Historia Amoris: A History of Love, Ancient and Modern

In post-pagan convulsions there was much that was very vile. But there is one aspect of evil which subsequent barbarism reproved, and in which Rome delighted. It was the symbolized shapes of sin, open and public, for which in modern speech there is no name, and which were then omnipresent, sung in verse, exhibited on the stage, paraded in the streets, put on the amulets that girls and matrons wore, put in the nursery, consecrated by custom, art, religion, and since recovered from disinterred Pompeii. “The mouth,” said Quintillian, “does not dare describe what the eyes behold.” Rome that had made orbs and urbs synonymous was being conquered by the turpitudes of the quelled.

“I have told of the Prince,” said Suetonius, “I will tell now of the Beast.” It was his privilege. He wrote in Latin. In English it is not possible. Gautier declared that the inexpressible does not exist. Even his pen might have balked, had he tried it on the imperial orgy. The ulcer that ravaged Sylla, gangrened a throne, and decomposed a world. Less violent under Tiberius than under Caligula, under Nero the fever rose to the brain and added delirium to it. In reading accounts of the epoch you feel as though you were assisting at the spectacle of a gigantic asylum, from which the keepers are gone, and of which the inmates are omnipotent. But, in spite of the virulence of the virus, the athletic constitution of the empire, joined to its native element of might, resisted the disease so potently that one must assume that there was there a vitality which no other people had had, a hardiness that enabled Rome to survive excesses in which Nineveh and Babylon fainted. From the disease itself Rome might have recovered. It was the delirium that brought her down. That delirium, mounting always, increased under Commodus, heightened under Caracalla, and reached its crisis in Heliogabalus. Thereafter, for a while it waned only to flame again under Diocletian. The virus remained. To extirpate it the earth had to produce new races. Already they were on their way.

Meanwhile, though there were reigns when, in the words of Tacitus, virtue was a sentence of death, the emperors were not always insane. Vespasian was a soldier, Hadrian a scholar, Pius Antoninus a philosopher, and Marcus Aurelius a sage. Rome was not wholly pandemoniac. There is goodness everywhere, even in evil. There was goodness even in Rome. Stoicism, a code of the highest morality, had been adopted by the polite. Cicero, in expounding it, had stated that no one could be a philosopher who has not learned that vice should be avoided, however concealable it may be. Aristotle had praised virtue because of its extreme utility. Seneca said that vices were maladies, among which Zeno catalogued love, as Plato did crime. To him, vice stood to virtue as disease does to health. All guilt, he said, is ignorance.

Expressions such as these appealed to a class relatively small, but highly lettered, whom the intense realism of the amphitheatre, the suggestive postures of the pantomimes, and the Orientalism of the orgy shocked. There are now honest men everywhere, even in prison. Even in Rome there were honest men then. Moreover, paganism at its worst, always tolerant, was often poetic. Then, too, life in the imperial epoch, while less fair than in the age of Pericles, was so splendidly brilliant that it exhausted possible glamour for a thousand years to come. Dazzling in violence, its coruscations blinded the barbarians so thoroughly that thereafter there was but night.

X

FINIS AMORIS

The first barbarian that invaded Rome was a Jew. There was then there a small colony of Hebrews. Porters, pedlers, rag-pickers, valets-de-place, they were the descendants mainly of former prisoners of war. The Jew had a message for them. It was very significant. But it conflicted so entirely with orthodox views that there were few whom it did not annoy. A disturbance ensued. The ghetto was raided. A complaint for inciting disorder was lodged against a certain Christos, of whom nothing was known, and who had eluded arrest.

Rome, through her relations with Syria, was probably the first Occidental city in which the name was pronounced. Though the message behind it annoyed many, others accepted it at once. These latter, the former denounced. Some suppression ensued. But it had no religious significance. The purport of the message and the attitude of those who accepted it was seditious. Both denied the divinity of the Cæsars. That was treason. In addition, they announced the approaching end of the world. That was a slur on the optimism of State. A law was passed —Non licet esse Christianos. None the less, they multiplied. The message that had been brought to Rome was repeated throughout the Roman world. It crossed the frontiers. It reached races of whom Rome had never heard. They came and peered at her. Over the context of the message they drank hydromel to her fall.

The message, initially significant, dynamic at birth, developed under multiplying hands into a force so disruptive that it shook the gods from the skies, buried them beneath their ruined temples, and in derision tossed after them their rites for shroud. In the convulsions a page of history turned. The great book of paganism closed. Another opened. In it was a new ideal of love.

Realization was not immediate. Entirely uncontemplated and equally unforeseen, the ideal was an after-growth, a blossom among other ruins, a flower that developed subtly with the Rosa mystica from higher shrines.

Meanwhile, the message persisted. Titularly an evangel, it meant good news. The Christ had said to his disciples: “As ye go, preach, saying, The Kingdom of God is at hand – for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.”

“All these things shall come upon this generation,” were his subsequent and explicit words. After the incident in the wilderness he declared: “The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Later he asserted: “Verily I say unto you that there be some of them that stand by which shall in no wise taste of death till they see the Kingdom of God come with power.”23

In repeating these tidings, the evangelists lived in a state of constant expectation. Their watchword was “Maran atha” – the Lord cometh. In fancy they saw themselves in immediate Edens, seated on immutable thrones.

The corner-stone of the early Church was based on that idea. When, later, it was recognized as a misconception, the coming of the Kingdom of God was interpreted as the establishment of the Christian creed.

Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. He came to prepare men not for life, but for death. He believed that the world was to end. Had he not so believed, his condemnation of labor, his prohibition against wealth, his injunction to forsake all things for his sake, his praise of celibacy, his disregard of family ties, and his abasement of marriage would be without meaning. Observance of his orders he regarded as a necessary preparation for an event then assumed to be near. It was exacted as a means of grace.

On the other hand, it may be that there was an esoteric doctrine which only the more spiritual among the disciples received. The significant threat, “In this life ye shall have tribulation,” contains a distinct suggestion of other views. Possibly they concerned less the termination of the world than the termination of life. Life extinct, obviously there must ensue that peace which passeth all understanding, the Pratscha-Paramita, or beyond all knowledge, which long before had been taught by the Buddha, in whose precepts it is not improbable that Jesus was versed.

To-day there are four gospels. Originally there were fifty. In some of them succincter views may have been expressed. The possibility, surviving texts support. These texts are provided by Clement of Alexandria. They are quoted by him from the Gospel according to the Egyptians, an Evangel that existed in the latter half of the second century and which was then regarded as canonical. In one of them, Jesus said: “I am come to destroy the work of woman, which is generation and death.” In another, being asked how long life shall continue, he answered: “So long as women bear children.”24

These passages seem conclusive. Even otherwise, the designed effect of the exoteric doctrine was identical. It eliminated love and condemned the sex. In the latter respect, Paul was particularly severe. In violent words he humiliated woman. He enjoined on her silence and submission. He reminded her that man was created in the image of God, while she was but created for him. He declared that he who giveth her in marriage cloth well, but he that giveth her not doth better.25

Theoretically, as well as canonically, marriage thereafter was regarded as unholy. The only union in which it was held that grace could possibly be, was one that in its perfect immaculacy was a negation of marriage itself. St. Sebastian enjoined any other form. The injunction was subsequently ratified. It was ecclesiastically adjudged that whoso declared marriage preferable to celibacy be accursed.26 St. Augustin, more leniently, permitted marriage, on condition, however, that the married in no circumstance overlooked the object of their union, which object was the creation of children, not to love them, he added, but to increase the number of the servants of the Lord.27

St. Augustin was considerate. But Jesus had been indulgent. In the plentitudes of his charity there was both commiseration and forgiveness. Throughout his entire ministry he wrote but once. It was on an occasion when a woman was brought before him. Her accusers were impatient. Jesus bent forward and with a finger wrote on the ground. The letters were illegible. But the symbol of obliteration was in the dust which the wind would disperse. The charge was impatiently repeated. Jesus straightened himself. With the weary comprehension of one to whom hearts are as books, he looked at them. “Whoever is without sin among you, may cast the first stone.”

The sins of Mary Magdalen were many. He forgave them, for she had loved much. His indulgence was real and it was infinite. Yet occasionally his severity was as great. At the marriage of Cana he said to his mother: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” In the house of the chief of the Pharisees he more emphatically announced: “If any man come unto me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Elsewhere he advocated celibacy enforced with the knife. John, his favorite disciple, beheld those who had practised it standing among the redeemed.28

That vision peopled the deserts with hermits. It filled the bastilles of God, the convents and monasteries of pre-mediæval days. The theory of it was adopted by kings on their thrones. Lovers in their betrothals engaged to observe it reciprocally. Husbands and wives separated that they might live more purely apart.

The theory, contrary to the spirit of paganism, was contrary also to that of the Mosaic law. The necessity of marriage was one of the six hundred and thirteen Hebraic precepts. The man who omitted to provide himself with heirs became a homicide. In the Greek republics celibacy was penalized. In Rome, during the republic, bachelors were taxed. Under the empire they could neither inherit nor serve the State. But the law was evaded. Even had it not been, the people of Rome, destroyed by war or as surely by pleasure, little by little was disappearing. Slaves could not replace citizens. The affranchised could be put in the army, even in the senate, as they were, but that did not change their servility, and it was precisely that servility which encouraged imperial aberrations and welcomed those which Christianity brought.

The continence which the Church inculcated was not otherwise new. The Persians had imposed it on girls consecrated to the worship of the Sun. It was observed by the priests of Osiris. It was the cardinal virtue of the Pythagoreans. It was exacted of Hellenic hierophants. Gaul had her druidesses and Rome her vestals. Celibacy existed, therefore, before Christianity did. But it was exceptional in addition to being not very rigorously enforced. Vesta was a mother. All the vestals that faltered were not buried alive. There was gossip, though it be but legend, of the druidesses, of the muses as well. Immaculacy was the ideal condition of the ideal gods. Zeus materially engendered material divinities that presided over forces and forms. But, without concurrence, there issued armed and adult from his brain the wise and immaculate Pallas.

Like her and the muses, genius was assumed to be ascetic also. Socrates thought otherwise. His punishment was Xantippe, and not a line to his credit. A married Homer is an anomaly which imagination cannot comfortably conjure. A married Plato is another. Philosophers and poets generally were single. Lucretius, Vergil, and the triumvirs of love were unmarried. In the epoch in which they appeared Rome was aristocratically indisposed to matrimony. To its pomps there was a dislike so pronounced that Augustus introduced coercive laws. Hypocrite though he were, he foresaw the dangers otherwise resulting. It was these that asceticism evoked.

The better part of the tenets of the early Church – sobriety, stoicism, the theory of future reward and punishment, pagan philosophy professed. Adherents could, therefore, have been readily recruited. But the doctrine of asceticism and, with it, the abnegation of whatever Rome loved, angered, creating first calumny, then persecution.

Infanticide at the time was very common. To accuse the Christians of it would have meant nothing. They were charged instead with eating the children that they killed. That being insufficient they were further charged with the united abominations of Œdipus and Thyestes.29

Thereafter, if the Tiber mounted or the Nile did not, if it rained too heavily or not enough, were there famine, earthquakes, pests, the fault was theirs. Then, through the streets, a cry resounded, Christianos ad leonem!– to the arena with them. At any consular delay the mob had its torches and tortures. Persecution augumented devotion. “Fast,” said Tertullian. “Fasting prepares for martyrdom. But do not marry, do not bear children. You would only leave them to the executioner. Garment yourselves simply, the robes the angels bring are robes of death.”

The robes did not always come, the executioner did not, either. The Kingdom of God delayed. The world persisted. So also did asceticism. Clement and Hermas unite in testifying that the immaculacy of the single never varied during an epoch when even that of the vestals did, and that the love of the married was the more tender because of the immaterial relations observed.30 Grégoire de Tours cited subsequently an instance in which a bride stipulated for a union of this kind. Her husband agreed. Many years later she died. Her husband, while preparing her for the grave, openly and solemnly declared that he restored her to God as immaculate as she came. “At which,” the historian added, “the dead woman smiled and said, ‘Why do you tell what no one asked you.’”

The subtlety of the question pleased the Church. The Church liked to compare the Christian to an athlete struggling in silence with the world, the flesh, and the devil. It liked to regard him as one whose life was a continual exercise in purification. It liked to represent his celibacy as an imitation of the angels. At that period Christianity took things literally and narrowly. Paul had spoken eloquently on the dignity of marriage. He authorized and honored it. He permitted and even counselled second marriages. But his pre-eminent praise of asceticism was alone considered. Celibacy became the ideal of the early Christians who necessarily avoided the Forum and whatever else was usual and Roman. It is not, therefore, very surprising that they should have been defined as enemies of gods, emperors, laws, customs, nature itself, or, more briefly, as barbarians.

Yet there were others. At the north and at the west they prowled, nourished in hatred of Rome, in wonder, too, of the effeminate and splendid city with its litters of gold, its baths of perfume, its inhabitants dressed in gauze, and its sway from the Indus to Britannia. From the day when a mass of them stumbled on Marius to the hour when Alaric laughed from beneath the walls his derision at imperial might, always they had wondered and hated.

In the slaking of the hate Christianity perhaps unintentionally assisted. The Master had said, “All they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.” His believers omitted to do either. When enrolled, they deserted. On the frontiers they refused to fight. The path of the barbarians was easy. In disorganized hordes they battened on Rome and melted away there in excesses. Tacitus and Salvian rather flattered them. They were neither intelligent or noble. They must have lacked even the sense of independence. They pulled civilization down, but they fell with it – into serfdom.

Already from the steppes of Tartary had issued cyclones of Huns. Painted blue, wrapped in cloaks of human skin, it was thought that they were the whelps of demons. Their chief was Attila. The whirlwind that he loosed swept the world like a broom. In the echoes of his passage is the crash of falling cities, the cries of the vanquished, the death rattle of nations, the surge and roar of seas of blood. In the reverberations Attila looms, dragging the desert after him, tossing it like a pall on the face of the earth. “But who are you?” a startled prelate gasped. Said Attila, “I am the Scourge of God.”

Satiated at last, overburdened with the booty of the world, he galloped back to his lair where, on his wedding couch, another Judith killed him. In spite of him, in spite of preceding Goths and subsequent Vandals, Rome, unlike her gods that had fled the skies, was immortal. She could fall, but she could not die. But though she survived, antiquity was dead. It departed with the lords of the ghostland.

PART II

I

THE CLOISTER AND THE HEART

In the making of the world that was Rome, ages combined. Centuries unrolled in its dissolution. Step by step it had ascended the path of empire, step by step it went down. The descent completed, Rome herself survived. The eternal feminine is not more everlasting than the Eternal City. Yet, in the descent, her power, wrested from a people who had but the infirmities of corruption, by others that had only the instincts of brutes, left but vices and ruins. From these feudalism and serfdom erupted. Humanity became divided into beasts of burden and beasts of prey.

Feudalism was the transmission of authority from an overlord to an underlord, from the latter to a retainer, and thence down to the lowest rung of the social ladder, beneath which was the serf, between whom and his master the one judge was God.

The resulting conditions have no parallel in any epoch of which history has cognizance. Except in Byzance, the glittering seat of Rome’s surviving dominion, and in Islâm, the glowing empire further east, nowhere was there light. Europe, pitch-black, became, almost in its entirety, subject to the caprices of a hierarchy of despots who managed to be both stupid and fierce, absolute autocrats, practically kings. To the suzerain they owed homage at court, assistance in war; but in their own baronies, all power, whether military, judiciary, or legislative, centred in them. They had the further prerogative, which they abundantly abused, of maintaining centuries of anarchy and intellectual night. The fief and the sword were the investiture of their power. The donjon – a pillory on one side, a gibbet on the other – was the symbol of their might. The blazon, with its sanguinary and fabulous beasts, was emblematic of themselves. Could wolves form a social order, their model would be that of these brutes, to whom God was but a bigger tyrant. Their personal interest, which alone prevented them from exterminating everybody, was the determining cause of affranchisement when it came, and, when it did, was accompanied by conditions always hard, often grotesque, and usually vile, among which was the jus primæ noctis and the affiliated marchetum, subsequently termed droit du seigneur, the dual right of poaching on maidenly and marital preserves.31

With that, with drink and pillage for relaxations, the chief business of the barons was war. When they descended from their keeps, it was to rob and attack. There was no security, not a road was safe, war was an intermittent fever and existence a panic.

In the constant assault and sack of burgs and keeps, the condition of woman was perilous. Usually she was shut away more securely and remotely than in the gynæceum. If, to the detriment of her lord, she emerged, she might have one of her lips cut off, both perhaps, or, more expeditiously, be murdered. She never knew which beforehand. It was as it pleased him. Penalties of this high-handedness were not sanctioned by law. There was none. It was the right of might. Civilization outwearied had lapsed back into eras in which women were things.

The lapse had ecclesiastical approbation. At the second council of Macon it was debated whether woman should not be regarded as beyond the pale of humanity and as appertaining to a degree intermediary between man and beast. Subsequent councils put her outside of humanity also, but on a plane between angels and man. But in the capitularies generally it was as Vas infirmius that she was defined. Yet already Chrysostom, with a better appreciation of the value of words, with a better appreciation of the value of woman as well, had defined her as danger in its most delectable form. Chrysostom means golden mouth. His views are of interest. Those of the mediæval lord are not recorded, and would not be citable, if they were.

From manners such as his and from times such as those, there was but one refuge – the cloister, though there was also the tomb. They were not always dissimilar. In the monasteries, there was a thick vapor of crapulence and bad dreams. They were vestibules of hell. The bishops, frankly barbarian, coarse, gluttonous, and worse, went about armed, pillaging as freely as the barons. Monks less adventurous, but not on that account any better, saw Satan calling gayly at them, “Thou art damned.” Yet, however drear their life, it was a surcease from the apoplexy of the epoch. Kings descended from their thrones to join them. To the abbeys and priories came women of rank.

In these latter retreats there was some suavity, but chiefly there was security from predatory incursions, from husbands quite as unwelcome, from the passions and violence of the turbulent world without. But the security was not over-secure. Women that escaped behind the bars, saw those bars shaken by the men from whom they had fled, saw the bars sunder, and themselves torn away. That, though, was exceptional. In the cloister generally there was safety, but there were also regrets, and, with them, a leisure not always very adequately filled. To some, the cloister was but another form of captivity in which they were put not of their own volition, but by way of precaution, to insure a security which may not have been entirely to their wish. Yet, from whatever cause existence in these retreats was induced, very rapidly it became the fashion.

There had been epochs in which women wore garments that were brief, there were others in which their robes were long. It was a question of mode. Then haircloth came in fashion. In Greece, women were nominally free. In Rome, they were unrestrained. In Europe at this period, they were cloistered. It was the proper thing, a distinction that lifted them above the vulgar. Bertheflede, a lady of very exalted position, who, Grégoire de Tours has related, cared much for the pleasures of the table and not at all for the service of God, entered a nunnery for no other reason.

There were other women who, for other causes, did likewise. In particular, there was Radegonde who founded a cloister of her own, one that within high walls had the gardens, porticoes, and baths of a Roman villa, but which in the deluge of worldly sin, was, Thierry says, intended to be an ark. There Radegonde received high ecclesiastics and laymen of position, among others Fortunatus, a poet, young and attractive, whom the abbess, young and attractive herself, welcomed so well that he lingered, supping nightly at the cloister, composing songs in which were strained the honey of Catullus, and, like him, crowned with roses.32