The Popes and Science

It is with regard to the little things in life, particularly those that are so small that one would be tempted to think at first blush that Dante paid no attention to them at all, that his powers of observation as a student of nature, and his all-pervading love for every even smallest manifestation of her power, is especially made manifest. With regard to this subject, Prof. Kuhns, to whom I have already turned so often, has an illuminating passage, which sums up a large amount of reading of the poet. He says:

"The smallest members of the animal kingdom do not escape the observing eye of the poet, and such unpoetical insects as the flea, the gnat, and the fly are brought into use. By means of these latter he has accurately given the time of day and season of the year in one line, where, showing us the farmer lying on the hillside of a summer evening, looking down upon the valley alight with fire-flies, he says the time was that

'When the fly yields to the gnat.'

Those pests of dogs, the flea and hornet, are referred to in a passage already given, where the dog is seen snapping and scratching in agony. The butterfly was symbolical, during the Middle Ages, of the death and resurrection of the body. The various phases of its development are referred to by Dante; the caterpillar state, the latter referring to the cocoon of the silk-worm, furnishing a figure for the souls in Paradise, swathed in light; in one passage, backsliding Christians are compared to insects in a state of arrested development."

Dante's passage in the tenth canto of the Purgatorio, in which he compares man to the butterfly, who in this life passes through the caterpillar stage, passing in death, as it were, into the larval stage when in his coffin he is motionless and apparently dead, as the insect in its cocoon, yet finally reaching the glory of the resurrection in the winged butterfly stage, shows how well these medieval observers of nature had studied carefully aspects of nature which we are apt to think were holden entirely from their eyes. The passage would remind one of the story of the Jesuit, three centuries later, who, in the early days of missionary work in this country, wondered how he would obtain a fitting word to express to the Indians the abstract idea of the resurrection of the body. The good Father finally recalled his Dante, and having found a caterpillar that had entered into the larval stage after having spun its cocoon and wrapped itself round with its shroud to lie down in what is a striking similitude of death, presented it to the Indians, and then having waited until the butterfly came out, asked them what they called this process, and applied the word for it to the resurrection. Dante says:–

  "Perceive ye not we are of a wormlike kind,    Born to bring forth the angel butterfly,  That soars to Judgment, and no screen doth find?    Why doth your soul lift up itself on high?  Ye are as insects yet but half complete,    As worms in whom their growth fails utterly."

It is with regard to bees and ants, however, that Dante's observant love of nature and of natury study is especially to be admired. It is true, as has been often pointed out, that the older poets, of whom Dante was an assiduous and mindful reader, made use of figures with regard to bees, and Virgil, with all of whose works Dante was so intimately acquainted that nothing must have escaped him, devoted one of the four books of his Georgics to what is practically a treatise on Apiculture. In this most of the problems of bee raising are discussed. Lucretius, Lucan, and Ovid, all made use of this interesting insect for figures in their poetry. Dante might have obtained most of the references to the bee, then, from his reading. Prof. Kuhns is of the opinion, however, that some at least of Dante's references to them are due to his observations, quite apart from his literary reminiscences with regard to their habits and instincts. He says:–

"There are certain touches in the Divina Commedia which seem to prove that Dante's use of them was not entirely conventional. In the wonderful passage where he stands contemplating

'La forma general di Paradiso,'

he saw the Blessed in the shape of a great white rose on the banks of the river of light; and the white-robed angels, with wings of gold and faces of flame, as they fly unceasingly back and forth from the seats of the saints to the effulgent river, are compared to bees, following their inborn instinct to make honey, flying from flower to flower, burying themselves in the chalice, and then rising heavily to carry their burden to their hives. In another passage their buzzing noise is compared to the noise of a distant waterfall;"–a touch of nature that could only have come from familiarity with the insects.

In is with regard to ants even more than bees that Dante's proclivities for nature study are most evident. When in the Purgatorio, in the twenty-sixth canto, Dante would describe the meeting of souls in Paradise who kiss each other as they speed on their way, he compares them to the ants who as they meet one another touch antennae, thus communicating various messages, and then go on their way. The passage is very striking because, as Dean Plumptre remarks, the picture drawn reminds one almost of Sir John Lubbock's ant studies, or the remarkable descriptions of ant life in Bishop Ken's Hymnotheo. Dante's lines are as follows:–

"So oft, within their dusk brown host proceedThis ant and that, till muzzle muzzle meet;Spying their way, or how affairs succeed."

Thus did Dante know the whole round of science in his time better than any modern university man. People who take exception to his knowledge fail to realize its environment. They may smile a little scornfully now at his complacent acceptance of the Ptolemaic system without a question, but it must not be forgotten that for three centuries after his time educated men still continued to accept it, and that even the distinguished Jesuit astronomer, Clavius, to whom we owe the Gregorian reformation of the calendar and the restoration of the year to its proper place as regards the heavens, not only accepted it, but worked out his calendar reform problems by means of it. Clavius's great contemporary, Tycho-Brahe, the distinguished Danish astronomer, found no reason to reject it. Even Lord Bacon, who with perverted historical sense is still proclaimed the father of modern experimental science, also accepted the Ptolemaic system, and found that it thoroughly explained all the phenomena of the heavens, while he rejected the Copernican system, then nearly a century before the world, because he thought it did not. The surprise, however, is not in Dante's knowledge of astronomy, but in his familiarity with details of biology that enables him to reason, though in poetic language, with straightforward and logical directness with regard to basic thought in this science that is usually considered so thoroughly modern.

Another surprising feature is the knowledge of the habits of birds and of insects. Our modern students of nature are supposed to be the first who went deeply enough into these subjects to make them material for literature. Here, however, is Dante describing, in a few picturesque words, characteristic peculiarities of birds and insects, which our modern writers spend pages over, yet tell us scarcely more about them. A little knowledge of Dante is evidently the best antidote that our generation can have for that foolish persuasion that the Middle Ages were ignorant of science and that the universities taught nothing but nonsense about nature.

I am tempted to add just a few paragraphs with regard to another aspect of Dante's scientific interests which assimilates him to the modern educated man. Education itself would seem to be one of the sciences the development of which was surely left to a late and more conscious age. There are, however, as has been pointed out by Brother Azarias, quite enough materials in Dante's works to show that a serious student who was, however, only a literary man and not an educator, had many thoughts with regard to the practical side of education, and had come to many conclusions with regard to how it should be carried on, that are anticipations of the most fruitful thoughts of our modern educators and that have formed the subject of many theses on education down to our own day. Education is, of course, scarcely one of the physical sciences, yet since its subject-matter is mainly the child and the developing human intellect, and in that sense it is nature study in its highest form, this aspect of Dante's thinking also deserves to be given due weight here. Brother Azarias says:–

"It is the mission of the poet to reflect in his work the predominant, all-pervading spirit and views of his age. Now, in his day, the universities were the controlling element in thought, in art, in politics, moulding the thinkers and rulers of the age both in church and state. But Dante was a life-long student. He traveled from land to land and from school to school, and sat impatiently, yet humbly, at the feet of masters, imbibing whatever knowledge they could convey. He disputed in public. His bright eyes and strong, sombre, reserved features attracted the attention of fellow students as he wended his way, absorbed in his own thoughts, through the rue de Fouarre and entered the hall in which Siger was holding forth. Tradition has it that he was no less assiduous a frequenter of School Street in Oxford. He has left us no distinct treatise on education; but he who embodied all the science of his day, who was supreme in teaching so many other lessons, could not be silent in regard to pedagogy. From his writings a whole volume of rules and principles bearing upon education might be gleaned. In 'Il Convito' he expresses himself fully on the different ages of human growth and development; speaks of obedience as an essential requisite for the child; after his father he should obey his master and his elders. He should also be gentle and modest, reverent and eager to acquire knowledge; reserved, never forward; repentant of his faults to the extent of overcoming them. As our soul in all its operations makes use of a bodily organ, it behooves us to exercise the body, that it grow in grace and aptness, and be well ordained and disposed in order that the soul may control it to the best advantage. Thus it is that a noble nature seeks to have a sound mind in a sound body."

THE CHURCH AND THE MENTALLY AFFLICTED

It is especially with regard to the attitude of the churchmen, the people, and even the physicians of the Middle Ages toward insanity, that most opprobrium has been heaped upon the Church and her teachings in the so-called histories of the relations of science to theology or faith. Much of what has been said that has been supposed to tell worst against the Church, however, should not rest upon the shoulders of ecclesiastics, and should not be set down to the evil effect of theology. It is easy now to look back and blame men for the acceptance of supernatural agencies as causes in nearly all cases of mental and nervous diseases, but the reason for this is rather to be looked for in the nature of man than in his belief in religion. Ethnology shows us traces of it everywhere. Our American Indians, long before any tincture of Christianity, and before any hint of theology of any kind reached them, beyond that which develops spontaneously from the depths of their natural faculties, believed in the effect of the evil spirits in producing disease, and, of course, particularly the mental diseases which made men do things so contrary to their own interests, and often so harmful to the beings they loved best in the world.

In the Middle Ages they had not yet outgrown this primitive way of looking at mental diseases. For that matter, we have not even as yet. The intelligent classes in the community are, as a rule, convinced of the physical basis of mental diseases, but there are a great many people who still are inclined to think that some of them, at least, are manifestations of some punitive force outside of the patients themselves, or even some manifestation of ill-understood forces quite apart from matter. Not all the thinking people of the Middle Ages accepted all the absurd notions sometimes rehearsed in this matter, but as in our own time, foolish traditions and superstitions dominated the unthinking classes, which form still, unfortunately, the great mass of mankind. We have had just the opposite delusions forced upon our attention in our own day. Large numbers, supposedly of intelligent people, have pretended to believe or have definitely accepted the teaching that disease is nothing. This is quite as foolish as attributing to spiritual agencies what has come to be recognized as due to physical factors. It is to be hoped that our generation and its thinking shall not be judged by future generations to have been utterly foolish, just because a few millions of us accepted Eddyism,–and it must be remembered that these are not, as a rule, the uneducated. Another side of this question is even more interesting, or at least has become so during the last twenty years. A generation ago it was the custom to scoff not a little scornfully in scientific circles, at the idea of admitting even the possibility of the interference of immaterial or spiritual agencies, or of any other intelligences or wills at work in the ordinary affairs of this life, than those of men. This scornful attitude still continues to be the pose of many students and teachers of science. It is by no means so universal as it was, however. Strikingly enough, the converts from this attitude of mind have come, not from the lower ranks of teachers of science, but from among the very leaders in original research and scientific investigation. We may still continue to laugh at and ridicule the medieval people for their admission of the activity of spirits in ordinary mundane affairs, but if we do so, we must also laugh at and ridicule just as much, such prominent leaders of scientific thought and progress as Sir William Crookes, Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor Charles Richet, the distinguished French physiologist, Flammarion the astronomer, and even of late years Professor Lombroso, the well-known Italian criminologist, whose special doctrines as to crime and criminals would apparently insure him against such theories as those of the spiritualists. All of these men have confessed their belief not only in the possibility of spiritual interference in this world of ours, but insist that they have seen such interference, and are absolutely convinced of its frequent occurrence.

This is a decided reaction from previous states of the scientific mind on this subject, and represents a retroversion to medieval modes of thought that may be deprecated by scientific investigators of materialistic tendencies, but that cannot be neglected, and must not be despised. When the results of these recent investigations are taken into account, the opprobrium which has been heaped upon medieval scholars and churchmen for the facility with which they accepted the doctrine of the interference of spirits in human life, must be minimized to such a degree, or indeed eradicated so entirely, that a saner view of the whole situation as regards the relationship of the spiritual and material world seems likely to prevail. It is easy and cheap to reject without more ado and without serious consideration, such evidence of spiritual manifestations as has convinced these leaders of scientific thought. But this rejection is not scientific, nor does it show an open mind. What is needed is a calm review of the situation, in order to see just where truth lies. It is not at either extreme. It is not in too great credulity with regard to spiritual interference, but certainly not at the opposite pole of the negation of all spiritual influence in human life, that genuine progress in knowledge is to come. This premised, we may take up the consideration of the actual accomplishment of the Middle Ages with regard to the insane, better prepared to appreciate their point of view and to get at the significance of their attitude toward the mentally diseased.

There are two phases of this question of the attitude of even intelligent men of the Middle Ages toward nervous and mental diseases, that deserve to be studied, not superficially, but in their actual relationships to the men of that time, and to our opinions at the present day. These are: first, the question of the treatment of the mentally afflicted, and second, the mystery of demoniacal possession and its related phenomenon–mediumship, as we call it.

Personally, I was very much surprised some years ago, while collecting material for a paper to be read before the International Guild for the Care of the Insane, to find how many things that are most modern in our methods of treating the insane, and that are among the desiderata which are universally conceded to be most necessary for the improvement of present conditions in our management of mental diseases, were anticipated by the generations of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. It is not hard, for instance, to show that such eminently desirable conditions as the open door for mild cases, the combination of the ordinary hospital with a ward for psychic cases, the colony system for the treatment of those of lower mentality, were all in existence in the Middle Ages and did good work. The colony system particularly, as it comes to us from the Middle Ages, has recently been studied very carefully, and this has given us many valuable hints as to the methods that will have to be adopted in other countries in modern times.

The conditions which developed at Gheel in Belgium have deservedly attracted much attention in recent times, and have been the subject of articles in the medical journals of nearly every country in the world, because of the poignant realization by our generation that large institutions, meaning by this large single buildings or closely associated groups of buildings, are very unfavorable for the care of the insane. In America, one of these articles was published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, and a second, written by my friend, Dr. Jelliffe, who is the Professor of Mental Diseases in Fordham University School of Medicine, was written after a special visit paid to Gheel by him, in order to investigate conditions there. Though the situation at Gheel now is practically identical with that which originated there at least five centuries ago, there are many who consider that similar conditions would be ideal for the treatment of certain classes of the insane even in our own day. It is this sort of interpretation of the work of these old-time philanthropists and physicians that we need, and not the cheap condemnation which makes it necessary for us to begin all over again in each generation.

In the light of this unexpected revelation and the consequent revolution of thought it suggests, a short review of the treatment of the insane will not be out of place. It is usual for our self-complacent generation to consider that it was not until our own time that rational measures for the care of the insane were taken. Most of the text-books on mental diseases that touch at all on the historical aspects of the treatment question, are apt to say that the evolution of methods for the treatment and cure of the insane might be divided into four historical periods: First, the era of exorcism, on the theory that insane patients were possessed of devils. Second, the chain and dungeon era, during which persons exhibiting signs of insanity were imprisoned and shackled in such a manner as to prevent the infliction of injury upon others. Third, the era of asylums. Fourth, the present era of psychopathic wards in general hospitals for the acutely insane in cities, and colonies for the chronic insane in the country, which is only just beginning to develop.

From this classification, the ordinary reader would suppose that nothing at all was done for the insane during the first two periods, except exorcism in one and confinement in the other. As a matter of fact, the number of the harmlessly insane has always been much larger than the violent, and the latter, indeed, constitute only a very small portion of the mentally ailing at any period. Exorcism, as a rule, was applied only to the violent and to the hysterical. In the asylums at all times there were a number of patients who were not chained or confined to any great degree, and unless one had shown some special violent manifestation, severe measures were not taken. It is the treatment of the great mass of the insane rather than of the few exceptional cases, that must be considered as representing the attitude of mind of the generations of the Middle Age toward the mentally afflicted, and not what they found themselves compelled to do because of their fear and dread of violence.

For those who were mentally afflicted in a mild degree, abundant suitable provision was made by the generations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. When historical writers suggest the contrary, they are only making one of the usual assumptions from ignorance of the details. Because in some cases insanity was supposed to be due to possession by the devil, to say that, therefore, in all cases no provision was made for the insane is nonsense. It is comparatively easy to find, from records of the hospitals of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that there were what we now call psychopathic wards for the acutely insane in the cities, and some colonies for the chronic insane in country places.

Knowing nothing of this, Prof. White, for instance, says: "The stream of Christian endeavor, so far as the insane were concerned, was almost entirely cut off. In all the beautiful provision during the Middle Ages for the alleviation of human suffering, there was for the insane almost no care. Some monasteries indeed gave them refuge. We hear of a charitable work done for them at the London Bethlehem Hospital in the thirteenth century, at Geneva in the fifteenth, at Marseilles in the sixteenth, by the Black Penitents in the South of France, by certain Franciscans in Northern France, by the Alexian Brothers on the Rhine, and by various agencies in other parts of Europe; but, curiously enough, the only really important effort in the Christian Church was stimulated by the Mohammedans." This last clause is a slur on Christianity absolutely without justification. As is true for all broad generalizations, to ignore thus the work of caring for the insane and the methods employed in earlier times, amounts to deplorable injustice to generations whose provision for the sick of every class was not only much more abundant, but more rational and complete, than it has been our custom to recognize and acknowledge. The earliest city hospitals that we know of were due to the fatherly care and providence of that great Pope, Innocent III., whose pontificate (1198-1213) has been more misunderstood than perhaps any corresponding period of time in history. It was Virchow, the great German pathologist, whose sympathies with the Papacy were very slight, and whose attitude in the Kulturkampf in Germany showed him to be a strenuous opponent of the Papal policy, who paid the high tribute to Pope Innocent III. which we quote in the chapter on the Foundation of City Hospitals. It was in connection with these hospitals founded by Pope Innocent III., or the result of the movement initiated by him, that the insane were cared for at first. This may seem to have been an undesirable method, but at the present time there is an almost universal demand on the part of experts in mental diseases for wards for the mentally diseased in connection with city hospitals, because admission is thus facilitated, treatment is begun earlier, the patient is not left in unsuitable conditions so long, friends are readier to take measures to bring the patient under proper treatment and surveillance, and, as a consequence, more of the acutely insane have the course of their disease modified at once, and more cures take place than would otherwise be possible. Of course, this was not the idea of the original founder of the medieval hospitals, or even the conscious plan of those who were in charge. They had to take the mentally infirm because there was nowhere else for them to go at that time. As a matter of fact, however, their simple method of procedure was better in the end for the patient than is our more complex method of admission to insane asylums, with its disturbing necessity for formal examination of the patient under circumstances that are likely to increase any excitement that he may be laboring under. And the transfer to an institution bearing the dreaded name of asylum, or even sanitarium (for that term has taken quite as ominous a meaning in recent years) is sure to aggravate the patient's irritated state, and to exaggerate symptoms which might otherwise be relieved by prompt, soothing care, and by the consciousness that his ailment is being treated rather than that he himself is being placed in durance.