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

CHAPTER IV
THE AGE OF FAITH IN THE WEST – (Concluded)
EFFECT OF THE EASTERN OR MILITARY ATTACK. – GENERAL REVIEW OF THE AGE OF FAITH

The Fall of Constantinople. – Its momentary Effect on the Italian System.

General Review of the Intellectual Condition in the Age Of Faith. —Supernaturalism and its Logic spread all over Europe. – It is destroyed by the Jews and Arabians. – Its total Extinction.

The Jewish Physicians. – Their Acquirements and Influence. – Their Collision with the Imposture-medicine of Europe. – Their Effect on the higher Classes. – Opposition to them.

Two Impulses, the Intellectual and Moral, operating against the Mediæval state of Things. – Downfall of the Italian System through the intellectual Impulse from the West and the moral from the North. – Action of the former through Astronomy. – Origin of the moral Impulse. – Their conjoint irresistible Effect. – Discovery of the state of Affairs in Italy. – The Writings of Machiavelli. – What the Church had actually done.

Entire Movement of the Italian System determined from a consideration of the four Revolts against it.

The Eastern pressure. From the West I have now to return to the East, and to describe the pressure made by Mohammedanism on that side. It is illustrated by many great events, but, above all, by the fall of Constantinople. The Greek Church, so long out of sight that it is perhaps almost forgotten by the reader, comes for a moment before us like a spectre from the dead.

Invasions of the Turks. A wandering tribe of Turks had found its way into Asia Minor, and, under its leader Ertogrul and his son Othman, consolidated its power and commenced extending its influence by possessions taken from the sultans of Iconium and the Byzantine empire. The third prince of the race instituted the Janissaries, a remarkable military force, and commenced driving the Greeks out of Asia Minor. His son Soliman crossed the Hellespont and captured Gallipoli, thus securing a foothold in Europe, A.D. 1358.

Extension of their power in Europe. This accomplished, the Turkish influence began to extend rapidly. Thrace, Macedon, and Servia were subdued. Sigismund, the King of Hungary, was overthrown at the battle of Nicopolis by Bajazet. Southern Greece, the countries along the Danube, submitted, and Constantinople would have fallen had it not been for the unexpected irruption of Tamerlane, who defeated Bajazet and took him prisoner. The reign of Mohammed I., who succeeded, was occupied in the restoration of Turkish affairs. Under Amurath II., the possession of the Euxine shore was obtained, the fortifications across the Isthmus of Corinth were stormed, and the Peloponnesus entered.

The Byzantine sovereigns apply to the West. Mohammed II. became the Sultan of the Turks A.D. 1451. From the moment of his accession, he turned all his powers to the capture of Constantinople. Its sovereigns had long foreseen the inevitable event, and had made repeated attempts to secure military aid from the West. They were ready to surrender their religious belief. On this principle, the monk Barlaam was despatched on an embassy to Benedict XII. to propose the reunion of the Greek and Latin Churches, as it was delicately termed, and to obtain, as an equivalent for the concession, an army of Franks. As the danger became more urgent, John Palæologus I. sought an interview with Urban V., and, having been purified from his heresies respecting the supremacy of the pope and the double procession of the Holy Ghost, was presented before the pontiff in the Church of St. Peter. The Greek monarch, after three genuflexions, was permitted to kiss the feet of the holy father and to lead by its bridle his mule. But, though they might have the will, the popes had lost the power, and these great submissions were productive of no good. Thirty years subsequently, Manuel, the son and successor of Palæologus, took what might have seemed a more certain course. He travelled to Paris and to London to lay his distress before the kings of France and England; but he received only pity, not aid. At the Council of Constance Byzantine ambassadors appeared. It was, however, reserved for the synods of Ferrara and of Florence to mature, as far as might be, the negotiation. The second son of John Palæologus journeyed again into Italy, A.D. 1438; and while Eugenius was being deposed in the chamber at Basle, he was consummating the union of the East and West in the Cathedral of Florence. The Greek Church yields to the Latin. In the pulpit of that edifice, on the sixth of July of that year, a Roman cardinal and a Greek archbishop embraced each other before the people; Te Deum was chanted in Greek, mass was celebrated in Latin, and the Creed was read with the "Filioque." The successor of Constantine the Great had given up his religion, but he had received no equivalent – no aid. The state of the Church, its disorders and schisms, rendered any community of action in the West impossible.

Mohammed II. The last, the inevitable hour at length struck. Mohammed II. is said to have been a learned man, able to express himself in five different languages; skilful in mathematics, especially in their practical application to engineering; an admirer of the fine arts; prodigal in his liberality to Italian painters. In Asia Minor, as in Spain, there was free thinking among the disciples of the Prophet. It was affirmed that the sultan, in his moments of relaxation, was often heard to deride the religion of his country as an imposture. His doubts in that particular were, however, compensated for by his determination to carry out the intention of so many of his Mohammedan predecessors – the seizure of Constantinople.

The siege of Constantinople. At this time the venerable city had so greatly declined that it contained only 100,000 inhabitants – out of them only 4970 able or willing to bear arms. The besieging force was more than a quarter of a million of men. As Mohammed pressed forward his works, the despairing emperor in vain looked for the long-promised effectual Western aid. In its extremity, the devoted metropolis was divided by religious feuds; and when a Latin priest officiated in St. Sophia, there were many who exclaimed that they would rather see the turban of the sultan than the tiara of the pope. In several particulars the siege of Constantinople marked out the end of old ages and the beginning of new. Its walls were shaken by the battering rams of the past, and overthrown by cannon, just then coming into general use. Upon a plank road, shipping was passed through the open country, in the darkness of a single night, a distance of ten miles. The works were pushed forward toward the walls, on the top of which the sentinels at length could hear the shouts of the Turks by their nocturnal fires. They were sounds such as Constantinople might well listen to. She had taught something different for many a long year. "God is God; there is none but God." In the streets an image of the Virgin was carried in solemn procession. Now or never she must come to the help of those who had done so much for her, who had made her a queen in heaven and a goddess upon earth. The cry of her worshippers was in vain.

Fall of the city. On May 29th, 1453, the assault was delivered. Constantine Palæologus, the last of the Roman emperors, putting off his purple, that no man might recognize and insult his corpse when the catastrophe was over, fell, as became a Roman emperor, in the breach. After his death resistance ceased, and the victorious Turks poured into the town. To the Church of St. Sophia there rushed a promiscuous crowd of women and children, priests, monks, religious virgins, and – men. Superstitious to the last, in this supreme moment they expected the fulfilment of a prophecy that, when the Turks should have forced their way to the square before that church, their progress would be arrested, for an angel with a sword in his hand would descend from heaven and save the city of the Lord. The Turks burst into the square, but the angel never came.

More than two thirds of the inhabitants of Constantinople were carried prisoners into the Turkish camp – the men for servitude, the women for a still more evil fate. The churches were sacked. From the dome of St. Sophia its glories were torn down. The divine images, for the sake of which Christendom had been sundered in former days, unresistingly submitted to the pious rage of the Mohammedans without working a single miracle, and, stripped of their gems and gold, were brought to their proper value in the vile uses of kitchens and stables. On that same day the Muezzin ascended the loftiest turret of St. Sophia, and over the City of the Trinity proclaimed the Oneness of God. The sultan performed his prayers at the great altar, directing the edifice to be purified from its idolatries and consecrated to the worship of God. Thence he repaired to the palace, and, reflecting on the instability of human prosperity, repeated, as he entered it, the Persian verse: "The spider has woven his web in the imperial palace; the owl hath sung her watch song on the towers of Afrasiab."

This solemn event – the fall of Constantinople – accomplished, there was no need of any reconciliation of the Greek and Latin Churches. The sword of Mohammed had settled their dispute. Constantinople had submitted to the fate of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Carthage. Terror of Christendom at the fall of Constantinople. Christendom was struck with consternation. The advance of the Turks in Europe was now very rapid. Corinth and Athens fell, and the reduction of Greece was completed. The confines of Italy were approached A.D. 1461. The Mohammedan flag confronted that peninsula along the Adriatic coast. In twenty years more Italy was invaded. Otranto was taken; its bishop killed at the door of his church. At this period, it was admitted that the Turkish infantry, cavalry, and artillery were the best in the world. Soliman the Magnificent took Belgrade A.D. 1520. Progress of the Turks. Nine years afterwards the Turks besieged Vienna, but were repulsed. Soliman now prepared for the subjugation of Italy, and was only diverted from it by an accident which turned him upon the Venetians. It was not until the battle of Lepanto that the Turkish advance was fairly checked. Even as it was, in the complicated policy and intrigues of Europe its different sovereigns could not trust one another; their common faith had ceased to be a common bond: in all it had been weakened, in some destroyed. Æneas Sylvius, speaking of Christendom, says, "It is a body without a head, a republic without laws or magistrates. The pope or the emperor may shine as lofty titles, an splendid images; but they are unable to command, and no one is willing to obey." But, during this period of Turkish aggression, had not the religious dissensions of Christendom been decently composed, there was imminent danger that Europe would have been Mohammedanized. A bitter experience of past ages, as well as of the present, had taught it that the Roman Church was utterly powerless against such attacks. Safety was to be looked for, not in any celestial aid, but in physical knowledge and pecuniary resources, carried out in the organization of armies and fleets. Had her authority been derived from the source she pretended, she should have found an all-sufficient protection in prayer – indeed, not even that should have been required. Men discovered at last that her Litanies and her miracles were equally of no use, and that she must trust, like any other human tyranny, to cannon and the sword.

Effect of the Turkish invasion. The Turkish aggression led to the staying of the democratic outbreak in the bosom of the Church – the abstaining for a season from any farther sapping of the papal autocracy. It was necessary that ecclesiastical disputes, if they could not be ended, should, at all events, be kept for a time in abeyance, and so indeed they were, until the pent-up dissensions burst forth in "the Reformation." And thus, as we have related, by Mohammedan knowledge in the West, papal Christianity was well-nigh brought to ruin; thus, by a strange paradox, the Mohammedan sword in the East gave it for a little longer a renewed lease of political power, though never again of life.

Nicolas V. a patron of art. To Nicolas V., a learned and able pope, the catastrophe of Constantinople was the death-blow. He had been the intimate friend of Cosmo de' Medici, and from him had imbibed a taste for letters and art, but, like his patron, he had no love for liberty. It was thus through commerce that the papacy first learned to turn to art. The ensuing development of Europe was really based on the commerce of upper Italy, and not upon the Church. The statesmen of Florence were the inventors of the balance of power. A lover of literature, Nicolas was the founder of the Vatican Library. He clearly perceived the only course in which the Roman system could be directed; that it was unfit for, and, indeed, incompatible with science, but might be brought into unison with art. Its influence upon the reason was gone, but the senses yet remained for it. Gradual rise of the fine arts. In continuing his policy, the succeeding popes acted with wisdom. They gratified the genius of their institutions, of their country, and their age. In the abundant leisure of monasteries, the monks had found occupation in the illumination of manuscripts. From the execution of miniatures they gradually rose to an undertaking of greater works. In that manner painting had originated in Italy in the twelfth century. Sculpture, at first merged in architecture, had extricated herself from that bondage in the fourteenth. The mendicant orders, acquiring wealth, became munificent patrons. From caligraphic illustrations to the grand works of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle is a prodigious advance, yet it took but a short time to accomplish it.

Review of the Age of Faith. I have now completed the history of the European Age of Faith as far as is necessary for the purposes of this book. It embraces a period of more than a thousand years, counting from the reign of Constantine. It remains to consider the intellectual peculiarity that marks the whole period – to review briefly the agents that exerted an influence upon it and conducted it to its close.

Philosophical peculiarities of the Age of Faith. Philosophically, the most remarkable peculiarity is the employment of a false logic, a total misconception of the nature of evidence. It is illustrated by miracle-proofs, trial by battle, ordeal tests, and a universal belief in supernatural agency even for objectless purposes. On the principles of this logic, if the authenticity of a thing or the proof of a statement be required, it is supposed to be furnished by an astounding illustration of something else. If the character of a princess is assailed, she offers a champion; he proves victorious, and therefore she was not frail. The character of its logic. If a national assembly, after a long discussion, cannot decide "whether children should inherit the property of their father during the lifetime of their grandfather," an equal number of equal combatants is chosen for each side; they fight; the champions of the children prevail, and therefore the law is fixed in their favour. A relic of some martyr is bought at a great price; no one seeks to criticize the channel through which it has come, but every one asks, Can it work a miracle? A vast institution demands the implicit obedience of all men. It justifies its claim, not by the history of the past, but by promises and threats of the future. A decrepit crone is suspected of witchcraft. She is stripped naked and thrown into the nearest pond: if she sinks, she is innocent; if she swims, she is in commerce with the Devil. In all such cases the intrinsic peculiarity of the logic is obvious enough; it shows a complete misconception of the nature of evidence. Its adoption of supernaturalism. Yet this ratiocination governed Europe for a thousand years, giving birth to those marvellous and supernatural explanations of physical phenomena and events upon which we now look back with unfeigned surprise, half disbelieving that it was possible for our ancestors to have credited such things. The Jews and Saracens destroy supernaturalism. Against this preposterous logic the Mohammedans and Jews struck the first blows. We have already heard what Algazzali the Arabian says respecting the enchanter who would prove that three are more than ten by changing a stick into a serpent. The circumstances under which the Jewish physicians acted we shall consider presently.

It will not be useless to devote a little space to this belief in the supernatural. It offers an opportunity of showing how false notions may become universal, embody themselves in law and practical life, and wonderful to be said, how they may, without anything being done to destroy them, vanish from sight of themselves, like night-spectres before the day. At present we only encounter them among the lowest peasant grades, or among those who have been purposely kept in the most abject state of ignorance. Less than a century ago the clergy of Spain wished to have the Opera prohibited, because that ungodly entertainment had given rise to a want of rain; but now, in a country so intellectually backward as that – a witch was burnt there so lately as A.D. 1781 – such an attempt would call up sly wit, and make the rabble of Madrid suspect that the archbishop was smarting under the rivalry of the prima donna, and that he was furbishing up the rusty ecclesiastical enginery to sustain his cause.

Respective influence of the clergy, the lawyers, and physicians. In the day of their power the ecclesiastical profession were the supporters of this delusion. They found it suitable to their interests, and, by dint of at first persuading others to believe, they at last, by habit, came to believe in it themselves. The Mohammedans and Jews were the first to assail it philosophically and by sarcasm, but its final ruin was brought about by the action of the two other professions, the legal and the medical. The lawyers, whose advent to power is seen in the history of Philip the Fair, and whose rise from that time was very rapid, were obliged to introduce the true methods of evidence; the physicians, from their pursuits, were perpetually led to the material explanation of natural phenomena in contradistinction to the mystical. It is to the honour of both these professions that they never sought for a perpetuation of power by schemes of vast organization, never attempted to delude mankind by stupendous impostures, never compelled them to desist from the expression of their thoughts, and even from thinking, by alliances with civil power. Far from being the determined antagonists of human knowledge, they uniformly fostered it, and, in its trials, defended it. The lawyers were hated because they replaced supernatural logic by philosophical logic; the physicians, because they broke down the profitable but mendacious system of miracle-cures.

Position of the Church. Yet the Church is not without excuse. In all her varied history it was impossible to disentangle her from the principles which at the beginning had entered into her political organization. For good or evil, right or wrong, her necessity required that she should put herself forth as the possessor of all knowledge within the reach of human intellect – the infallible arbitress of every question that should arise among men. Doubtless it was a splendid imposture, capable for a time of yielding great results, but sooner or later certain to be unmasked. Early discovering the antagonism of science, which could not fail, in due season, to subject her pretensions to investigation, she lent herself to a systematic delusion of the illiterate, and thereby tried to put off that fatal day when creeds engendered in the darkness would have to be examined in the light, enforcing her attempt with an unsparing, often with a bloody hand. She could not extricate herself from her false position. It was for this reason that, when the inevitable time of trial came, no intellectual defence could be made in her behalf, and hence there only remained a recourse to physical and political compulsion. But such a compulsion, under such circumstances, is not only a testimony to the intrinsic weakness of that for which it is invoked, it is also a token that they who resort to it have lost all faith in any inherent power of the system they are supporting, and that, in truth, it is fast coming to an end.

Successive order in supernatural ideas. The reader will remark, from the incidents connected with supernatural delusions now to be related, that they follow a law of continuous variation, the particular embodiment they assumed changing with the condition of the human mind at each epoch under examination. For ages they are implicitly believed in by all classes; then, to a few, but the number perpetually increasing, they become an idle story of bare-faced imposture. At last humanity wakens from its delusion – its dream. The final rejection of the whole, in spite of the wonderful amount of testimony which for ages had accumulated, occurs spontaneously the moment that pyschical development has reached a certain point. There can be no more striking illustration of the definite advancement of the human mind. The boy who is terror-stricken in a dark room insensibly dismisses his idle fears as he grows up to be a man.

Oriental magicians – Simon Magus. Clemens Romanus and Anastasius Sinaita, speaking of Simon Magus, say that he could make himself invisible; that he formed a man out of air; that he could pass bodily through mountains without being obstructed thereby; that he could fly and sit unharmed in flames; that he constructed animated statues and self-moving furniture, and not only changed his countenance into the similitude of many other men, but that his whole body could be transformed into the shape of a goat, a sheep, a snake; that, as he walked in the street, he cast many shadows in different directions; that he could make trees suddenly spring up in desert places; and, on one occasion, compelled an enchanted sickle to go into a field and reap twice as much in one day as if it had been used by a man. Greek thaumaturgists. Of Apollonius of Tyana we are told that, after an unbroken silence of five years, he comprehended the languages of all animals and all men; that, under circumstances very picturesquely related, he detected the genius of a plague at Ephesus, and dragged him, self-convicted, before the people; that, at the wedding-dinner of Menippus, he caused all the dishes and viands to vanish, thereby compelling the bride to acknowledge that she was a vampire, intending to eat the flesh and lap the blood of her husband in the night; that he exhibited the prodigy of being in many places at the same time; raised a young woman from the dead; and, finally, weary of the world, ascended bodily into heaven.

Introduction of an Arabian element. As Arabian influence spread, ideas of Oriental aspect appear. There are peris who live on perfumes, and divs who are poisoned by them; enchanted palaces; moving statues; veiled prophets, like Mokanna; brazen flying horses; charmed arrows; dervises who can project their soul into the body of a dead animal, giving it temporary life; enchanted rings, to make the wearer invisible, or give him two different bodies at the same time; ghouls who live in cemeteries, and at night eat the flesh of dead men. As the European counterpart of these Perso-Arabic ideas, there are fairies, and their dancing by moonlight, their tampering with children, and imposing changelings on horror-stricken mothers. Introduction of European sorcery and witchcraft. Every one believes that rain and wind may be purchased of wizards, and that fair weather may be obtained and storms abated by prayer. Whoever attains to wealth or eminence does so by a compact with Satan, signed with blood. The head of the Church, Sylvester II., makes a brazen head, which speaks to him prophetically. He finds underground treasures in a subterranean magic palace beneath a mountain. The protestator of the Greek emperor is accused of a conspiracy against his master's life by making invisible men. Robert Grostête, the Bishop of Lincoln, makes another speaking head. Nay, more, Albertus Magnus constructs a complete brazen man, so cunningly contrived as to serve him for a domestic. This was at the time that Thomas Aquinas was living with him. The household trouble arising from the excessive garrulity of this simulacrum grew so intolerable – for it was incessantly making mischief among the other inmates – that Thomas, unable to bear it any longer, took a hammer and broke the troublesome android to pieces. These ideas infect all classes. This reverend father, known among his contemporaries as the "seraphic doctor," was not without experience in the mysterious craft. Annoyed by the frequent passing of horses near his dwelling, he constructed a magical horse of brass, and buried it in the road. From that moment no animal could be made to pass his door. Among brazen heads of great celebrity is that of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungy. This oracle announced, "Time is; time was; time is passed;" perhaps it was some kind of clock. The alchemist Peter d'Apono had seven spirits in glass bottles. He had entrapped them by baiting with distilled dew, and imprisoned them safely by dexterously putting in the corks. He is the same who possessed a secret which it is greatly to be regretted that he did not divulge for the benefit of chemists who have come after him, that, whatever money he paid, within the space of one hour's time came back of itself again into his pocket. That was better than even the philosopher's stone.

Modifications of supernaturalism. These supernatural notions were at different times modified by two intrusive elements, the first being the Perso-Arabic just alluded to, the second derived from the north of Europe. This element was witchcraft; for, though long before, among Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, decrepit women were known as witches – as the Thessalian crone who raised a corpse from the dead for Sextus by lashing it with a snake – it was not until a later period that this element was fairly developed. The persecutions for witchcraft. A bull of Pope Innocent VIII., published A.D. 1484, says, "It has come to our ears that numbers of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with the infernal fiends, and that by their sorceries they afflict both man and beast. They blight the marriage-bed; destroy the births of women and the increase of cattle; they blast the corn on the ground, the grapes in the vineyard, the fruits of the trees, and the grass and herbs of the field." At this time, therefore, the head of the Church had not relinquished a belief in these delusions. The consequences of the punishment he ordained were very dreadful. In the valleys of the Alps many hundred aged women were committed to the flames under an accusation of denying Christ, dishonouring the crucifix, and solemnizing a devil's sabbath in company with the fiend. Such persecutions, begun by papal authority, continued among illiterate zealots till late times, and, as is well known, were practised even in America. Very masculine minds fell into these delusions. Thus Luther, in his work on the abuses attendant on private masses, says that he had conferences with the Devil on that subject, passing many bitter nights and much restless and wearisome repose; that once, in particular, Satan came to him in the dead of the night, when he was just awakened out of sleep. Experiences of Luther. "The Devil," says Luther, "knows well enough how to construct his arguments, and to urge them with the skill of a master. He delivers himself with a grave and yet with a shrill voice. Nor does he use circumlocutions and beat about the bush, but excels in forcible statements and quick rejoinders. I no longer wonder that the persons whom he assails in this way are occasionally found dead in their beds. He is able to compress and throttle, and more than once he has so assaulted me and driven my soul into a corner that I have felt as if the next moment it must leave my body. I am of opinion that Gesner and Œcolampadius came in that manner to their deaths. The Devil's manner of opening a debate is pleasant enough, but he soon urges things so peremptorily that the respondent in a short time knows not how to acquit himself."

English wizards – Scotch witches. Social eminence is no preservative from social delusion. When it was affirmed that Agnes Sampson, with two hundred other Scotch witches, had sailed in sieves from Leith to North Berwick church to hold a banquet with the Devil, James I. had the torture applied to the wretched woman, and took pleasure in putting appropriate questions to her after the racking had been duly prolonged. It then came out that the two hundred crones had baptized and drowned a black cat, thereby raising a dreadful storm in which the ship that carried the king narrowly escaped being wrecked. Upon this Agnes was condemned to the flames. She died protesting her innocence, and piteously calling on Jesus to have mercy on her, for Christian men would not. On the accession of James to the English throne he procured an act of Parliament against any one convicted of witchcraft, sorcery, or enchantment, or having commerce with the Devil. Under this monstrous statute many persons suffered. At this time England was intellectually in a very backward state. French and English legal proceedings. The statute remained until 1736 unrepealed. The French preceded the English in putting a stop to these atrocities; for Louis XIV., A.D. 1672, by an order in council, forbade the tribunals from inflicting penalty in accusations of sorcery.