It is difficult to conceive a more dreary and dismal state of society than existed in France, and in fact over all Europe, when Charlemagne began to reign. The Roman Empire was in ruins, except in the East, where the Greek emperors reigned at Constantinople. The western provinces were ruled by independent barbaric kings. There was no central authority, although there was an attempt of the popes to revive it,—a spiritual rather than a temporal power; a theocracy whose foundation was secured by Leo the Great when he established the jus divinum principle,—that he was the successor of Peter, to whom were given the keys of heaven and hell. If there was an interesting feature in the times it was this spiritual authority exercised by the bishops of Rome: the most useful and beneficent considering the evils which prevailed,—the reign of brute force. The barbaric chieftains yielded a partial homage to this spiritual power, and it was some check on their rapacity of violence. It is mournful to think that so little of the ancient civilization remained in the eighth century. Its eclipse was total. The shadows of a dark and long night of superstition and ignorance spread over Europe. Law was silenced by the sword. Justinian's glorious legacy was already forgotten. The old mechanism which had kept society together in the fifth century was worn out, broken, rejected. There was no literature, no philosophy, no poetry, no history, and no art. Even the clergy had become ignorant, superstitious, and idle. Forms had taken the place of faith. No great theologians had arisen since Saint Augustine. The piety of the age hid itself in monasteries; and these monasteries were as funereal as society itself. Men despaired of the world, and retreated from it to sing mournful songs. The architecture of the age expressed the sentiments of the age, and was heavy, gloomy, and monotonous. "The barbarians ruthlessly marched over the ruins of cities and palaces, having no regard for the treasures of the classic world, and unmoved by the lessons of its past experience." Rome itself, repeatedly sacked, was a heap of ruins. No reconstruction had taken place. Gardens and villas were as desolate as the ruined palaces, which were the abodes of owls and spiders. The immortal creations of the chisel were used to prop up old crumbling walls. The costly monuments of senatorial pride were broken to pieces in sport or in caprice, and those structures which had excited the admiration of ages were pulled down that their material might be used in erecting tasteless edifices. Literature shared the general desolation. The valued manuscripts of classical ages were mutilated, erased, or burned. Ignorance finished the destruction which the barbarians began. Ignorance as well as anarchy veiled Europe in darkness. The rust of barbarism became harder and thicker. The last hope of man had fled, and glory was succeeded by shame. Even slavery, the curse of the Roman Empire, was continued by the barbarians; only, brute force was not made subservient to intellect, but intellect to brute force. The descendants of ancient patrician families were in bondage to barbarians. The age was the jubilee of monsters. Assassination was common, and was unavenged by law. Every man was his own avenger of crime, and his bloody weapons were his only law.
Nor were there seen among the barbaric chieftains the virtues of ancient Pagan Rome and Greece, for Christianity was nominal. War was universal; for the barbarians, having no longer the Romans to fight, fought among themselves. There were incessant irruptions of different tribes passing from one country to another, in search of plunder and pillage. There was no security of life or property, and therefore no ambition for acquisition. Men hid themselves in morasses, in forests, on the tops of inaccessible hills, and amid the recesses of valleys, for violence was the rule and not the exception. Even feudalism was not then born, and still less chivalry. We find no elevated sentiments. The only refuge for the miserable was in the Church, and it was governed by men who shrank from the world. A cry of despair went up to heaven among the descendants of the old population. There was no commerce, no travel, no industries, no money, no peace. The chastisement of Almighty Power seems to have been sent on the old races and the new alike. It was a desolation greater than that predicted by Jeremy the prophet. The very end of the world seemed to be at hand. Never in the old seats of civilization was there such a disintegration; never such a combination of evils and miseries. And there appeared to be no remedy: nothing but a long night of horrors and sufferings could be predicted. Gaul, or France, was the scene of turbulence, invasions, and anarchies; of murders, of conflagrations, and of pillage by rival chieftains, who sought to divide its territories among themselves. The people were utterly trodden down. England was the battlefield of Danes, Saxons, and Celts, invaded perpetually, and split up into petty Saxon kingdoms. The roads were infested with robbers, and agriculture was rude. The people lived in cabins, dressed themselves in skins, and fed on the coarsest food. Spain was invaded by Saracens, and the Gothic kingdoms succumbed to these fierce invaders. Italy was portioned out among different tribes, Gothic and Slavonic. But the prevailing races in Europe were Germanic (who had conquered both the Celts and the Romans), the Goths in Spain, the Franks and Burgundians in France, the Lombards in Italy, the Saxons in England.
What a commentary on the imperial government of the Caesars!—that government which, with all its mechanisms and traditions, lasted scarcely four hundred years. Was there ever, in the whole history of the world, so sudden and mournful a change from civilization to barbarism,—and this in spite of art, science, law, and Christianity itself? Were there no conservative forces in that imposing Empire? Why did society constantly decline for four hundred years, with that civilization which was its boast and hope? Oh, ye optimists, who talk so glibly about the natural and necessary progress of humanity, why was the Roman Empire swept away, with all its material glories, to give place to such a state of society as I have just briefly described?
And yet men should arise in due time, after the punishment of five centuries of crime and violence, wretchedness and despair, to reconstruct, not from the old Pagan materials of Greece and Rome, but with the fresh energies of new races, aided and inspired by the truths of the everlasting gospel. The infancy of the new races, sprung however from the same old Aryan stock, passed into vigorous youth when Charlemagne appeared. From him we date the first decided impulse given to the Gothic civilization. He was the morning star of European hopes and aspirations.
Let us now turn to his glorious deeds. What were the services he rendered to Europe and Christian civilization?
It was necessary that a truly great man should arise in the eighth century, if the new forces of civilization were to be organized. To show what he did for the new races, and how he did it, is the historian's duty and task in describing the reign of Charlemagne,— sent, I think, as Moses was, for a providential mission, in the fulness of time, after the slaveries of three hundred years, which prepared the people for labor and industry. Better was it that they should till the lands of allodial proprietors in misery and sorrow, attacked and pillaged, than to wander like savages in forests and morasses in quest of a precarious support, or in great predatory hands, as they did in the fourth and fifth centuries, when they ravaged the provinces of the falling Empire. Nothing was wanted but their consolidation under central rule in order to repel aggressors. And that is what Charlemagne attempted to do.
He soon perceived the greatness of the struggle to which he was destined, and he did not flinch from the contest which has given him immortality. He comprehended the difficulties which surrounded him and the dangers which menaced him.
The great perils which threatened Europe were from unsubdued barbarians, who sought to replunge it into the miseries which the great irruptions had inflicted three hundred years before. He therefore bent all the energies of his mind and all the resources of his kingdom to arrest these fresh waves of inundation. And so long was his contest with Saxons, Avares, Lombards, and other tribes and races that he is chiefly to be contemplated as a man who struggled against barbarism. And he fought them, not for excitement, not for the love of fighting, not for useless conquests, not for military fame, not for aggrandizement, but because a stern necessity was laid upon him to protect his own territories and the institutions he wished to conserve.
Of these barbarians there was one nation peculiarly warlike and ferocious, and which cherished an inextinguishable hatred not merely of the Franks, but of civilization itself. They were obstinately attached to their old superstitions, and had a great repugnance to Christianity. They were barbarians, like the old North American Indians, because they determined to be so; because they loved their forests and the chase, indulged in amusements which were uncertain and dangerous, and sought for nothing beyond their immediate inclinations. They had no territorial divisions, and abhorred cities as prisons of despotism. But, like all the Germanic barbarians, they had interesting traits. They respected women; they were brave and daring; they had a dogged perseverance, and a noble passion for personal independence. But they were nevertheless the enemies of civilization, of a regular and industrious life, and sought plunder and revenge. The Franks and Goths were once like them, before the time of Clovis; but they had made settlements, they tilled the land, and built villages and cities: they were partially civilized, and were converted to Christianity. But these new barbarians could not be won by arts or the ministers of religion. These people were the Saxons, and inhabited those parts of Germany which were bounded by the Rhine, the Oder, the North Sea, and the Thuringian forests. They were fond of the sea, and of daring expeditions for plunder. They were a kindred race to those Saxons who had conquered England, and had the same elements of character. They were poor, and sought to live by piracy and robbery. They were very dangerous enemies, but if brought under subjection to law, and converted to Christianity, might be turned into useful allies, for they had the materials of a noble race.
With such a people on his borders, and every day becoming more formidable, what was Charlemagne's policy? What was he to do? The only thing to the eye of that enlightened statesman was to conquer them, if possible, and add their territories to the Frankish Empire. If left to themselves, they might have conquered the Franks. It was either anvil or hammer. There could be no lasting peace in Europe while these barbarians were left to pursue their depredations. A vigorous warfare was imperative, for, unless subdued, a disadvantageous war would be carried on near the frontiers, until some warrior would arise among them, unite the various chieftains, and lead his followers to successful invasion. Charlemagne knew that the difficult and unpleasant work of subjugation must be done by somebody, and he was unwilling to leave the work to enervated successors. The work was not child's play. It took him the best part of his life to accomplish it, and amid great discouragements. Of his fifty-three expeditions, eighteen were against the Saxons. As soon as he had cut off one head of the monster, another head appeared. How allegorical of human labor is that old fable of the Hydra! Where do man's labors cease? Charlemagne fought not only amid great difficulties, but perpetual irritations. The Saxons cheated him; they broke their promises and their oaths. When beaten, they sued for peace; but the moment his back was turned, they broke out in new insurrections. The fame of Caesar chiefly rests on his eight campaigns in Gaul. But Caesar had the disciplined Legions of Rome to fight with. Charlemagne had no such disciplined troops. Yet he had as many difficulties to surmount as Caesar,—rugged forests to penetrate, rapid rivers to cross, morasses to avoid, and mountains to climb. It is a very difficult thing to subdue even savages who are desperate, determined, and united.
Charlemagne fought the Saxons for thirty-three years. Though he never lost a battle, they still held out. At first he was generous and forgiving, for he was more magnanimous than Caesar; but they could not be won by kindness. He was obliged to change his course, and at last was as summary as Oliver Cromwell in Ireland. He is even accused of cruelties. But war in the hands of masters has no quarter to give, and no tears to shed. It was necessary to conquer the Saxons, and Charlemagne used the requisite means. Sometimes the harshest measures will most speedily effect the end. Did our fathers ever dream of compromise with treacherous and hostile Indians? War has a horrid maxim,—that "nothing is so successful as success." Charlemagne, at last, was successful. The Saxons were so completely subdued at the end of thirty-three years, that they never molested civilized Europe again. They became civilized, like the once invading Celts and Goths; and they even embraced the religion of the conquerors. They became ultimately the best people in Europe,—earnest, honest, and brave. They formed great kingdoms and states, and became new barriers against fresh inundations from the North and East. The Saxons formed the nucleus of the great German Empire (or were incorporated with it) which arose in the Middle Ages, and which to-day is the most powerful in Europe, and the least corrupted by the vices of a luxurious life. The descendants of those Saxons are among the most industrious and useful settlers in the New World.
There was one mistake which Charlemagne made in reference to them. He forced their conversion to a nominal Christianity. He immersed them in the rivers of Saxony, whether they would or no. He would make them Christians in his way. But then, who does not seek to make converts in his way, whether enlightened or not? When have the principles of religious toleration been understood? Did the Puritans understand them, with all their professions? Do we tolerate, in our hearts, those who differ from us? Do not men look daggers, though they dare not use them? If we had the power, would we not seek to produce conformity with our notions, like Queen Elizabeth, or Oliver Cromwell, or Archbishop Laud? There is not perhaps a village in America where a true catholicism reigns. There is not a spot upon the globe where there is not some form of religious persecution. Nor is there any thing more sincere than religious bigotry. And where people have not fundamental principles to fight about, they will fight about technicalities and matters of no account, and all the more bitterly sometimes when the objects of contention are not worth fighting about at all,—as in forms of worship, or baptism. Such is the weakness of human nature. Charlemagne was no exception to the race. But if he wished to make Christians in his way, he was, on the whole, enlightened. He caused the young Saxons, whom he baptized and marked with the sign of the Cross, to be educated. He built monasteries and churches in the conquered territories. He recognized this,—that Christianity, whatever it be, is the mightiest power of the world; and he bore his testimony in behalf of the intellectual dignity of the clergy in comparison with other classes. He encouraged missions as well as schools.
There was another Germanic tribe at that time which he held in great alarm, but which he did not attack, since they were not immediately dangerous. This tribe or race was the Norman, just then beginning their ravages,—pirates in open boats. They had dared to enter a port in Narbonensis Gaul for purposes of plunder. Some took them for Africans, and others for British merchants. Nay, said Charlemagne, they are not merchants, but cruel enemies; and he covered his face with his iron hands and wept like a child. He did not fear these barbarians, but he wept when he foresaw the evil they would do when he was dead. "I weep," said he, "that they should dare almost to land on my shores, in my lifetime." These Normans escaped him. They conquered and they founded kingdoms. But they did not replunge Europe in darkness. A barrier had been made against their inundation. The Saxon conquest was that barrier. Moreover, the Normans were the noblest race of barbarians which then roamed through the forests of Germany, or skirted the shores of Scandinavia. They had grand natural traits of character. They were poetic, brave, and adventurous. They were superior to the Saxons and the Franks. When converted, they were the great allies of the Pope, and early became civilized. To them we trace the noblest development of Gothic architecture. They became great scholars and statesmen. They were more refined by nature than the Saxons, and avoided their gluttonous habits. In after times they composed the flower of European chivalry. It was providential that they were not subdued,—that they became the leading race in Northern Europe. To them we trace the mercantile greatness of England, for they were born sailors. They never lost their natural heroism, or love of power.
The next important conquest of Charlemagne was that of the Avares,— a tribe of the Huns, of Slavonic origin. They are represented as very hideous barbarians, and only thought of plunder. They never sought to reconstruct. There seemed to be no end of their invasions from the time of Attila. They were more formidable for their numbers and destructive ravages than for their military skill. There was a time, however, when they threatened the combined forces of Germany and Rome; but Europe was delivered by the battle of Poictiers,—the bloodiest battle on record,—when they seemed to be annihilated. But they sprang up again, in new invasions, in the ninth century. Had they conquered, civilization would have been crushed out. But Charlemagne was successful against them, and from that time to this they were shut out from western Europe. They would be formidable now, for the Russians are the descendants of these people, were it not for the barrier raised against them by the Germans. The necessities of Europe still require the vast military strength and organization of Germany, not to fight France, but to awe Russia. Napoleon predicted that Europe would become either French or Cossack; but there is little probability of Russian aggressions in Europe, so long as Russia is held in check by Germany.
Charlemagne had now delivered France and Germany from external enemies. He then turned his arms against the Saracens of Spain. This was the great mistake of his life. Yet every one makes mistakes, however great his genius. Alexander made the mistake of pushing his arms into India; and Napoleon made a great blunder in invading Russia. Even Caesar died at the right time for his military fame, for he was on the point of attempting the conquest of Parthia, where, like Crassus, he would probably have perished, or have lost his army. Needless conquests seem to be impossible in the moral government of God, who rules the fate of war. Conquests are only possible when civilization seems to require them. In seeking to invade Spain, Charlemagne warred against a race from whom Europe had nothing more to fear. His grandfather, Charles Martel, had arrested the conquests of the Saracens; and they were quiet in their settlements in Spain, and had made considerable attainments in science and literature. Their schools of medicine and their arts were in advance of the rest of Europe. They were the translators of Aristotle, who reigned in the rising universities during the Middle Ages. As this war was unnecessary, Providence seemed to rebuke Charlemagne. His defeat at Roncesvalles was one of the most memorable events in his military history. Prodigies of valor were wrought by him and his gallant Paladins. The early heroic poetry of the Middle Ages has commemorated his exploits, as well as those of his nephew Roland, to whom some writers have ascribed the origin of Chivalry. But the Frankish forces were signally defeated amid the passes of the Pyrenees; and it was not until after several centuries that the Gothic princes of Spain shook off the yoke of their Saracenic conquerors, and drove them from Europe.
The Lombard wars of Charlemagne are the last to which I allude. These were undertaken in defence of the Church, to rescue his ally the Pope. The Lombards belonged to the great Germanic family, but they were unfriendly to the Pope and to the Church. They stood out against the Empire, which was then the chief hope of Europe and of civilization. They would have reduced the Pope to insignificance and seized his territories, without uniting Italy. So Charlemagne, like his father Pepin, lent his powerful aid to the Roman bishop, and the Lombards were easily subdued. This conquest, although the easiest which he ever made, most flattered his pride. Lombardy was not only joined to his Empire, but he received unparalleled honors from the Pope, being crowned by him Emperor of the West.
It was a proud day when, in the ancient metropolis of the world, and in the fulness of his fame, Pope Leo III. placed the crown of Augustus upon Charlemagne's brow, and gave to him, amid the festivities of Christmas, his apostolic benediction. His dominions now extended from Catalonia to the Bohemian forests, embracing Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and the Spanish main,—the largest empire which any one man has possessed since the fall of the Roman Empire. What more natural than for Charlemagne to feel that he had restored the Western Empire? What more natural than that he should have taken the title, still claimed by the Austrian emperor, in one sense his legitimate successor,—Kaiser, or Caesar? In the possession of such enormous power, he naturally dreamed of establishing a new universal military monarchy like that of the Romans,—as Charles V. dreamed, and Napoleon after him. But this is a dream that Providence has rebuked among all successive conquerors. There may have been need of the universal monarchy of the Caesars, that Christianity might spread in peace, and be protected by a reign of law and order. This at least is one of the platitudes of historians. Froude himself harps on it in his life of Caesar. Historians are fond of exalting the glories of imperialism, and everybody is dazzled by the splendor and power of ancient Roman emperors. They do not, I think, sufficiently consider the blasting influence of imperialism on the life of nations, how it dries up the sources of renovation, how it necessarily withers literature and philosophy, how nothing can thrive under it but pomp and material glories, how it paralyzes all virtuous impulses, how it kills all enthusiasm, how it crushes out all hope and lofty aspirations, how it makes slaves of its best subjects, how it fills the earth with fear, how it drains national resources to support standing armies, how it mocks all enterprises which do not receive imperial approbation, how everything is concentrated to reflect the glory of one man or family; how impossible, under its withering shade, is manly independence, or the free expression of opinions or healthy growth; how it buries up, under its armies, discontents and aspirations alike, and creates nothing but machinery which must ultimately wear out and leave a world in ruins, with nothing stable to take its place. Law and order are good things, the preservation of property is desirable, the punishment of crime is necessary; but there are other things which are valuable also. Nothing is so valuable as the preservation of national life; nothing is so healthy as scope for energies; nothing is so contemptible and degrading as universal sycophancy to official rule. There are no tyrants more oppressive than the tools of absolute power. See in what a state imperialism left the Roman Empire when it fell. There were no rallying forces; there was no resurrection of heroes. Vitality had fled. Where would Turkey be to-day without the European powers, if the Sultan's authority were to fall? It would be in the state of ancient Babylon or Persia when those empires fell.
There is another side to imperialism besides dreaded anarchies. Moreover, the whole progress of civilization has been counter to it. The fiats of eternal justice have pronounced against it, because it is antagonistic to the dignity of man and the triumphs of reason. I would not fall in with the cant of the dignity of man, because there is no dignity to man without aid from God Almighty through His spirit and the message he has sent in Christianity. But there is dignity in man with the aid of a regenerating gospel. Some people talk of the triumphs of Christianity under the Roman emperors; but see how rapidly it was corrupted by them when they sought the aid of its institutions to bolster up their power. The power of Christianity is in its truths; in its religion, and not in its forms and institutions, in its inventions to uphold the arms of despotism and the tools of despotism. It is, and it was, and it will be through all the ages the great power of the world, against which it is vain to rebel. And that government is really the best which unfetters its spiritual influence, and encourages it; and not that government which seeks to perpetuate its corrupt and worldly institutions. The Roman emperors made Christianity an institution, and obscured its truths. And perhaps that is one reason why Providence permitted their despotism to pass away,—preferring the rude anarchy of the Germanic nations to the dead mechanism of a lifeless Church and imperial rottenness. Imperialism must ever end in rottenness. And that is one reason why the heart of Christendom—I mean the people of Europe, in its enlightened and virtuous sections has ever opposed imperialism. The progress has been slow, but marked, towards representative governments,—not the reign of the people directly, but of those whom they select to represent them. The victory has been nearly gained in England. In France the progress has been uniform since the Revolution. Napoleon revived, or sought to revive, the imperialism of Rome. He failed. There is nothing which the French now so cordially detest, since their eyes have been opened to the character and ends of that usurper, as his imperialism. It cannot be revived any more easily than the oracles of Dodona. Even in Germany there are dreadful discontents in view of the imperialism which Bismarck, by the force of successful wars, has seemingly revived. The awful standing armies are a menace to all liberty and progress and national development. In Italy itself there is the commencement of constitutional authority, although it is united under a king. The great standing warfare of modern times is constitutional authority against the absolute power of kings and emperors. And the progress has been on the side of liberty everywhere, with occasional drawbacks, such as when Louis Napoleon revived the accursed despotism of his uncle, and by the same means,—a standing army and promises of military glory.
Hence, in the order of Providence, the dream of Charlemagne as to unbounded military aggrandizement could not be realized. He could not revive the imperialism of Rome or Persia. No man will ever arise in Europe who can re-establish it, except for a brief period. It will be rebuked by the superintending Power, because it is fatal to the highest development of nations, because all its glories are delusory, because it sows the seeds of ruin. It produces that very egotism, materialism, and sensuality, that inglorious rest and pleasure, which, as everybody concedes, prepared the way for violence.
And hence Charlemagne's empire went to pieces as soon as he was dead. There was nothing permanent in his conquests, except those made against barbarism. He was raised up to erect barriers against fresh inroads of barbarians. His whole empire was finally split up into petty sovereignties. In one sense he founded States, "since he founded the States which sprang up from the dismemberment of his empire. The kingdoms of Germany, Italy, France, Burgundy, Lorraine, Navarre, all date to his memorable reign." But these mediaeval kingdoms were feudal; the power of the kings was nominal. Government passed from imperialism into the hands of nobles. The government of Europe in the Middle Ages was a military aristocracy, only powerful as the interests of the people were considered. Kings and princes did not make much show, except in the trappings of royalty,—in gorgeous dresses of purple and gold, to suit a barbaric taste,—in the insignia of power without its reality. The power was among the aristocracy, who, it must be confessed, ground down the people by a hard feudal rule, but who did not grind the souls out of them, like the imperialism of absolute monarchies, with their standing armies. Under them the feudal nobles of Europe at length recuperated. Virtues were born everywhere,—in England, in France, in Germany, in Holland,—which were a savor of life unto life: loyalty, self-respect, fidelity to covenants, chivalry, sympathy with human misery, love of home, rural sports, a glorious rural life, which gave stamina to character,—a material which Christianity could work upon, and kindle the latent fires of freedom, and the impulses of a generous enthusiasm. It was under the fostering influences of small, independent chieftains that manly strength and organized social institutions arose once more,— the reserved power of unconquerable nations. Nobody hates feudalism—in its corruptions, in its oppressions—more than I do. But it was the transition stage from the anarchy which the collapse of imperialism produced to the constitutional governments of our times, if we could forget the absolute monarchies which flourished on the breaking up of feudalism, when it became a tyranny and a mockery, but which absolute monarchies flourished only one or two hundred years,—a sort of necessity in the development of nations to check the insolence and overgrown power of nobles, but after all essentially different from the imperialism of Caesar or Napoleon, since they relied on the support of nobles and municipalities more than on a standing army; yea, on votes and grants from parliaments to raise money to support the army,—certainly in England, as in the time of Elizabeth. The Bourbons, indeed, reigned without grants from the people or the nobility, and what was the logical result?—a French Revolution! Would a French Revolution have been possible under the Roman Caesars?
But I will not pursue this gradual development of constitutional government from the anarchies which arose out of the fall of the Roman Empire,—just the reverse of what happened in the history of Rome; I say no more of the imperialism which Charlemagne sought to restore, but was not permitted by Providence, and which, after all, was the dream of his latter days, when, like Napoleon, he was intoxicated by power and brilliant conquests; and I turn to consider briefly his direct effects in civilization, which showed his great and enlightened mind, and on which his fame in no small degree rests.
Charlemagne was no insignificant legislator. His Capitularies may not be equal to the laws of Justinian in natural justice, but were adapted to his times and circumstances. He collected the scattered codes, so far as laws were codified, of the various Germanic nations, and modified them. He introduced a great Christian element into his jurisprudence. He made use of the canons of the Church. His code is more ecclesiastical than that of Theodosius even, the last great Christian emperor. But in his day the clergy wielded great power, and their ordinances and decisions were directed to society as it was. The clergy were the great jurists of their day. The spiritual courts decided matters of great importance, and took cognizance of cases which were out of the jurisdiction of temporal courts. Charlemagne recognized the value of these spiritual courts, and aided them. He had no quarrels with ecclesiastics, nor was he jealous of their power. He allied himself with it. He was a friend of the clergy. One of the peculiarities of all the Germanic laws, seen especially in those of Ina and Alfred, was pecuniary compensation for crime: fifty shillings, in England, would pay for the loss of a foot, and twenty for a nose and four for a tooth; thus recognizing a principle seen in our times in railroad accidents, though not recognized in our civil laws in reference to crimes. This system of compensation Charlemagne retained, which perhaps answered for his day.
He was also a great administrator. Nothing escaped his vigilance. I do not read that he made many roads, or effected important internal improvements. The age was too barbarous for the development of national industries,—one of the main things which occupy modern statesmen and governments. But whatever he did was wise and enlightened. He rewarded merit; he made an alliance with learned men; he sought out the right men for important posts; he made the learned Alcuin his teacher and counsellor; he established libraries and schools; he built convents and monasteries; he gave encouragement to men of great attainments; he loved to surround himself with learned men; the scholars of all countries sought his protection and patronage, and found him a friend. Alcuin became one of the richest men in his dominions, and Englebert received one of his daughters in marriage. Napoleon professed a great admiration for Charlemagne, although Frederic II. was his model sovereign. But how differently Napoleon acted in this respect! Napoleon was jealous of literary genius. He hated literary men. He rarely invited them to his table, and was constrained in their presence. He drove them out of the kingdom even. He wanted nothing but homage,—and literary genius has no sympathy with brute force, or machinery, or military exploits. But Charlemagne, like Peter the Great, delighted in the society of all who could teach him anything. He was a tolerably learned man himself, considering his life of activity. He spoke Latin as fluently as his native German, and it is said that he understood Greek. He liked to visit schools, and witness the performances of the boys; and, provided they made proficiency in their studies, he cared little for their noble birth. He was no respecter of persons. With wrath he reproved the idle. He promised rewards to merit and industry.
The most marked feature of his reign, outside his wars, was his sympathy with the clergy. Here, too, he differed from Napoleon and Frederic II. Mr. Hallam considers his alliance with the Church the great error of his reign; but I believe it built up his throne. In his time the clergy were the most influential people of the Empire and the most enlightened; but at that time the great contest of the Middle Ages between spiritual and temporal authority had not begun. Ambrose, indeed, had rebuked Theodosius, and set in defiance the empress when she interfered with his spiritual functions; and Leo had firmly established the Papacy by emphasizing a divine right to his decrees. But a Hildebrand and a Becket had not arisen to usurp the prerogatives of their monarchs. Least of all did popes then dream of subjecting the temporal powers and raising the spiritual over them, so as to lead to issues with kings. That was a later development in the history of the papacy. The popes of the eighth and ninth centuries sought to heal disorder, to punish turbulent chieftains, to sustain law and order, to establish a tribunal of justice to which the discontented might appeal. They sought to conserve the peace of the world. They sought to rule the Church, rather than the world. They aimed at a theocratic ministry,—to be the ambassadors of God Almighty,—to allay strife and division.
The clergy were the friends of order and law, and they were the natural guardians of learning. They were kindness itself to the slaves,—for slavery still prevailed. That was an evil with which the clergy did not grapple; they would ameliorate it, but did not seek to remove it. Yet they shielded the unfortunate and the persecuted and the poor; they gave the only consolation which an iron age afforded. The Church was gloomy, ascetic, austere, like the cathedrals of that time. Monks buried themselves in crypts; they sang mournful songs; they saw nothing but poverty and misery, and they came to the relief in a funereal way. But they were not cold and hard and cruel, like baronial lords. Secular lords were rapacious, and ground down the people, and mocked and trampled upon them; but the clergy were hospitable, gentle, and affectionate. They sympathized with the people, from whom they chiefly sprang. They had their vices, but those vices were not half so revolting as those of barons and knights. Intellectually, the clergy were at all times the superiors of these secular lords. They loved the peaceful virtues which were generated in the consecrated convent. The passions of nobles urged them on to perpetual pillage, injustice, and cruelty. The clergy quarrelled only among themselves. They were human, and not wholly free from human frailties; but they were not public robbers. They were the best farmers of their times; they cultivated lands, and made them attractive by fruits and flowers. They were generally industrious; every convent was a beehive, in which various kinds of manufactures were produced. The monks aspired even to be artists. They illuminated manuscripts, as well as copied them; they made tapestries and beautiful vestments. They were a peaceful and useful set of men, at this period, outside their spiritual functions; they built grand churches; they had fruitful gardens; they were exceedingly hospitable. Every monastery was an inn, as well as a beehive, to which all travellers resorted, and where no pay was exacted. It was a retreat for the unfortunate, which no one dared assail. And it was vocal with songs and anthems.
The clergy were not only thus general benefactors in an age of turbulence and crime, in spite of all their narrowness and spiritual pride and their natural ambition for power, but they lent a helping hand to the peasantry. The Church was democratic, and enabled the poor to rise according to their merits, while nobles combined to crush them or keep them in an ignoble sphere. In the Church, the son of a murdered peasant could rise according to his deserts; but if he followed a warrior to the battle-field, no virtues, no talents, no bravery could elevate him,—he was still a peasant, a low-born menial. If he entered a monastery, he might pass from office to office until as a mitred abbot he would become the master of ten thousand acres, the counsellor of kings, the equal of that proud baron in whose service his father spent his abject life. The great Hildebrand was the son of a carpenter. The Church ever recognized, what feudality did not,—the claims of man as man; and enabled peasants' sons, if they had abilities and virtues, to rise to proud positions,—to be the patrons of the learned, the companions of princes, the ministers of kings.
And that is the reason why Charlemagne befriended the Church and elevated it, because its influence was civilizing. He sought to establish among the clergy a counterbalancing power to that of nobles. Who can doubt that the influence of the Church was better than that of nobles in the Middle Ages? If it ground down society by a spiritual yoke, that yoke was necessary, for the rude Middle Ages could be ruled only by fear. What fear more potent than the destruction of the soul in a future life! It was by this weapon— excommunication—that Europe was governed. We may abhor it, but it was the great idea of Mediaeval Europe, which no one could resist, and which kept society from dissolution. Charlemagne may have erred in thus giving power and consideration to the clergy, in view of the subsequent encroachments of the popes. But he never anticipated the future quarrels between his successors and the popes, for the popes were not then formidable as the antagonists of kings. I believe his policy was the best for Europe, on the whole. The infancy of the Gothic races was long, dark, dreary, and unfortunate, but it prepared them for the civilization which they scorned.
Such were the services which this great sovereign rendered to his times and to Europe. He probably saved it from renewed barbarism. He was the great legislator of the Middle Ages, and the greatest friend—after Constantine and Theodosius—of which the Church can boast. With him dawned the new civilization. He brought back souvenirs of Rome and the Empire. Not for himself did he live, but for the welfare of the nations he governed. It was his example which Alfred sought to imitate. Though a warrior, he saw something greater than the warrior's excellence. It is said he was eloquent, like Julius Caesar. He loved music and all the arts. In his palace at Aix-la-Chapelle were sung the songs of the earliest poets of Germany. He took great pains to introduce the Gregorian chant. He was simple in dress, and only on rare occasions did he indulge in parade. He was temperate in eating and drinking, as all the famous warriors have been. He absolutely abhorred drunkenness, the great vice of the Northern nations. During meals he listened to the lays of minstrels or the readings of his secretaries. He took unwearied pains with the education of his daughters, and he was so fond of them that they even accompanied him in his military expeditions. He was not one of those men that Gibbon appreciated; but his fame is steadily growing, after a lapse of a thousand years. His whole appearance was manly, cheerful, and dignified. His countenance reflected a child-like serenity. He was one of the few men, like David, who was not spoiled by war and flatteries. Though gentle, he was subject to fits of anger, like Theodosius; but he did not affect anger, like Napoleon, for theatrical effect. His greatness and his simplicity, his humanity and his religious faith, are typical of the Germanic race. He died A. D. 814, after a reign of half a century, lamented by his own subjects and to be admired by succeeding generations. Hallam, though not eloquent generally, has pronounced his most beautiful eulogy, "written in the disgraces and miseries of succeeding times. He stands alone like a rock in the ocean, like a beacon on a waste. His sceptre was the bow of Ulysses, not to be bent by a weaker hand. In the dark ages of European history, his reign affords a solitary resting-place between two dark periods of turbulence and ignominy, deriving the advantage of contrast both from that of the preceding dynasty and of a posterity for whom he had founded an empire which they were unworthy and unequal to maintain."
To such a tribute I can add nothing. His greatness consists in this, that, born amidst barbarism, he was yet the friend of civilization, and understood its elemental principles, and struggled forty-seven years to establish them,—failing only because his successors and subjects were not prepared for them, and could not learn them until the severe experience of ten centuries, amidst disasters and storms, should prove the value of the "old basal walls and pillars" which remained unburied amid the despised ruins of antiquity, and show that no structure could adequately shelter the European nations which was not established by the beautiful union of German vigor with Christian art,—by the combined richness of native genius with those immortal treasures which had escaped the wreck of the classic world.
AUTHORITIES.
Eginhard's Vita Caroli Magni; Le Clerc's De la Bruyere, Histoire du Regne de Charlemagne; Haureau's Charlemagne et son Cour; Gaillard's Histoire de Charlemagne; Lorenz's Karls des Grossen. There is a tolerably popular history of Charlemagne by James Bulfinch, entitled "Legends of Charlemagne;" also a Life by James the novelist. Henri Martin, Sismondi, and Michelet may be consulted; also Hallam's Middle Ages, Milman's Latin Christianity, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Biographie Universelle, and the Encyclopaedias.
HILDEBRAND.
A. D. 1020-1085.
THE PAPAL EMPIRE.
We associate with Hildebrand the great contest of the Middle Ages between spiritual and temporal authority, the triumph of the former, and its supremacy in Europe until the Reformation. What great ideas and events are interwoven with that majestic domination,—not in one age, but for fifteen centuries; not religious merely, but political, embracing as it were the whole progress of European society, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Protestant Reformation; yea, intimately connected with the condition of Europe to the present day, and not of Europe only, but America itself! What an august power is this Catholic empire, equally great as an institution and as a religion! What lessons of human experience, what great truths of government, what subtile influences, reaching alike the palaces of kings and the hovels of peasants, are indissolubly linked with its marvellous domination, so that whether in its growth or decay it is more suggestive than the rise and fall of any temporal empire. It has produced, probably, more illustrious men than any political State in Europe. It has aimed to accomplish far grander ends. It is invested with more poetic interest. Its policy, its heroes, its saints, its doctors, its dignitaries, its missions, its persecutions, all rise up before us with varied but never-ending interest, when seriously contemplated. It has proved to be the most wonderful fabric of what we call worldly wisdom that our world has seen,—controlling kings, dictating laws to ancient monarchies, and binding the souls of millions with a more perfect despotism than Oriental emperors ever sought or dreamed. And what a marvellous vitality it seems to have! It has survived the attacks of its countless enemies; it has recovered from the shock of the Reformation; it still remains majestic and powerful, extending its arms of paternal love or Briarean terror over half of Christendom. As a temporal government, rivalling kings in the pomps of war and the pride of armies, it may be passing away; but as an organization to diffuse and conserve religious truths,—yea, even to bring a moral pressure on the minds of princes and governors, and reinforce its ranks with the mighty and the noble,—it seems to be as potent as ever. It is still sending its missionaries, its prelates, and its cardinals into the heart of Protestant countries, who anticipate and boast of new victories. It derides the dissensions and the rationalistic speculations of the Protestants, and predicts that they will either become open Pagans or re-enter the fold of Saint Peter. No longer do angry partisans call it the "Beast" or the "Scarlet Mother" or the "predicted Antichrist," since its religious creeds in their vital points are more in harmony with the theology of venerated Fathers than those of some of the progressive and proudest parties which call themselves Protestant. In Germany, in France,—shall I add, in England and America?—it is more in earnest, and more laborious and self-denying than many sects among the Protestants. In Germany—in those very seats of learning and power and fashion which once were kindled into lofty enthusiasm by the voice of Luther—who is it that desert the churches and disregard the sacraments, the Catholics or the Protestants?
Surely such a power, whether we view it as an institution or as a religion, cannot be despised, even by the narrowest and most fanatical Protestant. It is too grand and venerable for sarcasm, ridicule, or mockery. It is too potent and respectable to be sneered at or lied about. No cause can be advanced permanently except by adherence to the truth, whether it be agreeable or not. If the Papacy were a mere despotism, having nothing else in view than the inthralment of mankind,—of which it has been accused,— then mankind long ago, in lofty indignation, would have hurled it from its venerable throne. But despotic as its yoke is in the eyes of Protestants, and always has been and always may be, it is something more than that, having at heart the welfare of the very millions whom it rules by working on their fears. In spite of dogmas which are deductions from questionable premises, or which are at war with reason, and ritualism borrowed from other religions, and "pious frauds," and Jesuitical means to compass desirable ends,—which Protestants indignantly discard, and which they maintain are antagonistic to the spirit of primitive Christianity,—still it is also the defender and advocate of vital Christian truths, to which we trace the hopes and consolations of mankind. As the conservator of doctrines common to all Christian sects it cannot be swept away by the hand of man; nor as a government, confining its officers and rules to the spiritual necessities of its members. Its empire is spiritual rather than temporal. Temporal monarchs are hurled from their thrones. The long line of the Bourbons vanishes before the tempests of revolution, and they who were borne into power by these tempests are in turn hurled into ignominious banishment; but the Pope—he still sits secure on the throne of the Gregories and the Clements, ready to pronounce benedictions or hurl anathemas, to which half of Europe bows in fear or love.
Whence this strange vitality? What are the elements of a power so enduring and so irresistible? What has given to it its greatness and its dignity? I confess I gaze upon it as a peasant surveys a king, as a boy contemplates a queen of beauty,—as something which may be talked about, yet removed beyond our influence, and no more affected by our praise or censure than is a procession of cardinals by the gaze of admiring spectators in Saint Peter's Church. Who can measure it, or analyze it, or comprehend it? The weapons of reason appear to fall impotent before its haughty dogmatism. Genius cannot reconcile its inconsistencies. Serenely it sits, unmoved amid all the aggressions of human thought and all the triumphs of modern science. It is both lofty and degraded; simple, yet worldly wise; humble, yet scornful and proud; washing beggars' feet, yet imposing commands on the potentates of earth; benignant, yet severe on all who rebel; here clothed in rags, and there revelling in palaces; supported by charities, yet feasting the princes of the earth; assuming the title of "servant of the servants of God," yet arrogating the highest seat among worldly dignitaries. Was there ever such a contradiction?—"glory in debasement, and debasement in glory,"—type of the misery and greatness of man? Was there ever such a mystery, so occult are its arts, so subtile its policy, so plausible its pretensions, so certain its shafts? How imposing the words of paternal benediction! How grand the liturgy brought down from ages of faith! How absorbed with beatific devotion appears to be the worshipper at its consecrated altars! How ravishing the music and the chants of grand ceremonials! How typical the churches and consecrated monuments of the passion of Christ! Everywhere you see the great emblem of our redemption,—on the loftiest pinnacle of the Mediaeval cathedral, on the dresses of the priests, over the gorgeous altars, in the ceremony of the Mass, in the baptismal rite, in the paintings of the side chapels; everywhere are rites and emblems betokening maceration, grief, sacrifice, penitence, the humiliation of humanity before the awful power of divine Omnipotence, whose personality and moral government no Catholic is tempted to deny.
And yet what crimes and abominations have not been committed in the name of the Church? If we go back and accept the history of the darker ages, what wars has not this Church encouraged, what discords has she not incited, what superstitions has she not indorsed, what pride has she not arrogated, what cruelties has she not inflicted, what countries has she not robbed, what hardships has she not imposed, what deceptions has she not used, what avenues of thought has she not guarded with a flaming sword, what truth has she not perverted, what goodness has she not mocked and persecuted? Ah, interrogate the Albigenses, the Waldenses, the shades of Jerome of Prague, of Huss, of Savonarola, of Cranmer, of Coligny, of Galileo; interrogate the martyrs of the Thirty Years' War, and those who were slain by the dragonnades of Louis XIV., those who fell by the hand of Alva and Charles IX.; go to Smithfield, and Paris on Saint Bartholomew; think of gunpowder plots and inquisitions, and intrigues and tortures, all vigorously carried on under the cloak of Religion—barbarities worse than those of savages, inflicted at the command of the ministers of a gospel of love!
I am compelled to allude to these things; I do not dwell on them, since they were the result of the intolerance of human nature as much as the bigotry of the Church,—faults of an age, more than of a religion; although, whether exaggerated or not, more disgraceful than the persecutions of Christians by Roman emperors.
As for the supreme rulers of this contradictory Church, so benevolent and yet so cruel, so enlightened and yet so fanatical, so humble and yet so proud,—this institution of blended piety and fraud, equally renowned for saints, theologians, statesmen, drivellers, and fanatics; the joy and the reproach, the glory and the shame of earth,—there never were greater geniuses or greater fools: saints of almost preternatural sanctity, like the first Leo and Gregory, or hounds like Boniface VIII. or Alexander VI.; an array of scholars and dunces, ascetics and gluttons, men who adorned and men who scandalized their lofty position; and yet, on the whole, we are forced to admit, the most remarkable body of rulers any empire has known, since they were elevated by their peers, and generally for talents or services, at a period of life when character is formed and experience is matured. They were not greater than their Church or their age, like the Charlemagnes and Peters of secular history, but they were the picked men, the best representatives of their Church; ambitious, doubtless, and worldly, as great potentates generally are, but made so by the circumstances which controlled them. Who can wield irresponsible power and not become arrogant, and perhaps self-indulgent? It requires the almost superhuman virtue of a Marcus Aurelius or a Saint Louis to crucify the pride of rank and power. If the president of a college or of a railroad or of a bank becomes a different man to the eye of an early friend, what can be expected of those who are raised above public opinion, and have no fetters on their wills,—men who are regarded as infallible and feel themselves supreme!
But of all these three hundred or four hundred men who have swayed the destinies of Europe,—an uninterrupted line of pontiffs for fifteen hundred years or more, no one is so famous as Gregory VII. for the grandeur of his character, the heroism of his struggles, and the posthumous influence of his deeds. He was too great a man to be called by his papal title. He is best known by his baptismal name, Hildebrand, the greatest hero of the Roman Church. There are some men whose titles add nothing to their august names,—David, Julius, Constantine, Augustine. When a man has become very eminent we drop titles altogether, except in military life. We say Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, William Pitt. Hildebrand is a greater name than Gregory VII., and with him is identified the greatest struggle of the Papacy against the temporal powers. I do not aim to dissect his character so much as to present his services to the Church. I wish to show why and how he is identified with movements of supreme historical importance. It would be easy to make him out a saint and martyr, and equally so to paint him as a tyrant and usurper. It is of little consequence to us whether he was ascetic or ambitious or unscrupulous; but it IS of consequence to show the majestic power of those ideas by which he ruled the Middle Ages, and which will never pass away as sublime agencies so long as men are ignorant and superstitious. As a man he no longer lives, but his thunderbolts are perpetual powers, since they still alarm the fears of men.
Still, his personal history is not uninteresting. Born of humble parents in Italy in the year 1020, the son of a carpenter, he rose by genius and virtue to the highest offices and dignities. But his greatness was in force of character rather than original ideas,— like that of Washington, or William III., or the Duke of Wellington. He had not the comprehensive intellect of Charlemagne, nor the creative genius of Peter of Russia, but he had the sagacity of Richelieu and the iron will of Napoleon. He was statesman as well as priest,—marvellous for his activity, insight into human nature, vast executive abilities, and dauntless heroism. He comprehended the only way whereby Christendom could be governed, and unhesitatingly used the means of success. He was not a great scholar, or theologian, or philosopher, but a man of action, embracing opportunities and striking decisive blows. From first to last he was devoted to his cause, which was greater than himself,— even the spiritual supremacy of the Papacy. I do not read of great intellectual precocity, like that of Cicero and William Pitt, nor of great attainments, like those of Abelard and Thomas Aquinas, nor even an insight, like that of Bacon, into what constitutes the dignity of man and the true glory of civilization; but, like Ambrose and the first Leo, he was early selected for important missions and responsible trusts, all of which he discharged with great fidelity and ability. His education was directed by the monks of Cluny,—that princely abbey in Burgundy where "monks were sovereigns and sovereigns were monks." Like all earnest monks, he was ascetic, devotional, and self-sacrificing. Like all men ambitions to rule, "he learned how to obey." He pondered on the Holy Scriptures as well as on the canons of the Church. So marked a man was he that he was early chosen as prior of his convent; and so great were his personal magnetism, eloquence, and influence that "he induced Bruno, the Bishop of Toul, when elected pope by the Emperor of Germany, to lay aside the badges and vestments of the pontifical office, and refuse his title, until he should be elected by the clergy and people of Rome,"—thus showing that at the age of twenty-nine he comprehended the issues of the day, and meditated on the gigantic changes it was necessary to make before the pope could be the supreme ruler of Christendom.
The autocratic idea of Leo I., and the great Gregory who sent his missionaries to England, was that to which Hildebrand's ardent soul clung with preternatural earnestness, as the only government fit for turbulent and superstitious ages. He did not originate this idea, but he defended and enforced it as had never been done before, so that to many minds he was the great architect of the papal structure. It was a rare spectacle to see a sovereign pontiff lay aside the insignia of his grandeur at the bidding of this monk of Cluny; it was grander to see this monk laying the foundation of an irresistible despotism, which was to last beyond the time of Luther. Not merely was Leo IX. his tool, but three successive popes were chosen at his dictation. And when he became cardinal and archdeacon he seems to have been the inspiring genius of the papal government, undertaking the most important missions, curbing the turbulent spirit of the Roman princes, and assisting in all ecclesiastical councils. It was by his suggestion that abbots were deposed, and bishops punished, and monarchs reprimanded. He was the prime minister of four popes before he accepted that high office to which he doubtless had aspired while meditating as a monk amid the sunny slopes of Cluny, since he knew that the exigences of the Church required a bold and able ruler,—and who in Christendom was bolder and more far-reaching than he? He might have been elevated to the chair of Saint Peter at an earlier period, but he was contented with power rather than glory, knowing that his day would come, and at a time when his extraordinary abilities would be most needed. He could afford to wait; and no man is truly great who cannot bide his time.
At last Hildebrand received the reward of his great services,—"a reward," says Stephen, "which he had long contemplated, but which, with self-controlling policy, he had so long declined." In the year 1073 Hildebrand became Gregory VII., and his memorable pontificate began as a reformer of the abuses of his age, and the intrepid defender of that unlimited and absolute despotism which inthralled not merely the princes of Europe, but the mind of Christendom itself. It was he who not only proclaimed the liberties of the people against nobles, and made the Church an asylum for misery and oppression, but who realized the idea that the Church was the mother of spiritual principles, and that the spiritual authority should be raised over all temporal power.
In the great crises of States and Empires deliverers seem to be raised up by Divine Providence to restore peace and order, and maintain the first condition of society, or extricate nations from overwhelming calamities. Thus Charlemagne appeared at the right time to prevent the overthrow of Europe by new waves of barbaric invasion. Thus William the Silent preserved the nationality of Holland, and Gustavus Adolphus gave religious liberty to Germany when persecution was apparently successful. Thus Richelieu undermined feudalism in France, and established absolutism as one of the needed forces of his turbulent age, even as Napoleon gave law and order to France when distracted by the anarchism of a revolution which did not comprehend the liberty which was invoked. So Hildebrand was raised up to establish the only government which could rescue Europe from the rapacities of feudal nobles, and establish law and order in the hands of the most enlightened class; so that, like Peter the Great, he looms up as a reformer as well as a despot. He appears in a double light.
Now you ask: "What were his reforms, and what were his schemes of aggrandizement, for which we honor him while we denounce him?" We cannot see the reforms he attempted without glancing at the enormous evils which stared him in the face.
Society in Europe, in the eleventh century, was nearly as dark and degraded as it was on the fall of the Merovingian dynasty. In some respects it had reached the lowest depth of wretchedness which the Middle Ages ever saw. Never had the clergy been more worldly or devoted to temporal things. They had not the piety of the fourth century, nor the intelligence of the sixteenth century; they were powerful and wealthy, but had grown corrupt. Monastic institutions covered the face of Europe, but the monks had sadly departed from the virtues which partially redeemed the miseries that succeeded the fall of the Roman Empire. The lives of the clergy, regular and secular, still compared favorably with the lives of the feudal nobility, who had, in addition to other vices, the vices of robbers and bandits. But still the clergy had fallen far from the high standard of earlier ages. Monasteries sought to be independent of all foreign control and of episcopal jurisdiction. They had been enormously enriched by princes and barons, and they owned, with the other clergy, half the lands of Europe, and more than half its silver and gold. The monks fattened on all the luxuries which then were known; they neglected the rules of their order and lived in idleness,—spending their time in the chase, or in taverns and brothels. Hardly a great scholar or theologian had arisen among them since the Patristic age, with the exception of a few schoolmen like Anselm and Peter Lombard. Saint Bernard had not yet appeared to reform the Benedictines, nor Dominic and Saint Francis to found new orders. Gluttony and idleness were perhaps the characteristic vices of the great body of the monks, who numbered over one hundred thousand. Hunting and hawking were the most innocent of their amusements. They have been accused of drinking toasts in honor of the Devil, and celebrating Mass in a state of intoxication. "Not one in a thousand," says Hallam, "could address to one another a common letter of salutation." They were a walking libel on everything sacred. Read the account of their banquets in the annals which have come down to us of the tenth and eleventh centuries, when convents were so numerous and rich. If Dugdale is to be credited, their gluttony exceeded that of any previous or succeeding age. Their cupidity, their drunken revels, their infamous haunts, their disgusting coarseness, their hypocrisy, ignorance, selfishness, and superstition were notorious. Yet the monks were not worse than the secular clergy, high and low. Bishoprics and all benefices were bought and sold; "canons were trodden under foot; ancient traditions were turned out of doors; old customs were laid aside;" boys were made archbishops; ludicrous stories were recited in the churches; the most disgraceful crimes were pardoned for money. Desolation, according to Cardinal Baronius, was seen in the temples of the Lord. As Petrarch said of Avignon in a better age, "There is no pity, no charity, no faith, no fear of God. The air, the streets, the houses, the markets, the beds, the hotels, the churches, even the altars consecrated to God, are all peopled with knaves and liars;" or, to use the still stronger language of a great reviewer, "The gates of hell appeared to roll back on their infernal hinges, that there might go forth malignant spirits to empty the vials of wrath on the patrimony even of the great chief of the apostles."
These vices, it is true, were not confined to the clergy. All classes were alike forlorn, miserable, and corrupt. It was a gloomy period. The Church, whenever religious, was sad and despairing. The contemplative hid themselves in noisome and sepulchral crypts. The inspiring chants of Ambrose gave place to gloomy and monotonous antiphonal singing,—that is, when the monks confined themselves to their own vocation. What was especially needed was a reform among the clergy themselves. They indeed owned their allegiance to the Pope, as the supreme head of the Church, but their fealty was becoming a mockery. They could not support the throne of absolutism if they were not respected by the laity. Baronial and feudal power was rapidly gaining over spiritual, and this was a poor exchange for the power of the clergy, if it led to violence and rapine. It is to maintain law and order, justice and safety, that all governments are established.
Hildebrand saw and lamented the countless evils of the day, especially those which were loosening the bands of clerical obedience, and undermining the absolutism which had become the great necessity of his age. He made up his mind to reform these evils. No pope before him had seriously undertaken this gigantic task. The popes who for two hundred years had preceded him were a scandal and a reproach to their exalted position. These heirs of Saint Peter wasted their patrimony in pleasures and pomps. At no period of the papal history was the papal chair filled with such bad or incompetent men. Of these popes two were murdered, five were driven into exile, and four were deposed. Some were raised to prominence by arms, and others by money. John X. commanded an army in person; John XI. died in a fit of debauchery; and John XII. was murdered by one of the infamous women whom he patronized. Benedict IX. was driven from the throne by robbery and murder, while Gregory VI. purchased the papal dignity. For two hundred years no commanding character had worn the tiara.
Hildebrand, however, set a new example, and became a watchful shepherd of his fold. His private life was without reproach; he was absorbed in his duties; he sympathized with learning and learned men. He was the friend of Lanfranc, and it was by his influence that this great prelate was appointed to the See of Canterbury, and a closer union was formed with England. He infused by his example a quiet but noble courage into the soul of Anselm. He had great faults, of course,—faults of his own and faults of his age. I wonder why so STRONG a man has escaped the admiring eulogium of Carlyle. Guizot compares him with the Russian Peter. In some respects he reminds me of Oliver Cromwell; since both equally deplored the evils of the day, and both invoked the aid of God Almighty. Both were ambitious, and unhesitating in the use of tools. Neither of them was stained by vulgar vices, nor seduced from his course by love of ease or pleasure. Both are to be contemplated in the double light of reformer and usurper. Both were honest, and both were unscrupulous; honest in seeking to promote public morality and the welfare of society, and unscrupulous in the arts by which their power was gained.
That which filled the soul of Hildebrand with especial grief was the alienation of the clergy from their highest duties, their worldly lives, and their frail support in his efforts to elevate the spiritual power. Therefore he determined to make a reform of the clergy themselves, having in view all the time their assistance in establishing the papal supremacy. He attacked the clergy where they were weakest. They—the secular ones, the parish priests— were getting married, especially in Germany and France. They were setting at defiance the laws of celibacy; they not only sought wives, but they lived in concubinage.
Now celibacy had been regarded as the supernal virtue from the time of Saint Jerome. It was supposed to be a state most favorable to Christian perfection; it animated the existence of the most noted saints. Says Jerome, "Take axe in hand and hew down the sterile tree of marriage." This notion of the superior virtue of virginity was one of the fruits of those Eastern theogonies which were engrafted on the early Church, growing out of the Oriental idea of the inalienable evil of matter. It was one of the fundamental principles of monasticism; and monasticism, wherever born—whether in India or the Syrian deserts—was one of the established institutions of the Church. It was indorsed by Benedict as well as by Basil; it had taken possession of the minds of the Gothic nations more firmly even than of the Eastern. The East never saw such monasteries as those which covered Italy, France, Germany, and England; they were more needed among the feudal robbers of Europe than in the effeminate monarchies of Asia. Moreover it was in monasteries that the popes had ever found their strongest adherents, their most zealous supporters. Without the aid of convents the papal empire might have crumbled. Monasticism and the papacy were strongly allied; one supported the other. So efficient were monastic institutions in advocating the idea of a theocracy, as upheld by the popes, that they were exempted from episcopal authority. An abbot was as powerful and independent as a bishop. But to make the Papacy supreme it was necessary to call in the aid of the secular priests likewise. Unmarried priests, being more like monks, were more efficient supporters of the papal throne. To maintain celibacy, therefore, was always in accordance with papal policy.
But Nature had gradually asserted its claims over tradition and authority. The clergy, especially in France and Germany, were setting at defiance the edicts of popes and councils. The glory of celibacy was in an eclipse.
No one comprehended the necessity of celibacy, among the clergy, more clearly than Hildebrand,—himself a monk by education and sympathy. He looked upon married life, with all its hallowed beauty, as a profanation for a priest. In his eyes the clergy were married only to the Church. "Domestic affections suited ill with the duties of a theocratic ministry." Anything which diverted the labors of the clergy from the Church seemed to him an outrage and a degeneracy. How could they reach the state of beatific existence if they were to listen to the prattle of children, or be engrossed with the joys of conjugal or parental love? So he assembled a council, and caused it to pass canons to the effect that married priests should not perform any clerical office; that the people should not even be present at Mass celebrated by them; that all who had wives—or concubines, as he called them—should put them away; and that no one should be ordained who did not promise to remain unmarried during his whole life.
Of course there was a violent opposition. A great outcry was raised, especially in Germany. The whole body of the secular priests exclaimed against the proceeding. At Mentz they threatened the life of the archbishop, who attempted to enforce the decree. At Paris a numerous synod was assembled, in which it was voted that Gregory ought not here to be obeyed. But Gregory was stronger than his rebellious clergy,—stronger than the instincts of human nature, stronger than the united voice of reason and Scripture. He fell back on the majestic power of prevailing ideas, on the ascetic element of the early Church, on the traditions of monastic life. He was supported by more than a hundred thousand monks, by the superstitions of primitive ages, by the example of saints and martyrs, by his own elevated rank, by the allegiance due to him as head of the Church. Excommunications were hurled, like thunderbolts, into remotest hamlets, and the murmurs of indignant Christendom were silenced by the awful denunciations of God's supposed vicegerent. The clergy succumbed before such a terrible spiritual force. The fear of hell—the great idea by which the priests themselves controlled their flocks—was more potent than any temporal good. What priest in that age would dare resist his spiritual monarch on almost any point, and especially when disobedience was supposed to entail the burnings of a physical hell forever and ever? So celibacy was re-established as a law of the Christian Church at the bidding of that far-seeing genius who had devised the means of spiritual despotism. That law—so gloomy, so unnatural, so fraught with evil—has never been repealed; it still rules the Catholic priesthood of Europe and America. Nor will it be repealed so long as the ideas of the Middle Ages have more force than enlightened reason. It is an abominable law, but who can doubt its efficacy in cementing the power of the popes?
But simony, or the sale of eeclesiastical benefices, was a still more alarming evil to the mind of Gregory. It was the great scandal of the Church and age. Here we honor the Pope for striving to remove it. And yet its abolition was no easy thing. He came in contact with the selfishness of barons and kings. He found it an easier matter to take away the wives of priests than the purses of princes. Priests who had vowed obedience might consent to the repudiation of their wives, but would great temporal robbers part with their spoils? The sale of benefices was one great source of royal and baronial revenues. Bishoprics, once conferred for wisdom and piety, had become prizes for the rapacious and ambitious. Bishops and abbots were most frequently chosen from the ranks of the great. Powerful Sees were the gifts of kings to their favorites or families, or were bought by the wealthy; so that worldly or incapable men were made overseers of the Church of Christ. The clergy were in danger of being hopelessly secularized. And the evil spread to the extremities of the clerical body. The princes and barons were getting control of the Church itself. Bishops often possessed a plurality of Sees. Children were elevated to episcopal thrones. Sycophants, courtiers, jesters, imbecile sons of princes, became great ecclesiastical dignitaries. Who can wonder at the degeneracy of the clergy when they held their cures at the hands of lay patrons, to whom they swore allegiance for the temporalities of their benefices? Even the ring and the crozier, the emblems of spiritual authority,—once received at the hand of metropolitan archbishops alone,—were now bestowed by temporal sovereigns, who claimed thereby fealty and allegiance; so that princes had gradually usurped the old rights of the Church, and Gregory resolved to recover them. So long as emperors and kings could fill the rich bishoprics and abbacies with their creatures, the papal dominion was weakened in its most vital point, and might become a dream. This evil was rapidly undermining the whole ecclesiastical edifice, and it required a hero of prodigious genius, energy, and influence to reform it.
Hildebrand saw and comprehended the whole extent and bearing of the evil, and resolved to remove it or die in the attempt. It was not only undermining his throne, but was secularizing the Church and destroying the real power of the clergy. He made up his mind to face the difficulty in its most dreaded quarters. He knew that the attempt to remove this scandal would entail a desperate conflict with the princes of the earth. Before this, popes and princes were generally leagued together; they played into each other's hands: but now a battle was to be fought between the temporal and spiritual powers. He knew that princes would never relinquish so lucrative a source of profit as the sale of powerful Sees, unless the right to sell them were taken away by some tremendous conflict. He therefore prepared for the fight, and forged his weapons and gathered together his forces. Nor would he waste time by idle negotiations; it was necessary to act with promptness and vigor. No matter how great the danger; no matter how powerful his enemies. The Church was in peril; and he resolved to come to the rescue, cost what it might. What was his life compared with the sale of God's heritage? For what was he placed in the most exalted post of the Church, if not to defend her in an alarming crisis?
In resolving to separate forever the spiritual from the temporal power, Hildebrand followed in the footsteps of Ambrose. But he had also deeper designs. He resolved to raise, if possible, the spiritual ABOVE the temporal power. Kings should be subject to the Church, not the Church to the kings of the earth. He believed that he was the appointed vicar of the Almighty to rule the world in peace, on the principles of eternal love; that Christ had established a new theocracy, and had delegated his power to the Apostle Peter, which had descended to the Pope as the Apostle's legitimate successor.
I say nothing here of this colossal claim, of this ingenious principle, on which the monarchical power of the Papacy rests. It is the great fact of the Middle Ages. And yet, but for this theocratic idea, it is difficult to see how the external unity of the Church could have been preserved among the semi-barbarians of Europe. And what a necessary thing it was—in ages of superstition, ignorance, and anarchy—to preserve the unity of the Church, to establish a spiritual power which should awe and control barbaric princes! There are two sides to the supremacy of the popes as head of the Church, when we consider the aspect and state of society in those iron and lawless times. Would Providence have permitted such a power to rule for a thousand years had it not been a necessity? At any rate, this is too complicated a question for me to discuss. It is enough for me to describe the conflict for principles, not to attempt to settle them. In this matter I am not a partisan, but a painter. I seek to describe a battle, not to defend either this cause or that. I have my opinions, but this is no place to present them. I seek to describe simply the great battle of the Middle Ages, and you can draw your own conclusions as to the merits of the respective causes. I present the battle of heroes,—a battle worthy of the muse of Homer.
Hildebrand in this battle disdained to fight with any but great and noble antagonists. As the friend of the poor man, crushed and mocked by a cold and unfeeling nobility; as the protector of the Church, in danger of being subverted by the unhallowed tyranny and greed of princes; as the consecrated monarch of a great spiritual fraternity,—he resolved to face the mightiest monarchs, and suffer, and if need be die, for a cause which he regarded as the hope and salvation of Europe. Therefore he convened another council, and prohibited, under the terrible penalty of excommunication,—for that was his mighty weapon,—the investiture of bishoprics and abbacies at the hands of laymen: only he himself should give to ecclesiastics the ring and the crozier,—the badges of spiritual authority. And he equally threatened with eternal fire any bishop or abbot who should receive his dignity from the hand of a prince.
This decree was especially aimed against the Emperor of Germany, to whom, as liege lord, the Pope himself owed fealty and obedience. Henry IV. was one of the mightiest monarchs of the Franconian dynasty,—a great warrior and a great man, beloved by his subjects and feared by the princes of Europe. But he, as well as Gregory, was resolved to maintain the rights of his predecessors. He also perceived the importance of the approaching contest. And what a contest! The spiritual and temporal powers were now to be arrayed against each other in a fierce antagonism. The apparent object of contention changed. It was not merely simony; it was as to who should be the supreme master of Germany and Italy, the emperor or the pope. To whom, in the eyes of contemporaries, would victory incline,—to the son of a carpenter, speaking in the name of the Church, and holding in his hands the consecrated weapon of excommunication; or the most powerful monarch of his age, armed with the secular sword, and seeking to restore the dignity of Roman emperors? The Pope is supported by the monks, the inferior clergy, and the vast spiritual powers universally supposed to be delegated to him by Christ, as the successor of Saint Peter; the Emperor is supported by large feudal armies, and all the prestige of the successors of Charlemagne. If the Pope appeals to an ancient custom of the Church, the Emperor appeals to a general feudal custom which required bishops and abbots to pay their homage to him for the temporalities of their Sees. The Pope has the canons of the Church on his side; the Emperor the laws of feudalism,—and both the canons of the Church and feudal principles are binding obligations. Hitherto they have not clashed. But now feudalism, very generally established, and papal absolutism, rapidly culminating, are to meet in angry collision. Shall the kings of the earth prevail, assisted by feudal armies and outward grandeur, and sustained by such powerful sentiments as loyalty and chivalry; or shall a priest, speaking in the name of God Almighty, and appealing to the future fears of men?
What conflict grander and more sublime than this, in the whole history of society? What conflict proved more momentous in its results?
I need not trace all the steps of that memorable contest, or describe the details, from the time that the Pope sent out his edicts and excommunicated all who dared to disobey him,—including some of the most eminent German prelates and German princes. Henry at this time was engaged in a desperate war with the Saxons, and Gregory seized this opportunity to summon the Emperor—his emperor— to appear before him at Rome and answer for alleged crimes against the Saxon Church. Was there ever such audacity? How could Henry help giving way to passionate indignation; he—the successor of the Roman Caesars, sovereign lord of Germany and Italy—summoned to the bar of a priest, and that priest his own subject, in a temporal sense? He was filled with wrath and defiance, and at once summoned a council of German bishops at Worms, "who denounced the Pope as a usurper, a simonist, a murderer, a worshipper of the Devil, and pronounced upon him the empty sentence of a deposition."
"The aged Hildebrand," in the words of Stephen, "was holding a council in the second week of Lent, 1076, beneath the sculptured roof of the Vatican, arrayed in the rich and mystic vestments of pontifical dominion, and the papal choir were chanting those immortal anthems which had come down from blessed saints and martyrs, when the messenger of the Emperor presented himself before the assembled hierarchy of Rome, and with insolent demeanor and abrupt speech delivered the sentence of the German council." He was left unharmed by the indignant pontiff, but the next day ascending his throne, and in presence of the dignitaries of his Church, thus invoked the assistance of the pretended founder of his empire:—
"Saint Peter! lend us your ears, and listen to your servant whom you have cherished from his infancy; and all the saints also bear witness how the Roman Church raised me by force and against my will to this high dignity, although I should have preferred to spend my days in a continual pilgrimage than to ascend thy pulpit for any human motive. And inasmuch as I think it will be grateful to you that those intrusted to my care should obey me; therefore, supported by these hopes, and for the honor and defence of the Church, in the name of the Omnipotent God,—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,—by my authority and power, I prohibit King Henry, who with unheard-of pride has raised himself against your Church, from governing the kingdoms of Germany and Italy; I absolve all Christians from the oath they have taken to him, and I forbid all men to yield to him that service which is due unto a king. Finally, I bind him with the bonds of anathema, that all people may know that thou art Peter, and that upon thee the Son of God hath built His Church, against which the gates of hell cannot prevail."
This was an old-fashioned excommunication; and we in these days have but a faint idea what a dreadful thing it was, especially when accompanied with an interdict. The churches were everywhere shut; the dead were unburied in consecrated ground; the rites of religion were suspended; gloom and fear sat on every countenance; desolation overspread the land. The king was regarded as guilty and damned; his ministers looked upon him as a Samson shorn of his locks; his very wife feared contamination from his society; his children, as a man blasted with the malediction of Heaven. When a man was universally supposed to be cursed in the house and in the field; in the wood and in the church; in eating or drinking; in fasting or sleeping; in working or resting; in his arms, in his legs, in his heart, and in his head; living or dying; in this world and in the next,—what could he do?
And what could Henry do, with all his greatness? His victorious armies deserted him; a rival prince laid claim to his throne; his enemies multiplied; his difficulties thickened; new dangers surrounded him on every side. If loyalty—that potent principle— had summoned one hundred thousand warriors to his camp, a principle much more powerful than loyalty—the fear of hell—had dispersed them. Even his friends joined the Pope. The sainted Agnes, his own mother, acquiesced in the sentence. The Countess Matilda, the richest lady in the world, threw all her treasures at the feet of her spiritual monarch. The moral sentiments of his own subjects were turned against him; he was regarded as justly condemned. The great princes of Germany sought his deposition. The world rejected him, the Church abandoned him, and God had forsaken him. He was prostrate, helpless, disarmed, ruined. True, he made superhuman efforts: he traversed his empire with the hope of rallying his subjects; he flew from city to city,—but all in vain. Every convent, every castle, every city of his vast dominions beheld in him the visitation of the Almighty. The diadem was obscured by the tiara, and loyalty itself yielded to the superior potency of religious fear. Only Bertha, his neglected wife, was faithful and trusting in that gloomy day; all else had defrauded and betrayed him. How bitter his humiliation! And yet his haughty foe was not contented with the punishment he had inflicted. He declared that if the sun went down on the 23d of February, 1077, before Henry was restored to the bosom of the Church, his crown should be transferred to another. That inexorable old pontiff laid claim to the right of giving and taking away imperial crowns. Was ever before seen such arrogance and audacity in a Pope? And yet he knew that he would be sustained, he knew that his supremacy was based on a universally recognized idea. Who can resist the ideas of his age? Henry might have resisted, if resistance had been possible. Even he must yield to irresistible necessity. He was morally certain that he would lose his crown, and be in danger of losing his soul, unless he made his peace with his dangerous enemy. It was necessary that the awful curse should be removed. He had no remedy; only one course was before him. He must yield; not to man alone, but to an idea, which had the force of fate. Wonder not that he made up his mind to submit. He was great, but not greater than his age. How few men are! Mohammed could renounce prevailing idolatries; Luther could burn a papal bull; but the Emperor of Germany could not resist the accepted vicegerent of the Almighty.
Behold, then, the melancholy, pitiable spectacle of this mighty monarch in the depth of winter—and a winter of unprecedented severity—crossing, in the garb of a pilgrim, the frozen Alps, enduring the greatest privations and fatigues and perils, and approaching on foot the gloomy fortress of Canossa (beyond the Po), in which Hildebrand had intrenched himself. Even then the angry pontiff refused to see him. Henry had to stoop to a still deeper degradation,—to stand bareheaded and barefooted for three days, amid the blasts of winter, in the court-yard of the castle, before the Pope would promise absolution, and then only at the intercession of the Countess Matilda.
What are we to think of such a fall, such a humiliation on the part of a sovereign? What are we to think of such haughtiness on the part of a priest,—his subject? We are filled with blended pity and indignation. We are inclined to say that this was the greatest blunder that any monarch ever made; that Henry—humbled and deserted and threatened as he was—should not have stooped to this; that he should have lost his crown and life rather than handed over his empire to a plebeian priest,—for he was an acknowledged hero; he was monarch of half of Europe. And yet we are bound to consider Henry's circumstances and the ideas with which he had to contend. His was the error of the Middle Ages; the feeblest of his modern successors would have killed the Pope if he could, rather than have disgraced himself by such an ignominy.
True it is that Henry came to himself; that he repented of his step. But it was too late. Gregory had gained the victory; and it was all the greater because it was a moral one. It was known to all Europe and all the world, and would be known to all posterity, that the Emperor of Germany had bowed in submission to a foreign priest. The temporal power had yielded to the spiritual; the State had conceded the supremacy of the Church. The Pope had triumphed over the mightiest monarch of the age, and his successors would place their feet over future prostrate kings. What a victory! What mighty consequences were the result of it! On what a throne did this moral victory seat the future pontiffs of the Eternal City! How august their dominion, for it was over the minds and souls of men! Truly to the Pope were given the keys of Heaven and Hell; and so long as the ideas of that age were accepted, who could resist a man armed with the thunders of Omnipotence?
It mattered nothing that the Emperor was ashamed of his weakness; that he retracted; that he vowed vengeance; that he marched at the head of new armies. No matter that his adherents were indignant; that all Germany wept; that loyalty rallied to his aid; that he gained victories proportionate with his former defeats; that he chased Gregory from city to city, and castle to castle, and convent to convent, while his generals burned the Pope's palaces and wasted his territories. No matter that Gregory—broken, defeated, miserable, outwardly ruined—died prematurely in exile; no matter that he did not, in his great reverses, anticipate the fruits of his firmness and heroism. His principles survived him; they have never been lost sight of by his successors; they gained strength through successive generations. Innocent III. reaped what he had sown. Kings dared not resist Innocent III., who realized those three things to which the more able Gregory had aspired,— "independent sovereignty, control over the princes of the earth, and the supremacy of the Church." Innocent was the greater pope, but Hildebrand was the greater man.
Yet, like so many of the great heroes of the world, he was not destined in his own person to reap the fruits of his heroism. "I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile,"—these were his last bitter words. He fancied he had failed. But did he fail? What did he leave behind? He left his great example and his still greater ideas. He left a legacy to his successors which makes them still potent on the earth, in spite of reformations and revolutions, and all the triumphs of literature and science. How mighty his deeds! How great his services to his Church! "He found," says an eloquent and able Edinburgh reviewer, "the papacy dependent on the emperor; he sustained it by alliances almost commensurate with the Italian peninsula. He found the papacy electoral by the Roman people and clergy; he left it electoral by papal nomination. He found the emperor the virtual patron of the Roman See; he wrenched that power from his hands. He found the secular clergy the allies and dependents of the secular power; he converted them into inalienable auxiliaries of his own. He found the patronage of the Church the desecrated spoil and merchandise of princes; he reduced it to his own dominion. He is celebrated as the reformer of the impure and profane abuses of his age; he is more justly entitled to the praise of having left the impress of his gigantic character on all the ages which have succeeded him."
Such was the great Hildebrand; a conqueror, however, by the force of recognized ideas more than by his own strength. How long, you ask, shall his empire last? We cannot tell who can predict the fortunes of such a power. It is not for me to speculate or preach. In considering his life and career, I have simply attempted to paint one of the most memorable moral contests of the world; to show the power of genius and will in a superstitious age,—and, more, the majestic force of ideas over the minds and souls of men, even though these ideas cannot be sustained by reason or Scripture.
AUTHORITIES.
Epistles of Gregory VII.; Baronius's Annals; Dupin's Ecclesiastical
history; Voigt, in his Hildebrand als Gregory VII.; Guizot's
Lectures on Civilization; Sir James Stephens's article on
Hildebrand, in Edinburgh Review; Dugdale's Mosasticon; Hallam's
Middle Ages; Digby's Ages of Faith; Jaffe's Regesta Pontificum
Romanorum; Mignet's series of articles on La Lutte des Papes contre
les Empereurs d'Allemagne; M. Villemain's Histoire de Gregoire
VII.; Bowden on the life and Times of Hildebrand; Milman's Latin
Christianity; Watterich's Romanorum Pontificum ab Aequalibus
Conscriptae; Platina's Lives of the Popes; Stubbs's Constitutional
History; Lee's History of Clerical Celibacy; Cardinal Newman's
Essays; Lecky's History of European Morals; Dr. Dollinger's Church
History; Neander's Church History; articles in Contemporary Review
of July and August, 1882, on the Turning Point of the Middle Ages.
SAINT BERNARD.
A. D. 1091-1153.
MONASTIC INSTITUTIONS.
One of the oldest institutions of the Church is that which grew out of monastic life. It had its seat, at a remote period, in India. It has existed, in different forms, in other Oriental countries. It has been modified by Brahminical, Buddhistic, and Persian theogonies, and extended to Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. Go where you will in the East, and you see traces of its mighty influence. We cannot tell its remotest origin, but we see everywhere the force of its ideas. Its fundamental principle appears to be the desire to propitiate the Deity by penances and ascetic labors as an atonement for sin, or as a means of rising to a higher religious life. It has sought to escape the polluting influences of demoralized society by lofty contemplation and retirement from the world. From the first, it was a protest against materialism, luxury, and enervating pleasures. It recognized something higher and nobler than devotion to material gains, or a life of degrading pleasure.
In one sense it was an intellectual movement, while in another it was an insult to the human understanding. It attempted a purer morality, but abnegated obvious and pressing duties. It was always a contradiction,—lofty while degraded, seeking to comprehend the profoundest mysteries, yet debased by puerile superstitions.
The consciousness of mankind, in all ages and countries, has ever accepted retribution for sin—more or less permanent—in this world or in the next. And it has equally accepted the existence of a Supreme Intelligence and Power, to whom all are responsible, and in connection with whom human destinies are bound up. The deeper we penetrate into the occult wisdom of the East,—on which light has been shed by modern explorations, monumental inscriptions, manuscripts, historical records, and other things which science and genius have deciphered,—the surer we feel that the esoteric classes of India, Egypt, and China were more united in their views of Supreme Power and Intelligence than was generally supposed fifty years ago. The higher intellects of Asia, in all countries and ages, had more lofty ideas of God than we have a right to infer from the superstitions of the people generally. They had unenlightened ideas as to the grounds of forgiveness. But of the necessity of forgiveness and the favor of the Deity they had no doubt.
The philosophical opinions of these sages gave direction to a great religious movement. Matter was supposed to be inherently evil, and mind was thought to be inherently good. The seat of evil was placed in the body rather than in the heart and mind. Not the thoughts of men were evil, but the passions and appetites of the body. Hence the first thing for a good man to do was to bring the body—this seat of evil—under subjection, and, if possible, to eradicate the passions and appetites which enslave the body; and this was to be done by self-flagellations, penances, austerities, and solitude,—flight from the contaminating influences of the world. All Oriental piety assumed this ascetic form. The transition was easy to the sundering of domestic ties, to the suppression of natural emotions and social enjoyments. The devotee became austere, cold, inhuman, unsocial. He shunned the habitations of men. And the more desirous he was to essay a high religious life and thus rise in favor with God, the more severe and revengeful and unforgiving he made the Deity he adored,—not a compassionate Creator and Father, but an irresistible Power bent on his destruction. This degrading view of the Deity, borrowed from Paganism, tinged the subsequent theology of the Christian monks, and entered largely into the theology of the Middle Ages.
Such was the prevailing philosophy, or theosophy—both lofty and degraded—with which the Christian convert had to contend; not merely the shameless vices of the people, so open and flagrant as to call out disgust and indignation, but also the views which the more virtuous and religious of Pagan saints accepted and promulgated: and not saints alone, but those who made the greatest pretension to intellectual culture, like the Gnostics and Manicheans; those men who were the first to ensnare Saint Augustine,—specious, subtle, sophistical, as acute as the Brahmins of India. It was Eastern philosophy, unquestionably false, that influenced the most powerful institution that existed in Europe for above a thousand years,—an institution which all the learning and eloquence of the Reformers of the sixteenth century could not subvert, except in Protestant countries.
Now what, more specifically, were the ideas which the early monks borrowed from India, Persia, and Egypt, which ultimately took such a firm hold of the European mind?
One was the superior virtue of a life devoted to purely religious contemplation, and for the same end that animated the existence of fakirs and sofis. It was to escape the contaminating influence of matter, to rise above the wants of the body, to exterminate animal passions and appetites, to hide from a world which luxury corrupted. The Christian recluses were thus led to bury themselves in cells among the mountains and deserts, in dreary and uncomfortable caverns, in isolated retreats far from the habitation of men,—yea, among wild beasts, clothing themselves in their skins and eating their food, in order to commune with God more effectually, and propitiate His favor. Their thoughts were diverted from the miseries which they ought to have alleviated and the ignorance which they ought to have removed, and were concentrated upon themselves, not upon their relatives and neighbors. The cries of suffering humanity were disregarded in a vain attempt to practise doubtful virtues. How much good those pious recluses might have done, had their piety taken a more practical form! What missionaries they might have made, what self- denying laborers in the field of active philanthropy, what noble teachers to the poor and miserable! The conversion of the world to Christianity did not enter into their minds so much as the desire to swell the number of their communities. They only aimed at a dreamy pietism,—at best their own individual salvation, rather than the salvation of others. Instead of reaching to the beatific vision, they became ignorant, narrow, and visionary; and, when learned, they fought for words and not for things. They were advocates of subtile and metaphysical distinctions in theology, rather than of those practical duties and simple faith which primitive Christianity enjoined. Monastic life, no less than the schools of Alexandria, was influential in creating a divinity which gave as great authority to dogmas that are the result of intellectual deductions, as those based on direct and original declarations. And these deductions were often gloomy, and colored by the fears which were inseparable from a belief in divine wrath rather than divine love. The genius of monasticism, ancient and modern, is the propitiation of the Divinity who seeks to punish rather than to forgive. It invented Purgatory, to escape the awful burnings of an everlasting hell of physical sufferings. It pervaded the whole theology of the Middle Ages, filling hamlet and convent alike with an atmosphere of fear and wrath, and creating a cruel spiritual despotism. The recluse, isolated and lonely, consumed himself with phantoms, fancied devils, and "chimeras dire." He could not escape from himself, although he might fly from society. As a means of grace he sought voluntary solitary confinement, without nutritious food or proper protection from the heat and cold, clad in a sheepskin filled with dirt and vermin. What life could be more antagonistic to enlightened reason? What mistake more fatal to everything like self-improvement, culture, knowledge, happiness? And all for what? To strive after an impossible perfection, or the solution of insoluble questions, or the favor of a Deity whose attributes he misunderstood.
But this unnatural, unwise retirement was not the worst evil in the life of a primitive monk, with all its dreamy contemplation and silent despair. It was accompanied with the most painful austerities,—self-inflicted scourgings, lacerations, dire privations, to propitiate an angry deity, or to bring the body into a state which would be insensible to pain, or to exorcise passions which the imaginations inflamed. All this was based on penance,— self-expiation,—which entered so largely into the theogonies of the East, and which gave a gloomy form to the piety of the Middle Ages. This error was among the first to kindle the fiery protests of Luther. The repudiation of this error, and of its logical sequences, was one of the causes of the Reformation. This error cast its dismal shadow on the common life of the Middle Ages. You cannot penetrate the spirit of those centuries without a painful recognition of almost universal darkness and despair. How gloomy was a Gothic church before the eleventh century, with its dark and heavy crypt, its narrow windows, its massive pillars, its low roof, its cold, damp pavement, as if men went into that church to hide themselves and sing mournful songs,—the Dies Irae of monastic fear!
But the primitive monks, with all their lofty self-sacrifices and efforts for holy meditation, towards the middle of the fourth century, as their number increased from the anarchies and miseries of a falling empire, became quarrelsome, sometimes turbulent, and generally fierce and fanatical. They had to be governed. They needed some master mind to control them, and confine them to their religious duties. Then arose Basil, a great scholar, and accustomed to civilized life in the schools of Athens and Constantinople, who gave rules and laws to the monks, gathered them into communities and discouraged social isolation, knowing that the demons had more power over men when they were alone and idle.
This Basil was an extraordinary man. His ancestors were honorable and wealthy. He moved in the highest circle of social life, like Chrysostom. He was educated in the most famous schools. He travelled extensively like other young men of rank. His tutor was the celebrated Libanius, the greatest rhetorician of the day. He exhausted Antioch, Caesarea, and Constantinople, and completed his studies at Athens, where he formed a famous friendship with Gregory Nazianzen, which was as warm and devoted as that between Cicero and Atticus: these young men were the talk and admiration of Athens. Here, too, he was intimate with young Julian, afterwards the "Apostate" Emperor of Rome. Basil then visited the schools of Alexandria, and made the acquaintance of the great Athanasius, as well as of those monks who sought a retreat amid Egyptian solitudes. Here his conversion took place, and he parted with his princely patrimony for the benefit of the poor. He then entered the Church, and was successively ordained deacon and priest, while leading a monastic life. He retired among the mountains of Armenia, and made choice of a beautiful grove, watered with crystal streams, where he gave himself to study and meditation. Here he was joined by his friend Gregory Nazianzen and by enthusiastic admirers, who formed a religious fraternity, to whom he was a spiritual father. He afterwards was forced to accept the great See of Caesarea, and was no less renowned as bishop and orator than he had been as monk. Yet it is as a monk that he left the most enduring influence, since he made the first great change in monastic life,—making it more orderly, more industrious, and less fanatical.
He instituted or embodied, among others, the three great vows, which are vital to monastic institutions,—Poverty, Obedience, and Chastity. In these vows he gave the institution a more Christian and a less Oriental aspect. Monachism became more practical and less visionary and wild. It approximated nearer to the Christian standard. Submission to poverty is certainly a Christian virtue, if voluntary poverty is not. Chastity is a cardinal duty. Obedience is a necessity to all civilized life. It is the first condition of all government.
Moreover, these three vows seem to have been called for by the condition of society, and the prevalence of destructive views. Here Basil,—one of the commanding intellects of his day, and as learned and polished as he was pious,—like Jerome after him, proved himself a great legislator and administrator, including in his comprehensive view both Christian principles and the necessities of the times, and adapting his institution to both.
One of the most obvious, flagrant, and universal evils of the day was devotion to money-making in order to purchase sensual pleasures. It pervaded Roman life from the time of Augustus. The vow of poverty, therefore, was a stern, lofty, disdainful protest against the most dangerous and demoralizing evil of the Empire. It hurled scorn, hatred, and defiance on this overwhelming evil, and invoked the aid of Christianity. It was simply the earnest affirmation and belief that money could not buy the higher joys of earth, and might jeopardize the hopes of heaven. It called to mind the greatest examples; it showed that the great teachers of mankind, the sages and prophets of history, had disdained money as the highest good; that riches exposed men to great temptation, and lowered the standard of morality and virtue,—"how hardly shall they who have riches enter into the kingdom of God!" It appealed to the highest form of self-sacrifice; it arrayed itself against a vice which was undermining society. And among truly Christian people this new application of Christ's warnings against the dangers of wealth excited enthusiasm. It was like enlisting in the army of Christ against his greatest enemies. Make any duty clear and imperious to Christian people, and they will generally conform to it. So the world saw one of the most impressive spectacles of all history,—the rich giving up their possessions to follow the example and injunctions of Christ. It was the most signal test of Christian obedience. It prompted Paula, the richest lady of Christian antiquity, to devote the revenues of an entire city, which she owned, to the cause of Christ; and the approbation of Jerome, her friend, was a sufficient recompense.
The vow of Chastity was equally a protest against one of the characteristic vices of the day, as well as a Christian virtue. Luxury and pleasure-seeking lives had relaxed the restraints of home and the virtues of earlier days. The evils of concubinage were shameless and open throughout the empire, which led to a low estimate of female virtue and degraded the sex. The pagan poets held up woman as a subject of scorn and scarcasm. On no subject were the apostles more urgent in their exhortations than to a life of purity. To no greater temptation were the converts to Christianity subjected than the looseness of prevailing sentiments in reference to this vice. It stared everybody in the face. Basil took especial care to guard the monks from this prevailing iniquity, and made chastity a transcendent and fundamental virtue. He aimed to remove the temptation to sin. The monks were enjoined to shun the very presence of women. If they carried the system of non-intercourse too far, and became hard and unsympathetic, it was to avoid the great scandal of the age,—a still greater evil. To the monk was denied even the blessing of the marriage ties. Celibacy became a fundamental law of monachism. It was not to cement a spiritual despotism that Basil forbade marriage, but to attain a greater sanctity,—for a monk was consecrated to what was rightly held the higher life. This law of celibacy was abused, and gradually was extended to all the clergy, secular as well as regular, but not till the clergy were all subordinated to the rule of an absolute Pope. It is the fate of all human institutions to become corrupt; but no institution of the Church has been so fatally perverted as that pertaining to the marriage of the clergy. Founded to promote purity of personal life, it was used to uphold the arms of spiritual despotism. It was the policy of Hildebrand.
The vow of Obedience, again, was made in special reference to the disintegration of society, when laws were feebly enforced and a central power was passing away. The discipline even of armies was relaxed. Mobs were the order of the day, even in imperial cities. Moreover, monks had long been insubordinate; they obeyed no head, except nominally; they were with difficulty ruled in their communities. Therefore obedience was made a cardinal virtue, as essential to the very existence of monastic institutions. I need not here allude to the perversion of this rule,—how it degenerated into a fearful despotism, and was made use of by ambitious popes, and finally by the generals of the Mendicant Friars and the Jesuits. All the rules of Basil were perverted from their original intention; but in his day they were called for.
About a century later the monastic system went through another change or development, when Benedict, a remarkable organizer, instituted on Monte Cassino, near Naples, his celebrated monastery (529 A. D.), which became the model of all the monasteries of the West. He reaffirmed the rules of Basil, but with greater strictness. He gave no new principles to monastic life; but he adapted it to the climate and institutions of the newly founded Gothic kingdoms of Europe. It became less Oriental; it was made more practical; it was invested with new dignity. The most visionary and fanatical of all the institutions of the East was made useful. The monks became industrious. Industry was recognized as a prime necessity even for men who had retired from the world. No longer were the labors of monks confined to the weaving of baskets, but they were extended to the comforts of ordinary life,—to the erection of stately buildings, to useful arts, the systematic cultivation of the land, to the accumulation of wealth,—not for individuals, but for their monasteries. Monastic life became less dreamy, less visionary, but more useful, recognizing the bodily necessities of men. The religious duties of monks were still dreary, monotonous, and gloomy,—long and protracted singing in the choir, incessant vigils, an unnatural silence at the table, solitary walks in the cloister, the absence of social pleasures, confinement to the precincts of their convents; but their convents became bee-hives of industry, and their lands were highly cultivated. The monks were hospitable; they entertained strangers, and gave a shelter to the persecuted and miserable. Their monasteries became sacred retreats, which were respected by those rude warriors who crushed beneath their feet the glories of ancient civilization. Nor for several centuries did the monks in their sacred enclosures give especial scandal. Their lives were spent in labors of a useful kind, alternated and relieved by devotional duties.
Hence they secured the respect and favor of princes and good men, who gave them lands and rich presents of gold and silver vessels. Their convents were unmolested and richly endowed, and these became enormously multiplied in every European country. Gradually they became so rich as to absorb the wealth of nations. Their abbots became great personages, being chosen from the ranks of princes and barons. The original poverty and social insignificance of monachism passed away, and the institution became the most powerful organization in Europe. It then aspired to political influence, and the lord abbots became the peers of princes and the ministers of kings. Their abbey churches, especially, became the wonder and the admiration of the age, both for size and magnificence. The abbey church of Cluny, in Burgundy, was five hundred and thirty feet long, and had stalls for two hundred monks. It had the appointment of one hundred and fifty parish priests. The church of Saint Albans, in England, is said to have been six hundred feet long; and that of Glastonbury, the oldest in England, five hundred and thirty. Peterborough's was over five hundred. The kings of England, both Saxon and Norman, were especial patrons of these religious houses. King Edgar founded forty-seven monasteries and richly endowed them; Henry I. founded one hundred and fifty; and Henry II. as many more. At one time there were seven hundred Benedictine abbeys in England, some of which were enormously rich,— like those of Westminster, St. Albans, Glastonbury, and Bury St. Edmunds,—and their abbots were men of the highest social and political distinction. They sat in Parliament as peers of the realm; they coined money, like feudal barons; they lived in great state and dignity. The abbot of Monte Cassino was duke and prince, and chancellor of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This celebrated convent had the patronage of four bishoprics, sixteen hundred and sixty-two churches, and possessed or controlled two hundred and fifty castles, four hundred and forty towns, and three hundred and thirty-six manors. Its revenues exceeded five hundred thousand ducats, so that the lord-abbot was the peer of the greatest secular princes. He was more powerful and wealthy, probably, than any archbishop in Europe. One of the abbots of St. Gall entered Strasburg with one thousand horsemen in his train. Whiting, of Glastonbury, entertained five hundred people of fashion at one time, and had three hundred domestic servants. "My vow of poverty," said another of these lordly abbots,—who generally rode on mules with gilded bridles and with hawks on their wrists,—"has given me ten thousand crowns a year; and my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince."
Among the privileges of these abbots was exemption from taxes and tolls; they were judges in the courts; they had the execution of all rents, and the supreme control of the income of the abbey lands. The revenues of Westminster and Glastonbury were equal to half a million of dollars a year in our money, considering the relative value of gold and silver. Glastonbury owned about one thousand oxen, two hundred and fifty cows, and six thousand sheep. Fontaine abbey possessed forty thousand acres of land. The abbot of Augia, in Germany, had a revenue of sixty thousand crowns,— several millions, as money is now measured. At one time the monks, with the other clergy, owned half of the lands of Europe. If a king was to be ransomed, it was they who furnished the money; if costly gifts were to be given to the Pope, it was they who made them. The value of the vessels of gold and silver, the robes and copes of silk and velvet, the chalices, the altar-pieces, and the shrines enriched with jewels, was inestimable. The feasts which the abbots gave were almost regal. At the installation of the abbot of St. Augustine, at Canterbury, there were consumed fifty- eight tuns of beer, eleven tuns of wine, thirty-one oxen, three hundred pigs, two hundred sheep, one thousand geese, one thousand capons, six hundred rabbits, nine thousand eggs, while the guests numbered six thousand people. Of the various orders of the Benedictines there have been thirty-seven thousand monasteries and one hundred and fifty thousand abbots. From the monks, twenty-one thousand have been chosen as bishops and archbishops, and twenty- eight have been elevated to the papal throne.
From these things, and others which may seem too trivial to mention, we infer the great wealth and power of monastic institutions, the most flourishing days of which were from the sixth century to the Crusades, beginning in the eleventh, when more than one hundred thousand monks acknowledged the rule of Saint Benedict. During this period of prosperity, when the vast abbey churches were built, and when abbots were great temporal as well as spiritual magnates, quite on an equality with the proudest feudal barons, we notice a marked decline in the virtues which had extorted the admiration of Europe. The Benedictines retained their original organization, they were bound by the same vows (as individuals, the monks were always poor), they wore the same dress, as they did centuries before, and they did not fail in their duties in the choir,—singing their regular chants from two o'clock in the morning. But discipline was relaxed; the brothers strayed into unseemly places; they indulged in the pleasures of the table; they were sensual in their appearance; they were certainly ignorant, as a body; and they performed more singing than preaching or teaching. They lived for themselves rather than for the people. They however remained hospitable to the last. Their convents were hotels as well as bee-hives; any stranger could remain two nights at a convent without compensation and without being questioned. The brothers dined together at the refectory, according to the rules, on bread, vegetables, and a little meat; although it was noticed that they had a great variety in cooking eggs, which were turned and roasted and beaten up, and hardened and minced and fried and stuffed. It is said that subsequently they drank enormous quantities of beer and wine, and sometimes even to disgraceful excess. Their rules required them to keep silence at their meals; but their humanity got the better of them, and they have been censured for their hilarious and frivolous conversation,—for jests and stories and puns. Bernard accused the monks of degeneracy, of being given to the pleasures of the table, of loving the good things which they professed to scorn,—rare fish, game, and elaborate cookery.
That the monks sadly degenerated in morals and discipline, and even became objects of scandal, is questioned by no respectable historian. No one was more bitter and vehement in his denunciations of this almost universal corruption of monastic life than Saint Bernard himself,—the impersonation of an ideal monk. Hence reforms were attempted; and the Cluniacs and Cistercians and other orders arose, modelled after the original institution on Monte Cassino. These were only branches of the Benedictines. Their vows and habits and duties were the same. It would seem that the prevailing vices of the Benedictines, in their decline, were those which were fostered by great wealth, and consequent idleness and luxury. But at their worst estate the monks, or regular clergy, were no worse than the secular clergy, or parish priests, in their ordinary lives, and were more intelligent,—at least more learned. The ignorance of the secular clergy was notorious and scandalous. They could not even write letters of common salutation; and what little knowledge they had was extolled and exaggerated. It was confined to the acquisition of the Psalter by heart, while a little grammar, writing, and accounts were regarded as extraordinary. He who could write a few homilies, drawn from the Fathers, was a wonder and a prodigy. There was a total absence of classical literature.
But the Benedictines, idle and worldly as they were, guarded what little literature had escaped the ruin of the ancient civilization. They gave the only education the age afforded. There was usually a school attached to every convent, and manual labor was shortened in favor of students. Nor did the monks systematically and deliberately shut the door of knowledge against those inclined to study, for at that time there was no jealousy of learning; there was only indifference to it, or want of appreciation. The age was ignorant, and life was hard, and the struggle for existence occupied the thoughts of all. The time of the monks was consumed in alternate drudgeries and religious devotions. There was such a general intellectual torpor that scholars (and these were very few) were left at liberty to think and write as they pleased on the great questions of theology. There was such a general unanimity of belief, that the popes were not on the look-out for heresy. Nobody thought of attacking their throne. There was no jealousy about the reading of the Scriptures. Every convent had a small library, mostly composed of Lives of the saints, and of devout meditations and homilies; and the Bible was the greatest treasure of all,—the Vulgate of Saint Jerome, which was copied and illuminated by busy hands. In spite of the general ignorance, the monks relieved their dull lives by some attempts at art. This was the age of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts. There was but little of doctrinal controversy, for the creed of the Church was settled; but pious meditations and the writings of noted saints were studied and accepted,—especially the works of Saint Augustine, who had fixed the thinking of the West for a thousand years. Pagan literature had but little charm until Aristotle was translated by Arabian scholars. The literature of the Church was puerile and extravagant, yet Christian,—consisting chiefly of legends of martyrs and Lives of saints. That literature has no charm to us, and can never be revived, indeed is already forgotten and neglected, as well it may be; but it gave unity to Christian belief, and enthroned the Christian heroes on the highest pedestal of human greatness. In the monasteries some one of the fraternity read aloud these Lives and Meditations, while the brothers worked or dined. There was no discussion, for all thought alike; and all sought to stimulate religious emotions rather than to quicken intellectual activity.
About half the time of the monks, in a well-regulated monastery, was given to singing and devotional exercises and religious improvement, and the other half to labors in the fields, or in painting or musical composition. So far as we know, the monks lived in great harmony, and were obedient to the commands of their superiors. They had a common object to live for, and had few differences in opinion on any subject. They did not enjoy a high life, but it was free from distracting pleasures. They held to great humility, with which spiritual pride was mingled,—not the arrogant pride of the dialectician, but the self-satisfied pride of the devotee. There was no religious hatred, except towards Turks and Saracens. The monk, in his narrowness and ignorance, may be repulsive to an enlightened age: he was not repulsive to his own, for he was not behind it either in his ideas or in his habits of life. In fact, the more repulsive the monk of the dark ages is to this generation, the more venerated he was by bishops and barons seven hundred years ago; which fact leads us to infer that the degenerate monk might be to us most interesting when he was most condemned by the reformers of his day, since he was more humane, genial, and free than his brethren, chained to the rigid discipline of his convent. Even a Friar Tuck is not so repulsive to us as an unsocial, austere, narrow-minded, and ignorant fanatic of the eleventh century.
But the monks were not to remain forever imprisoned in the castles of ignorance and despair. With the opening of the twelfth century light began to dawn upon the human mind. The intellectual monk, long accustomed to devout meditations, began to speculate on those subjects which had occupied his thoughts,—on God and His attributes, on the nature and penalty of sin, on redemption, on the Saviour, on the power of the will to resist evil, and other questions that had agitated the early Fathers of the Church. Then arose such men as Erigena, Roscelin, Berenger, Lanfranc, Anselm, Bernard, and others,—all more or less orthodox, but inquiring and intellectual. It was within the walls of the cloister that the awakening began and the first impulse was given to learning and philosophy. The abbey of Bec, in Normandy, was the most distinguished of new intellectual centres, while Clairvaux and other princely abbeys had inmates as distinguished for meditative habits as for luxury and pride.
It was at this period, when the convents of Europe rejoiced in ample possessions, and their churches rivalled cathedrals in size and magnificence, and their abbots were lords and princes,—the palmy age of monastic institutions, chiefly of the Benedictine order,—that Saint Bernard, the greatest and best representative of Mediaeval monasticism, was born, 1091, at Fontaine, in Burgundy. He belonged to a noble family. His mother was as remarkable as Monica or Nonna. She had six sons and a daughter, whom she early consecrated to the Lord. Bernard was the third son. Like Luther, he was religiously inclined from early youth, and panted for monastic seclusion. At the age of twenty-three he entered the new monastery at Citeaux, which had been founded a few years before by Stephen Harding, an English saint, who revived the rule of Saint Benedict with still greater strictness, and was the founder of the Cistercian order,—a branch of the Benedictines. He entered this gloomy retreat, situated amid marshes and morasses, with no outward attractions like Cluny, but unhealthy and miserably poor,—the dreariest spot, perhaps, in Burgundy; and he entered at the head of thirty young men, of the noble class, among whom were four of his brothers who had been knights, and who presented themselves to the abbot as novices, bent on the severest austerities that human nature could support.
Bernard himself was a beautiful, delicate, refined young man,— tall, with flaxen hair, fair complexion, blue eyes from which shone a superhuman simplicity and purity. His noble birth would have opened to him the highest dignities of the Church, but he sought only to bear the yoke of Christ, and to be nailed to the cross; and he really became a common laborer wrapped in a coarse cowl, digging ditches and planting fields,—for such were the labors of the monks of Citeaux when not performing their religious exercises. But his disposition was as beautiful as his person, and he soon won the admiration of his brother monks, as he had won the affection of the knights of Burgundy. Such was his physical weakness that "nearly everything he took his stomach rejected;" and such was the rigor of his austerities that he destroyed the power of appetite. He could scarcely distinguish oil from wine. He satisfied his hunger with the Bible and quenched his thirst with prayer. In three years he became famous as a saint, and was made Abbot of Clairvaux,—a new Cistercian convent, in a retired valley which had been a nest of robbers.
But his intellect was as remarkable as his piety, and his monastery became not only a model of monastic life to which flocked men from all parts of Europe to study its rules, but the ascetic abbot himself became an oracle on all the questions of the day. So great was his influence that when he died, in 1153, he left behind one hundred and sixty monasteries formed after his model. He became the counsellor of kings and nobles, bishops and popes. He was summoned to attend councils and settle quarrels. His correspondence exceeded that of Jerome or Saint Augustine. He was sought for as bishop in the largest cities of France and Italy. He ruled Europe by the power of learning and sanctity. He entered into all the theological controversies of the day. He was the opponent of Abelard, whose condemnation he secured. He became a great theologian and statesman, as well as churchman. He incited the princes of Europe to a new crusade. His eloquence is said to have been marvellous; even the tones of his voice would melt to pity or excite to rage. With a long neck, like that of Cicero, and a trembling, emaciated frame, he preached with passionate intensity. Nobody could resist his eloquence. He could scarcely stand upright from weakness, yet he could address ten thousand men. He was an outspoken man, and reproved the greatest dignitaries with as much boldness as did Savonarola. He denounced the gluttony of monks, the avarice of popes, and the rapacity of princes. He held heresy in mortal hatred, like the Fathers of the fifth century. His hostility to Abelard was direful, since he looked upon him as undermining Christianity and extinguishing faith in the world. In his defence of orthodoxy he was the peer of Augustine or Athanasius. He absolutely abhorred the Mohammedans as the bitterest foes of Christendom,—the persecutors of pious pilgrims. He wandered over Europe preaching a crusade. He renounced the world, yet was compelled by the unanimous voice of his contemporaries to govern the world. He gave a new impulse to the order of Knights Templars. He was as warlike as he was humble. He would breathe the breath of intense hostility into the souls of crusaders, and then hasten back to the desolate and barren country in which Clairvaux was situated, rebuild his hut of leaves and boughs, and soothe his restless spirit with the study of the Song of Songs. Like his age, and like his institution, he was a great contradiction. The fiercest and most dogmatic of controversialists was the most gentle and loving of saints. His humanity was as marked as his fanaticism, and nothing could weaken it,—not even the rigors of his convent life. He wept at the sorrows of all who sought his sympathy or advice. On the occasion of his brother's death he endeavored to preach a sermon on the Canticles, but broke down as Jerome did at the funeral of Paula. He kept to the last the most vivid recollection of his mother; and every night, before he went to bed, he recited the seven Penitential Psalms for the benefit of her soul.
In his sermons and exhortations Bernard dwelt equally on the wrath of God and the love of Christ. Said he to a runaway Cistercian, "Thou fearest watchings, fasts, and manual labor, but these are light to one who thinks on eternal fire. The remembrance of the outer darkness takes away all horror from solitude. Place before thine eyes the everlasting weeping and gnashing of teeth, the fury of those flames which can never be extinguished" (the essence of the theology of the Middle Ages,—the fear of Hell, of a physical and eternal Hell of bodily torments, by which fear those ages were controlled). Bernard, the loveliest impersonation of virtue which those ages saw, was not beyond their ideas. He impersonated them, and therefore led the age and became its greatest oracle. The passive virtues of the Sermon on the Mount were united with the fiercest passions of religious intolerance and the most repulsive views of divine vengeance. That is the soul of monasticism, even as reformed by Harding, Alberic, and Bernard in the twelfth century,—less human than in the tenth century, yet more intellectual.
The monks of Citeaux, of Morimond, of Pontigny, of Clairvaux, amid the wastes of a barren country, with their white habits and perpetual vigils and haircloth shirts and root dinners and hard labors in the field were yet the counsellors and ministers of kings and the creators of popes, and incited the nations to the most bloody and unfortunate wars in the whole history of society,—I mean the Crusades. Some were great intellectual giants, yet all repelled scepticism as life repels death; all dwelt on the sufferings of the cross as a door through which the penitent and believing could surely enter heaven, yet based the justice of the infinite Father of Love on what, when it appeals to consciousness, seems to be the direst injustice. We cannot despise the Middle Ages, which produced such beatific and exalted saints, but we pity those dismal times when the great mass of the people had so little pleasure and comfort in this life, and such gloomy fears of the world to come; when life was made a perpetual sacrifice and abnegation of all the pleasures that are given us to enjoy,—to use and not to pervert. Hence monasticism was repulsive, even in its best ages, to enlightened reason, and fatal to all progress among nations, although it served a useful purpose when men were governed by fear alone, and when violence and strife and physical discomfort and ignorance and degrading superstitions covered the fairest portion of the earth with a funereal pall for more than a thousand years.
The thirteenth century saw a new development of monastic institutions in the creation of the Mendicant Friars,—especially the Dominicans and Franciscans,—monks whose mission it was to wander over Europe as preachers, confessors, and teachers. The Benedictines were too numerous, wealthy, and corrupt to be reformed. They had become a scandal; they had lost the confidence of good men. There were needed more active partisans of the Pope to sustain his authority; the new universities required abler professors; the cities sought more popular preachers; the great desired more intelligent confessors. The Crusades had created a new field of enterprise, and had opened to the eye of Europe a wider horizon of knowledge. The universities which had grown up around the cathedral schools had kindled a spirit of inquiry. Church architecture had become lighter, more cheerful, and more symbolic. The Greek philosophy had revealed a new method. The doctrines of the Church, if they did not require a new system, yet needed, or were supposed to need, the aid of philosophy, for the questions which the schoolmen discussed were so subtile and intricate that only the logic of Aristotle could make them clear.
Now the Mendicant orders entered with a zeal which has never been equalled, except by the Jesuits, into all the inquiries of the schools, and kindled a new religious life among the people, like the Methodists of the last century. They were somewhat similar to the Temperance reformers of the last fifty years. They were popular, zealous, intelligent, and religious. So great were their talents and virtues that they speedily spread over Europe, and occupied the principal pulpits and the most important chairs in the universities. Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus were the great ornaments of these new orders. Their peculiarity—in contrast with the old orders—was, that they wandered from city to city and village to village at the command of their superiors. They had convents, like the other monks; but they professed absolute poverty, went barefooted, and submitted to increased rigors. Their vows were essentially those of the Benedictines. In less than a century, however, they too had degenerated, and were bitterly reproached for their vagabond habits and the violation of their vows. Their convents had also become rich, like those of the Benedictines. It was these friars whom Chaucer ridiculed, and against whose vices Wyclif declaimed. Yet they were retained by the popes for their services in behalf of ecclesiastical usurpation. It was they who were especially chosen to peddle indulgences. Their history is an impressive confirmation of the tendency of all human institutions to degenerate. It would seem that the mission of the Benedictines had been accomplished in the thirteenth century, and that of the Dominicans and Franciscans in the fourteenth.
But monasticism, in any of its forms, ceased to have a salutary influence on society when the darkness of the Middle Ages was dispersed. It is peculiarly a Mediaeval institution. As a Mediaeval institution, it conferred many benefits on the semi- barbarians of Europe. As a whole, considering the shadows of ignorance and superstition which veiled Christendom, and the evils which violence produced, its influence was beneficent.
Among the benefits which monastic institutions conferred, at least indirectly, may be mentioned the counteracting influence they exerted against the turbulence and tyranny of baronial lords, whose arrogance and extortion they rebuked; they befriended the peasantry; they enabled poor boys to rise; they defended the doctrine that the instructors of mankind should be taken from all classes alike; they were democratic in their sympathies, while feudal life produced haughtiness and scorn; they welcomed scholars from the humblest ranks; they beheld in peasants' children souls which could be ennobled. Though abbots were chosen generally from the upper classes, yet the ordinary monks sprang from the peasantry. For instance, a peasant's family is deprived of its head; he has been killed while fighting for a feudal lord. The family are doomed to misery and hardship. No aristocratic tears are shed for them; they are no better than dogs or cattle. The mother is heartbroken. Not one of her children can ordinarily rise from their abject position; they can live and breathe the common air, and that is all. They are unmolested in their mud huts, if they will toil for the owner of their village at the foot of the baronial castle. But one of her sons is bright and religious. He attracts the attention of a sympathetic monk, whose venerable retreat is shaded with trees, adorned with flowers, and seated perhaps on the side of a murmuring stream, whose banks have been made fertile by industry and beautiful with herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. He urges the afflicted mother to consecrate him to the service of the Church; and the boy enters the sanctuary and is educated according to the fashion of the age, growing up a well- trained, austere, and obedient member of the fraternity, whose spirit is dominated by its superiors in all activities. He passes from office to office. In time he becomes the prior of his convent,—possibly its abbot, the equal of that proud baron in whose service his father lost his life, the controller of innumerable acres, the minister of kings. How, outside the Church, could he thus have arisen? But in the monastery he is enabled, in the most aristocratic age of the world, to rise to the highest of worldly dignities. And he is a man of peace and not of war. He hates war; he seeks to quell dissensions and quarrels. He believes that there is a higher than the warrior's excellence. Monachism recognized what feudalism did not,—the claims of man as man. In this respect it was human and sympathetic. It furnished a retreat from misery and oppression. It favored contemplative habits and the passive virtues, so much needed in turbulent times. Whatever faults the monks had, it must be allowed that they alleviated sufferings, and presented the only consolation that their gloomy and iron age afforded. In an imperfect manner their convents answered the purpose of our modern hotels, hospitals, and schools. It was benevolence, charity, and piety which the monks aimed to secure, and which they often succeeded in diffusing among people more wretched and ignorant than themselves.
AUTHORITIES.
Saint Bernard's Works, especially the Epistles; Mabillon; Helyot's
Histoire des Ordres Monastiques; Dugdale's Monasticon; Doring's
Geschichte der Monchsorden; Montalembert's Les Moines d'Occident;
Milman's Latin Christianity; Morison's Life and Times of Saint
Bernard; Lives of the English Saints; Stephen Harding; Histoire
d'Abbaye do Cluny, par M. P. Lorain; Neander's Church History;
Butler's Lives of the Saints; Vaughan's Life of Thomas Aquinas;
Digby's Ages of Faith.
SAINT ANSELM
A. D. 1033-1109.
MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY.
The Middle Ages produced no more interesting man than Anselm, Abbot of Bec and Archbishop of Canterbury,—not merely a great prelate, but a great theologian, resplendent in the virtues of monastic life and in devotion to the interests of the Church. He was one of the first to create an intellectual movement in Europe, and to stimulate theological inquiries.
Anselm was born at Aosta, in Italy, 1033, and he died in 1109, at the age of 76. He was therefore the contemporary of Hildebrand, of Lanfranc, of Berenger, of Roscelin, of Henry IV. of Germany, of William the Conqueror, of the Countess Matilda, and of Urban II. He saw the first Crusade, the great quarrel about investitures and the establishment of the Normans in England. Aosta was on the confines of Lombardy and Burgundy, in a mountainous district, amid rich cornfields and fruitful vines and dark, waving chestnuts, in sight of lofty peaks with their everlasting snow. Anselm belonged to a noble but impoverished family; his father was violent and unthrifty, but his mother was religious and prudent. He was by nature a student, and early was destined to monastic life,—the only life favorable to the development of the intellect in a rude and turbulent age. I have already alluded to the general ignorance of the clergy in those times. There were no schools of any note at this period, and no convents where learning was cultivated beyond the rudiments of grammar and arithmetic and the writings of the Fathers. The monks could read and talk in Latin, of a barbarous sort,—which was the common language of the learned, so far as any in that age could be called learned.
The most famous place in Europe, at that time, where learning was cultivated, was the newly-founded abbey of Bec in Normandy, under the superintendence of the Archbishop of Rouen, of which Lanfranc of Pavia was the prior. It was the first abbey in Normandy to open the door of learning to the young and inquiring minds of Western Europe. It was a Benedictine abbey, as severe in its rules as that of Clairvaux. It would seem that the fame of this convent, and of Lanfranc its presiding genius (afterwards the great Archbishop of Canterbury), reached the ears of Anselm; so that on the death of his parents he wandered over the Alps, through Burgundy, to this famous school, where the best teaching of the day was to be had. Lanfranc cordially welcomed his fellow-countryman, then at the age of twenty-six, to his retreat; and on his removal three years afterwards to the more princely abbey of St. Stephen in Caen, Anselm succeeded him as prior. Fifteen years later he became abbot, and ruled the abbey for fifteen years, during which time Lanfranc—the mutual friend of William the Conqueror and the great Hildebrand—became Archbishop of Canterbury.
During this seclusion of thirty years in the abbey of Bec, Anselm gave himself up to theological and philosophical studies, and became known both as a profound and original thinker and a powerful supporter of ecclesiastical authority. The scholastic age,—that is, the age of dialectics, when theology invoked the aid of philosophy to establish the truths of Christianity,—had not yet begun; but Anselm may be regarded as a pioneer, the precursor of Thomas Aquinas, since he was led into important theological controversies to establish the creed of Saint Augustine. It was not till several centuries after his death, however, that his remarkable originality of genius was fully appreciated. He anticipated Descartes in his argument to prove the existence of God. He is generally regarded as the profoundest intellect among the early schoolmen, and the most original that appeared in the Church after Saint Augustine. He was not a popular preacher like Saint Bernard, but he taught theology with marvellous lucidity to the monks who sought the genial quiet of his convent. As an abbot he was cheerful and humane, almost to light-heartedness, frank and kind to everybody,—an exception to most of the abbots of his day, who were either austere and rigid, or convivial and worldly. He was a man whom everybody loved and trusted, yet one not unmindful of his duties as the supreme ruler of his abbey, enforcing discipline, while favoring relaxation. No monk ever led a life of higher meditation than he; absorbed not in a dreamy and visionary piety, but in intelligent inquiries as to the grounds of religious belief. He was a true scholar of the Platonic and Angustinian school; not a dialectician like Albertus Magnus and Abelard, but a man who went beyond words to things, and seized on realities rather than forms; not given to disputatious and the sports of logical tournaments, but to solid inquiries after truth. The universities had not then arisen, but a hundred years later he would have been their ornament, like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura.
Like other Norman abbeys, the abbey of Bec had after the Conquest received lands in England, and it became one of the duties of the abbot to look after its temporal interests. Hence Anselm was obliged to make frequent visits to England, where his friendship with Lanfranc was renewed, and where he made the acquaintance of distinguished prelates and abbots and churchmen, among others of Eadmer, his future biographer. It seems that he also won the hearts of the English nobility by his gentleness and affability, so that they rendered to him uncommon attentions, not only as a great ecclesiastic who had no equal in learning, but as a man whom they could not help loving.
The life of Anselm very nearly corresponded with that of the Conqueror, who died in 1087, being five years older; and he was Abbot of Bec during the whole reign of William as King of England. There was nothing particularly memorable in his life as abbot aside from his theological studies. It was not until he was elevated to the See of Canterbury, on the death of Lanfranc, that his memorable career became historical. He anticipated Thomas Becket in his contest to secure the liberties of the Church against the encroachments of the Norman kings. The cause of the one was the cause of the other; only, Anselm was trained in monastic seclusion, and Becket amid the tumults and intrigues of a court. The one was essentially an ecclesiastic and theologian; the other a courtier and statesman. The former was religious, and the latter secular in his habits and duties. Yet both fought the same great battle, the essential principle of which was the object of contention between the popes and the emperors of Germany,—that pertaining to the right of investiture, which may be regarded, next to the Crusades, as the great outward event of the twelfth century. That memorable struggle for supremacy was not brought to a close until Innocent III. made the kings of the earth his vassals, and reigned without a rival in Christendom. Gregory VII. had fought heroically, but he died in exile, leaving to future popes the fruit of his transcendent labors.
Lanfranc died in 1089,—the ablest churchman of the century next to the great Hildebrand, his master. It was through his influence that England was more closely allied with Rome, and that those fetters were imposed by the popes which the ablest of the Norman kings were unable to break. The Pope had sanctioned the atrocious conquest of England by the Normans—beneficially as it afterwards turned out—only on the condition that extraordinary powers should be conferred on the Archbishop of Canterbury, his representative in enforcing the papal claims, who thus became virtually independent of the king,—a spiritual monarch of such dignity that he was almost equal to his sovereign in authority. There was no such See in Germany and France as that of Canterbury. Its mighty and lordly metropolitan had the exclusive right of crowning the king. To him the Archbishop of York, once his equal, had succumbed. He was not merely primate, but had the supreme control of the Church in England. He could depose prelates and excommunicate the greatest personages; he enjoyed enormous revenues; he was vicegerent of the Pope.
Loth was William to concede such great powers to the Pope, but he could not be King of England without making a king of Canterbury. So he made choice of Lanfranc—then Abbot of St. Stephen, the most princely of the Norman convents—for the highest ecclesiastical dignity in his realm, and perhaps in Europe after the papacy itself. Lanfranc was his friend, and also the friend of Hildebrand; and no collision took place between them, for neither could do without the other. William was willing to waive some of his prerogatives as a sovereign for such a kingdom as England, which made him the most powerful monarch in Western Europe, since he ruled the fairest part of France and the whole British realm, the united possession of both Saxons and Danes, with more absolute authority than any feudal sovereign at that time possessed. His victorious knights were virtually a standing army, bound to him with more than feudal loyalty, since he divided among them the lands of the conquered Saxons, and gave to their relatives the richest benefices of the Church. With the aid of an Italian prelate, bound in allegiance to the Pope, he hoped to cement his conquest. Lanfranc did as he wished,—removed the Saxon bishops, and gave their sees to Normans. Since Dunstan, no great Saxon bishop had arisen. The Saxon bishops were feeble and indolent, and were not capable of making an effective resistance. But Lanfranc was even more able than Dunstan,—a great statesman as well as prelate. He ruled England as grand justiciary in the absence of the monarch, and was thus viceregent of the kingdom. But while he despoiled the Saxon prelates, he would suffer no royal spoliation of the Norman bishops. He even wrested away from Odo, half-brother of the Conqueror, the manors he held as Count of Kent, which originally belonged to the See of Canterbury. Thus was William, with all his greed and ambition, kept in check by the spiritual monarch he had himself made so powerful.
On the death of this great prelate, all eyes were turned to Anselm as his successor, who was then Abbot of Bec, absorbed in his studies. But William Rufus, who had in the mean time succeeded to the throne of the Conqueror, did not at once appoint any one to the vacant See, since he had seized and used its revenues to the scandal of the nation and the indignation of the Church. For five years there was no primate in England and no Archbishop of Canterbury. At last, what seemed to be a mortal sickness seized the King, and in the near prospect of death he summoned Anselm to his chamber and conferred upon him the exalted dignity,—which Anselm refused to accept, dreading the burdens of the office, and preferring the quiet life of a scholar in his Norman abbey. Like Thomas Aquinas, in the next century, who refused the archbishopric of Naples to pursue his philosophical studies in Paris, Anselm declined the primacy of the Church in England, with its cares and labors and responsibilities, that he might be unmolested in his theological inquiries. He understood the position in which he should be placed, and foresaw that he should be brought in collision with his sovereign if he would faithfully guard the liberties and interests of the Church. He was a man of peace and meditation, and hated conflict, turmoil, and active life. He knew that one of the requirements a great prelate is to have business talents, more necessary perhaps than eloquence or learning. At last, however, on the pressing solicitation of the Pope, the King, and the clergy, he consented to mount the throne of Lanfranc, on condition that the temporalities, privileges, and powers of the See of Canterbury should not be attacked. The crafty and rapacious, but now penitent monarch, thinking he was about to die, and wishing to make his peace with Heaven, made all the concessions required; and the quiet monk and doctor, whom everybody loved and revered, was enthroned and consecrated as the spiritual monarch of England.
Anselm's memorable career as bishop began in peace, but was soon clouded by a desperate quarrel with his sovereign, as he had anticipated. This learned and peace-loving theologian was forced into a contest which stands out in history like the warfare between Hildebrand and Henry IV. It was the beginning of that fierce contest in England which was made memorable by the martyrdom of Becket. Anselm, when consecrated, was sixty years of age,—a period of life when men are naturally timid, cautious, and averse to innovations, quarrels, and physical discomforts.
The friendly relations between William Rufus and Anselm were disturbed when the former sought to exact large sums of money from his subjects to carry on war against his brother Robert. Among those who were expected to make heavy contributions, in the shape of presents, was the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose revenues were enormous,—perhaps the largest in the realm next to those of the King. Anselm offered as his contribution five hundred marks, what would now be equal to l0,000 pounds,—a large sum in those days, but not as much as the Norman sovereign expected. In indignation he refused the present, which seemed to him meagre, especially since it was accompanied with words of seeming reproof; for Anselm had said that "a free gift, which he meant this to be, was better than a forced and servile contribution." The King then angrily bade him begone; "that he wanted neither his money nor his scolding." The courtiers tried to prevail on the prelate to double the amount of his present, and thus regain the royal favor; but he firmly refused to do this, since it looked to him like a corrupt bargain. Anselm, having distributed among the poor the money which the King had refused, left the court as soon as the Christmas festival was over and retired to his diocese, preserving his independence and dignity.
A breach had not been made, but the irritation was followed by coolness; and this was increased when Anselm desired to have the religious posts filled the revenues of which the King had too long enjoyed, and when, in addition, he demanded a council of bishops to remedy the disorders and growing evils of the kingdom. This council the angry King refused with a sneer, saying, "he would call the council when he himself pleased, not when Anselm pleased." As to the filling the vacancies of the abbeys, he further replied: "What are abbeys to YOU? Are they not MINE? Go and do what you like with your farms, and I will do what I please with my abbeys." So they parted, these two potentates, the King saying to his companions, "I hated him yesterday; I hate him more to-day; and I shall hate him still more to-morrow. I refuse alike his blessings and his prayers." His chief desire now was to get rid of the man he had elevated to the throne of Canterbury. It may be observed that it was not the Pope who made this appointment, but the King of England. Yet, by the rules long established by the popes and accepted by Christendom, it was necessary that an archbishop, before he could fully exercise his spiritual powers, should go to Rome and receive at the hands of the Pope his pallium, or white woollen stole, as the badge of his office and dignity. Lanfranc had himself gone to Rome for this purpose,—and a journey from Canterbury to Rome in the eleventh century was no small undertaking, being expensive and fatiguing. But there were now at Rome two rival popes. Which one should Anselm recognize? France and Normandy acknowledged Urban. England was undecided whether it should be Urban or Clement. William would probably recognize the one that Anselm did not, for a rupture was certain, and the King sought for a pretext.
So when the Archbishop asked leave of the King to go to Rome, according to custom, William demanded to know to which of these two popes he would apply for his pallium. "To Pope Urban," was the reply. "But," said the King, "him I have not acknowledged; and no man in England may acknowledge a pope without my leave." At first view the matter was a small one comparatively, whether Urban was or was not the true pope. The real point was whether the King of England should accept as pope the man whom the Archbishop recognized, or whether the Archbishop should acknowledge him whom the King had accepted. This could be settled only by a grand council of the nation, to whom the matter should be submitted,— virtually a parliament. This council, demanded by Anselm, met in the royal castle of Rockingham, 1095, composed of nobles, bishops, and abbots. A large majority of the council were in the interests of the King, and the subject at issue was virtually whether the King or the prelate was supreme in spiritual matters,—a point which the Conqueror had ceded to Lanfranc and Hildebrand. This council insulted and worried the primate, and sought to frighten him into submission. But submission was to yield up the liberties of the Church. The intrepid prelate was not prepared for this, and he appealed from the council to the Pope, thereby putting himself in antagonism to the King and a majority of the peers of the realm. The King was exasperated, but foiled, while the council was perplexed. The Bishop of Durham saw no solution but in violence; but violence to the metropolitan was too bold a measure to be seriously entertained. The King hoped that Anselm would resign, as his situation was very unpleasant.
But resignation would be an act of cowardice, and would result in the appointment of an archbishop favorable to the encroachments of the King, who doubtless aimed at the subversion of the liberties of the Church and greater independence. Five centuries later the sympathies of England would have been on his side. But the English nation felt differently in the eleventh century. All Christendom sympathized with the Pope; for this resistance of Anselm to the King was the cause of the popes themselves against the monarchs of Europe. Anselm simply acted as the vicegerent of the Pope. To submit to the dictation of the King in a spiritual matter was to undermine the authority of Rome. I do not attempt to settle the merits of the question, but only to describe the contest. To settle the merits of such a question is to settle the question whether the papal power in its plenitude was good or evil for society in the Middle Ages.
One thing seems certain, that the King was thus far foiled by the firmness of a churchman,—the man who had passed the greater part of his life in a convent, studying and teaching theology; one of the mildest and meekest men ever elevated to high ecclesiastical office. Anselm was sustained by the power of conscience, by an imperative sense of duty, by allegiance to his spiritual head. He indeed owed fealty to the King, but only for the temporalities of his See. His paramount obligations as an archbishop were, according to all the ideas of his age, to the supreme pontiff of Christendom. Doubtless his life would have been easier and more pleasant had he been more submissive to the King. He could have brought all the bishops, as well as barons, to acknowledge the King's supremacy; but on his shoulders was laid the burden of sustaining ecclesiastical authority in England. He had anticipated this burden, and would have joyfully been exempted from its weight. But having assumed it, perhaps against his will, he had only one course to pursue, according to the ideas of the age; and this was to maintain the supreme authority of the Pope in England in all spiritual matters. It was remarkable that at this stage of the contest the barons took his side, and the bishops took the side of the King. The barons feared for their own privileges should the monarch be successful; for they knew his unscrupulous and tyrannical character,—that he would encroach on these and make himself as absolute as possible. The bishops were weak and worldly men, and either did not realize the gravity of the case or wished to gain the royal favor. They were nearly all Norman nobles, who had been under obligations to the crown.
The King, however, understood and, appreciated his position. He could not afford to quarrel with the Pope; he dared not do violence to the primate of the realm. So he dissembled his designs and restrained his wrath, and sought to gain by cunning what he could not openly effect by the exercise of royal power. He sent messengers and costly gifts to Rome, such as the needy and greedy servants of the servants of God rarely disdained. He sought to conciliate the Pope, and begged, as a favor, that the pallium should be sent to him as monarch, and given by him, with the papal sanction, to the Archbishop,—the name of Anselm being suppressed. This favor, being bought by potent arguments, was granted unwisely, and the pallium was sent to William with the greatest secrecy. In return, the King acknowledged the claims of Urban as pope. So Anselm did not go to Rome for the emblem of his power.
The King, having succeeded thus far, then demanded of the Pope the deposition of Anselm. He could not himself depose the archbishop. He could elevate him, but not remove him; he could make, but not unmake. Only he who held the keys of Saint Peter, who was armed with spiritual omnipotence, could reverse his own decrees and rule arbitrarily. But for any king to expect that the Pope would part with the ablest defender of the liberties of the Church, and disgrace him for being faithful to papal interests, was absurd. The Pope may have used smooth words, but was firm in the uniform policy of all his predecessors.
Meanwhile political troubles came so thick and heavy on the King, some of his powerful nobles being in open rebellion, that he felt it necessary to dissemble and defer the gratification of his vengeance on the man he hated more than any personage in England. He pretended to restore Anselm to favor. "Bygones should be bygones." The King and the Archbishop sat at dinner at Windsor with friends and nobles, while an ironical courtier pleasantly quoted the Psalmist, "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!"
The King now supposed that Anselm would receive the pallium at his royal hands, which the prelate warily refused to accept. The subject was carefully dropped, but as the pallium was Saint Peter's gift, it was brought to Canterbury and placed upon the altar, and the Archbishop condescended, amid much pomp and ceremony, to take it thence and put it on,—a sort of puerile concession for the sake of peace. The King, too, wishing conciliation for the present, until he had gained the possession of Normandy from his brother Robert, who had embarked in the Crusades, and feeling that he could ill afford to quarrel with the highest dignitary of his kingdom until his political ambition was gratified, treated Anslem with affected kindness, until his ill success with the Celtic Welsh put him in a bad humor and led to renewed hostility. He complained that Anselm had not furnished his proper contingent of forces for the conquest of Wales, and summoned him to his court. In a secular matter like this, Anselm as a subject had no remedy. Refusal to appear would be regarded as treason and rebellion. Yet he neglected to obey the summons, perhaps fearing violence, and sought counsel from the Pope. He asked permission to go to Rome. The request was angrily refused. Again he renewed his request, and again it was denied him, with threats if he departed without leave. The barons, now against him, thought he had no right to leave his post; the bishops even urged him not to go. To all of whom he replied: "You wish me to swear that I will not appeal to Saint Peter. To swear this is to forswear Saint Peter; to forswear Saint Peter is to forswear Christ." At last it seems that the King gave a reluctant consent, but with messages that were insulting; and Anselm, with a pilgrim's staff, took leave of his monks, for the chapter of Canterbury was composed of monks, set out for Dover, and reached the continent in safety.
"Thus began," says Church, "the system of appeals to Rome, and of inviting foreign interference in the home affairs of England; and Anselm was the beginning of it." But however unfortunate it ultimately proved, it was in accordance with the ideas and customs of the Middle Ages, without which the papal power could not have been so successfully established. And I take the ground that the Papacy was an institution of which very much may be said in its favor in the dark ages of European society, especially in restraining the tyranny of kings and the turbulence of nobles. Governments are based on expediencies and changing circumstances, not on immutable principles or divine rights. If this be not true, we are driven to accept as the true form of government that which was recognized by Christ and his disciples. The feudal kings of Europe claimed a "divine right," and professed to reign by the "grace of God." Whence was this right derived? If it can be substantiated, on what claim rests the sovereignty of the people? Are not popes and kings and bishops alike the creation of circumstances, good or evil inventions, as they meet the wants of society?
Anselm felt himself to be the subject of the Pope as well as of the King, but that, as a priest; his supreme allegiance should be given to the Pope, as the spiritual head of the Church and vicegerent of Christ upon the earth. We differ from him in his view of the claims of the Pope, which he regarded as based on immutable truth and the fiat of Almighty power,—even as Richelieu looked upon the imbecile king whom he served as reigning by divine right. The Protestant Reformation demolished the claims of the spiritual potentate, as the French Revolution swept away the claims of the temporal monarch. The "logic of events" is the only logic which substantiates the claims of rulers; and this logic means, in our day, constitutional government in politics and private judgment in religion,—the free choice of such public servants, whatever their titles of honor, in State and Church, as the exigencies and circumstances of society require. The haughtiest of the popes, in the proudest period of their absolute ascendancy, never rejected their early title,—"servant of the servants of God." Wherever there is real liberty among the people, whose sovereignty is acknowledged as the source of power, the ruler IS a servant of the people and not their tyrant, however great the authority which they delegate to him, which they alone may continue or take away. Absolute authority, delegated to kings or popes by God, was the belief of the Middle Ages; limited authority, delegated to rulers by the people, is the idea of our times. What the next invention in government may be no one can tell; but whatever it be, it will be in accordance with the ideas and altered circumstances of progressive ages. No one can anticipate or foresee the revolutions in human thought, and therefore in human governments, "till He shall come whose right it is to reign."
Taking it, then, to be the established idea of the Middle Ages that all ecclesiastics owed supreme allegiance to the visible head of the Church, no one can blame Anselm for siding with the Pope, rather than with his sovereign, in spiritual matters. He would have been disloyal to his conscience if he had not been true to his clerical vows of obedience. Conscience may be unenlightened, yet take away the power of conscience and what would become of our world? What is a man without a conscience? He is a usurper, a tyrant, a libertine, a spendthrift, a robber, a miser, an idler, a trifler,—whatever he is tempted to be; a supreme egotist, who says in his heart, "There is no God." The Almighty Creator placed this instinct in the soul of man to prevent the total eclipse of faith, and to preserve some allegiance to Him, some guidance in the trials and temptations of life. We lament a perverted conscience; yet better this than no conscience at all, a voice silenced by the combined forces of evil. A man MUST obey this voice. It is the wisdom of the ages to make it harmonious with eternal right; it is the power of God to remove or weaken the assailing forces which pervert or silence it.
See, then, this gentle, lovable, and meditative scholar—not haughty like Dunstan, not arrogant like Becket, not sacerdotal like Ambrose, not passionate like Chrysostom, but meek as Moses is said to have been before Pharaoh (although I never could see this distinguishing trait in the Hebrew leader)—yet firmly and heroically braving the wrath of the sovereign who had elevated him, and pursuing his toilsome journey to Rome to appeal to justice against injustice, to law against violence. He reached the old capital of the world in midwinter, after having spent Christmas in that hospitable convent where Hildebrand had reigned, and which was to shield the persecuted Abelard from the wrath of his ecclesiastical tormentors. He was most honorably received by the Pope, and lodged in the Lateran, as the great champion of papal authority. Vainly did he beseech the Pope to relieve him from his dignities and burdens; for such a man could not be spared from the exalted post in which he had been placed. Peace-loving as he was, his destiny was to fight battles.
In the following year Pope Urban died; and in the following year William Rufus himself was accidentally killed in the New Forest. His death was not much lamented, he having proved hard, unscrupulous, cunning, and tyrannical. At this period the kings of England reigned with almost despotic power, independent of barons and oppressive to the people. William had but little regard for the interests of the kingdom. He built neither churches nor convents, but Westminster Hall was the memorial of his iron reign.
Much was expected of Henry I., who immediately recalled Anselm from Lyons, where he was living in voluntary exile. He returned to Canterbury, with the firm intention of reforming the morals of the clergy and resisting royal encroachments. Henry was equally resolved on making bishops as well as nobles subservient to him. Of course harmony and concord could not long exist between such men, with such opposite views. Even at the first interview of the King with the Archbishop at Salisbury, he demanded a renewal of homage by a new act of investiture, which was virtually a continuance of the quarrel. It was, however, mutually agreed that the matter should be referred to the new pope. Anselm, on his part, knew that the appeal was hopeless; while the King wished to gain time. It was not long before the answer of Pope Pascal came. He was willing that Henry should have many favors, but not this. Only the head of the Church could bestow the emblems of spiritual authority. On receiving the papal reply the King summoned his nobles and bishops to his court, and required that Anselm should acknowledge the right of the King to invest prelates with the badges of spiritual authority. The result was a second embassy to the Pope, of more distinguished persons,—the Archbishop of York and two other prelates. The Pope, of course, remained inflexible. On the return of the envoys a great council was assembled in London, and Anselm again was required to submit to the King's will. It seems that the Pope, from motives of policy (for all the popes were reluctant to quarrel with princes), had given the envoys assurance that, so long as Henry was a good king, he should have nothing to fear from the clergy.
These oral declarations were contrary to the Pope's written documents, and this contradiction required a new embassy to Rome; but in the mean time the King gave the See of Salisbury to his chancellor, and that of Hereford to the superintendent of his larder. When the answer of the Pope was finally received, it was found that he indignantly disavowed the verbal message, and excommunicated the three prelates as liars. But the King was not disconcerted. He suddenly appeared at Canterbury, and told Anselm that further opposition would be followed by the royal enmity; yet, mollifying his wrath, requested Anselm himself to go to Rome and do what he could with the Pope. Anselm assured him that he could do nothing to the prejudice of the Church. He departed, however, the King obviously wishing him out of the way.
The second journey of Anselm to Rome was a perpetual ovation, but was of course barren of results. The Pope remained inflexible, and Anselm prepared to return to England; but, from the friendly hints of the prelates who accompanied him, he sojourned again at Lyons with his friend the archbishop. Both the Pope and the King had compromised; Anselm alone was straightforward and fearless. As a consequence his revenues were seized, and he remained in exile. He had been willing to do the Pope's bidding, had he made an exception to the canons; but so long as the law remained in force he had nothing to do but conform to it. He remained in Lyons a year and a half, while Henry continued his negotiations with Pascal; but finding that nothing was accomplished, Anselm resolved to excommunicate his sovereign. The report of this intention alarmed Henry, then preparing for a decisive conflict with his brother Robert. The excommunication would at least be inconvenient; it might cost him his crown. So he sought an interview with Anselm at the castle of l'Aigle, and became outwardly reconciled, and restored to him his revenues.
"The end of the dreary contest came at last, in 1107, after vexatious delays and intrigues." It was settled by compromise,—as most quarrels are settled, as most institutions are established. Outwardly the King yielded. He agreed, in an assembly of nobles, bishops, and abbots at London, that henceforth no one should be invested with bishopric or abbacy, either by king or layman, by the customary badges of ring and crosier. Anselm, on his part, agreed that no prelate should be refused consecration who was nominated by the King. The appointment of bishops remained with the King; but the consecration could be withheld by the primate, since he alone had the right to give the badges of office, without which spiritual functions could not be lawfully performed. It was a moral victory to the Church, but the victory of an unpopular cause. It cemented the power of the Pope, while freedom from papal interference has ever been dear to the English nation.
When Anselm had fought this great fight he died, 1109, in the sixteenth year of his reign as primate of the Church in England, and was buried, next to Lanfranc, in his abbey church. His career outwardly is memorable only for this contest, which was afterwards renewed by Thomas Becket with a greater king than either William Rufus or Henry I. It is interesting, since it was a part of the great struggle between the spiritual and temporal powers for two hundred years,—from Hildebrand to Innocent III. This was only one of the phases of the quarrel,—one of the battles of a long war,— not between popes and emperors, as in Germany and Italy, but between a king and the vicegerent of a pope; a king and his subject, the one armed with secular, the other with spiritual, weapons. It was only brought to an end by an appeal to the fears of men,—the dread of excommunication and consequent torments in hell, which was the great governing idea of the Middle Ages, the means by which the clergy controlled the laity. Abused and perverted as this idea was, it indicates and presupposes a general belief in the personality of God, in rewards and punishments in a future state, and the necessity of conforming to the divine laws as expounded and enforced by the Christian Church. Hence the dark ages have been called "Ages of Faith."
It now remains to us to contemplate Anselm as a theologian and philosopher,—a more interesting view, for in this aspect his character is more genial, and his influence more extended and permanent. He is one of the first who revived theological studies in Europe. He did not teach in the universities as a scholastic doctor, but he was one who prepared the way for universities by the stimulus he gave to philosophy. It was in his abbey of Bec that he laid the foundation of a new school of theological inquiry. In original genius he was surpassed by no scholastic in the Middle Ages, although both Abelard and Thomas Aquinas enjoyed a greater fame. It was for his learning and sanctity that he was canonized,— and singularly enough by Alexander VI., the worst pope who ever reigned. Still more singular is it that the last of his successors, as abbot of Bec, was the diplomatist Talleyrand,—one of the most worldly and secular of all the ecclesiastical dignitaries of an infidel age.
The theology of the Middle Ages, of which Anselm was one of the greatest expounders, certainly the most profound, was that which was systematized by Saint Augustine from the writings of Paul. Augustine was the oracle of the Latin Church until the Council of Trent, and nominally his authority has never been repudiated by the Catholic Church. But he was no more the father of the Catholic theology than he was of the Protestant, as taught by John Calvin: these two great theologians were in harmony in all essential doctrines as completely as were Augustine and Anselm, or Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. The doctrines of theology, as formulated by Augustine, were subjects of contemplation and study in all the convents of the Middle Ages. In spite of the prevailing ignorance, it was impossible that inquiring men, "secluded in gloomy monasteries, should find food for their minds in the dreary and monotonous duties to which monks were doomed,—a life devoted to alternate manual labor and mechanical religious services." There would be some of them who would speculate on the lofty subjects which were the constant themes of their meditations. Bishops were absorbed in their practical duties as executive rulers. Village priests were too ignorant to do much beyond looking after the wants of hinds and peasants. The only scholarly men were the monks. And although the number of these was small, they have the honor of creating the first intellectual movement since the fall of the Roman Empire. They alone combined leisure with brain-work. These intellectual and inquiring monks, as far back as the ninth century speculated on the great subjects of Christian faith with singular boldness, considering the general ignorance which veiled Europe in melancholy darkness. Some of them were logically led "to a secret mutiny and insurrection" against the doctrines which were universally received. This insurrection of human intelligence gave great alarm to the orthodox leaders of the Church; and to suppress it the Church raised up conservative dialecticians as acute and able as those who strove for emancipation. At first they used the weapons of natural reason, but afterwards employed the logic and method of Aristotle, as translated into Latin from the Arabic, to assist them in their intellectual combats. Gradually the movement centred in the scholastic philosophy, as a bulwark to Catholic theology. But this was nearly a hundred years after the time of Anselm, who himself was not enslaved by the technicalities of a complicated system of dialectics.
Naturally the first subject which was suggested to the minds of inquiring monks was the being and attributes of God. He was the beginning and end of their meditations. It was to meditate upon God that the Oriental recluse sought the deserts of Asia Minor and Egypt. Like the Eastern monk of the fourth century, he sought to know the essence and nature of the Deity he worshipped. There arose before his mind the great doctrines of the trinity, the incarnation, and redemption. Closely connected with these were predestination and grace, and then "fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute." On these mysteries he could not help meditating; and with meditation came speculation on unfathomable subjects pertaining to God and his relations with man, to the nature of sin and its penalty, to the freedom of the will, and eternal decrees.
The monk became first a theologian and then a philosopher, whether of the school of Plato or of Aristotle he did not know. He began to speculate on questions which had agitated the Grecian schools,— the origin of evil and of matter; whether the world was created or uncreated; whether there is a distinction between things visible and invisible; whether we derive our knowledge from sensation or reflection; whether the soul is necessarily immortal; how free-will is to be reconciled with God's eternal decrees, or what the Greeks called Fate; whether ideas are eternal, or are the creation of our own minds. These, and other more subtile questions—like the nature of angels—began to agitate the convent in the ninth century.
It was then that the monk Gottschalk revived the question of predestination, which had slumbered since the time of Saint Augustine. Although the Bishop of Hippo was the oracle of the Church, and no one disputed his authority, it would seem that his characteristic doctrine,—that of grace; the essential doctrine of Luther also,—was never a favorite one with the great churchmen of the Middle Ages. They did not dispute Saint Augustine, but they adhered to penances and expiations, which entered so largely into the piety of the Middle Ages. The idea of penances and expiations, pushed to their utmost logical sequence, was salvation by works and not by faith. Grace, as understood by the Fathers, was closely allied to predestination; it disdained the elaborate and cumbrous machinery of ecclesiastical discipline, on which the power of the clergy was based. Grace was opposed to penance, while penance was the form which religion took; and as predestination was a theological sequence of grace, it was distasteful to the Mediaeval Church. Both grace and predestination tended to undermine the system of penance then universally accepted. The great churchmen of the Middle Ages were plainly at war with their great oracle in this matter, without being fully aware of their real antagonism. So they made an onslaught on Gottschalk, as opposed to those ideas on which sacerdotal power rested,—especially did Hinemar, Archbishop of Rheims, the greatest prelate of that age. Persecuted, Gottschalk appealed to reason rather than authority, thus anticipating Luther by five hundred years,—an immense heresy in the Middle Ages. Hinemar, not being able to grapple with the monk in argument, summoned to his aid the brightest intellect of that century,—the first man who really gave an impulse to philosophical inquiries in the Middle Ages, the true founder of scholasticism.
This man was John Scotus Erigena,—or John the Erin-born,—who was also a monk, and whose early days had been spent in some secluded monastery in Ireland, or the Scottish islands. Somehow he attracted the attention of Charles the Bald, A. D. 843, and became his guest and chosen companion. And yet, while he lived in the court, he spent the most of his time in intellectual seclusion. As a guest of the king he may have become acquainted with Hinemar, or his acquaintance with Hinemar may have led to his friendship with Charles. He was witty, bright, and learned, like Abelard, a favorite with the great. In his treatise on Predestination, in which he combated the views of Gottschalk, he probably went further than Hinemar desired or expected: he boldly asserted the supremacy of reason, and threw off the shackles of authority. He combated Saint Augustine as well as Gottschalk. He even aspired to reconcile free-will with the divine sovereignty,—the great mistake of theologians in every age, the most hopeless and the most ambitious effort of human genius,—a problem which cannot be solved. He went even further than this: he attempted to harmonize philosophy with religion, as Abelard did afterwards. He brought all theological questions to the test of dialectical reasoning. Thus the ninth century saw a rationalist and a pantheist at the court of a Christian king. Like Democritus, he maintained the eternity of matter. Like a Buddhist, he believed that God is all things and all things are God. Such doctrines were not to be tolerated, even in an age when theological speculations did not usually provoke persecution. Religious persecution for opinions was the fruit of subsequent inquiries, and did not reach its height until the Dominicans arose in the thirteenth century. But Erigena was generally denounced; he fell under the censure of the Pope, and, probably on that account, took refuge about the year 882 in England,—it is said at Oxford, where there was probably a cathedral school, but not as yet a university, with its professors' chairs and scholastic honors. Others suppose that he died in Paris, 891.
A spirit of inquiry having been thus awakened among a few intellectual monks, they began to speculate about those questions which had agitated the Grecian schools: whether genera and species— called "universals," or ideas—have a substantial and independent existence, or whether they are the creation of our own minds; whether, if they have a real existence, they are material or immaterial essences; whether they exist apart from objects perceptible by the senses. It is singular that such questions should have been discussed in the ninth century, since neither Plato nor Aristotle were studied. Unless in the Irish monastic schools, it may be doubted whether there was a Greek scholar in Western Europe,—or even in Rome.
No very remarkable man arose with a rationalizing spirit, after Erigena, until Berengar of Tours in the eleventh century, who maintained that in the Sacrament the presence of the body of Christ involves no change in the nature and essence of the bread and wine. He was opposed by Lanfranc. But the doctrine of transubstantiation was too deeply grounded in the faith of Christendom to be easily shaken. Controversies seemed to centre around the doctrine of the real existence of ideas,—what are called "universals,"—which doctrine was generally accepted. The monks, in this matter, followed Saint Augustine, who was a realist, as were also the orthodox leaders of the Church generally from his time to that of Saint Bernard. It was a sequence of the belief in the doctrine of the Trinity.
No one of mark opposed the Realism which had now become one of the accepted philosophical opinions of the age, until Roscelin, in the latter part of the eleventh century, denied that universals have a real existence. It was Plato's doctrine that universals have an independent existence apart from individual objects, and that they exist before the latter (universalia ANTE rem,—the thought BEFORE the thing); while Aristotle maintained that universals, though possessing a real existence, exist only in individual objects (universalia IN re,—the thought IN the thing). Nominalism is the doctrine that individuals only have real existence (universalia POST rem,—the thought AFTER the thing).
It is not probable that this profound question about universals would have excited much interest among the intellectual monks of the eleventh century, had it not been applied to theological subjects, in which chiefly they were absorbed. Now Roscelin advanced the doctrine, that, if the three persons in the Trinity were one thing, it would follow that the Father and the Holy Ghost must have entered into the flesh together with the Son; and as he believed that only individuals exist in reality, it would follow that the three persons of the Godhead are three substances, in fact three Gods. Thus Nominalism logically led to an assault on the received doctrine of the Trinity—the central point in the theology of the Church. This was heresy. The foundations of Christian belief were attacked, and no one in that age was strong enough to come to the rescue but Anselm, then Abbot of Bec.
His great service to the cause of Christian theology, and therefore to the Church universal, was his exposition of the logical results of the Nominalism of Roscelin,—to whom universals, or ideas, were merely creations of the mind, or conventional phrases, having no real existence. Hence such things as love, friendship, beauty, justice, were only conceptions. Plato and Augustine maintained that they are eternal verities, not to be explained by definitions, appealing to consciousness, in the firm belief in which the soul sustains itself; that there can be no certain knowledge without a recognition of these; that from these only sound deductions of moral truth can be drawn; that without a firm belief in these eternal certitudes there can be no repose and no lofty faith. These ideas are independent of us. They do not vary with our changing sensations; they have nothing to do with sensation. They are not creations of the brain; they inherently exist, from all eternity. The substance of these ideas is God; without these we could not conceive of God. Augustine especially, in the true spirit of Platonism, abhorred doctrines which made the existence of God depend upon our own abstractions. To him there was a reality in love, in friendship, in justice, in beauty; and he repelled scepticism as to their eternal existence, as life repels death.
Roscelin took away the platform from whose lofty heights Socrates and Plato would survey the universe. He attacked the citadel in which Augustine intrenched himself amid the desolations of a dissolving world; he laid the axe at the root of the tree which sheltered all those who would fly from uncertainty and despair.
But if these ideas were not true, what was true; on what were the hopes of the world to be based; where was consolation for the miseries of life to be found? "There are many goods," says Anselm, "which we desire,—some for utility, and others for beauty; but all these goods are relative,—more or less good,—and imply something absolutely good. This absolute good—the summum bonum—is God. In like manner all that is great and high are only relatively great and high; and hence there must be something absolutely great and high, and this is God. There must exist at least one being than which no other is higher; hence there must be but one such being,— and this is God."
It was thus that Anselm brought philosophy to the support of theology. He would combat the philosophical reasonings of Roscelin with still keener dialectics. He would conquer him on his own ground and with his own weapons.
Let it not be supposed that this controversy about universals was a mere dialectical tournament, with no grand results. It goes down to the root of almost every great subject in philosophy and religion. The denial of universal ideas is rationalism and materialism in philosophy, as it is Pelagianism and Arminianism in theology. The Nominalism of Roscelin reappeared in the rationalism of Abelard; and, carried out to its severe logical sequences, is the refusal to accept any doctrine which cannot be proved by reason. Hence nothing is to be accepted which is beyond the province of reason to explain; and hence nothing is to be received by faith alone. Christianity, in the hands of fearless and logical nominalists, would melt away,—that is, what is peculiar in its mysterious dogmas. Its mysterious dogmas were the anchors of belief in ages of faith. It was these which animated the existence of such men as Augustine, Bernard, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas. Hence their terrible antagonism even to philosophical doctrines which conflicted with the orthodox belief, on which, as they thought, the salvation of mankind rested.
But Anselm did not rest with combating the Nominalism of Roscelin. In the course of his inquiries and arguments he felt it necessary to establish the belief in God—the one great thing from which all other questions radiated—by a new argument, and on firmer ground than that on which it had hitherto rested. He was profoundly devotional as well as logical, and original as he was learned. Beyond all the monks of his age he lived in the contemplation of God. God was to him the essence of all good, the end of all inquiries, the joy and repose of his soul. He could not understand unless he FIRST believed; knowledge was the FRUIT of faith, not its CAUSE. The idea of God in the mind of man is the highest proof of the existence of God. That only is real which appeals to consciousness. He did not care to reason about a thing when reasoning would not strengthen his convictions, perhaps involve him in doubts and perplexities. Reason is finite and clouded and warped. But that which directly appeals to consciousness (as all that is eternal must appeal), and to that alone, like beauty and justice and love,—ultimate ideas to which reasoning and definitions add nothing,—is to be received as a final certitude. Hence, absolute certainty of the existence of God, as it appeals to consciousness,—like the "Cogito, ergo sum." In this argument he anticipated Descartes, and proved himself the profoundest thinker of his century, perhaps of five centuries.
The deductions which Anselm made from the attributes of God and his moral government seem to have strengthened the belief of the Middle Ages in some theological aspects which are repulsive to consciousness,—his stronghold; thereby showing how one-sided any deductions are apt to be when pushed out to their utmost logical consequences; how they may even become a rebuke to human reason in those grand efforts of which reason is most proud, for theology, it must be borne in mind, is a science of deductions from acknowledged truths of revelation. Hence, from the imperfections of reason, or from disregard of other established truths, deductions may be pushed to absurdity even when logical, and may be made to conflict with the obvious meaning of primal truths from which these deductions are made, or at least with those intuitions which are hard to be distinguished from consciousness itself. There may be no flaw in the argument, but the argument may land one in absurdity and contradiction. For instance, from the acknowledged sinfulness of human nature—one of the cardinal declarations of Scripture, and confirmed by universal experience—and the equally fundamental truth that God is infinite, Anselm assumed the dogma that the guilt of men as sinners against an infinite God is infinitely great. From this premise, which few in his age were disposed to deny, for it was in accordance with Saint Augustine, it follows that infinite sin, according to eternal justice, could only be atoned for by an infinite punishment. Hence all men deserve eternal punishment, and must receive it, unless there be made an infinite satisfaction or atonement, since not otherwise can divine love be harmonized with divine justice. Hence it was necessary that the eternal Son should become man, and make, by his voluntary death on the cross, the necessary atonement for human sins. Pushed out to the severest logical consequences, it would follow, that, as an infinite satisfaction has atoned for sin, ALL sinners are pardoned. But the Church shrank from such a conclusion, although logical, and included in the benefits of the atonement only the BELIEVING portion of mankind. The discrepancy between the logical deductions and consciousness, and I may add Scripture, lies in assuming that human guilt IS INFINITELY great. It is thus that theology became complicated, even gloomy, and in some points false, by metaphysical reasonings, which had such a charm both to the Fathers and the Schoolmen. The attempt to reconcile divine justice with divine love by metaphysics and abstruse reasoning proved as futile as the attempt to reconcile free-will with predestination; for divine justice was made by deduction, without reference to other attributes, to conflict with those ideas of justice which consciousness attests,—even as a fettered will, of which all are conscious (that is, a will fettered by sin), was pushed out by logical deductions into absolute slavery and impotence.
Anselm did not carry out metaphysical reasonings to such lengths as did the Schoolmen who succeeded him,—those dialecticians who lived in universities in the thirteenth century. He was a devout man, who meditated on God and on revealed truth with awe and reverence, without any desire of system-making or dialectical victories. This desire more properly marked the Scholastic doctors of the universities in a subsequent age, when, though philosophy had been invoked by Anselm to support theology, they virtually made theology subordinate to philosophy. It was his main effort to establish, on rational grounds, the existence of God, and afterwards the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. And yet with Anselm and Roscelin the Scholastic age began. They were the founders of the Realists and the Nominalists,—those two schools which divided the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and which will probably go on together, under different names, as long as men shall believe and doubt. But this subject, on which I have only entered, must be deferred to the next lecture.
AUTHORITIES.
Church's Life of Saint Anselm; Neander's Church History; Milman's
History of the Latin Church; Stockl's History of the Philosophy of
the Middle Ages; Ueberweg's History of Philosophy; Wordsworth's
Ecclesiastical Biography; Trench's Mediaeval Church history;
Digby's Ages of Faith; Fleury's Ecclesiastical History; Dupin's
Ecclesiastical History; Biographie Universelle; M. Rousselot's
Histoire de la Philosophie du Moyen Age; Newman's Mission of the
Benedictine Order; Dugdale's Monasticon; Hallam's Literature of
Europe; Hampden's article on the Scholastic Philosophy, in
Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.
THOMAS AQUINAS
A. D. 1225(7)-1274.
THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY.
We have seen how the cloister life of the Middle Ages developed meditative habits of mind, which were followed by a spirit of inquiry on deep theological questions. We have now to consider a great intellectual movement, stimulated by the effort to bring philosophy to the aid of theology, and thus more effectually to battle with insidious and rising heresies. The most illustrious representative of this movement was Thomas of Aquino, generally called Thomas Aquinas. With him we associate the Scholastic Philosophy, which, though barren in the results at which it aimed, led to a remarkable intellectual activity, and hence, indirectly, to the emancipation of the mind. It furnished teachers who prepared the way for the great lights of the Reformation.
Anselm had successfully battled with the rationalism of Roscelin, and also had furnished a new argument for the existence of God. He secured the triumph of Realism for a time and the apparent extinction of heresy. But a new impulse to thought was given, soon after his death, by a less profound but more popular and brilliant man, and, like him, a monk. This was the celebrated Peter Abelard, born in the year 1079, in Brittany, of noble parents, and a boy of remarkable precocity. He was a sort of knight-errant of philosophy, going from convent to convent and from school to school, disputing, while a mere youth, with learned teachers, wherever he could find them. Having vanquished the masters in the provincial schools, he turned his steps to Paris, at that time the intellectual centre of Europe. The university was not yet established, but the cathedral school of Notre Dame was presided over by William of Champeaux, who defended the Realism of Anselm.
To this famous cathedral school Abelard came as a pupil of the veteran dialectician at the age of twenty, and dared to dispute his doctrines. He soon set up as a teacher himself; but as Notre Dame was interdicted to him he retired to Melun, ten leagues from Paris, where enthusiastic pupils crowded to his lecture room, for he was witty, bold, sarcastic, acute, and eloquent. He afterwards removed to Paris, and so completely discomfited his old master that he retired from the field. Abelard then applied himself to the study of divinity, and attended the lectures of Anselm of Laon, who, though an old man, was treated by Abelard with great flippancy and arrogance. He then began to lee-tare on divinity as well as philosophy, with extraordinary eclat. Students flocked to his lecture room from all parts of Germany, Italy, France, and England. It is said that five thousand young men attended his lectures, among whom one hundred were destined to be prelates, including that brilliant and able Italian who afterwards reigned as Innocent III. It was about this time, 1117, when he was thirty-eight, that he encountered Heloise,—a passage of his life which will be considered in a later volume of this work. His unfortunate love and his cruel misfortune led to a temporary seclusion in a convent, from which, however, he issued to lecture with renewed popularity in a desert place in Champagne, where he constructed a vast edifice and dedicated it to the Paraclete. It was here that his most brilliant days were spent. It is said that three thousand pupils followed him to this wilderness. He was doubtless the most brilliant and successful lecturer that the Middle Ages ever saw. He continued the controversy which was begun by Roscelin respecting universals, the reality or which he denied.
Abelard was not acquainted with the Greek, but in a Latin translation from the Arabic he had studied Aristotle, whom he regarded as the great master of dialectics, although not making use of his method, as did the great Scholastics of the succeeding century. Still, he was among the first to apply dialectics to theology. He maintained a certain independence of the patristic authority by his "Sic et Non," in which treatise he makes the authorities neutralize each other by placing side by side contradictory assertions. He maintained that the natural propensity to evil, in consequence of the original transgression, is not in itself sin; that sin consists in consenting to evil. "It is not," said he, "the temptation to lust that is sinful, but the acquiescence in the temptation;" hence, that virtue cannot be tested without temptations; consequently, that moral worth can only be truly estimated by God, to whom motives are known,—in short, that sin consists in the intention, and not in act. He admitted with Anselm that faith, in a certain sense, precedes knowledge, but insisted that one must know why and what he believes before his faith is established; hence, that faith works itself out of doubt by means of rational investigation.
The tendency of Abelard's teachings was rationalistic, and therefore he arrayed against himself the great champion of orthodoxy in his day,—Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, the most influential churchman of his age, and the most devout and lofty. His immense influence was based on his learning and sanctity; but he was dogmatic and intolerant. It is probable that the intellectual arrogance of Abelard, his flippancy and his sarcasms, offended more than the matter of his lectures. "It is not by industry," said he, "that I have reached the heights of philosophy, but by force of genius." He was more admired by young and worldly men than by old men. He was the admiration of women, for he was poet as well as philosopher. His love-songs were scattered over Europe. With a proud and aristocratic bearing, severe yet negligent dress, beautiful and noble figure, musical and electrical voice, added to the impression he made by his wit and dialectical power, no man ever commanded greater admiration from those who listened to him. But he excited envy as well as admiration, and was probably misrepresented by his opponents. Like all strong and original characters, he had bitter enemies as well as admiring friends; and these enemies exaggerated his failings and his heretical opinions. Therefore he was summoned before the Council of Soissons, and condemned to perpetual silence. From this he appealed to Rome, and Rome sided with his enemies. He found a retreat, after his condemnation, in the abbey of Cluny, and died in the arms of his friend Peter the Venerable, the most benignant ecclesiastic of the century, who venerated his genius and defended his orthodoxy, and whose influence procured him absolution from the Pope.
But whatever were the faults of Abelard; however selfish he was in his treatment of Heloise, or proud and provoking to adversaries, or even heretical in many of his doctrines, especially in reference to faith, which he is accused of undermining, although he accepted in the main the received doctrines of the Church, certainly in his latter days, when he was broken and penitent (for no great man ever suffered more humiliating misfortunes),—one thing is clear, that he gave a stimulus to philosophical inquiries, and awakened a desire of knowledge, and gave dignity to human reason, beyond any man in the Middle Ages.
The dialectical and controversial spirit awakened by Abelard led to such a variety of opinions among the inquiring young men who assembled in Paris at the various schools, some of which were regarded as rationalistic in their tendency, or at least a departure from the patristic standard, that Peter Lombard, Bishop of Paris, collected in four books the various sayings of the Fathers concerning theological dogmas. He was also influenced to make this exposition by the "Sic et Non" of Abelard, which tended to unsettle belief. This famous manual, called the "Book of Sentences," appeared about the middle of the twelfth century, and had an immense influence. It was the great text-book of the theological schools.
About the time this book appeared the works of Aristotle were introduced to the attention of students, translated into Latin from the Saracenic language. Aristotle had already been commented upon by Arabian scholars in Spain,—among whom Averroes, a physician and mathematician of Cordova, was the most distinguished,—who regarded the Greek philosopher as the founder of scientific knowledge. His works were translated from the Greek into the Arabic in the early part of the ninth century.
The introduction of Aristotle led to an extension of philosophical studies. From the time of Charlemagne only grammar and elementary logic and dogmatic theology had been taught, but Abelard introduced dialectics into theology. A more complete method was required than that which the existing schools furnished, and this was supplied by the dialectics of Aristotle. He became, therefore, at the close of the twelfth century, an acknowledged authority, and his method was adopted to support the dogmas of the Church.
Meanwhile the press of students at Paris, collected into various schools,—the chief of which were the theological school of Notre Dame, and the school of logic at Mount Genevieve, where Abelard had lectured,—demanded a new organization. The teachers and pupils of these schools then formed a corporation called a university (Universitas magistrorum et Scholarium), under the control of the chancellor and chapter of Notre Dame, whose corporate existence was secured from Innocent III. a few years afterwards.
Thus arose the University of Paris at the close of the twelfth century, or about the beginning of the thirteenth, soon followed in different parts of Europe by other universities, the most distinguished of which were those of Oxford, Bologna, Padua, and Salamanca. But that of Paris took the lead, this city being the intellectual centre of Europe even at that early day. Thither flocked young men from Germany, England, and Italy, as well as from all parts of France, to the number of twenty-five or thirty thousand. These students were a motley crowd: some of them were half-starved youth, with tattered, clothes, living in garrets and unhealthy cells; others again were rich and noble,—but all were eager for knowledge. They came to Paris as pilgrims flocked to Jerusalem, being drawn by the fame of the lecturers. The quiet old schools of the convents were deserted, for who would go to Fulda or York or Citeaux, when such men as Abelard, Albert, and Victor were dazzling enthusiastic youth by their brilliant disputations? These young men also seem to have been noisy, turbulent, and dissipated for the most part, "filling the streets with their brawls and the taverns with the fumes of liquor. There was no such thing as discipline among them. They yelled and shouted and brandished daggers, fought the townspeople, and were free with their knocks and blows." They were not all youth; many of them were men in middle life, with wives and children. At that time no one finished his education at twenty-one; some remained scholars until the age of thirty-five.
Some of these students came to study medicine, others law, but more theology and philosophy. The headquarters of theology was the Sorbonne, opened in 1253,—a college founded by Robert Sorbon, chaplain of the king, whose aim was to bring together the students and professors, heretofore scattered throughout the city. The students of this college, which formed a part of the university, under the rule of the chancellor of Notre Dame, it would seem were more orderly and studious than the other students. They arose at five, assisted at Mass at six, studied till ten,—the dinner hour; from dinner till five they studied or attended lectures; then went to supper,—the principal meal; after which they discussed problems till nine or ten, when they went to bed. The students were divided into hospites and socii, the latter of whom carried on the administration. The lectures were given in a large hall, in the middle of which was the chair of the master or doctor, while immediately below him sat his assistant, the bachelor, who was going through his training for a professorship. The chair of theology was the most coveted honor of the university, and was reached only by a long course of study and searching examinations, to which no one could aspire but the most learned and gifted of the doctors. The students sat around on benches, or on the straw. There were no writing-desks. The teaching was oral, principally by questions and answers. Neither the master nor the bachelor used a book. No reading was allowed. The students rarely took notes or wrote in short-hand; they listened to the lectures and wrote them down afterwards, so far as their memory served them. The usual text-book was the "Book of Sentences," by Peter Lombard. The bachelor, after having previously studied ten years, was obliged to go through a three years' drill, and then submit to a public examination in presence of the whole university before he was thought fit to teach. He could not then receive his master's badge until he had successfully maintained a public disputation on some thesis proposed; and even then he stood no chance of being elevated to a professor's chair unless he had lectured for some time with great eclat. Even Albertus Magnus, fresh with the laurels of Cologne, was compelled to go through a three years' course as a sub-teacher at Paris before he received his doctor's cap, and to lecture for some years more as master before his transcendent abilities were rewarded with a professorship. The dean of the faculty of theology was chosen by the suffrages of the doctors.
The Organum (philosophy of first principles) of Aristotle was first publicly taught in 1215. This was certainly in advance of the seven liberal arts which were studied in the old Cathedral schools,— grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (Trivium); and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (Quadrivium),—for only the elements of these were taught. But philosophy and theology, under the teaching of the Scholastic doctors (Doctores Scholastici), taxed severely the intellectual powers. When they introduced dialectics to support theology a more severe method was required. "The method consisted in connecting the doctrine to be expounded with a commentary on some work chosen for the purpose. The contents were divided and subdivided, until the several propositions of which it was composed were reached. Then these were interpreted, questions were raised in reference to them, and the grounds of affirming or denying were presented. Then the decision was announced, and in case this was affirmative, the grounds of the negative were confuted."
Aristotle was made use of in order to reduce to scientific form a body of dogmatic teachings, or to introduce a logical arrangement. Platonism, embraced by the early Fathers, was a collection of abstractions and theories, but was deficient in method. It did not furnish the weapons to assail heresy with effect. But Aristotle was logical and precise and passionless. He examined the nature of language, and was clear and accurate in his definitions. His logic was studied with the sole view of learning to use polemical weapons. For this end the syllogism was introduced, which descends from the universal to the particular, by deduction,—connecting the general with the special by means of a middle term which is common to both. This mode of reasoning is opposite to the method by induction, which rises to the universal from a comparison of the single and particular, or, as applied in science, from a collection and collation of facts sufficient to form a certainty or high probability. A sound special deduction can be arrived at only by logical inference from true and certain general principles.
This is what Anselm essayed to do; but the Schoolmen who succeeded Abelard often drew dialectical inferences from what appeared to be true, while some of them were so sophistical as to argue from false premises. This syllogistic reasoning, in the hands of an acute dialectician, was very efficient in overthrowing an antagonist, or turning his position into absurdity, but not favorable for the discovery of truth, since it aimed no higher than the establishment of the particulars which were included in the doctrine assumed or deduced from it. It was reasoning in perpetual circles; it was full of quibbles and sophistries; it was ingenious, subtle, acute, very attractive to the minds of that age, and inexhaustible from divisions and subdivisions and endless ramifications. It made the contests of the schools a dialectical display of remarkable powers in which great interest was felt, yet but little knowledge was acquired. In one respect the Scholastic doctors rendered a service: they demolished all dreamy theories and poured contempt on mystical phrases. They insisted, like Socrates, on a definite meaning to words. If they were hair-splitting in their definitions and distinctions, they were at least clear and precise. Their method was scientific. Such terms and expressions as are frequently used by our modern transcendental philosophers would have been laughed to scorn by the Schoolmen. No system of philosophy can be built up when words have no definite meaning. This Socrates was the first to inculcate, and Aristotle followed in his steps.
With the Crusades arose a new spirit, which gave an impulse to philosophy as well as to art and enterprise. "The primum mobile of the new system was Motion, in distinction from the rest which marked the old monastic retreats." An immense enthusiasm for knowledge had been kindled by Abelard, which was further intensified by the Scholastic doctors of the thirteenth century, especially such of them as belonged to the Dominican and Franciscan friars.
These celebrated Orders arose at a great crisis in the Papal history, when rival popes aspired to the throne of Saint Peter, when the Church was rent with divisions, when princes were contending for the right of investiture, and when heretical opinions were defended by men of genius. At this crisis a great Pope was called to the government of the Church,—Innocent III., under whose able rule the papal power culminated. He belonged to an illustrious Roman family, and received an unusual education, being versed in theology, philosophy, and canon law. His name was Lothario, of the family of the Conti; he was nephew of a pope, and counted three cardinals among his relatives. At the age of twenty- one, about the year 1181, he was one of the canons of Saint Peter's Church; at twenty-four he was sent by the Pope on important missions. In 1188 he was created cardinal by his uncle, Clement III.; and in 1198 he was elected Pope, at the age of thirty-eight, when the Crusades were at their height, when the south of France was agitated by the opinions of the Albigenses, and the provinces on the Rhine by those of the Waldenses. It was a turbulent age, full of tumults, insurrections, wars, and theological dissensions. The old monastic orders had degenerated and lost influence through idleness and self-indulgence, while the secular clergy were scarcely any better. Innocent cast his eagle eye into all the abuses which disgraced the age and Church, and made fearless war upon those princes who usurped his prerogatives. He excommunicated princes, humbled the Emperor of Germany and the King of England, put kingdoms under interdict, exempted abbots from the jurisdiction of bishops, punished heretics, formed crusades, laid down new canons, regulated taxes, and directed all ecclesiastical movements. His activity was ceaseless, and his ambition was boundless. He instituted important changes, and added new orders of monks to the Church. It was this Pope who made auricular confession obligatory, thus laying the foundation of an imperious spiritual sway in the form of inquisitions.
A firm guardian of public morals, his private life was above reproach. His habits were simple and his tastes were cultivated. He was charitable and kind to the poor and unfortunate. He spent his enormous revenues in building churches, endowing hospitals, and rewarding learned men; and otherwise showed himself the friend of scholars, and the patron of benevolent movements. He was a reformer of abuses, publishing the most severe acts against venality, and deciding quarrels on principles of justice. He had no dramatic conflicts like Hildebrand, for his authority was established. As the supreme guardian of the interests of the Church he seldom made demands which he had not the power to enforce. John of England attempted resistance, but was compelled to submit. Innocent even gave the arch-bishopric of Canterbury to one of his cardinals, Stephen Langton, against the wishes of a Norman king. He made Philip II take back his lawful wife; he nominated an emperor to the throne of Constantine; he compelled France to make war on England, and incited the barons to rebellion against John. Ten years' civil war in Germany was the fruit of his astute policy, and the only great failure of his administration was that he could not exempt Italy from the dominion of the Emperors of Germany, thus giving rise to the two great political parties of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,—the Guelphs and Ghibellines.
To cement his vast spiritual power and to add to the usefulness and glory of the Church, he not only countenanced but encouraged the Mendicant Friars, established by Saint Francis of Assisi, and Saint Dominic of the great family of the Guzmans in Spain. These men made substantially the same offers to the Pope that Ignatius Loyola did in after times,—to go where they were sent as teachers, preachers, and missionaries without condition or reward. They renounced riches, professed absolute poverty, and wandered from village to city barefooted, and subsisting entirely on alms as beggars. The Dominican friar in his black habit, and the Franciscan in his gray, became the ablest and most effective preachers of the thirteenth century. The Dominicans confined their teachings to the upper classes, and became their favorite confessors. They were the most learned men of the thirteenth century, and also the most reproachless in morals. The Franciscans were itinerary preachers to the common people, and created among them the same religious revival that the Methodists did later in England under the guidance of Wesley. The founder of the Franciscans was a man who seemed to be "inebriated with love," so unquenchable was his charity, rapt his devotions, and supernal his sympathy. He found his way to Rome in the year 1215, and in twenty-two years after his death there were nine thousand religious houses of his Order. In a century from his death the friars numbered one hundred and fifty thousand. The increase of the Dominicans was not so rapid, but more illustrious men belonged to this institution. It is affirmed that it produced seventy cardinals, four hundred and sixty bishops, and four popes.
It was in the palmy days of these celebrated monks, before corruption had set in, that the Dominican Order was recruited with one of the most extraordinary men of the Middle Ages. This man was Saint Thomas, born 1225 or 1227, son of a Count of Aquino in the kingdom of Naples, known in history as Thomas Aquinas, "the most successful organizer of knowledge," says Archbishop Trench, "the world has known since Aristotle." He was called "the angelical doctor," exciting the enthusiasm of his age for his learning and piety and genius alike. He was a prodigy and a marvel of dialectical skill, and Catholic writers have exhausted language to find expressions for their admiration. Their Lives of him are an unbounded panegyric for the sweetness of his temper, his wonderful self-control, his lofty devotion to study, his indifference to praises and rewards, his spiritual devotion, his loyalty to the Church, his marvellous acuteness of intellect, his industry, and his unparalleled logical victories. When he was five years of age his father, a noble of very high rank, sent him to Monte Cassino with the hope that he would become a Benedictine monk, and ultimately abbot of that famous monastery, with the control of its vast revenues and patronage. Here he remained seven years, until the convent was taken and sacked by the soldiers of the Emperor Frederic in his war with the Pope. The young Aquino returned to his father's castle, and was then sent to Naples to be educated at the university, living in a Benedictine abbey, and not in lodgings like other students. The Dominicans and Franciscans held chairs in the university, one of which was filled with a man of great ability, whose preaching and teaching had such great influence on the youthful Thomas that he resolved to join the Order, and at the age of seventeen became a Dominican friar, to the disappointment of his family. His mother Theodora went to Naples to extricate him from the hands of the Dominicans, who secretly hurried him off to Rome and guarded him in their convent, from which he was rescued by violence. But the youth persisted in his intentions against the most passionate entreaties of his mother, made his escape, and was carried back to Naples. The Pope, at the solicitation of his family, offered to make him Abbot of Monte Cassino, but he remained a poor Dominican. His superior, seeing his remarkable talents, sent him to Cologne to attend the lectures of Albertus Magnus, then the most able expounder of the Scholastic Philosophy, and the oracle of the universities, who continued his lectures after he was made a bishop, and even until he was eighty-five. When Albertus was transferred from Cologne to Paris, where the Dominicans held two chairs of theology, Thomas followed him, and soon after was made bachelor. Again was Albert sent back to Cologne, and Thomas was made his assistant professor. He at once attracted attention, was ordained priest, and became as famous for his sermons as for his lectures. After four years at Cologne Thomas was ordered back to Paris, travelling on foot, and begging his way, yet stopping to preach in the large cities. He was still magister and Albert professor, but had greatly distinguished himself by his lectures.
His appearance at this time was marked. His body was tall and massive, but spare and lean from fasting and labor. His eyes were bright, but their expression was most modest. His face was oblong, his complexion sallow; his forehead depressed, his head large, his person erect.
His first great work was a commentary of about twelve hundred pages on the "Book of Sentences," in the Parma edition, which was received with great admiration for its logical precision, and its opposition to the rationalistic tendencies of the times. In it are discussed all the great theological questions treated by Saint Angustine,—God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, grace, predestination, faith, free-will, Providence, and the like,—blended with metaphysical discussions on the soul, the existence of evil, the nature of angels, and other subjects which interested the Middle Ages. Such was his fame and dialectical skill that he was taken away from his teachings and sent to Rome to defend his Order and the cause of orthodoxy against the slanders of William of Saint Amour, an aristocratic doctor, who hated the Mendicant Friars and their wandering and begging habits. William had written a book called "Perils" in which he exposed the dangers to be apprehended from the new order of monks, in which he proved himself a true prophet, for ultimately the Mendicant Friars became subjects of ridicule and reproach. But the Pope came to the rescue of his best supporters.
On the return of Thomas to Paris he was made doctor of theology, at the same time with Bonaventura the Franciscan, called "the seraphic doctor," between whom and Thomas were intimate ties of friendship. He had now reached the highest honor that the university could bestow, which was conferred with such extraordinary ceremony that it would seem to have been a great event in Paris at that time.
His fame chiefly rests on the ablest treatise written in the Middle Ages,—the "Summa Theologica,"—in which all the great questions in theology and philosophy are minutely discussed, in the most exhaustive manner. He took the side of the Realists, his object being to uphold Saint Augustine. He was, more a Platonist in his spirit than an Aristotelian, although he was indebted to Aristotle for his method. He appealed to both reason and authority. He presented the Christian religion in a scientific form. His book is an assimilation of all that is precious in the thinking of the Church. If he learned many things at Paris, Cologne, and Naples, he was also educated by Chrysostom, by Augustine, and Ambrose. "It is impossible," says Cardinal Newman, and no authority is higher than his, "to read the Catena of Saint Thomas without being struck by the masterly skill with which he put it together. A learning of the highest kind,—not mere literary book knowledge which may have supplied the place of indexes and tables in ages destitute of these helps, and when they had to be read in unarranged and fragmentary manuscripts, but a thorough acquaintance with the whole range of ecclesiastical antiquity, so as to be able to bring the substance of all that had been written on any point to bear upon the text which involved it,—a familiarity with the style of each writer so as to compress in a few words the pith of the whole page, and a power of clear and orderly arrangement in this mass of knowledge, are qualities which make this Catena nearly perfect as an interpretation of Patristic literature." Dr. Vaughan, in eulogistic language, says "The 'Summa Theologica' may be likened to one of the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages, infinite in detail but massive in the grouping of pillars and arches, forming a complete unity that must have taxed the brain of the architect to its greatest extent. But greater as work of intellect is this digest of all theological richness for one thousand years, in which the thread of discourse is never lost sight of, but winds through a labyrinth of important discussions and digressions, all bearing on the fundamental truths which Paul declared and Augustine systematized."
This treatise would seem to be a thesaurus of both Patristic and Mediaeval learning; not a dictionary of knowledge, but a system of truth severely elaborated in every part,—a work to be studied by the Mediaeval students as Calvin's "Institutes" were by the scholars of the Reformation, and not far different in its scope and end; for the Patristic, the Mediaeval, and the Protestant divines did not materially differ in reference to the fundamental truths pertaining to God, the Incarnation, and Redemption. The Catholic and Protestant divines differ chiefly on the ideas pertaining to government and ecclesiastical institutions, and the various inventions of the Middle Ages to uphold the authority of the Church, not on dogmas strictly theological. A student in theology could even in our times sit at the feet of Thomas Aquinas, as he could at the feet of Augustine or Calvin; except that in the theology which Thomas Aquinas commented upon there is a cumbrous method, borrowed from Aristotle, which introduced infinite distinctions and questions and definitions and deductions and ramifications which have no charm to men who have other things to occupy their minds than Scholastic subtilties, acute and logical as they may be. Thomas Aquinas was raised to combat, with the weapons most esteemed in his day, the various forms of Rationalism, Pantheism, and Mysticism which then existed, and were included in the Nominalism of his antagonists. And as long as universities are centres of inquiry the same errors, under other names, will have to be combated, but probably not with the same methods which marked the teachings of the "angelical doctor." In demolishing errors and systematizing truth he was the greatest benefactor to the cause of "orthodoxy" that appeared in Europe for several centuries, admired for his genius as much as Spencer and other great lights of science are in our day, but standing preeminent and lofty over all, like a beacon light to give both guidance and warning to inquiring minds in every part of Christendom. Nor could popes and sovereigns render too great honor to such a prodigy of genius. They offered him the abbacy of Monte Cassino and the archbishopric of Naples, but he preferred the life of a quiet student, finding in knowledge and study, for their own sake, the highest reward, and pursuing his labors without the impedimenta of those high positions which involve ceremonies and cares and pomps, yet which most ambitious men love better than freedom, placidity, and intellectual repose. He lived not in a palace, as he might have lived, surrounded with flatterers, luxuries, and dignities, but in a cell, wearing his simple black gown, and walking barefooted wherever he went, begging his daily bread according to the rules of his Order. His black gown was not an academic badge, but the Dominican dress. His only badge of distinction was the doctors' cap.
Dr. Vaughan, in his heavy and unartistic life of Thomas Aquinas, has drawn a striking resemblance between Plato and the Mediaeval doctor: "Both," he says, "were nobly born, both were grave from youth, both loved truth with an intensity of devotion. If Plato was instructed by Socrates, Aquinas was taught by Albertus Magnus; if Plato travelled into Italy, Greece, and Egypt, Aquinas went to Cologne, Naples, Bologna, and Rome; if Plato was famous for his erudition, Aquinas was no less noted for his universal knowledge. Both were naturally meek and gentle; both led lives of retirement and contemplation; both loved solitude; both were celebrated for self-control; both were brave; both held their pupils spell-bound by their brilliant mental gifts; both passed their time in lecturing to the schools (what the Pythagoreans were to Plato, the Benedictines were to the angelical); both shrank from the display of self; both were great dialecticians; both reposed on eternal ideas; both were oracles to their generation." But if Aquinas had the soul of Plato, he also had the scholastic gifts of Aristotle, to whom the Church is indebted for method and nomenclature as it was to Plato for synthesis and that exalted Realism which went hand in hand with Christianity. How far he was indebted to Plato it is difficult to say. He certainly had not studied his dialectics through translations or in the original, but had probably imbibed the spirit of this great philosopher through Saint Augustine and other orthodox Fathers who were his admirers.
Although both Plato and Aristotle accepted "universals" as the foundation of scientific inquiry, the former arrived at them by consciousness, and the other by reasoning. The spirit of the two great masters of thought was as essentially different as their habits and lives. Plato believed that God governed the world; Aristotle believed that it was governed by chance. The former maintained that mind is divine and eternal; the latter that it is a form of the body, and consequently mortal. Plato thought that the source of happiness was in virtue and resemblance to God; while Aristotle placed it in riches and outward prosperity. Plato believed in prayer; but Aristotle thought that God would not hear or answer it, and therefore that it was useless. Plato believed in happiness after death; while Aristotle supposed that death ended all pleasure. Plato lived in the world of abstract ideas; Aristotle in the realm of sense and observation. The one was religious; the other secular and worldly. With both the passion for knowledge was boundless, but they differed in their conceptions of knowledge; the one basing it on eternal ideas and the deductions to be drawn from them, and the other on physical science,—the phenomena of Nature,—those things which are cognizable by the senses. The spiritual life of Plato was "a longing after love and of eternal ideas, by the contemplation of which the soul sustains itself and becomes participant in immortality." The life of Aristotle was not spiritual, but intellectual. He was an incarnation of mere intellect, the architect of a great temple of knowledge, which received the name of Organum, or the philosophy of first principles.
Thomas Aquinas, we may see from what has been said, was both Platonic and Aristotelian. He resembled Plato in his deep and pious meditations on the eternal realities of the spiritual world, while in the severity of his logic he resembled Aristotle, from whom he learned precision of language, lucidity of statement, and a syllogistic mode of argument well calculated to confirm what was already known, but not to make attainments in new fields of thought or knowledge. If he was gentle and loving and pious like Plato, he was also as calm and passionless as Aristotle.
This great man died at the age of forty-eight, in the year 1274, a few years after Saint Louis, before his sum of theology was completed. He died prematurely, exhausted by his intense studies; leaving, however, treatises which filled seventeen printed folio volumes,—one of the most voluminous writers of the world. His fame was prodigious, both as a dialectician and a saint, and he was in due time canonized as one of the great pillars of the Church, ranking after Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great,—the standard authority for centuries of the Catholic theology.
The Scholastic Philosophy, which culminated in Thomas Aquinas, maintained its position in the universities of Europe until the Reformation, but declined in earnestness. It descended to the discussion of unimportant and often frivolous questions. Even the "angelical doctor" is quoted as discussing the absurd question as to how many angels could dance together on the point of a needle. The play of words became interminable. Things were lost sight of in a barbarous jargon about questions which have no interest to humanity, and which are utterly unintelligible. At the best, logical processes can add nothing to the ideas from which they start. When these ideas are lofty, discussion upon them elevates the mind and doubtless strengthens its powers. But when the subjects themselves are frivolous, the logical tournaments in their defence degrade the intellect and narrow it. Nothing destroys intellectual dignity more effectually than the waste of energies in the defence of what is of no practical utility, and which cannot be applied to the acquisition of solid knowledge. Hence the Scholastic Philosophy did not advance knowledge, since it did not seek the acquisition of new truths, but only the establishment of the old. Its utility consisted in training the human mind to logical reasonings. It exercised the intellect and strengthened it, as gymnastics do the body, without enlarging it. It was nothing but barren dialectics,—"dry bones," a perpetual fencing. The soul cries out for bread; the Scholastics gave it a stone.
We are amazed that intellectual giants, equal to the old Greeks in acuteness and logical powers, could waste their time on the frivolous questions and dialectical subtilties to which they devoted their mighty powers. However interesting to them, nothing is drier and duller to us, nothing more barren and unsatisfying, than their logical sports. Their treatises are like trees with endless branches, each leading to new ramifications, with no central point in view, and hence never finished, and which might be carried on ad infinitum. To attempt to read their disquisitions is like walking in labyrinths of ever-opening intricacies. By such a method no ultimate truth could be arrived at, beyond what was assumed. There is now and then a man who professes to have derived light and wisdom from those dialectical displays, since they were doubtless marvels of logical precision and clearness of statement. But in a practical point of view those "masterpieces of logic" are utterly useless to most modern inquirers. These are interesting only as they exhibit the waste of gigantic energies; they do not even have the merit of illustrative rhetoric or eloquence. The earlier monks were devout and spiritual, and we can still read their lofty meditations with profit, since they elevate the soul and make it pant for the beatitudes of spiritual communion with God. But the writings of the Scholastic doctors are cold, calm, passionless, and purely intellectual,—logical without being edifying. We turn from them, however acute and able, with blended disappointment and despair. They are fig-trees, bearing nothing but leaves, such as our Lord did curse. The distinctions are simply metaphysical, and not moral.
Why the whole force of an awakening age should have been devoted to such subtilties and barren discussion it is difficult to see, unless they were found useful in supporting a theology made up of metaphysical deductions rather than an interpretation of the meaning of Scripture texts. But there was then no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew; there was no exegetical research; there was no science and no real learning. There was nothing but theology, with the exception of Lives of the Saints. The horizon of human inquiries was extremely narrow. But when the minds of very intellectual men were directed to one particular field, it would be natural to expect something remarkable and marvellously elaborate of its kind. Such was the Scholastic Philosophy. As a mere exhibition of dialectical acumen, minute distinctions, and logical precision in the use of words, it was wonderful. The intricacy and detail and ramifications of this system were an intellectual feat which astonishes us, yet which does not instruct us, certainly outside of a metaphysical divinity which had more charm to the men of the Middle Ages than it can have to us, even in a theological school where dogmatic divinity is made the most important study. The day will soon come when the principal chair in the theological school will be for the explanation of the Scripture texts on which dogmas are based; and for this, great learning and scholarship will be indispensable. To me it is surprising that metaphysics have so long retained their hold on the minds of Protestant divines. Nothing is more unsatisfactory, and to many more repellent, than metaphysical divinity. It is a perversion of the spirit of Christian teachings. "What says our Lord?" should be the great inquiry in our schools of theology; not, What deductions can be drawn from them by a process of ingenious reasoning which often, without reference to other important truths, lands one in absurdities, or at least in one-sided systems?
But the metaphysical divinity of the Schoolmen had great attractions to the students of the Middle Ages. And there must have been something in it which we do not appreciate, or it would not have maintained itself in the schools for three hundred years. Perhaps it was what those ages needed, the discipline through which the mind must go before it could be prepared for the scientific investigations of our own times. In an important sense the Scholastic doctors were the teachers of Luther and Bacon. Certainly their unsatisfactory science was one of the marked developments of the civilization of Europe, through which the Gothic nations must need pass. It has been the fashion to ridicule it and depreciate it in our modern times, especially among Protestants, who have ridiculed and slandered the papal power and all the institutions of the Middle Ages. Yet scholars might as well ridicule the text-books they were required to study fifty years ago, because they are not up to our times. We should not disdain the early steps by which future progress is made easy. We cannot despise men who gave up their lives to the contemplation of subjects which demand the highest tension of the intellectual faculties, even if these exercises were barren of utilitarian results. Some future age may be surprised at the comparative unimportance of questions which interest this generation. The Scholastic Philosophy cannot indeed be utilized by us in the pursuit of scientific knowledge; nor (to recur to Vaughan's simile for the great work of Aquinas) can a mediaeval cathedral be utilized for purposes of oratory or business. But the cathedral is nevertheless a grand monument, suggesting lofty sentiments, which it would be senseless and ruthless barbarism to destroy or allow to fall into decay, but which should rather be preserved as a precious memento of what is most poetic and attractive in the Middle Ages. When any modern philosopher shall rear so gigantic and symmetrical a monument of logical disquisitions as the "Summa Theologica" is said to be by the most competent authorities, then the sneers of a Macaulay or a Lewes will be entitled to more consideration. It is said that a new edition of this great Mediaeval work is about to be published under the direct auspices of the Pope, as the best and most comprehensive system of Christian theology ever written by man.
AUTHORITIES.
Dr. Vaughan's Life of Thomas Aquinas; Histoire de la Vie et des Ecrits de St. Thomas d'Aquin, par l'Abbe Bareille; Lacordaire's Life of Saint Dominic; Dr. Hampden's Life of Thomas Aquinas; article on Thomas Aquinas, in London Quarterly, July, 1881; Summa Theologica; Neander, Milman, Fleury, Dupin, and Ecclesiastical Histories generally; Biographie Universelle; Werner's Leben des Heiligen Thomas von Aquino; Trench's Lectures on Mediaeval History; Ueberweg & Rousselot's History of Philosophy. Dr. Hampden's article, in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, on Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastic Philosophy, is regarded by Hallam as the ablest view of this subject which has appeared in English.
THOMAS BECKET
A. D. 1118-1170.
PRELATICAL POWER.
A great deal has been written of late years on Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Henry II.,—some historians writing him up, and others writing him down; some making him a martyr to the Church, and others representing him as an ambitious prelate who encroached on royal authority,—more of a rebel than a patriot. His history has become interesting, in view of this very discrepancy of opinion,—like that of Oliver Cromwell, one of those historical puzzles which always have attraction to critics. And there is abundant material for either side we choose to take. An advocate can make a case in reference to Becket's career with more plausibility than about any other great character in English history,—with the exception of Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, and Archbishop Laud.
The cause of Becket was the cause of the Middle Ages. He was not the advocate of fundamental principles, as were Burke and Bacon. He fought either for himself, or for principles whose importance has in a measure passed away. He was a high-churchman, who sought to make the spiritual power independent of the temporal. He appears in an interesting light only so far as the principles he sought to establish were necessary for the elevation of society in his ignorant and iron age. Moreover, it was his struggles which give to his life its chief charm, and invest it with dramatic interest. It was his energy, his audacity, his ability in overcoming obstacles, which made him memorable,—one of the heroes of history, like Ambrose and Hildebrand; an ecclesiastical warrior who fought bravely, and died without seeing the fruits of his bravery.