CHAPTER VITHE PURE OF LIFE

Here is a little problem in mathematics which is not out of place in a book of history. Take a piece of string and make it into a circle, like this:

In this circle all diameters will of course be equal.

AB = CD = EF = GH and so on, ad infinitum.

But turn the circle into an ellipse by slightly pulling two sides. Then the perfect balance is at once disturbed. The diameters are thrown out of gear. A few like AB and EF have beengreatly shortened. Others, and especially CD, have been lengthened.

Now transfer the problem from mathematics to history. Let us for the sake of argument suppose that

In thefigure Ithe perfectly balanced state, all lines are equally long and quite as much attention is paid to politics as to trade and art and militarism.

But infigure II(which is no longer a perfect circle) trade has got an undue advantage at the expense of politics and art has almost entirely disappeared, while militarism shows a gain.

Or make GH (militarism) the longest diameter, and the others will tend to disappear altogether.

III

You will find this a handy key to a great many historical problems.

Try it on the Greeks.

For a short time the Greeks had been able to maintain a perfect circle of all-around accomplishments. But the foolish quarrels between the different political parties soon grew to such proportions that all the surplus energy of the nation was being absorbed by the incessant civil wars. The soldiers were no longer used for the purpose of defending the country against foreign aggression. They were turned loose upon their own neighbors, who had voted for a different candidate, or who believed in a slightly modified form of taxation.

Trade, that most important diameter of all such circles, at first became difficult, then became entirely impossible and fled to other parts of the world, where business enjoyed a greater degree of stability.

The moment poverty entered through the front gate of the city, the arts escaped by way of the back door, never to be seen again. Capital sailed away on the fastest ship it couldfind within a hundred miles, and since intellectualism is a very expensive luxury, it was henceforth impossible to maintain good schools. The best teachers hastened to Rome and to Alexandria.

What remained was a group of second-rate citizens who subsisted upon tradition and routine.

And all this happened because the line of politics had grown out of all proportion, because the perfect circle had been destroyed, and the other lines, art, science, philosophy, etc., etc., had been reduced to nothing.

If you apply the circular problem to Rome, you will find that there the particular line called “political power” grew and grew and grew until there was nothing left of any of the others. The circle which had spelled the glory of the Republic disappeared. All that remained was a straight, narrow line, the shortest distance between success and failure.

And if, to give you still another example, you reduce the history of the medieval Church to this sort of mathematics, this is what you will find.

The earliest Christians had tried very hard to maintain a circle of conduct that should be perfect. Perhaps they had rather neglected the diameter of science, but since they were not interested in the life of the world, they could not very well be expected to pay much attention to medicine or physics or astronomy, useful subjects, no doubt, but of small appeal to men and women who were making ready for the last judgment and who regarded this world merely as the ante-room to Heaven.

But for the rest, these sincere followers of Christ endeavored (however imperfectly) to lead the good life and to be as industrious as they were charitable and as kindly as they were honest.

As soon, however, as their little communities had been united into a single powerful organization, the perfect balance of the old spiritual circle was rudely upset by the obligations and duties of the new international responsibilities. It was easy enough for small groups of half-starved carpenters and quarry workers to follow those principles of poverty and unselfishness upon which their faith was founded. But the heir to the imperial throne of Rome, the Pontifex Maximus of the western world, the richest landowner of the entire continent, could not live as simply as if he were a sub-deacon in a provincial town somewhere in Pomerania or Spain.

Or, to use the circular language of this chapter, the diameter representing “worldliness” and the diameter representing “foreign policy” were lengthened to such an extent that the diameters representing “humility” and “poverty” and “self-negation” and the other elementary Christian virtues were being reduced to the point of extinction.

It is a pleasant habit of our time to speak patronizingly of the benighted people of the Middle Ages, who, as we all know, lived in utter darkness. It is true they burned wax tapers in their churches and went to bed by the uncertain light of a sconce, they possessed few books, they were ignorant of many things which are now being taught in our grammar schools and in our better grade lunatic asylums. But knowledge and intelligence are two very different things and of the latter, these excellent burghers, who constructed the political and social structure in which we ourselves continue to live, had their full share.

If a good deal of the time they seemed to stand apparently helpless before the many and terrible abuses in their Church, let us judge them mercifully. They had at least the courage of their convictions and they fought whateverthey considered wrong with such sublime disregard for personal happiness and comfort that they frequently ended their lives on the scaffold.

More than that we can ask of no one.

It is true that during the first thousand years of our era, comparatively few people fell as victims to their ideas. Not, however, because the Church felt less strongly about heresy than she did at a later date, but because she was too much occupied with more important questions to have any time to waste upon comparatively harmless dissenters.

In the first place, there remained many parts of Europe where Odin and the other heathen gods still ruled supreme.

And in the second place, something very unpleasant had happened, which had wellnigh threatened the whole of Europe with destruction.

This “something unpleasant” was the sudden appearance of a brand-new prophet by the name of Mahomet, and the conquest of western Asia and northern Africa by the followers of a new God who was called Allah.

The literature which we absorb in our childhood full of “infidel dogs” and Turkish atrocities is apt to leave us under the impression that Jesus and Mahomet represented ideals which were as mutually antagonistic as fire and water.

But as a matter of fact, the two men belonged to the same race, they spoke dialects which belonged to the same linguistic group, they both claimed Abraham as their great-great-grandfather and they both looked back upon a common ancestral home, which a thousand years before had stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf.

And yet, the followers of those two great teachers who were such close relatives have always regarded each other with bitter scorn and have fought a war which has lastedmore than twelve centuries and which has not yet come to an end.

At this late day and age it is useless to speculate upon what might have happened, but there was a time when Mecca, the arch-enemy of Rome, might have easily been gained for the Christian faith.

The Arabs, like all desert people, spent a great deal of their time tending their flocks and therefore were much given to meditation. People in cities can drug their souls with the pleasures of a perennial county-fair. But shepherds and fisher folk and farmers lead solitary lives and want something a little more substantial than noise and excitement.

In his quest for salvation, the Arab had tried several religions, but had shown a distinct preference for Judaism. This is easily explained, as Arabia was full of Jews. In the tenth century B.C., a great many of King Solomon’s subjects, exasperated by the high taxes and the despotism of their ruler, had fled into Arabia and again, five hundred years later in 586 B.C., when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah, there had been a second wholesale exodus of Jews towards the desert lands of the south.

Judaism, therefore, was well known and furthermore the quest of the Jews after the one and only true God was entirely in line with the aspirations and ideals of the Arabian tribes.

Any one in the least familiar with the work of Mahomet will know how much the Medinite had borrowed from the wisdom contained in some of the books of the Old Testament.

Nor were the descendants of Ishmael (who together with his mother Hagar lay buried in the Holy of Holies in the heart of Arabia) hostile to the ideas expressed by the young reformer from Nazareth. On the contrary, they followed Jesus eagerly when he spoke of that one God who was aloving father to all men. They were not inclined to accept those miracles of which the followers of the Nazarene carpenter made so much. And as for the resurrection, they flatly refused to believe in it. But generally speaking, they felt very kindly disposed towards the new faith and were willing to give it a chance.

But Mahomet suffered considerable annoyance at the hands of certain Christian zealots who with their usual lack of discretion had denounced him as a liar and a false prophet before he had fairly opened his mouth. That and the impression which was rapidly gaining ground that the Christians were idol worshipers who believed in three Gods instead of one, made the people of the desert finally turn their backs upon Christianity and declare themselves in favor of the Medinese camel driver who spoke to them of one and only one God and did not confuse them with references to three deities that were “one” and yet were not one, but were one or three as it might please the convenience of the moment and the interests of the officiating priest.

Thus the western world found itself possessed of two religions, each of which proclaimed its own God to be the One True God and each of which insisted that all other Gods were impostors.

Such conflicts of opinion are apt to lead to warfare.

Mahomet died in 632.

Within less than a dozen years, Palestine, Syria, Persia and Egypt had been conquered and Damascus had become the capital of a great Arab empire.

Before the end of 656 the entire coast of northern Africa had accepted Allah as its divine ruler and in less than a century after the flight of Mahomet from Mecca to Medina, the Mediterranean had been turned into a Moslem lake, all communications between Europe and Asia had been cut offand the European continent was placed in a state of siege which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century.

Under those circumstances it had been impossible for the Church to carry her doctrines eastward. All she could hope to do was to hold on to what she already possessed. Germany and the Balkans and Russia and Denmark and Sweden and Norway and Bohemia and Hungary had been chosen as a profitable field for intensive spiritual cultivation and on the whole, the work was done with great success. Occasionally a hardy Christian of the variety of Charlemagne, well-intentioned but not yet entirely civilized, might revert to strong-arm methods and might butcher those of his subjects who preferred their own Gods to those of the foreigner. By and large, however, the Christian missionaries were well received, for they were honest men who told a simple and straightforward story which all the people could understand and because they introduced certain elements of order and neatness and mercy into a world full of bloodshed and strife and highway robbery.

But while this was happening along the frontier, things had not gone so well in the heart of the pontifical empire. Incessantly (to revert to the mathematics explained in the first pages of this chapter) the line of worldliness had been lengthened until at last the spiritual element in the Church had been made entirely subservient to considerations of a purely political and economic nature and although Rome was to grow in power and exercise a tremendous influence upon the development of the next twelve centuries, certain elements of disintegration had already made their appearance and were being recognized as such by the more intelligent among the laity and the clergy.

We modern people of the Protestant north think of a “church” as a building which stands empty six days out ofevery seven and a place where people go on a Sunday to hear a sermon and sing a few hymns. We know that some of our churches have bishops and occasionally these bishops hold a convention in our town and then we find ourselves surrounded by a number of kindly old gentlemen with their collars turned backwards and we read in the papers that they have declared themselves in favor of dancing or against divorce, and then they go home again and nothing has happened to disturb the peace and happiness of our community.

We rarely associate this church (even if it happens to be our own) with the sum total of all our experiences, both in life and in death.

The State, of course, is something very different. The State may take our money and may kill us if it feels that such a course is desirable for the public good. The State is our owner, our master, but what is now generally called “the Church” is either our good and trusted friend or, if we happen to quarrel with her, a fairly indifferent enemy.

But in the Middle Ages this was altogether different. Then, the Church was something visible and tangible, a highly active organization which breathed and existed, which shaped man’s destiny in many more ways than the State would ever dream of doing. Very likely those first Popes who accepted pieces of land from grateful princes and renounced the ancient ideal of poverty did not foresee the consequences to which such a policy was bound to lead. In the beginning it had seemed harmless enough and quite appropriate that faithful followers of Christ should bestow upon the successor of the apostle Peter a share of their own worldly goods. Besides, there was the overhead of a complicated administration which reached all the way from John o’Groat’s to Trebizond and from Carthage to Upsala.Think of all the thousands of secretaries and clerks and scribes, not to mention the hundreds of heads of the different departments, that had to be housed and clothed and fed. Think of the amount spent upon a courier service across an entire continent; the traveling expenses of diplomatic agents now going to London, then returning from Novgorod; the sums necessary to keep the papal courtiers in the style that was expected of people who foregathered with worldly princes on a footing of complete equality.

All the same, looking back upon what the Church came to stand for and contemplating what it might have been under slightly more favorable circumstances, this development seems a great pity. For Rome rapidly grew into a gigantic super-state with a slight religious tinge and the pope became an international autocrat who held all the nations of western Europe in a bondage compared to which the rule of the old emperors had been mild and generous.

And then, when complete success seemed within certain reach, something happened which proved fatal to the ambition for world dominion.

The true spirit of the Master once more began to stir among the masses and that is one of the most uncomfortable things that can happen to any religious organization.

Heretics were nothing new.

There had been dissenters as soon as there had been a single rule of faith from which people could possibly dissent and disputes, which had divided Europe and Africa and western Asia into hostile camps for centuries at a time, were almost as old as the Church herself.

But these sanguinary quarrels between Donatists and Sabellianists and Monophysites and Manichaeans and Nestorians hardly come within the scope of this book. As a rule, one party was quite as narrow-minded as the other andthere was little to choose between the intolerance of a follower of Arius and the intolerance of a follower of Athanasius.

Besides, these quarrels were invariably based upon certain obscure points of theology which are gradually beginning to be forgotten. Heaven forbid that I should drag them out of their parchment graves. I am not wasting my time upon the fabrication of this volume to cause a fresh outbreak of theological fury. Rather, I am writing these pages to tell our children of certain ideals of intellectual liberty for which some of their ancestors fought at the risk of their lives and to warn them against that attitude of doctrinary arrogance and cock-sureness which has caused such a terrible lot of suffering during the last two thousand years.

But when I reach the thirteenth century, it is a very different story.

Then a heretic ceases to be a mere dissenter, a disputatious fellow with a pet hobby of his own based upon the wrong translation of an obscure sentence in the Apocalypse or the mis-spelling of a holy word in the gospel of St. John.

Instead he becomes the champion of those ideas for which during the reign of Tiberius a certain carpenter from the village of Nazareth went to his death, and behold! he stands revealed as the only true Christian!

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