This manipulation of the plague by Moses, upon what seems to have been a sudden inspiration, was a stroke of genius in the way of quackery. He was, indeed, in this way almost portentous. It had a great and terrifying effect upon the people, who were completely subdued by it. Against corporeal enemies they might hope to prevail, but they were helpless against the plague. And they all cried out with one accord, “Behold we die, we perish, we all perish. Whosoever cometh anything near unto the tabernacle of the Lord shall die: shall we be consumed with dying?”
As I have already pointed out, Moses was a very great theurgist, as many saints and prophets have been. When in the actual presence of others he evidently had the power of creating a belief in himself which approached the miraculous, so far as disease was concerned. And he presumed on this power and took correspondingly great risks. The case of the brazen serpent is an example. The story is—and there is no reason to doubt its substantial truth—that the Hebrews were attacked by venomous serpents probably in the neighborhood of Mount Hor, where Aaron died, and thereupon Moses set up a large brazen serpent on a pole, and declared that whoever would look upon the serpent should live. Also, apparently, it did produce an effect upon those who believed: which, of course, is not an unprecedented phenomenon among faith healers. But what is interesting in this historical anecdote is not that Moses performed certain faith cures by the suggestion of a serpent, but that the Israelites themselves, when out of the presence of Moses, recognized that he had perpetrated on them a vulgar fraud. For example, King Hezekiah destroyed this relic, which had been preserved in the Temple, calling it “Nehushtan,” “a brazen thing,” as an expression of his contempt. And what is more remarkable still is that although Hezekiah reigned four or five centuries after the exodus, yet science had made no such advance in the interval as to justify this contempt. Hezekiah seems to have been every whit as credulous as were the pilgrims who looked on the brazen serpent and were healed. Hezekiah “was sick unto death, and Isaiah came to see him, and told him to set his house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.... And Hezekiah wept sore.”
Then, like Moses, Isaiah had another revelation in which he was directed to return to Hezekiah, and tell him that he was to live fifteen years longer. And Isaiah told the attendants to take “a lump of figs.” “And they took it and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.”
Afterward Hezekiah asked of Isaiah how he was to know that the Lord would keep his word and give him fifteen additional years of life. Isaiah told him that the shadow should go back ten degrees on the dial. And Isaiah “cried unto the Lord,” and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward “by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” [Footnote: 2 Kings xx, 11.] And yet this man Hezekiah, who could believe in this marvellous cure of Isaiah, repudiated with scorn the brazen serpent as an insult to credulity. The contrast between Moses, who hesitated not to take all risks in matters of disease with which he felt himself competent to cope, and his timidity and hesitation in matters of war, is astounding. But it is a common phenomenon with the worker of miracles and indicates the limit of faith at which the saint or prophet has always betrayed the impostor. For example: Saint Bernard, when he preached in 1146 the Second Crusade, made miraculous cures by the thousand, so much so that there was danger of being killed in the crowds which pressed upon him. And yet this same saint, when chosen by the crusaders four years later, in 1150, to lead them because of his power to constrain victory by the intervention of God, wrote, after the crusaders’ defeat, in terror to the pope to protect him, because he was unfit to take such responsibility.
But even with this reservation Moses could not gain the complete confidence of the congregation and the insecurity of his position finally broke him down.
At this same place of Kadesh, Miriam died, “and the people chode with Moses because there was no water for the congregation.” [Footnote: Numbers xx, 8.] Moses thereupon withdrew and, as usual, received a revelation. And the Lord directed him to take his rod, “and speak ye unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give forth his water.”
And Moses gathered the congregation and said unto them, “Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?”
“And he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly.”
But Moses felt that he had offended God, “Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.”
Moses had become an old man, and he felt himself unequal to the burden he had assumed. He recognized that his theory of cause and effect had broken down, and that the “Lord” whom at the outset he had firmly believed to be an actual and efficient power to be dominated by him, either could not or would not support him in emergency. In short, he had learned that he was an adventurer who must trust to himself. Hence, after Hormah he was a changed man. Nothing could induce him to lead the Jews across the Jordan to attack the peoples on the west bank, and though the congregation made a couple of campaigns against Sihon and Og, whose ruthlessness has always been a stain on Moses, the probability is that Moses did not meddle much with the active command. Had he done so, the author of Deuteronomy would have given the story in more detail and Moses more credit. All that is attributed to Moses is a division of the conquests made together with Joshua, and a fruitless prayer to the Lord that he might be permitted to cross the Jordan.
Meanwhile life was ending for him. His elder sister Miriam died at Kadesh, and Aaron died somewhat later at Mount Hor, which is supposed to lie about as far to the east of Kadesh as Hormah is to the west, but there are circumstances about the death of Aaron which point to Moses as having had more to do with it than of having been a mere passive spectator thereof.
The whole congregation is represented as having “journeyed from Kadesh and come unto Mount Hor ... by the coast of the land of Edom,” and there the “Lord” spoke unto Moses and Aaron, and explained that Aaron was to be “gathered unto his people, ... because ye rebelled ... at the water of Meribah.” Therefore Moses was to “take Aaron and Eleazar his son, and bring them up unto Mount Hor: and strip Aaron of his garments, and put them upon Eleazar,” ... and that Aaron ... shall die there.
“And they went up into Mount Hor in the sight of all the congregation. And Moses stripped Aaron of his garments, and put them upon Eleazar his son; and Aaron died there in the top of the mount: and Moses and Eleazar came down from the mount.” [Footnote: Numbers xx, 22-28.]
Now it is incredible that all this happened as straightforwardly as the chronicle would have us believe. Aaron was an old man and probably failing, but his death was not imminent. On the contrary, he had strength to climb Mount Hor with Moses, without aid, and there is no hint that he suffered from any ailment likely to end his life suddenly. Moses took care that he and Eleazar should be alone with Aaron so that there should be no witness as to what occurred, and Moses alone knew what was expected.
Moses had time to take off the priestly garments, which were the insignia of office and to put them on Eleazar, and then, when all was ready, Aaron simply ceased to breathe at the precise moment when it was convenient for Moses to have him die, for the policy of Moses evidently demanded that Aaron should live no longer. Under the conditions of the march Moses was evidently preparing for his own death, and for a complete change in the administration of affairs. Appreciating that his leadership had broken down and that the system he had created was collapsing, he had dawdled as long on the east side of the Jordan as the patience of the congregation would permit. An advance had become inevitable, but Moses recognized his own inability to lead it. The command had to be delegated to a younger man and that man was Joshua. Eleazar, on the other hand, was the only available candidate for the high priesthood, and Moses took the opportunity of making the investiture on Mount Hor. So Aaron passed away, a sacrifice to the optimism of Moses. Next came the turn of Moses himself. The whole story is told in Deuteronomy. Within, probably, something less than a year after Aaron’s death the “Lord” made a like communication to Moses.
“Get thee up ... unto Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab, that is over against Jericho;
“And die in the Mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto thy people; as Aaron, thy brother died in Mount Hor;
“Because ye trespassed against me among the children of Israel at the waters of Meribah-Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin, because ye sanctified me not in the midst of the children of Israel.
“And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, ... And the Lord showed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan.
“And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord.... But no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.
“And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.”
The facts, as preserved by Josephus, appear to have been these: Moses ascended the mountain with only the elders, the high priest Eleazar, and Joshua. At the top of the mountain he dismissed the elders, and then, as he was embracing Joshua and Eleazar and still speaking, a cloud covered him, and he disappeared in a ravine. In other words, he killed himself.
Such is the story of Moses, a fragment of history interesting enough in itself, but especially material to us not only because of the development of the thought dealt with in the following volumes, but of the inferences which, at the present time, it permits us to draw touching our own immediate future.
Moses was the first great optimist of whom any record remains, and one of the greatest. He was the prototype of all those who have followed. He was a visionary. All optimists must be visionaries. Moses based the social system which he tried to organize, not on observed facts, but ona prioritheories evolved out of his own mind, and he met with the failure that all men of that cast of mind must meet with when he sought to realize his visions. His theory was that the universe about him was the expression of an infinite mind which operated according to law. That this mind, or consciousness, was intelligent and capable of communicating with man. That it did, in fact, so communicate through him, as a medium, and that other men had only to receive humbly and obey implicitly his revelations to arrive at a condition nearly approaching, if not absolutely reaching, perfection, while they should enjoy happiness and prosperity in the land in which they should be permitted, by an infinite and supernatural power and wisdom, to dwell. All this is not alien to the attitude of scientific optimists at the present day, who anticipate progressive perfection.
Let us consider, for a moment, whither thesea prioritheories led, when put in practice upon human beings, including himself. And, in the first place, it will probably be conceded that no optimist could have, or ever hope to have, a fairer opportunity to try his experiment than had Moses on that plastic Hebrew community which he undertook to lead through Arabia. Also it must be admitted that Moses, as an expounder of a moral code, achieved success. The moral principles which he laid down have been accepted as sound from that day to this, and are still written up in our churches, as a standard for men and women, however slackly they may be observed. But when we come to mark the methods by which Moses obtained acceptance of his code by his contemporaries, and, above all, sought to constrain obedience to himself and to it, we find the prospect unalluring. To begin with, Moses had only begun the exodus when he learned from his practical father-in-law that the system he employed was fantastic and certain to fail: his notion being that he should sit and judge causes himself, as the mouthpiece of the infinite, and that therefore each judgment he gave would demand a separate miracle or imposture. This could not be contemplated. Therefore Moses was constrained to impose his code in writing, once for all, by one gigantic fraud which he must perpetrate himself. This he tried at Sinai, unblushingly declaring that the stone tablets which he produced were “written with the finger of God”; wherefore, as they must have been written by himself, or under his personal supervision, he brazenly and deliberately lied. His good faith was obviously suspected, and this suspicion caused disastrous results. To support his lie Moses caused three thousand unsuspecting and trusting men to be murdered in cold blood, whose only crime was that they would have preferred another leadership to his, and because, had they been able to effect their purpose, they would have disappointed his ambition.
To follow Moses further in the course which optimism enforced upon him would be tedious, as it would be to recapitulate the story which has already been told. It suffices to say shortly that, at every camp, he had to sink to deeper depths of fraud, deception, lying, and crime in order to maintain his credit. It might be that, as at Meribah, it was only claiming for himself a miracle which he knew he could not work, and for claiming which, instead of giving the credit to God, he openly declared he deserved and must receive punishment; or it might be some impudent quackery, like the brazen serpent, which at least was harmless; or it might have been complicated combinations which suggest a deeper shade; as, for example, the outbreak of the plague, after Korah’s rebellion, which bears the aspect of a successful effort at intimidation to support his own wavering credit. But the result was always the same. Moses had promised that the supernatural power he pretended to control should sustain him and give victory. Possibly, when he started on the exodus he verily believed that such a power existed, was amenable and could be constrained to intervene. He found that he had been mistaken on all these heads, and when he accepted these facts as final, nothing remained for him but suicide, as has been related. It only remains to glance, for a single moment, at what befell, when he had gone, the society he had organized on the optimistic principle of the approach of human beings toward perfection. During the period of the Judges, when “there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes,” [Footnote: Judges xvii, 6.] anarchy supervened, indeed, but also the whole Mosaic system broke down because of the imbecility of the men on whom Moses relied to lift the people toward perfection.
Eli, a descendant of Aaron, was high priest, and a judge, being the predecessor of Samuel, the last of the judges. Now Eli had two sons who “were sons of Belial; they knew not the Lord.”
Eli, being very old, “heard all that his sons did unto all Israel; and how they lay with the women that assembled at the door of the tabernacle....” And Eli argued with them; “notwithstanding they harkened not unto the voice of their father.”
Samuel succeeded Eli. He was not a descendant of Aaron, but became a judge, apparently, upon his own merits. But as a judge he did not constrain his sons any better than Eli had his, for “they took bribes, and perverted judgment.” So the elders of Israel came to Samuel and said, “Give us a king to judge us.” “And Samuel prayed unto the Lord,” though he disliked the idea. Yet the result was inevitable. The kingdom was set up, and the Mosaic society perished. Nothing was left of Mosaic optimism but the tradition. Also there was the Mosaic morality, and what that amounted to may best, perhaps, be judged by David, who was the most perfect flower of the perfection to which humanity was to attain under the Mosaic law, and has always stood for what was best in Mosaic optimism. David’s morality is perhaps best illustrated by the story of Uriah the Hittite.
One day David saw Uriah’s wife taking a bath on her housetop and took a fancy to her. The story is all told in the Second of Samuel. How David sent for her, took her into the palace, and murdered Uriah by sending him to Joab who commanded the army, and instructing Joab to set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and “retire ye from him that he may be smitten and die.” And Uriah was killed.
Then came the famous parable by Nathan of the ewe lamb. “And David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man who hath done this thing shall surely die.
“And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.”
And Nathan threatened David with all kinds of disaster and even with death, and David was very repentant and “he fasted and lay all night upon the earth.” But for all that, when assured that nothing worse was to happen to him than the loss of the son Bathsheba had borne him, David comforted Bathsheba. He by no means gave her up. On the contrary, “he went in unto her ... and she bare him a son, and he called his name Solomon: and the Lord loved him.”
Again the flesh had prevailed. And so it has always been with each new movement which has been stimulated by an idealism inspired by a belief that the spirit was capable of generating an impulse which would overcome the flesh and which could cause men to move toward perfection along any other path than the least resistant. And this because man is an automaton, and can move no otherwise. In this point of view nothing can be more instructive than to compare the Roman with the Mosaic civilization, for the Romans were a sternly practical people and worshipped force as Moses worshipped an ideal.
As Moses dreamed of realizing the divine consciousness on earth by introspection and by prayer, so the Romans supposed that they could attain to prosperity and happiness on earth by the development of superior physical force and the destruction of all rivals. Cato the Censor was the typical Roman landowner, the type of the class which built up the great vested interest in land which always moved and dominated Rome. He expressed the Roman ideal in his famous declaration in the Senate, when he gave his vote for the Third Punic War; “Delenda est Carthago,” Carthage must be destroyed. And Carthage was destroyed because to a Roman to destroy Carthage was a logical competitive necessity. Subsequently, the Romans took the next step in their social adjustment at home. They deified the energy which had destroyed Carthage. The incarnation of physical force became the head of the State;—the Emperor when living, the Divus, when dead. And this conception gained expression in the law. This godlike energy found vent in the Imperial will; “Quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem.” [Footnote: Inst. 1, 2, 6.]
Nothing could be more antagonistic to the Mosaic philosophy, which invoked the supernatural unity as authority for every police regulation. Moreover, the Romans carried out their principle relentlessly, to their own destruction. That great vested interest which had absorbed the land of Italy, and had erected the administrative entity which policed it, could not hold and cultivate its land profitably, in competition with other lands such as Egypt, North Africa, or Assyria, which were worked by a cheaper and more resistant people. Therefore the Roman landowners imported this competitive population from their homes, having first seized them as slaves, and cultivated their own Italian fields with them after the eviction of the original native peasants, who could not survive on the scanty nutriment on which the eastern races throve. [Footnote: I have dealt with this subject at length in myLaw of Civilization and Decay, chapter II, to which I must refer the reader. More fully still in the French translation. “This unceasing emigration gradually changed the character of the rural population, and a similar alteration took place in the army. As early as the time of Cæsar, Italy was exhausted; his legions were mainly raised in Gaul, and as the native farmers sank into serfdom or slavery, and then at last vanished, recruits were drawn more and more from beyond the limits of the empire.” I cannot repeat my arguments here, but I am not aware that they have been seriously controverted.]
The Roman law, theRomana lex, was as gigantic, as original, and as comprehensive a structure as was the empire which gave to it expression. Modern European law is but a dilution thereof. The Roman law attained perfection, as I conceive, about the time of the Antonines, through the great jurists who then flourished. If one might name a particular moment at which so vast and complex a movement culminated, one would be tempted to suggest the reign of Hadrian, who appointed Salvius Julianus to draw up theedictum perpetuum, or permanent edict, in the year 132 A.D. Thenceforward the magistrate had to use his discretion only when the edict of Julianus did not apply.
I am not aware that any capital principle of municipal law has been evolved since that time, and the astonishing power of the Roman mind can only be appreciated when it is remembered that the whole of this colossal fabric was original. Modern European law has been only a servile copy. But, regard being had to the position of the emperor in relation to the people, and more especially in relation to the vast bureaucracy of Rome, which was the embodiment of the vested interest which was Rome itself, the adherence of Roman thought to the path of least resistance was absolute. “So far as the cravings of Stoicism found historical and political fulfilment, they did so in the sixty years of Hadrian and the Antonines, and so far again as an individual can embody the spirit of an age, its highest and most representative impersonation is unquestionably to be found in the person of Marcus Antoninus.... Stoicism faced the whole problem of existence, and devoted as searching an investigation to processes of being and of thought, to physics and to dialectic, as to the moral problems presented by the emotions and the will.” [Footnote:Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, in English, by Gerald H. Rendall, Introduction, xxvii.]
Such was stoicism, of which Marcus Aurelius was and still remains the foremost expression. He admitted that as emperor his first duty was to sacrifice himself for the public and he did his duty with a constancy which ultimately cost him his life. Among these duties was the great duty of naming his successor. The Roman Empire never became strictly hereditary. It hinged, as perhaps no other equally developed system ever hinged, upon the personality of the emperor, who incarnated the administrative bureaucracy which gave effect to thePax Romanaand theRomana lexfrom the Euphrates to the Atlantic and from Scotland to the Tropic of Cancer. Of all men Marcus Aurelius was the most conscientious and the most sincere, and he understood, as perhaps no other man in like position ever understood, the responsibility which impinged on him, to allow no private prevention to impose an unfit emperor upon the empire But Marcus had a son Commodus, who was nineteen when his father died, and who had already developed traits which caused foreboding. Nevertheless, Marcus associated Commodus with himself in the empire when Commodus was fourteen and Commodus attained to absolute power when Marcus died. Subsequently, Commodus became the epitome of all that was basest and worst in a ruler. He was murdered by the treachery of Marcia, his favorite concubine, and the Senate decreed that “his body should be dragged with a hook into the stripping room of the gladiators, to satiate the public fury.” [Footnote:Decline and Fall, chap. iv.]
From that day Rome entered upon the acute stage of her decline, and she did so very largely because Marcus Aurelius, the ideal stoic, was incapable of violating the great law of nature which impelled him to follow not reason, but the path of least resistance in choosing a successor; or, in other words, the instinct of heredity. Moreover, this instinct and not reason is or has been, among the strongest which operate upon men, and makes them automata. It is the basis upon which the family rests, and the family is the essence of social cohesion. Also the hereditary instinct has been the prime motor which has created constructive municipal jurisprudence and which has evolved religion.
With the death of Marcus Aurelius individual competition may be judged to have done its work, and presently, as the population changed its character under the stress thereof, a new phase opened: a phase which is marked, as such phases usually are, by victory in war. Marcus Aurelius died in 180 A.D. Substantially a century later, in 312, Constantine won the battle of the Milvian Bridge with his troops fighting under the Labarum, a standard bearing a cross with the device “In hoc signo vinces”; By this sign conquer. Probably Constantine had himself scanty faith in the Labarum, but he speculated upon it as a means to arouse enthusiasm in his men. It served his purpose, and finding the step he had taken on the whole satisfactory, he followed it up by accepting baptism in 337 A.D.
From this time forward the theory of the possibility of securing divine or supernatural aid by various forms of incantation or prayer gained steadily in power for about eight centuries, until at length it became a passion and gave birth to a school of optimism, the most overwhelming and the most brilliant which the world has ever known and which evolved an age whose end we still await.
The Germans of the fourth century were a very simple race, who comprehended little of natural laws, and who therefore referred phenomena they did not understand to supernatural intervention. This intervention could only be controlled by priests, and thus the invasions caused a rapid rise in the influence of the sacred class. The power of every ecclesiastical organization has always rested on the miracle, and the clergy have always proved their divine commission as did Moses. This was eminently the case with the mediæval Church. At the outset Christianity was socialistic, and its spread among the poor was apparently caused by the pressure of servile competition; for the sect only became of enough importance to be persecuted under Nero, contemporaneously with the first signs of distress which appeared through the debasement of the denarius. But socialism was only a passing phase, and disappeared as the money value of the miracle rose, and brought wealth to the Church. Under the Emperor Decius, about 250, the magistrates thought the Christians opulent enough to use gold and silver vessels in their service, and by the fourth century the supernatural so possessed the popular mind that Constantine, as we have seen, not only allowed himself to be converted by a miracle, but used enchantment as an engine of war.
The action of the Milvian Bridge, fought in 312, by which Constantine established himself at Rome, was probably the point whence nature began to discriminate decisively against the vested interest of Western Europe. Capital had already abandoned Italy; Christianity was soon after officially recognized, and during the next century the priest began to rank with the soldier as a force in war.
Meanwhile, as the population sank into exhaustion, it yielded less and less revenue, the police deteriorated, and the guards became unable to protect the frontier. In 376, the Goths, hard pressed by the Huns, came to the Danube and implored to be taken as subjects by the emperor. After mature deliberation the Council of Valens granted the prayer, and some five hundred thousand Germans were cantoned in Moesia. The intention of the government was to scatter this multitude through the provinces ascoloni,or to draft them into the legions; but the detachment detailed to handle them was too feeble, the Goths mutinied, cut the guard to pieces, and having ravaged Thrace for two years, defeated and killed Valens at Hadrianople. In another generation the disorganization of the Roman army had become complete, and Alaric gave it its death-blow in his campaign of 410.
Alaric was not a Gothic king, but a barbarian deserter, who, in 392, was in the service of Theodosius. Subsequently he sometimes held imperial commands, and sometimes led bands of marauders on his own account, but was always in difficulty about his pay. Finally, in the revolution in which Stilicho was murdered, a corps of auxiliaries mutinied and chose him their general. Alleging that his arrears were unpaid, Alaric accepted the command, and with this army sacked Rome.
During the campaign the attitude of the Christians was more interesting than the strategy of the soldiers. Alaric was a robber, leading mutineers, and yet the orthodox historians did not condemn him. They did not condemn him because the sacred class instinctively loved the barbarians whom they could overawe, whereas they could make little impression on the materialistic intellect of the old centralized society. Under the empire the priests, like all other individuals, had to obey the power which paid the police; and as long as a revenue could be drawn from the provinces, the Christian hierarchy were subordinate to the monied bureaucracy who had the means to coerce them.
Yet only very slowly, as the empire disintegrated, did the theocratic idea take shape. As late as the ninth century the pope prostrated himself before Charlemagne, and did homage as to a Roman emperor. [Footnote: Perz,Annales Lauressenses, I, 188.]
Saint Benedict founded Monte Cassino in 529, but centuries elapsed before the Benedictine order rose to power. The early convents were isolated and feeble, and much at the mercy of the laity, who invaded and debauched them. Abbots, like bishops, were often soldiers, who lived within the walls with their wives and children, their hawks, their hounds, and their men-at-arms; and it has been said that, in all France, Corbie and Fleury alone kept always something of their early discipline.
Only in the early years of the most lurid century of the Middle Ages, when decentralization culminated, and the imagination began to gain its fullest intensity, did the period of monastic consolidation open with the foundation of Cluny. In 910 William of Aquitaine draw a charter [Footnote: Bruel,Recueil des Chartes de l’Abbaye de Cluny, I, 124.] which, so far as possible, provided for the complete independence of his new corporation. There was no episcopal visitation, and no interference with the election of the abbot. The monks were put directly under the protection of the pope, who was made their sole superior. John XI confirmed this charter by his bull of 932, and authorized the affiliation of all converts who wished to share in the reform. [Footnote:Bull. Clun.p. 2, col. 1. Also Luchaire,Manuel des Institutions Françaises, 93, 95, where the authorities are collected.]
The growth of Cluny was marvellous; by the twelfth century two thousand houses obeyed its rule, and its wealth was so great, and its buildings so vast, that in 1245 Innocent IV, the Emperor Baldwin, and Saint Louis were all lodged together within its walls, and with them all the attendant trains of prelates and nobles with their servants.
In the eleventh century no other force of equal energy existed. The monks were the most opulent, the ablest, and the best organized society in Europe, and their effect upon mankind was proportioned to their strength. They intuitively sought autocratic power, and during the centuries when nature favored them, they passed from triumph to triumph. They first seized upon the papacy and made it self-perpetuating; they then gave battle to the laity for the possession of the secular hierarchy, which had been under temporal control since the very foundation of the Church.
According to the picturesque legend, Bruno, Bishop of Toul, seduced by the flattery of courtiers and the allurements of ambition, accepted the tiara from the emperor, and set out upon his journey to Italy with a splendid retinue, and with his robe and crown. On his way he turned aside at Cluny, where Hildebrand was prior. Hildebrand, filled with the spirit of God, reproached him with having seized upon the seat of the vicar of Christ by force, and accepted the holy office from the sacrilegious hand of a layman. He exhorted Bruno to cast away his pomp, and to cross the Alps humbly as a pilgrim, assuring him that the priests and people of Rome would recognize him as their bishop, and elect him according to canonical forms. Then he would taste the joys of a pure conscience, having entered the fold of Christ as a shepherd and not as a robber. Inspired by these words, Bruno dismissed his train, and left the convent gate as a pilgrim. He walked barefoot, and when after two months of pious meditations he stood before Saint Peter’s, he spoke to the people and told them it was their privilege to elect the pope, and since he had come unwillingly he would return again, were he not their choice.
He was answered with acclamations, and on February 2, 1049, he was enthroned as Leo IX. His first act was to make Hildebrand his minister.
The legend tells of the triumph of Cluny as no historical facts could do. Ten years later, in the reign of Nicholas II, the theocracy made itself self-perpetuating through the assumption of the election of the pope by the college of cardinals, and in 1073 Hildebrand, the incarnation of monasticism, was crowned under the name of Gregory VII.
With Hildebrand’s election, war began. The Council of Rome, held in 1075, decreed that holy orders should not be recognized where investiture had been granted by a layman, and that princes guilty of conferring investiture should be excommunicated. The Council of the next year, which excommunicated the emperor, also enunciated the famous propositions of Baronius—the full expression of the theocratic idea. The priest had grown to be a god on earth.
“So strong in this confidence, for the honour and defence of your Church, on behalf of the omnipotent God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, by your power and authority, I forbid the government of the German and Italian kingdoms, to King Henry, the son of the Emperor Henry, who, with unheard-of arrogance, has rebelled against your Church. I absolve all Christians from the oaths they have made or may make to him, and I forbid that any one should obey him as king.” [Footnote: Migne, CXLVIII, 790.]
Henry marched on Italy, but in all European history there has been no drama more tremendous than the expiation of his sacrilege. To his soldiers the world was a vast space, peopled by those fantastic beings which are still seen on Gothic towers. These demons obeyed the monk of Rome, and his army, melting from about the emperor under a nameless horror, left him helpless.
Gregory lay like a magician in the fortress of Canossa: but he had no need of carnal weapons, for when the emperor reached the Alps he was almost alone. Then his imagination also took fire, the panic seized him, and he sued for mercy.
On August 7, 1106, Henry died at Liège, an outcast and a mendicant, and for five long years his body lay at the church door, an accursed thing which no man dared to bury.
Gregory prevailed because, to the understanding of the eleventh century, the evidence at hand indicated that he embodied in a high degree the infinite energy. The eleventh century was intensely imaginative and the evidence which appealed to it was those phenomena of trance, hypnotism, and catalepsy which are as mysterious now as they were then, but whose effect was then to create an overpowering demand for miracle-working substances. The sale of these substances gradually drew the larger portion of the wealth of the community into the hands of the clergy, and with wealth went temporal power. No vested interest in any progressive community has probably ever been relatively stronger, for the Church found no difficulty, when embarrassed, in establishing and operating a thorough system for exterminating her critics.
Under such a pressure modern civilization must have sunk into some form of caste had the mediæval mind resembled any antecedent mind, but the middle age, though superficially imaginative, was fundamentally materialistic, as the history of the crusades showed.
At Canossa the laity conceded as a probable hypothesis that the Church could miraculously control nature; but they insisted that if the Church possessed such power, she must use that power for the common good. Upon this point they would not compromise, nor would they permit delay. During the chaos of the ninth century turmoil and violence reached a stage at which the aspirations of most Christians ended with self-preservation; but when the discovery and working of the Harz silver had brought with it some semblance of order, an intense yearning possessed both men and women to ameliorate their lot. If relics could give protection against oppression, disease, famine, and death, then relics must be obtained, and, if the cross and the tomb were the most effective relics, then the cross and the tomb must be conquered at any cost. In the north of Europe especially, misery was so acute that the people gladly left their homes upon the slenderest promise of betterment, even following a vagrant like Peter the Hermit, who was neither soldier nor priest. There is a passage in William of Tyre which has been often quoted to explain a frenzy which is otherwise inexplicable, and in the old English of Caxton the words still glow with the same agony which makes lurid the supplication of the litany,—“From battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord deliver us”:
“Of charyte men spack not, debates, discordes, and warres were nyhe oueral, in suche wyse, that it seemed, that thende of the world was nyghe, by the signes that our lord sayth in the gospell, ffor pestylences and famynes were grete on therthe, ferdfulness of heuen, tremblyng of therthe in many places, and many other thinges there were that ought to fere the hertes of men....
“The prynces and the barons brente and destroyed the contrees of theyr neyghbours, yf ony man had saved ony thynge in theyr kepyng, theyr owne lordes toke them and put them in prison and in greuous tormentis, for to take fro them suche as they had, in suche qyse that the chyldren of them that had ben riche men, men myght see them goo fro dore to dore, for to begge and gete theyr brede, and some deye for hungre and mesease.” [Footnote: Godeffroy of Bologne, by William, Archbishop of Tyre, translated from the French by William Caxton, London, 1893, 21, 22.]
Throughout the eleventh century the excitement touching the virtues of the holy places in Judea grew, until Gregory VII, about the time of Canossa, perceived that a paroxysm was at hand, and considered leading it, but on the whole nothing is so suggestive of the latent scepticism of the age as the irresolution of the popes at this supreme moment. The laity were the pilgrims and the agitators. The kings sought the relics and took the cross; the clergy hung back. Robert, Duke of Normandy, for example, the father of William the Conqueror, died in 1035 from hardship at Nicæa when returning from Palestine, absorbed to the last in the relics which he had collected, but the popes stayed at home. Whatever they may have said in private, neither Hildebrand nor Victor nor Urban moved officially until they were swept forward by the torrent. They shunned responsibility for a war which they would have passionately promoted had they been sure of victory. The man who finally kindled the conflagration was a half-mad fanatic, a stranger to the hierarchy. No one knew the family of Peter the Hermit, or whence he came, but he certainly was not an ecclesiastic in good standing. Inflamed by fasting and penance, Peter followed the throng of pilgrims to Jerusalem, and there, wrought upon by what he saw, he sought the patriarch. Peter asked the patriarch if nothing could be done to protect the pilgrims, and to retrieve the Holy Places. The patriarch replied, “Nothing, unless God will touch the heart of the western princes, and will send them to succor the Holy City.” The patriarch did not propose meddling himself, nor did it occur to him that the pope should intervene. He took a rationalistic view of the Moslem military power. Peter, on the contrary, was logical, arguing from eleventh-century premises. If he could but receive a divine mandate, he would raise an invincible army. He prayed. His prayer was answered. One day while prostrated before the sepulchre he heard Christ charge him to announce in Europe that the appointed hour had come. Furnished with letters from the patriarch, Peter straightway embarked for Rome to obtain Urban’s sanction for his design. Urban listened and gave a consent which he could not prudently have withheld, but he abstained from participating in the propaganda. In March, 1095, Urban called a Council at Piacenza, nominally to consider the deliverance of Jerusalem, and this Council was attended by thirty thousand impatient laymen, only waiting for the word to take the vow, but the pope did nothing. Even at Clermont eight months later, he showed a disposition to deal with private war, or church discipline, or with anything in fact rather than with the one engrossing question of the day, but this time there was no escape. A vast multitude of determined men filled not only Clermont but the adjacent towns and villages, even sleeping in the fields, although the weather was bitterly cold, who demanded to know the policy of the Church. Urban seems to have procrastinated as long as he safely could, but, at length, at the tenth session, he produced Peter on the platform, clad as a pilgrim, and, after Peter had spoken, he proclaimed the war. Urban declined, however, to command the army. The only effective force which marched was a body of laymen, organized and led by laymen, who in 1099 carried Jerusalem by an ordinary assault. In Jerusalem they found the cross and the sepulchre, and with these relics as the foundation of their power, the laity began an experiment which lasted eighty-eight years, ending in 1187 with the battle of Tiberias. At Tiberias the infidels defeated the Christians, captured their king and their cross, and shortly afterward seized the tomb.
If the eleventh-century mind had been as rigid as the Roman mind of the first century, mediæval civilization could hardly, after the collapse of the crusades, have failed to degenerate as Roman civilization degenerated after the defeat of Varus. Being more elastic, it began, under an increased tension, to develop new phases of thought. The effort was indeed prodigious and the absolute movement possibly slow, but a change of intellectual attitude may be detected almost contemporaneously with the fall of the Latin kingdom in Palestine. It is doubtless true that the thirteenth century was the century in which imaginative thought reached its highest brilliancy, when Albertus Magnus and Saint Thomas Aquinas taught, when Saint Francis and Saint Clara lived, and when Thomas of Celano wrote theDies Iræ. It was then that Gothic architecture touched its climax in the cathedrals of Chartres and Amiens, of Bourges and of Paris; it was then also that Blanche of Castile ruled in France and that Saint Louis bought the crown of thorns, but it is equally true that the death of Saint Louis occurred in 1270, shortly after the thorough organization of the Inquisition by Innocent IV in 1252, and within two years or so of the production by Roger Bacon of hisOpus Majus.
The establishment of the Inquisition is decisive, because it proves that sceptical thought had been spread far enough to goad the Church to general and systematic repression, while theOpus Majusis a scientific exposition of the method by which the sceptical mind is trained.
Roger Bacon was born about 1214, and going early to Oxford fell under the influence of the most liberal teachers in Europe, at whose head stood Robert Grosseteste, afterward Bishop of Lincoln. Bacon conceived a veneration for Grosseteste, and even for Adam de Marisco his disciple, and turning toward mathematics rather than toward metaphysics he eagerly applied himself, when he went to Paris, to astrology and alchemy, which were the progenitors of the modern exact sciences. In the thirteenth century a young man like Bacon could hardly stand alone, and Bacon joined the Franciscans, but before many years elapsed he embroiled himself with his superiors. His friend, Grosseteste, died in 1253, the year after Innocent IV issued the bullAd extirpandaestablishing the Inquisition, and Bacon felt the consequences. The general of his order, Saint Bonaventura, withdrew him from Oxford where he was prominent, and immured him in a Parisian convent, treating him rigorously, as Bacon intimated to Pope Clement IV. There he remained, silenced, for some ten years, until the election of Clement IV, in 1265. Bacon at once wrote to Clement complaining of his imprisonment, and deploring to the pope the plight into which scientific education had fallen. The pope replied directing Bacon to explain his views in a treatise, but did not order his release. In response Bacon composed theOpus Majus.
TheOpus Majusdeals among other things with experimental science, and in the introductory chapter to the sixth part Bacon stated the theory of inductive thought quite as lucidly as did Francis Bacon three and a half centuries later in theNovum Organum. [Footnote: Positis radicibus sapientiae Latinorum penes Linguas et Mathematicam et Perspectivam, nunc volo revolvere radices a parte Scientiae Experimentalis, quia sine experientia nihil sufficienter scire protest. Duo enim simt modi cognoscendi, scilicet per argumentum et experimentum. Argumentum concludit et facit nos concedere conclusionem, sed non certificat neque removet dubitationem ut quiescat animus in intuitu veritatis, nisi eam inveniat via experientiae; quia multi habent argumenta ad scibilia, sed quia non habent experientiam, negligunt ea, nee vitant nociva nex persequuntue bona. J. H. Bridges,The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon(Oxford, 1897), II, 167.]
Clement died in 1268. The papacy remained vacant for a couple of years, but in 1271 Gregory X came in on a conservative reaction. Bacon passed most of the rest of his life in prison, perhaps through his own ungovernable temper, and ostensibly his writings seem to have had little or no effect on his contemporaries, yet it is certain that he was not an isolated specimen of a type of intelligence which suddenly bloomed during the Reformation. Bacon constantly spoke of his friends, but his friends evidently did not share his temperament. The scientific man has seldom relished martyrdom, and Galileo’s experience as late as 1633 shows what risks men of science ran who even indirectly attacked the vested interests of the Church. After the middle of the thirteenth century the danger was real enough to account for any degree of secretiveness, and a striking case of this timidity is related by Bacon himself. No one knows even the name of the man to whom Bacon referred as “Master Peter,” but according to Bacon, “Master Peter” was the greatest and most original genius of the age, only he shunned publicity. The “Dominus experimentorum,” as Bacon called him, lived in a safe retreat and devoted himself to mathematics, chemistry, and the mechanical arts with such success that, Bacon insisted, he could by his inventions have aided Saint Louis in his crusade more than his whole army. [Footnote: Émile Charles,Roger Bacon. Sa vie et ses ouvrages, 17.] Nor is this assertion altogether fantastic. Bacon understood the formula for gunpowder, and if Saint Louis had been provided with even a poor explosive he might have taken Cairo; not to speak of the terror which Greek fire always inspired. Saint Louis met his decisive defeat in a naval battle fought in 1250, for the command of the Nile, by which he drew supplies from Damietta, and he met it, according to Matthew Paris, because his ships could not withstand Greek fire. Gunpowder, even in a very simple form, might have changed the fate of the war.
Scepticism touching the value of relics as a means for controlling nature was an effect of experiment, and, logically enough, scepticism advanced fastest among certain ecclesiastics who dealt in relics. For example, in 1248 Saint Louis undertook to invade Egypt in defence of the cross. Possibly Saint Louis may have been affected by economic considerations also touching the eastern trade, but his ostensible object was a crusade. The risk was very great, the cost enormous, and the responsibility the king assumed of the most serious kind. Nothing that he could do was left undone to ensure success. In 1249 he captured Damietta, and then stood in need of every pound of money and of every man that Christendom could raise; yet at this crisis the Church thought chiefly of making what it could in cash out of the war, the inference being that the hierarchy suspected that even if Saint Louis prevailed and occupied Jerusalem, little would be gained from an ecclesiastical standpoint. At all events, Matthew Paris has left an account, in his chronicle of the year 1249, of how the pope and the Franciscans preached this crusade, which is one of the most suggestive passages in thirteenth-century literature:
“About the same time, by command of the pope, whom they obeyed implicitly, the Preacher and Minorite brethren diligently employed themselves in preaching; and to increase the devotion of the Christians, they went with great solemnity to the places where their preaching was previously indicated, and granted many days of indulgence to those who came to hear them.... Preaching on behalf of the cross, they bestowed that symbol on people of every age, sex and rank, whatever their property or worth, and even on sick men and women, and those who were deprived of strength by sickness or old age; and on the next day, or even directly afterwards, receiving it back from them, they absolved them from their vow of pilgrimage, for whatever sum they could obtain for the favour. What seemed unsuitable and absurd was, that not many days afterwards, Earl Richard collected all this money in his treasury, by the agency of Master Bernard, an Italian clerk, who gathered in the fruit; whereby no slight scandal arose in the Church of God, and amongst the people in general, and the devotion of the faithful evidently cooled.” [Footnote: Matthew Paris,English History, translated by the Rev. J. A, Giles, II, 309.]
When the unfortunate Baldwin II became Emperor of the East in 1237, the relics of the passion were his best asset. In 1238, while Baldwin was in France trying to obtain aid, the French barons who carried on the government at Constantinople in his absence were obliged to pledge the crown of thorns to an Italian syndicate for 13,134 perpera, which Gibbon conjectures to have been besants. Baldwin was notified of the pledge and urged to arrange for its redemption. He met with no difficulty. He confidently addressed himself to Saint Louis and Queen Blanche, and “Although the king felt keen displeasure at the deplorable condition of Constantinople, he was well pleased, nevertheless, with the opportunity of adorning France with the richest and most precious treasure in all Christendom.” More especially with “a relic, and a sacred object which was not on the commercial market.” [Footnote: Du Cange,Histoire de L’empire de Constantinople sous les empereurs Français, edition de Buchon, I, 259.]
Louis, beside paying the loan and the cost of transportation which came to two thousand French pounds (the mark being then coined into £2, 15 sous and 6 pence), made Baldwin a present of ten thousand pounds for acting as broker. Baldwin was so well contented with this sale which he closed in 1239, that a couple of years later he sent to Paris all the contents of his private chapel which had any value. Part of the treasure was a fragment of what purported to be the cross, but the authenticity of this relic was doubtful; there was beside, however, the baby linen, the spear-head, the sponge, and the chain, beside several miscellaneous articles like the rod of Moses.
Louis built the Sainte Chapelle at a cost of twenty thousand marks as a shrine in which to deposit them. The Sainte Chapelle has usually ranked as the most absolutely perfect specimen of mediaeval religious architecture. [Footnote: On this whole subject of the inter-relation of mediæval theology with architecture and philosophy the reader is referred toMont-Saint-Michel et Chartres, by Henry Adams, which is the most philosophical and thorough exposition of this subject which ever has been attempted.]
When Saint Louis bought the Crown of Thorns from Baldwin in 1239, the commercial value of relics may, possibly, be said to have touched its highest point, but, in fact, the adoration of them had culminated with the collapse of the Second Crusade, and in another century and a half the market had decisively broken and the Reformation had already begun, with the advent of Wycliffe and the outbreak of Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381. For these social movements have always a common cause and reach a predetermined result.
In the eleventh century the convent of Cluny, for example, had an enormous and a perfectly justified hold upon the popular imagination, because of the sanctity and unselfishness of its abbots. Saint Hugh won his sainthood by a self-denial and effort which were impossible to ordinary men, but with Louis IX the penitential life had already lost its attractions and men like Arnold rapidly brought religion and religious thought into contempt. The famous Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, born, probably, in 1175, died in 1253. He presided over the diocese of Lincoln at the precise moment when Saint Louis was building the Sainte Chapelle, but Grosseteste in 1250 denounced in a sermon at Lyons the scandals of the papal court with a ferocity which hardly was surpassed at any later day.
To attempt even an abstract of the thought of the English Reformation would lead too far, however fascinating the subject might be. It must suffice to say briefly that theology had little or nothing to do with it. Wycliffe denounced the friars as lazy, profligate impostors, who wrung money from the poor which they afterwards squandered in ways offensive to God, and he would have stultified himself had he admitted, in the same breath, that these reprobates, when united, formed a divinely illuminated corporation, each member of which could and did work innumerable miracles through the interposition of Christ. Ordinary miracles, indeed, could be tested by the senses, but the essence of transubstantiation was that it eluded the senses. Thus nothing could be more convenient to the government than to make this invisible and intangible necromancy a test in capital cases for heresy-Hence Wycliffe had no alternative but to deny transubstantiation, for nothing could be more insulting to the intelligence than to adore a morsel of bread which a priest held in his hand. The pretension of the priests to make the flesh of Christ was, according to Wycliffe, an impudent fraud, and their pretension to possess this power was only an excuse by which they enforced their claim to collect fees, and what amounted to extortionate taxes, from the people. [Footnote: Nowhere, perhaps, does Wycliffe express himself more strongly on this subject than in a little tract calledThe Wicket, written in English, which he issued for popular consumption about this time.] But, in the main, no dogma, however incomprehensible, ever troubled Protestants, as a class. They easily accepted the Trinity, the double procession, or the Holy Ghost itself, though no one had the slightest notion what the Holy Ghost might be. Wycliffe roundly declared in the first paragraph of his confession [Footnote: Fasciculi Zizaniorum, 115.] that the body of Christ which was crucified was truly and really in the consecrated host, and Huss, who inherited the Wycliffian tradition, answered before the Council of Constance, “Verily, I do think that the body of Christ is really and totally in the sacrament of the altar, which was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered, died, and rose again, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.” [Footnote: Foxe,Acts and Monuments, III, 452.] That which has rent society in twain and has caused blood to flow like water, has never been abstract opinions, but that economic competition either between states or classes, that lust for power and wealth, which makes a vested interest. Thus by 1382 the eucharist had come to represent to the privileged classes power and wealth, and they would have repudiated Wycliffe even had they felt strong enough to support him. But they were threatened by an adversary equally formidable with heresy in the person of the villeins whom the constantly increasing momentum of the time had raised into a position in which they undertook to compete for the ownership of the land which they still tilled as technical serfs.