Nearly related to this lycanthropy is the more horrible vampirism. The vampires, according to the belief of the Middle Ages, are disembodied souls which clothe themselves again in their buried bodies, steal at night into houses, and suck from the nipple of the sleeping all their blood. He who is thus bereft of the vital fluid is in his turn changed into a vampire and visits preferably his own relatives. If the corpse of a person suspected of vampirism is dug up, and its stomach pressed, an abundance of fresh blood flows from the mouth. The corpse is well preserved. The belief in vampires has likewise produced a kind of psychical pestilence which yet in the eighteenth century spread terror in the Austrian provinces.[57]
If sorcery was an imaginary people’s magic,there existed also a real, and it consisted in an infinite variety of usages, observances and rules for all conditions of life. Not to speak of the astrologers’ extensive hand-written calendars, which pointed out which constellations, seasons and days are auspicious for bathing, bleeding, hair-cutting, shaving, house-building, wooing, engaging servants, setting out on travels and so on, there existed among the people an incredibly large mass of rules for living which any body that would avoid the constant danger of bringing misfortune on himself and his family, must know.
From waking up in the morning to going asleep at night, such maxims were to be observed: putting the wrong foot first out of bed in the morning was as sure to be followed by annoyances in the course of the day as a neglect to place the shoes with the heels toward the bed at night was certain to cause the visit of ghosts or evil dreams. When children are born, no one must go out or in, or open the door without bringing fire with him, that the trolls may not find their way inand exchange the child; and no one entering must say a word before he has touched the fire. For the same reason the child, while unchristened, must be watched carefully every night, and a fire must be kept constantly burning on the hearth. Before the christening a child must not be moved from one room to another without putting steel beside it. If two boys are baptized on the same occasion, that one who obtains his name and blessing first will be best endowed both bodily and mentally. On the day of christening the mother should avoid handling an axe, knife or other cutting instruments, otherwise the child will some time be murdered. If the floor under a cradle is swept, the child will be bereft of its sleep. If the cradle is moved while the child is not in it, the child becomes peevish. When a child yawns, the sign of the cross must be made over its mouth, and the words “Jesus, God’s son!” added; otherwise the devil will then enter into it. If a child looks out through the window or looks in a mirror at night, it will fall sick. Childrenpunished on Sunday become disobedient; but a child whipped on Good Friday before sunset, will become obedient and well-behaved. If the child walks about in one shoe, the mother will have a sore back. If a child walks or runs backwards, it drives its parents so many steps into hell. A child eating and reading at the same time gets a bad memory. If a suitor’s first gift to his betrothed consists of shoes, she will be unfaithful, if of stockings, she will be jealous. Nuptials on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays are unfortunate. If a bridal procession comes to a stop for any reason, the married pair will meet with dissensions. If the marriage-ring is too small, misfortune is in store. Of the bridal pair, that one dies first who first kneels down or rises from kneeling. Those who hold the canopy must not change hands or touch the bride’s crown, for that prognosticates misfortune and ennui. If in going out an old woman or one carrying water is met, the room should be re-entered. When the table is set, the bread must be laidupon it immediately. Bread must never be placed with the upper crust down. Great care must be taken to remove all substances separated from the body, as hair, nails, blood; they must be buried in the soil so as not to come in contact with diseased persons, or fall into the hands of witches.
We have selected the preceding observances and rules as examples of those thousands of precepts for all conditions of life which have been collected by investigations in this field from the mouths of the people. A full collection would require a large volume. In all of them is seen a servile fear of mysterious evil influences, lurking on all sides, and whose power or impotency as regards man nowise depends on his morality, but only on the way in which he observes certain ethically indifferent acts. Many of them seem to have arisen only by faulty application of the theory of causality; others depend on a symbolical method of contemplating nature. What a difference between this popular wisdom and that stored up inthe gnomes of the Greeks or in the heathen Havamal! Part of the former may be likewise an heirloom, but how exuberantly these superstitions grew during the centuries of ripe and glaring belief in personified evil; how deeply they struck root among the people, while Havamal has been saved from the flood of time only by the hand of the student!
Among the superstitions are to be counted the magical prognosis of diseases and death. Many were the tokens of the approaching skeleton-figure with his scythe and glass. They were heard in the cawing of crows and ravens, in the howling of dogs, in the chirping of the cricket, and the regular ticking of the wood-worm concealed in the wall. If the horse of a priest riding to visit a sick person in his parish lowered its head upon arriving at a house, if a gnat was caught gnawing any clothing, if a light suddenly went out, if an image fell down, if a glass or a mirror was broken, it indicated an approaching death in the house. To determinethe fate of a sick person, a piece of bread of which he had eaten was laid in a dark corner, and its change of color was observed; or a piece of fat with which the soles of the sick had been smeared was offered to a dog, or a stone was lifted to see if any thing was concealed beneath it. If the bread became dark, or if the dog refused to eat what was offered him, or if there was no living thing under the stone, then the sick person was considered incurable, and nothing could be hoped even from the inherited medical skill of the wise old men and women. The exercise of this skill consisted in the use, along with “reading” and conjurations, partly of herbs of more or less known efficiency, and partly also, as it appears, of magnetic forces, resorted to mechanically without reflection.
The medical art inherited among the people from generation to generation is a subject which none but a clear-sighted and unprejudiced scientist of the medical profession can treat, and which has been left hitherto without that investigation which the subjectundoubtedly deserves, at least from a historical point of view. There was, at the end of the Middle Ages, among the devotees of the Galenic art a man of genius who, despairing to find in the folios of the medical scholastics any traces of truth, abandoned the lecture-room and went forth into the world without in order, as he himself said, to read the book of nature and learn something of that medical instinct with which God, as he believed, must have endowed men as well as animals, and which must find a true expression only in the people living in immediate reciprocity with nature. This man was Paracelsus. He who despised and overwhelmed with mockery the coryphei of his days in the medical faculties, did not disdain to listen to “the experience of peasants, old women, night-wanderers, and vagabonds,” and the magnetical system which he constructed “by the illumination of nature’s light, and not by the lamp-flare of an apothecary’s shop,” rest in all probability on the general principles which he found in the pluralityof sympathetic cures practiced among the people. In the “reading” by which these cures were accompanied, Paracelsus saw rightly nothing but a subjective moment, and means of making faith and imagination the allies of the physician. A mass of these conjuration-formulæ in different diseases have been collected and published in various countries of Europe. They offer the reader little or nothing of interest.[58]
A very common usage during the Middle Ages was to measure the sick person, at onetime to cure him, at another to find out if the disease was decreasing or increasing. Another means was to drag him through a hole. Sick children were pulled through holes dug in the earth or through a cleft cherry-tree. Sick sheep were forced to creep through the cleft of an oak, and so on. Another remedy against many kinds of sufferings was the binding of a thread or a band which had been read over, around the neck or some limb of the sick. Connected with this is the tying of witch-knots, used only with evil intent. Bands of different colors and material[59]were required for these. They were buried near the dwelling of the person to be injured. It was thought that by this means any limb or bodily power of an enemy could be impaired. A French jurist and witch-judge, Pierre Delancre, complains that in his days there were few married couplesin France whose happiness had not been marred by this means; young men hardly dared to marry from fear of it. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, advised, as a remedy against this influence, a diligent use of the sacraments. In French rituals church-prayers against the effects of witch-knots are prescribed. Hardly less universally was it the custom to make dolls of rags, dough, wax or clay, baptize them with the name of the hated person, put them in the fire or pierce them with needles, and bury them under the threshold of that individual, all in order to inflict sufferings on him.[60]Diseases could also be transferred to dolls by reading certain formulæ, and placing them in some inaccessible place, or in running water.
Not only against diseases, but also against the dangers of fire and war, against ill-luck in love or chase, on voyages and the like, magical remedies were freely resorted to bythe people. The “Witch-hammer” complains bitterly against the criminal practice of the soldiers in mutilating crucifixes in order to harden themselves against the sword and bullets. The executioner in Passau gained, during the Thirty Years’ War, a wide reputation for his skill in hardening the human frame, which he did by means of scraps of paper with cabalistic figures (Passauer Henkers-Zettel), which were eaten. The belief that hunters procured, by means of conjurations, “free-arrows” and “free-bullets” was very common. The “Witch-hammer” accuses various potentates of having in their pay “diabolical archers” who hit their mark from a long distance without aiming. It was customary at fires to throw into the flames so-called shields of David,—plates with two intersecting triangles and the motto “Agla” (the initials of four Hebrew words meaning: “Thou art strong eternally, O Lord!”) and “consummatum est.” As late as in the middle of the last century the magistrate of Leipzigordered that such plates should be laid up in the rathhaus to be used in case of fires. In Catholic countries the clergy took the employment of magical appliances against fires into their own hands; processions singing and bearing relics went around the burning house three times, and if this had no salutary effect, it was a sure sign that God had allowed the devil to wield the consuming element unto destruction.
The extent of this treatise does not allow a detailed exposition of the many divinatory arts which had their adepts among the people. The Church preaching mightily against those arts and representing them as devices of the devil, the father of lies and founder of oracles, did not, however, deny, but could confirm by biblical quotation, their power to unveil futurity.
Every thing that we have here described was to the Church black magic: all mystical practices among the people, whether resorted to for good or evil purposes, to heal or cure, were looked upon as implying contempt forthe divine magic of the Church itself, and also a league with the devil, if not a formal one, at any rate a “pactum implicitum.” It was therefore the possessors of the traditional popular art of healing who were first sent to the stake wherever the inquisition commenced its trials. But no terrorism could eradicate the popular magic so long as the persecutors themselves believed in its efficiency, and fought only for a consecrated superstition against its outlawed counterfeit. The struggle against the superstition of the Church as well as of the people, was reserved for another time and for another theory of the universe and of morals.
The so-called wandering scholastics (scholastici vagantes,scholares erratici) formed a kind of connecting link between the magic of the learned and that of the common people. They were ruined and adventurous students, priests and monks who wandered about in the rural districts of most of the European states, especially Germany, representing themselves as treasure-diggers, selling “spiritusfamiliares,” amulets, love-potions, and life-elixirs, conjuring spirits, divining by the stars, and healing men and cattle. These adventurers were associated in a regular guild, and had like other vagrant tradesmen, their lodgings and hospitals in the cities. They were dreaded competitors of the witch-fathers of the cloisters, were several times excommunicated by the Church, and seem to have nearly disappeared when the witch-trials commenced in earnest. It is to a person of that kind that the Faust-legend is attached. It reflects the popular opinions concerning the power of learned magicians.[61]
The same period which saw the bull of Innocentius promulgated, and the belief in devils culminate in the witch-processes, gave birth to therenaissance. This saviour cameto the world in the hour of its intensest need. The Hellenic spirit, born again from the study of classic literature and classic art, was a new Messias putting his heel on the head of the old serpent and saving humanity from the power of death and of the devil. The people sitting in darkness illumined only by the lurid flames kindled by the inquisition saw a great light and stretched their hands towards the new dawn. The study of the ancients had an immense influence, all the more as the actual world was so different from the antique world. The exhumed monuments of Hellas revealed other state systems than the feudal of the Middle Ages,—states which were organizations, not mere mechanical conglomerates of conquerors and conquered, and were founded upon a nobler basis than given or assumed privileges. These monuments revealed an independent search for truth which had placed itself above tradition—a novel spectacle to the people of the Middle Ages! They revealed an art in which harmony reigned between spirit andnature, between the higher life and sensuousness, between the relative opposites which the Middle Ages had conceived as absolute, placing them against one another in a struggle which wrecked beauty and morality. They revealed large symmetrical characters as free from the asceticism of the Middle Ages as from the wild sensuality of that time. All these ideas, hailed with enthusiasm, could not but transform the appearance of the world. They overthrew the darkness of the Middle Ages, put the devil and hell to flight, and drove them into that lumber-corner of the spiritual kingdom where they are at present, but from which, at any political reaction, they peer out eagerly watching whether they may not once more bring the great wide world into their power. But they shall scarcely succeed in this, as long as freedom of thought and scientific independence are guarded as the foremost conditions of the spiritual health of mankind; and they shall utterly fail when an all-extended intelligence has taught the peoplethat the premises of the devil-dogma, if they could be again inoculated into the popular mind, would show anew the same results which have been depicted above, and lead us back to the terrible times of the inquisition and the burning of witches. This, no doubt, even the orthodox defenders of belief in an impersonated evil principle do not desire; but they do not observe that history acts more consistently than they, and cures general errors only by making long generations draw from them the last consequences and suffer their full effect.
THE END.
INDEX.
Adam’s sin, brings countless woes on man,12.Agnus Dei,63;its power,64.Ahriman, affirmed to have been Judaized in “Satan,”35;repelled at Marathon,36;his power over man limited,47;author ofblackmagic,54.Alexander, conquers Asia, but helps the triumph of dualism,37.Ammonius Sacca, tries to restore Neoplatonism,40.Amulets employed in Church-magic,62,63.Angels, belong to the lowest hierarchy,5;have the care of mortals,6.Appolonius of Tyana, deemed the peer of Christ in gift of miracles,40,163.Archangels, part of the lowest hierarchy,5;protect religion,6.Archetypes, world of,i. e., the Empyrean,1;all celestial things are in the Empyrean; are immaterial,6.Aristotle’s method revives science,44.Astrology, introduction to (Table II. of correspondences),127.Atmosphere of earth situate next below space of the moon,2.Augustine, a Manicheian,43;last of the fathers educated in philosophy,44;quoted on baptism,57;quoted on the existence of fauns, satyrs, etc.,162;believes in the existence of were-wolves,206.Baptism, copied, in anticipation, in the Mithras mysteries,57.Baptismal water, its various efficacy,58.Bartholomeus Chassaneus, instructs how to proceed in the courts against common pests,78.Benoit de Montferrand, bishop of Lausanne, excommunicates may-bugs,75,76.Bereshit, its mystic meaning,144.Bethesda, the efficacy of the water in its pool inferior to that of baptism,57.Bishop Gerhard, converts the heretics of Arras,60.Boethius, on the basis of creation,124.Borrichius (Olaf Borch) cited,115.Bunsen’s Gott in der Geschichte, quoted,93,94,175.Cabalists’ method of searching out the inner meaning of the Bible,144;discover the seventy-two mystical names of God,146.Christian fathers, one of, doubts if his way of attaining perfection is the only one,32;one of, declares every thing in heathen thought to be of the devil,42.Church the, prepared for by election of the Jews, and founded by Christ,14;is one body; accumulates a wealth of supererogatory works, and grants remission of guilt also to dead,15;a mole against the tide of sin,16;the kingdom of God on earth; her destiny universal extension,18;can not check the growth of sin; her emblem an ark,22;the only legitimate bodily physician,68;forbids at several councils the secular practice of medicine,72.Church bells, their power against the demons,74.Clemens of Alexandria, fights for the union of belief and thought,41;quoted on the mission of philosophy,42;rejects the doctrine of eternal punishment,43.Colquhoun quoted,200.Conception-billets described,64-66.“Conjurer of Hell,”148.Contrast between state of Society in Middle Ages and Hellenic and later European civilizations due to different theories of the universe,29.Cosmic Philosophy of Middle Ages,1-28.Cyprianus and others enter into league with Satan,165.Delrio, ascribes the origin of witchcraft to Zoroaster,45.Demonianism, cured by the Church,70.Demons, fallen intelligences of the middle hierarchy,11;war against the good angels; cause storms and drouth; pervade the elements,12;entice man,13;able to take full possession of men,25.Deutsche Theologie, quoted on the nature of evil,26.Differences between the dualism of Zoroaster and the Christian,46-48.Dissection prohibited,71.Dominion, order of angels, receives the commands of God,5.Dualism, of the Middle Ages affirmed to have been derived from Persia,34;its conflict with the unitarian notions of Greece the sum of history between Cyrus and Constantine; wins a flank-position on the Mediterranean upon the return of the Jews from captivity; its demon-belief testified to by the many demoniacs in the time of Christ,35;magic and belief upon authority its necessary consequences,36;derived from Zoroaster,38;spreads over the Roman provinces,39;advances against Europe, as Manicheism,43;is finally absolute and brings on the Dark Ages,44;is intensified after entering Christianity,46,and undergoes changes,47,48;attacks the inner authority,92.Earth, encompassed by ten heavens,1;made a paradise for man; explains symbolically man’s destiny,8.Egidius, opposes fire-worship,171.Electrum magicum,138.Elements, four prime in the constitution of all things,3.Eleusinian mysteries, fragments of, preserved in magic of the learned,117.Empire, third order of angels, ward off all hindrances,5.Empyrean, the heaven of fire; world of archetypes,1;remains after the final conflagration,26.Europe, belief, of in Middle Ages,1;defeats dualism,36;goes into the enemy’s country,37.Eucharist, perennial source of power and sanctification,59.Faust, quoted,98,109.Faust-legend, at first proposed to employ H. C. Agrippa as its chief character,221.Field-rats prosecuted,78-80.Formula against bloody-flux,215;against epilepsy,215.Formulary of malediction used by priests,81,82.Gnosticism springs up,38.God, enthroned in the Empyrean,1;associates with man,8-9.Gregory IX. exhorts to a crusade against the Stedinghs,174.Gregory the Great, mentioned,44,60;forbade the abrogation of pagan festivities,160.Heaven of crystal, next beneath Empyrean,—primum mobile; of fixed stars, devoid of weight,2.Hell, becomes a place of punishment,11;remains after final conflagration,26.Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheim, on God as the source of all power,3,4;is not chosen to represent the magician in the Faust-legend,221.Heretics of Arras, their belief,60.Hermes Trismegistus, transmuted whatever he chose to gold,115.Hincmar, archb. of Rheims, propounds a remedy against witch-knots,216.Hippocrates, mentioned,71,72.Historical development of Middle-age Cosmic Philosophy,28-51.History, a spiritual comedy,23.Homunculus philosophicus, how produced,132,133.Horst’s Demonomagie quoted,199.Houses of the planets,134.“Hubertus-bands” and “Hubertus-keys,”69.Images, their miraculous properties,67,68.Incense appropriate for Mars,139.“Incubi” and “succubi,”167.Inevitable causation, not admitted in the Middle Age Cosmic philosophy,4.Isis, secrets of entrusted to the sons of Ham,114.Jacob’s ladder, structure of the universe likened to,6.Jamblichus, practices secret arts, to outrival Christian magi,40.Jean Bodin, ascribes witchcraft to Zoroaster,45.John of Salisbury upon witch-festivals,173.Judaico-Alexandrian philosophy blooms,38.Jupiter belonging to the second of the planetary spaces,2.Knowledge of highest truths revealed to man,20.Lucifer, prince of Seraphim,9;revolts, and wars with Michael,10;is conquered, is permitted to tempt man,10;transformed into an angel of light,12;triumphs,14.Luther, on Satanic malice as the cause of accidents,24,25;esteems highly “Deutsche Theologie,”26;Tischreden quoted,168;referred to,199.Lycanthropy of the Middle Ages,205-207.“Magia Divina,” quoted130-133.Magic, of the Church,51-94;what enters into all employment of it,53,54;white and black magic, celestial and diabolical,54;of the Church defined,92.—Magic of the Learned,95-158;is derived from various sources,116;first principle of,128.—Magic of the People,158-224;black magic and devil worship,164.Magician, the learned of the 15th century,100;his apartments described,105,108,110;explains his science,112-129;performs an incantation,129-155.Malice of the devil, causes unforeseen accidents,24,25.Man, a microcosm; must dwell on earth,7;at first happy,8.Mandrake, superstitions concerning,201.Manicheism, new form of dualism; advances against Europe; finds a follower in Augustine,43.Marathon, Salamis and Platæa really battle-fields of a religious war,35.Mars, situate in the third of the planetary spaces,2.Matter, devoid of force and all quality,3.May-bugs excommunicated,75.Men are often terrified into an alliance with the devil,25.Mercury, path of in planetary world,2.Middle Ages, Cosmic Philosophy of,1-28;historical origin of,28-55,94.Miracles, defined,4.Mithras mysteries, contain a copy, by anticipation, of the sacrament of baptism,57;imitate other mysteries of the Church,58,60.Moon, path of,2.“Mus exenteratus,” etc., quoted,60.Native spirits popularly believed to inhabit land, air and water,202.Nature, knowledge of, same as a knowledge of the angels,5.Neoplatonism arises,40.Nine revolving heavens,1.Nork’s “Sitten und Gebräuche der Deutschen,” etc., quoted,202.Number 72, its significance,143,144;number 488,147.Origen, attempts to unite belief and thought,41;rejects the doctrine of eternal punishment,43.Origin of the names of the days of the week,135,136.Ormuzd and Ahriman, are the real adversaries repelled at Marathon,36;author ofwhitemagic,54.Pentecost, its gifts transmitted,91.Peter de Abano, author of an important question,97.Perpetuum mobile naturæ, method of producing,130,131.Pierre Delancre complains against witch-knots,216.Philosophy, system of possible within the Church,20;adherents of the scholastic may use Aristotle’s dialectics,21.Planetary world, next beneath that of fixed stars,2;consisting of seven heavens,2.Planets guided by angels,3;influence the elements and man,134,135.Plotinus, tries to restore Neoplatonism,40.Pope, feudal lord of emperors,18;determines the true inductions of philosophy,21;Sergius III.,63;Urban Vitus,65.Pope John XXII., complains that his life is endangered by sorcerers,177.Pope Innocent VIII., puts forth a bull against the spread of sorcery,178.Popular maxims of superstition,208-211.Power, from a spiritual source only,3;communicated to the heavens and the earth by angels,3.Power, order of angels, guide the stars and planets,5.Principalities, Archangels, and Angels, the third and lowest hierarchy, hold supremacy over terrestrial things,5,6.Principalities, part of the lowest hierarchy of angels, guardian spirits of nations,6.Proclus, last Neoplatonician,44.Pythagoras, glorified as fit to rank with Christ in miraculous gifts,40;believed the universe founded on numbers,124.Rain-processions in the Middle Ages,74.Reason, darkened by apostacy,13.“Recognitiones divi Clementis ad Jacob.,” quoted,165.Reformation, retains somewhat of the Church-magic,92.Relics, their magical use,66.Remigius, ascribes witchcraft to Zoroaster,45.Renaissance, overthrew the darkness and superstition of the Middle Ages,222-223.Saints, intercession of, more effective than that of Seraphim,17;not disturbed by misery of the damned,27;have control over various diseases,69.Satan, the Judaized Ahriman,35.Saturn, belonging to the first of the planetary spaces,2.Scale of the Holy Tetrad (Table I.),123.Schemhamphoras, or God’s mystical names,144,146.Scholastici errantes,220.Science the, of the Greeks is rational, originates logic and geometry; of the Middle Ages ismagic,30.Scotus Erigena, mentioned,44.Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, the first hierarchy, and nearest God,5.Simon Magus, legend of his discomfiture by St. Peter,165.Sprenger, author of Malleus Malificarum, ascribes the origin of witchcraft to Zoroaster,45.Stedinghs persecuted,174.Summa Theologica, quoted on the delectation of the redeemed upon seeing the misery of the damned,28.Sun, belonging to the middle space of planetary world,2.Superstitious prognostics of disease and death,212-216.Synodal decree of Ancyra,171.Table of correspondences between microcosmos and things on earth, and the planets,127.Tekfael, name of the demon summoned,147,153.Terrestrial things, images of the celestial,6;are composed of the coarsest matter,6;are all under the control of special angels,7;are also influenced by stars, planets and archetypes,7.Theologie der Thatsachen wider die Theologie der Rhetorik (A. F. C. H. Vilmar, 1857) quoted,48-50.Thomas Aquinas, on the acquiescence of the saints in the punishment of the lost,28;on the power of demons,73.Universe, a vast lyre,7;an unbroken harmony,9;divided between Good and Evil,11.University of 15th century described,96-98.Vampirism,207.Venus, path of in planetary world,2.Vilmar, Neo-Lutheran, would restore to the clergy their mediæval prerogatives,48-50.Virgil quoted,205,216.Von Görres, attempts to restore the belief in vampirism,207.Witch-hammer, contains directions for the judge in witch-trials,90,178-195.Witches’ Sabbath, supposed origin of,170.Witch-knots,216.Zoroaster, the reputed founder of magic science; and by some believed the author of witchcraft,45;his religion allows evil to disappear in course of time, and promises a final restoration of all things,46.Zoroaster and Plato’s systems blended,37.
Footnotes:
[1]Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheim: “De occulta Philosophia.”—I.,XIII.
[2]Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheim: “De occulta Philosophia.”—I.,XIII.
[3]Ibidem.
[4]This passage, directed against the ruler of Assyria, was already interpreted by the early fathers as having reference to Satan. Thus Lucifer, the Latin translation for Morning Star, came to be a name for the prince of darkness.
[5]Luke x. 18.
[6]“De Contemptu Mundi sive de Miseria Humanæ Conditionis,” a little book written about 1200, by the afterwards Pope Innocent III.
[7]The words of Luther, who, in addition to his dualistic belief, was a genuine son of this same Middle Age, though the destroyer of its autocratic faith.
[8]As such,—as perishable and unreal, are all evil things regarded by an unknown author in the Middle Ages. In his beautiful opuscule “Deutsche Theologie,” he says among other things: “Now some one may ask, ‘Since we must love every thing, must we also love sin?’ The answer is, no; for when we say every thing, we only mean every thing that is good. Every thing that exists is good by virtue of its existence. The devil is good in so far as he exists. In this sense, there is nothing evil in existence. But it is a sin to wish, desire or love any thing else than God. Now all things are essentially in God, and more essentially in God than in themselves; therefore are they all good in their real essence.”—The little work from which the above is quoted, is the expression of a deep and pious soul, struggling to master the dualism which fettered his age. It is remarkable that Luther was not more strongly influenced by its spirit, although he confesses that “Next to the Bible and St. Augustine I have found no book from which I have learned more.”
[9]See the work “Summa Theologica” (supplementum ad tertiam partem, quæst. 94) by the most prominent and most influential among the theologians of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas. It is there said: “Ut beatitudo sanctorum eis magis complaceat et de ea uberiores gratias Deo agant, datur eis ut pœnam impiorum perfecte videant.... Beati, qui erunt in gloria, nullam compassionem ad damnatos habebunt.... Sancti de pœnis impiorum gaudebunt, considerando in eis divinæ justitiæ ordinem et suam liberationem de qua gaudebunt.”—With this may be compared the following execrable effusion of another theologian: “Beati cœlites non tantum non cognatorum sed nec parentum sempiternis suppliciis ad ullam miserationem flectentur. Imo vero lætabuntur justi, cum viderint vindictam; manus lavabunt in sanguine peccatorum.”
[10]Tertullian.
[11]This has been denied in so far as the original teachings of Zoroaster are concerned, but is confirmed by a passage in Aristotle (Metaphys., I.,XIV., c. 4).
[12]A. F. Ch. Vilmar: “Theologie der Thatsachen wider die Theologie der Rhetorik” (Marburg, 1857).
[13]Thus, for instance, the red lustre of copper was supposed to indicate that it was connected with Mars, which shines with a reddish light.
[14]“Non baptisatis parvulis nemo promittat inter damnationem regnumque cœlorum quietis vel felicitatis cujuslibet atque ubilibet quasi medium locum; hoc enim eis etiam hæresis Pelagiana promisit” (Augustinus: De Anima et Ejus Origine, 1. I., c.IX). In one of his letters Augustine declares that even if the parents hurry to the priest, and he likewise hasten to baptize the child, but find it dead before it has obtained the sacrament, it is nevertheless then doomed to be eternally tormented with the damned, and to blaspheme the name of God.
[15]All these are found, in connection with baptism, in heathen mysteries.
[16]Extract from the formula given at the council of Rome,A. D.1059, to Berengar of Tours, to which he was forced to swear under penalty of death.
[17]The wafer substituted in the twelfth century for bread was called the host.
[18]The discovery made in our days by the Danish theologian Martensens that the food obtained in the Supper of our Lord is not for the soul only, but also for the body,—for the nourishment of our ascension-body, is not really new; the pagan initiated into the Mithras mysteries was taught that the consecrated bread and wine, being assimilated into his flesh and blood, gave immortality to his corporeal being. Like presuppositions produce in different times like ideas.
An important question in the Middle Ages and one which had been already argued with great heat from the time of Petrus Lombardus until the seventeenth century, is propounded as follows: Has a rat which has eaten of the host thereby partaken of Christ’s body? In connection with this it was further asked: How is a rat which has eaten of Christ’s body to be treated,—ought it to be killed or honored? Ought the sacrament to be venerated even in the stomach of the rat? If some of the consecrated bread is found in the stomach of a rat, is it a duty to eat it? What must be done if immediately after partaking of the sacrament one is attacked by vomiting? When a rat can eat the host, can not the devil also do it?—One of the last products of these important investigations is a book published in Tübingen in 1593, entitled: “Mus exenteratus, hoc est tractatus valde magistralis super quæstione quadam theologica spinosa et multum subtili,”etc.
[19]During the period of political reaction in 1815, when Schlegel and de Maistre praised the Middle Ages as man’s era of bliss, and Görres sought to restore to credence during the “state period of enlightenment” all the forgotten ghost and vampire stories, the clergy of Brussels were celebrating with processions and other solemnities the anniversary of this persecution of the Jews in Namur.
At the synod inA. D.1099 a proclamation was issued forbidding priests to enter into any servile relations with laymen, because it were shameful if the most holy hands which prepared the flesh and blood of Almighty God should serve the unconsecrated laity. The famous orator Bourdaloue requested that greater homage should be paid to the priest than to the holy Virgin, because God had been incarnated in her bosom only once, but was in the hands of the priest daily, as often as the mass was read.
[20]The oldest Christian art in which the dying spirit of antiquity yet reveals itself, represented Jesus as a shepherd youth carrying a lamb upon his bosom. Many a one could only turn away sadly from the beaming world of Olympus to the new Christian ideal, and when they must needs so do, they would fain transfer to the new “puer redemptor” the mild beauty of the former youthful mediator, Dionysus Zagreus. In the hymns, still preserved to us, of Synesius, who combined in one person the bishop and the Greek who still longs for wisdom and beauty (doubtless known to many of our readers by Kingsley’s novel of Hypatia), this sadness is in wonderful harmony with Christian devotion. With the ruin of the antique world, this longing as well as the capability of satisfying it ceased. The material symbol obtained thereafter a more prominent place. If the Phœnicians and Canaanites represented their god corporeally as the powerful steer, the Christians chose the patient and inoffensive lamb as the type of theirs. The Council of Constantinople inA. D.692 confirmed this lamb-symbol. As Aaron had made a golden calf, Pope Sergius III. procured a lamb to be made of gold and ivory. All who rebelled against its worship were treated as disorderly and heretical. In the time of Charlemagne one of them, Bishop Claudius of Turin, from whom the Waldenses derive their origin, complained: “Isti perversorum dogmatum auctores agnos vivos volunt vorare et in pariete pictos adorare.”