History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume II (of 2)

Europe has visited with its maledictions the great political writer by whom these atrocious maxims have been recommended, forgetting that his offence consists not in inventing, but in divulging them. His works thus offer the purest example we possess of physical statesmanship. They are altogether impassive. He views the management of a state precisely as he might do the construction of a machine, recommending that such a wheel or such a lever should be introduced, his only inquiry being whether it will accomplish his intention. As to any happiness or misery it may work, he gives himself no concern, unless, indeed, they evidently ought to enter into the calculation. He had suffered the rack himself under a charge of conspiracy, and borne it without flinching. But, before Machiavelli wrote, his principles had all been carried into practice; indeed, it would not be difficult to give abundant examples in proof of the assertion that they had been for ages regarded in Italy as rules of conduct.

Conjoined effect of the intellectual and moral impulses. Such was the morality which Europe detected as existing in Italy, carried out with inconceivable wickedness in public and private life; and thus the two causes we have been considering – contact with the Saracens in Syria and a knowledge of the real state of things in Rome – conspired together to produce what may be designated as the moral impulse, which, in its turn, conspired with the intellectual. Their association foreboded evil to ecclesiastical authority, thus taken at great disadvantage. Though, from its very birthday, that authority had been in absolute opposition to the intellectual movement, it might, doubtless, for a much longer time have successfully maintained its conflict therewith had the conditions remained unchanged. Up to this time its chief strength reposed upon its moral relations. It could point, and did point the attention of those whose mental culture enabled them to understand the true position of affairs, to Europe brought out of barbarism, and beginning a course of glorious civilization. That achievement was claimed by the Church. If it were true that she had thus brought it to pass, it had been altogether wrought by the agency of her moral power, intellectual influence in no manner aiding therein, but being uniformly, from the time of Constantine the Great to that of the Reformation, instinctively repulsed. When, now, the moral power suffered so great a shock, and was not only ready to go over to, but had actually allied itself with the intellectual, there was great danger to ecclesiastical authority. And hence we need not be surprised that an impression began to prevail among the clear-thinking men of the time that the real functions of that authority were completed in producing the partially-civilized condition to which Europe had attained, the course of events tending evidently to an elimination of that authority as an active element in the approaching European system. The excuses of ecclesiasticism. To such the Church might emphatically address herself, pointing out the signal and brilliant results to which she had given rise, and displaying the manifest evils which must inevitably ensue if her relations, as then existing, should be touched. For it must have been plain that the first effect arising from the coalition of the intellectual with the moral element would be an assertion of the right of private judgment in the individual – a condition utterly inconsistent with the dominating influence of authority. It was actually upon that very principle that the battle of the Reformation was eventually fought. She might point out – for it needed no prophetic inspiration – that, if once this principle was yielded, there could be no other issue in Christendom than a total decomposition; that though, for a little while, the separation might be limited to a few great confessions, these, under the very influence of the principle that had brought themselves into existence, must, in their turn, undergo disintegration, and the end of it be a complete anarchy of sects. Her feeble resistance. In one sense it may be said that it was in wisdom that the Church took her stand upon this point, determining to make it her base of resistance; unwisely in another, for it was evident that she had already lost the initiative of action, and that her very resistance would constitute the first stage in the process of decomposition.

Contemporaneous changes in Europe. Europe had made a vast step during its Age of Faith. Spontaneously it had grown through its youth; and the Italians, who had furnished it with many of its ideas, had furnished it also with many of its forms of life. In that respect justice has still to be done them. When Rome broke away from her connexions with Constantinople, a cloud of more than Cimmerian darkness overshadowed Europe. It was occupied by wandering savages. Six hundred years organized it into families, neighbourhoods, cities. Those centuries found it full of bondmen; they left it without a slave. They found it a scene of violence, rapine, lust; they left it the abode of God-fearing men. Where there had been trackless forests, there were innumerable steeples glittering in the sun; where there had been bloody chieftains, drinking out of their enemies' skulls, there were grave ecclesiastics, fathoming the depths of free-will, predestination, election. Investing the clergy with a mysterious superiority, the Church asserted the equality of the laity from the king to the beggar before God. It disregarded wealth and birth, and opened a career for all. Its influence over the family and domestic relations was felt through all classes. It fixed paternity by a previous ceremony; it enforced the rule that a wife passes into the family of her husband, and hence it followed that legitimate children belong to the father, illegitimate to the mother. It compelled women to domestic life, shut them out from the priesthood, and tried to exclude them from government. In a worldly sense, the mistake that Rome committed was this: she attempted to maintain an intellectual immobility in the midst of an advancing social state. She saw not that society could no more be stopped in its career through her mere assertion that it could not and should not move, than that the earth could be checked in its revolution merely because she protested that it was at rest. She tried, first by persuasion and then by force, to arrest the onward movement, but she was overborne, notwithstanding her frantic resistance, by the impetuous current. Very different would it have been had the Italian statesmen boldly put themselves in the van of progress, and, instead of asserting an immutability and infallibility, changed their dogmas and maxims as the progress of events required. Europe need not have waited for Arabs and Jews.

Loss of power in Church organizations. In describing these various facts, I have endeavoured to point out impressively how the Church, so full of vigour at first, contained within itself the seeds of inevitable decay. From the period when it came into collision with the intellectual and moral elements, the origin of which we have traced, and which conspired together for its overthrow, it exhibited a gradual decline; first losing its influence upon nations, and ceasing to be in them a principle of public action; next, witnessing the alienation of the higher and educated classes, the process descending downward through the social scale, therein retracing the steps of its advance. When ecclesiasticism became so weak as to be unable to regulate international affairs, and was supplanted by diplomacy, in the castle the physician was more than a rival for the confessor, in the town the mayor was a greater man than the abbot. There remained a lingering influence over individuals, who had not yet risen above a belief that it could control their state after death. This decline of its ancient influence should be a cause of rejoicing to all intelligent men, for an ecclesiastical organization allying itself to political power can never now be a source of any good. In America we have seen the bond that held the Church and State together abruptly snapped. Return of things to the ancient Christian times. It is therefore well that, since the close of the Age of Faith, things have been coming back with an accelerated pace, to the state in which they were in the early Christian times, before the founder of Constantinople beguiled the devotional spirit to his personal and family benefit – to the state in which they were before ambitious men sought political advancement and wealth by organizing hypocrisy – when maxims of morality, charity, benevolence, were rules of life for individual man – when the monitions of conscience were obeyed without the suggestions of an outward, often an interested and artful prompter – when the individual lived not under the sleepless gaze, the crushing hand of a great overwhelming hierarchical organization, surrounding him on all sides, doing his thinking for him, directing him in his acts, making him a mere automaton, but in simplicity, humility, and truthfulness guiding himself according to the light given him, and discharging the duties of this troublesome and transitory life "as ever in his great Taskmaster's eye."

For the progressive degradations exhibited by the Roman Church during the Age of Faith, something may be offered as at once an explanation and an excuse. Machiavelli relates, in his "History of Florence" – a work which, if inferior in philosophical penetration to his "Prince," is of the most singular merit as a literary composition – that Osporco, a Roman, having become pope, exchanged his unseemly name for the more classical one Sergius, and that his successors have ever since observed the practice of assuming a new name. Connexion of religious ideas in Italy with its ethnical state. This incident profoundly illustrates the psychical progress of that Church. During the fifteen centuries that we have had under consideration – counting from a little before the Christian era – the population of Italy had been constantly changing. The old Roman ethnical element had become eliminated partly through the republican and imperial wars, and partly through the slave system. The degenerated half-breeds, of whom the Peninsula was full through repeated northern immigrations, degenerated, as time went on, still more and more. After that blood admixture had for the most part ceased, it took a long time for the base ethnical element which was its product to come into physiological correspondence with the country, for the adaptation of man to a new climate is a slow, a secular change.

But blood-degeneration implies thought-degeneration. It is nothing more than might be expected that, in this mongrel race, customs, and language, and even names should change – that rivers, and towns, and men should receive new appellations. As the great statesman to whom I have referred observes, Cæsar and Pompey had disappeared; John, Matthew, and Peter had come in their stead. Barbarized names are the outward and visible signs of barbarized ideas. Those early bishops of Rome whose dignified acts have commanded our respect, were men of Roman blood, and animated with sentiments that were truly Latin; but the succeeding pontiffs, whose lives were so infamous and thoughts so base, were engendered of half-breeds. Nor was it until the Italian population had re-established itself in a physiological relation with the country – not until it had passed through the earlier stages of national life – that manly thoughts and true conceptions could be regained.

Ideas and dogmas that would not have been tolerated for an instant in the old, pure, homogeneous Roman race, found acceptance in this adulterated, festering mass. This was the true cause of the increasing debasement of Latin Christianity. Whoever will take the trouble of constructing a chart of the religious conceptions as they successively struggled into light, will see how close was their connexion with the physiological state of the Italian ethnical element at the moment. Successive steps in the religious decline. It is a sad and humiliating succession. Mariolatry; the invocation of saints; the supreme value of virginity; the working of miracles by relics; the satisfaction of moral crimes by gifts of money or goods to the clergy; the worship of images; Purgatory; the sale of benefices; transubstantiation, or the making of God by the priest; the materialization of God – that He has eyes, feet, hands, toes; the virtue of pilgrimages; vicarious religion, the sinner paying the priest to pray for him; the corporeality of spirits; the forbidding of the Bible to the laity; the descent to shrine-worship and fetichism; the doctrine that man can do more than his duty, and hence have a claim upon God; the sale by the priests of indulgences in sin for money.

But there is another, a very different aspect under which we must regard this Church. Enveloped as it was with the many evils of the times, the truly Christian principle which was at its basis perpetually vindicated its power, giving rise to numberless blessings in spite of the degradation and wickedness of man. Statement of what the Church had actually done. As I have elsewhere (Physiology, Book II., Chap. VIII.) remarked, "The civil law exerted an exterior power in human relations; Christianity produced an interior and moral change. The idea of an ultimate accountability for personal deeds, of which the old Europeans had an indistinct perception, became intense and precise. The sentiment of universal charity was exemplified not only in individual acts, the remembrance of which soon passes away, but in the more permanent institution of establishments for the relief of affliction, the spread of knowledge, the propagation of truth. Of the great ecclesiastics, many had risen from the humblest ranks of society, and these men, true to their democratic instincts, were often found to be the inflexible supporters of right against might. Eventually coming to be the depositaries of the knowledge that then existed, they opposed intellect to brute force, in many instances successfully, and by the example of the organization of the Church, which was essentially republican, they showed how representative systems may be introduced into the state. Nor was it over communities and nations that the Church displayed her chief power. Never in the world before was there such a system. From her central seat at Rome, her all-seeing eye, like that of Providence itself, could equally take in a hemisphere at a glance, or examine the private life of any individual. Her boundless influences enveloped kings in their palaces, and relieved the beggar at the monastery gate. In all Europe there was not a man too obscure, too insignificant, or too desolate for her. Surrounded by her solemnities, every one received his name at her altar; her bells chimed at his marriage, her knell tolled at his funeral. She extorted from him the secrets of his life at her confessionals, and punished his faults by her penances. In his hour of sickness and trouble her servants sought him out, teaching him, by her exquisite litanies and prayers, to place his reliance on God, or strengthening him for the trials of life by the example of the holy and just. Her prayers had an efficacy to give repose to the souls of his dead. When, even to his friends, his lifeless body had become an offence, in the name of God she received it into her consecrated ground, and under her shadow he rested till the great reckoning-day. From little better than a slave she raised his wife to be his equal, and, forbidding him to have more than one, met her recompense for those noble deeds in a firm friend at every fireside. Discountenancing all impure love, she put round that fireside the children of one mother, and made that mother little less than sacred in their eyes. In ages of lawlessness and rapine, among people but a step above savages, she vindicated the inviolability of her precincts against the hand of power, and made her temples a refuge and sanctuary for the despairing and oppressed. Truly she was the shadow of a great rock in many a weary land!"

Analysis of the career of the Church. This being the point which I consider the end of the Italian system as a living force in European progress, its subsequent operation being directed to the senses and not to the understanding, it will not be amiss if for a moment we extend our view to later times and to circumstances beyond the strict compass of this book, endeavouring thus to ascertain the condition of the Church, especially as to many devout persons it may doubtless appear that she has lost none of her power.

Four revolts against the Italian system. On four occasions there have been revolts against the Italian Church system: 1st, in the thirteenth century, the Albigensian; 2nd, in the fourteenth, the Wiclifite; 3rd, in the sixteenth, the Reformation; 4th, in the eighteenth, at the French Revolution. On each of these occasions ecclesiastical authority has exerted whatever offensive or defensive power it possessed. Its action is a true indication of its condition at the time. Astronomers can determine the orbit of a comet or other celestial meteor by three observations of its position as seen from the earth, and taken at intervals apart.

The Albigensian revolt. 1st. Of the Albigensian revolt. We have ascertained that the origin of this is distinctly traceable to the Mohammedan influence of Spain, through the schools of Cordova and Granada, pervading Languedoc and Provence. Had these agencies produced only the gay scenes of chivalry and courtesy as their material results, and, as their intellectual, war-ballads, satires, and amorous songs, they had been excused; but, along with such elegant frivolities, there was something of a more serious kind. A popular proverb will often betray national belief, and there was a proverb in Provence, "Viler than a priest." The offensive sectaries also quoted, for the edification of the monks, certain texts, to the effect that, "if a man will not work neither let him eat." The event, in the hands of Simon de Montfort, taught them that there is such a thing as wresting Scripture to one's own destruction.

How did the Church deal with this Albigensian heresy? As those do who have an absolutely overwhelming power. She did not crush it – that would have been too indulgent; she absolutely annihilated it. Awake to what must necessarily ensue from the imperceptible spread of such opinions, she remorselessly consumed its birth-place with fire and sword; and, fearful that some fugitives might have escaped her vigilant eye, or that heresy might go wherever a bale of goods might be conveyed, she organized the Inquisition with its troops of familiars and spies. Six hundred years have elapsed since these events, and the south of France has never recovered from the blow.

That was a persecution worthy of a sovereign – a persecution conducted on sound Italian principles of policy – to consider clearly the end to be attained, and adopt the proper means without any kind of concern as to their nature. But it was a persecution that implied the possession of unlimited and irresponsible power.

The revolt of Wiclif. 2nd. Of the revolt of Wiclif. We have also considered the state of affairs which aroused the resistance of Wiclif. It is manifested by legal enactments early in the fourteenth century, such as that ecclesiastics shall not go armed, nor join themselves with thieves, nor frequent taverns, nor chambers of strumpets, nor visit nuns, nor play at dice, nor keep concubines – by the Parliamentary bill of 1376, setting forth that the tax paid in England to the pope for ecclesiastical dignities is fourfold as much as that coming to the king from the whole realm; that alien clergy, who have never seen nor care to see their flocks, convey away the treasure of the country – by the homely preaching of John Ball, that all men are equal in the sight of God. Wiclif's opposition was not only directed against corruptions of discipline in the Church, but equally against doctrinal errors. His dogma that "God bindeth not men to believe any thing they cannot understand" is a distinct embodiment of the rights of reason, and the noble purpose he carried into execution of translating the Bible from the Vulgate shows in what direction he intended the application of that doctrine to be made. Through the influence of the queen of Richard the Second, who was a native of that country, his doctrines found an echo in Bohemia – Huss not only earnestly adopting his theological views, but also joining in his resistance to the despotism of the court of Rome and his exposures of the corruptions of the clergy. The political point of this revolt in England occurs in the refusal of Edward III., at the instigation of Wiclif, to do homage to the pope; the religious, in the translation of the Bible.

Though a bull was sent to London requiring the arch-heretic to be seized and put in irons, Wiclif died in his bed, and his bones rested quietly in the grave for forty-four years. Ecclesiastical vengeance burned them at last, and scattered them to the winds.

There was no remissness in the ecclesiastical authority, but there were victories won by the blind hero, John Zisca. After the death of that great soldier – whose body was left by the road-side to the wolves and crows, and his skin dried and made into a drum – in vain was all that perfidy could suggest and all that brutality could execute resorted to – in vain the sword and fire were passed over Bohemia, and the last effort of impotent vengeance tried in England – the heretics could not be exterminated nor the detested translation of the Bible destroyed.

The revolt of Luther. 3rd. Of the revolt of Luther. As we shall have, in a subsequent chapter, to consider the causes that led to the Reformation, it is not necessary to anticipate them in any detail here. The necessities of the Roman treasury, which suggested the doctrine of supererogation and the sale of indulgences as a ready means of relief, merely brought on a crisis which otherwise could not have been long postponed, the real point at issue being the right of interpretation of the Scriptures by private judgment.

The Church did not restrict her resistance to the use of ecclesiastical weapons – those of a carnal kind she also employed. Yet we look in vain for the concentrated energy with which she annihilated the Albigenses, or the atrocious policy with which the Hussites were met. The times no longer permitted those things. But the struggle was maintained with unflinching constancy through the disasters and successes of one hundred and thirty years. Then came the peace of Westphalia, and the result of the contest was ascertained. The Church had lost the whole of northern Europe.

The revolt of the philosophers.4th. Of the revolt of the philosophers. Besides the actual loss of the nations who openly fell away to Protestantism, a serious detriment was soon found to have befallen those still remaining nominally faithful to the Church. The fact of secession or adherence depending, in a monarchy, on the personal caprice or policy of the sovereign, is by no means a true index of the opinions or relations of the subjects; and thus it happened that in several countries in which there was an outward appearance of agreement with the Church because of the attitude of the government, there was, in reality, a total disruption, so far as the educated and thinking classes were concerned. This was especially the case in France.

When the voyage of circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan had for ever settled all such questions as those of the figure of the earth and the existence of the antipodes, the principles upon which the contest was composed between the conflicting parties are obvious from the most superficial perusal of the history of physics. Free thought was extorted for science, and, as its equivalent, an unmolested state for theology. It was an armed truce.

It was not through either of the parties to that conflict that new troubles arose, but through the action of a class fast rising into importance – literary men. From the beginning to the middle of the last century these philosophers became more and more audacious in their attacks. Unlike the scientific, whose theological action was by implication rather than in a direct way, these boldly assaulted the intellectual basis of faith. The opportune occurrence of the American Revolution, by bringing forward in a prominent manner social evils and political methods for their cure, gave a practical application to the movement in Europe, and the Church was found unable to offer any kind of resistance.