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

Such was the state of affairs when the Arab element, having pervaded France and Italy, made its formal intellectual attack. It might almost have been foreseen in what manner that attack would be made, and the shape it would be likely to assume. Of the sciences, astronomy was the oldest and most advanced. The intellectual impulse makes its attack through astronomy, Its beginning dates earlier than the historic period, and both in India and in Egypt it had long reached correctness, so far as its general principles were concerned. The Saracens had been assiduous cultivators of it in both its branches, observation and mathematical investigation. Upon one point, the figure and relations of the earth, it is evident that not the slightest doubt existed among them. Nay, it must be added that no learned European ecclesiastic or statesman could deny the demonstrated truths. Nevertheless, it so fell out that upon this very point the conflict broke out. In India the Brahmans had passed through the same trial – for different nations walk through similar paths – with a certain plausible success, by satisfying the popular clamour that there was, in reality, nothing inconsistent between the astronomical doctrine of the globular form and movement of the earth, and the mythological dogma that it rests upon a succession of animals, the lowest of which is a tortoise. But the strong common sense of Western Europe was not to be deluded in any such idle way. It is not difficult to see the point of contact, the point of pressure with the Church. The abstract question gave her no concern; it was the consequences that might possibly follow. The memorable battle was fought upon the question thus sharply defined: Is the earth a moving globe, a small body in the midst of suns and countless myriads of worlds, or is it the central and greatest object in the universe, flat, and canopied over with a blue dome, motionless while all is in movement around it? and the Church is defeated. The dispute thus definitely put, its issue was such as must always attend a controversy in which he who is defending is at once lukewarm and conscious of his own weakness. Never can moral interests, however pure, stand against intellect enforcing truth. On this ill-omened question the Church ventured her battle and lost it.

The moral impulse. Though this great conflict is embodied in the history of Galileo, who has become its historical representative, the prime moving cause must not be misunderstood. From the Pyrenees had passed forth an influence which had infected all the learned men of Western Europe. Its tendency was altogether unfavourable to the Church. Moreover, the illiterate classes had been touched, but in a different way. To the first action the designation of the intellectual impulse may be given; to the latter, the moral. It is to be especially observed that in their directions these impulses conspired. We have seen how, through the Saracens and Jews conjointly, the intellectual impulse came into play. Origin of the moral impulse. The moral impulse originated in a different manner, being due partly to the Crusades and partly to the state of things in Rome. On these causes it is therefore needful for us to reflect.

First, of the Crusades. There had been wrenched from Christendom its fairest and most glorious portions. Spain, the north of Africa, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, were gone. The Mohammedans had been repeatedly under the walls of Constantinople; its fall was only a question of time. They had been in the streets of Rome. They had marched across Italy in every direction. Loss of the holy places. But perhaps the geographical losses, appalling as they were, did not appear so painful as the capture of the holy places; the birth-place of our Redeemer; the scene of His sufferings; the Mount of Olives; the Sea of Galilee; the Garden of Gethsemane; Calvary; the Sepulchre. Too often in their day of strength, while there were Roman legions at their back, had the bishops taunted Paganism with the weakness of its divinities, who could not defend themselves, their temples, or their sacred places. That logic was retaliated now. To many a sincere heart must many an ominous reflexion have occurred. In Western Europe there was a strong common sense which quickly caught the true position of things – a common sense that could neither be blinded nor hoodwinked. The astuteness of the Italian politicians was insufficient to conceal altogether the great fact, though it might succeed in dissembling its real significance for a time. The Europe of that day was very different from the Europe of ours. It was in its Age of Faith. Recently converted, as all recent converts do, it made its belief a living rule of action. In our times there is not upon that continent a nation which, in its practical relations with others, carries out to their consequences its ostensible, its avowed articles of belief. Catholics, Protestants, Mohammedans, they of the Greek communion, indiscriminately consort together under the expediences of the passing hour. Statesmanship has long been dissevered from religion – a fact most portentous for future times. But it was not so in the Middle Ages. Men then believed their form of faith with the same clearness, the same intensity with which they believed their own existence or the actual presence of things upon which they cast their eyes. The doctrines of the Church were to them no mere inconsequential affair, but an absolute, an actual reality, a living and a fearful thing. It would have passed their comprehension if they could have been assured that a day would come when Christian Europe, by a breath, could remove from the holy places the scandal of an infidel intruder, but, upon the whole, would consider it not worth her while to do so. How differently they acted. Effect of the Crusades. When, by the preaching of Peter the Hermit and his collaborators, who had received a signal from Rome, a knowledge had come to their ears of the reproach that had befallen Jerusalem and the sufferings of the pilgrims, their plain but straightforward common sense taught them at once what was the right remedy to apply, and forthwith they did apply it, and Christendom, precipitated headlong upon the Holy Land, was brought face to face with Mohammedanism. But what a scene awaited the zealous, the religious barbarians – for such they truly were – when Constantinople, with its matchless splendours, came in view! What a scene when they had passed into Asia Minor, that garden of the world, presenting city after city, with palaces and edifices, the pride of twenty centuries! Change of opinion in the Crusaders. How unexpected the character of those Saracens, whom they had been taught, by those who had incited them to their enterprise, to regard as no better than bloodthirsty fiends, but whom they found valiant, merciful, just! When Richard the Lion-hearted, King of England, lay in his tent consumed by a fever, there came into the camp camels laden with snow, sent by his enemy, the Sultan Saladin, to assuage his disease, the homage of one brave soldier to another. But when Richard was returning to England, it was by a Christian prince that he was treacherously seized and secretly confined. This was doubtless only one of many such incidents which had often before occurred. Even down to the meanest camp-follower, every one must have recognized the difference between what they had anticipated and what they had found. They had seen undaunted courage, chivalrous bearing, intellectual culture far higher than their own. They had been in lands filled with the prodigies of human skill. They did not melt down into the populations to whom they returned without imparting to them a profound impression destined to make itself felt in the course of time.

They discover the immoralities of Italy. But, secondly, as to the state of things in Rome. The movement into which all Europe had been thrown by these wars brought to light the true condition of things in Italy as respects morality. Locomotion in a population is followed by intellectual development. The old stationary condition of things in Europe was closed by the Crusades. National movement gave rise to better observation, better information, and could not but be followed by national reflexion. And though we are obliged to speak of the European population as being in one sense in a barbarous state, it was a moral population, earnestly believing the truth of every doctrine it had been taught, and sincerely expecting that those doctrines would be carried to their practical application, and that religious profession must, as a matter of course, be illustrated by religious life. The Romans themselves were an exception to this. They had lived too long behind the scenes. Indeed, it may be said that all the Italian peninsula had emancipated itself from that delusion, as likewise certain classes in France, who had become familiar with the state of things during the residence of the popes at Avignon. It has been the destiny of Southern France to pass, on a small scale, under the same influence, and to exhibit the same results as were appointed for all Europe at last.

And now, what was it that awakening Europe found to be the state of things in Italy? I avert my eyes from looking again at the biography of the popes; it would be only to renew a scene of sin and shame. Nor can I, without injustice to truth, speak of the social condition of the inhabitants of that peninsula without relating facts which would compel my reader to turn over the page with a blush. I prefer to look at the maxims of political life which had been followed for many centuries, and which were first divulged by one of the greatest men that Italy has produced, in a work – A.D. 1513 – truly characterized as a literary prodigy. Certainly nothing can surpass in atrocity the maxims therein laid down.

The principles of Italian statesmanship – Machiavelli. Machiavelli, in that work, tells us that there are three degrees of capacity among men. That one understands things by his own natural powers; another, when they are explained to him; a third, not at all. In dealing with these different classes different methods must be used. The last class, which is by far the most numerous, is so simple and weak that it is very easy to dupe those who belong to it. If they cease to believe of their own accord they ought to be constrained by force, in the application of which, though there may be considerable difficulties at first, yet, these once overcome by a sufficient unscrupulousness – veneration, security, tranquillity, and happiness will follow. That, if a prince is constrained to make his choice, it is better for him to be feared than loved; he should remember that all men are ungrateful, fickle, timid, dissembling, and self-interested; that love depends on them, but fear depends on him, and hence it is best to prefer the latter, which is always in his own hands. The great aim of statesmanship should be permanence, which is worth everything else, being far more valuable than freedom. That, if a man wants to ruin a republic, his proper course is to set it on bold undertakings, which it is sure to mismanage; that men, being naturally wicked, incline to good only when they are compelled; they think a great deal more of the present than the past, and never seek change so long as they are made comfortable.

He recommends a ruler to bear in mind that, while the lower class of men may desert him, the superior will not only desert, but conspire. If such cannot with certainty be made trustworthy friends, it is very clearly necessary to put it out of their power to be enemies. Thus it may be observed that the frequent insurrections in Spain, Gaul, and Greece against the Romans were entirely due to the petty chiefs inhabiting those countries; but that, after these had been put to death, everything went on very well. Up to a certain point, it should be the grand maxim of a wise government to content the people and to manage the nobles; but that, since hatred is just as easily incurred by good actions as by bad ones, there will occasionally arise the necessity of being wicked in order to maintain power, and, in such a case, there should be no hesitation; for, though it is useful to persevere in the path of rectitude while there is no inconvenience, we should deviate from it at once if circumstances so advise. A prudent prince ought not keep his word to his own injury; he ought to bear in mind that one who always endeavours to act as duty dictates necessarily insures his own destruction; that new obligations never extinguish the memory of former injuries in the minds of the superior order of men; that liberality, in the end, generally insures more enemies than friends; that it is the nature of mankind to become as much attached to one by the benefits they render as by the favours they receive; that, where the question is as to the taking of life or the confiscation of property, it is useful to remember that men forget the death of their relatives, but not the loss of their patrimony; that, if cruelties should become expedient, they should be committed thoroughly and but once – it is very impolitic to resort to them a second time; that there are three ways of deciding any contest – by fraud, by force, or by law, and a wise man will make the most suitable choice; that there are also three ways of maintaining control in newly-conquered states that have once been free – by ruining them, by inhabiting them, or by permitting them to keep their own laws and to pay tribute. Of these the first will often be found the best, as we may see from the history of the Romans, who were experienced judges of such cases. That, as respects the family of a rival but conquered sovereign, the greatest pains should be taken to extinguish it completely; for history proves, what many fabulous traditions relate, that dangerous political consequences have originated in the escape of some obscure or insignificant member; that men of the highest order, who are, therefore, of sound judgment – who seek for actual social truths for their guidance rather than visionary models which never existed – will conform to the decisions of reason, and never be influenced by feelings of sentiment, unless it is apparent that some collateral advantage will arise from the temporary exhibition thereof; and that they will put a just estimate on the delusions in which the vulgar indulge, casting aside the so-called interventions of Divine Providence, which are, in reality, nothing more than the concatenation of certain circumstances following the ordinary law of cause and effect, but which, by interfering with the action of each other, have assumed a direction which the judgment of the wisest could not have foreseen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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