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Title: Tolerance
Author: Hendrik Willem Van Loon
Release date: November 25, 2024 [eBook #74798]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Boni & Liveright
Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOLERANCE ***
TOLERANCE
TOLERANCE
_By_
HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON
_The final end of the State consists not in dominating over
men, restraining them by fear, subjecting them to the will of
others. Rather it has for its end so to act that its citizens
shall in security develop soul and body and make free use of
their reason. For the true end of the State is Liberty._
SPINOZA.
_Farewell, good Sirs, I am leaving for the future. I will wait
for Humanity at the crossroads, three hundred years hence._
LUIGI LUCATELLI.
[Illustration]
_NEW YORK_
BONI & LIVERIGHT
1925
COPYRIGHT 1925 [Illustration] BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
[Illustration]
TO THE MEMORY OF
JOHN W. T. NICHOLS
CONTENTS
PAGE
PROLOGUE 11
CHAPTER
I. THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE 17
II. THE GREEKS 28
III. THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT 68
IV. THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 80
V. IMPRISONMENT 104
VI. THE PURE OF LIFE 114
VII. THE INQUISITION 126
VIII. THE CURIOUS ONES 146
IX. THE WAR UPON THE PRINTED WORD 160
X. CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN GENERAL
AND THIS BOOK IN PARTICULAR 168
XI. RENAISSANCE 172
XII. THE REFORMATION 181
XIII. ERASMUS 195
XIV. RABELAIS 212
XV. NEW SIGNBOARDS FOR OLD 223
XVI. THE ANABAPTISTS 246
XVII. THE SOZZINI FAMILY 257
XVIII. MONTAIGNE 269
XIX. ARMINIUS 275
XX. BRUNO 286
XXI. SPINOZA 292
XXII. THE NEW ZION 307
XXIII. THE SUN KING 321
XXIV. FREDERICK THE GREAT 326
XXV. VOLTAIRE 330
XXVI. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA 352
XXVII. THE INTOLERANCE OF REVOLUTION 361
XXVIII. LESSING 372
XXIX. TOM PAINE 387
XXX. THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS 393
TOLERANCE
TOLERANCE
PROLOGUE
Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.
To the north, to the south, to the west and to the east stretched the
ridges of the Hills Everlasting.
A little stream of Knowledge trickled slowly through a deep worn gully.
It came out of the Mountains of the Past.
It lost itself in the Marshes of the Future.
It was not much, as rivers go. But it was enough for the humble needs of
the villagers.
In the evening, when they had watered their cattle and had filled their
casks, they were content to sit down to enjoy life.
The Old Men Who Knew were brought forth from the shady corners where they
had spent their day, pondering over the mysterious pages of an old book.
They mumbled strange words to their grandchildren, who would have
preferred to play with the pretty pebbles, brought down from distant
lands.
Often these words were not very clear.
But they were writ a thousand years ago by a forgotten race. Hence they
were holy.
For in the Valley of Ignorance, whatever was old was venerable. And those
who dared to gainsay the wisdom of the fathers were shunned by all decent
people.
And so they kept their peace.
Fear was ever with them. What if they should be refused the common share
of the products of the garden?
Vague stories there were, whispered at night among the narrow streets
of the little town, vague stories of men and women who had dared to ask
questions.
They had gone forth, and never again had they been seen.
A few had tried to scale the high walls of the rocky range that hid the
sun.
Their whitened bones lay at the foot of the cliffs.
The years came and the years went by.
Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.
* * * * *
Out of the darkness crept a man.
The nails of his hands were torn.
His feet were covered with rags, red with the blood of long marches.
He stumbled to the door of the nearest hut and knocked.
Then he fainted. By the light of a frightened candle, he was carried to a
cot.
In the morning throughout the village it was known: “He has come back.”
The neighbors stood around and shook their heads. They had always known
that this was to be the end.
Defeat and surrender awaited those who dared to stroll away from the foot
of the mountains.
And in one corner of the village the Old Men shook their heads and
whispered burning words.
They did not mean to be cruel, but the Law was the Law. Bitterly this man
had sinned against the wishes of Those Who Knew.
As soon as his wounds were healed he must be brought to trial.
They meant to be lenient.
They remembered the strange, burning eyes of his mother. They recalled
the tragedy of his father, lost in the desert these thirty years ago.
The Law, however, was the Law; and the Law must be obeyed.
The Men Who Knew would see to that.
* * * * *
They carried the wanderer to the Market Place, and the people stood
around in respectful silence.
He was still weak from hunger and thirst and the Elders bade him sit down.
He refused.
They ordered him to be silent.
But he spoke.
Upon the Old Men he turned his back and his eyes sought those who but a
short time before had been his comrades.
“Listen to me,” he implored. “Listen to me and be rejoiced. I have come
back from beyond the mountains. My feet have trod a fresh soil. My hands
have felt the touch of other races. My eyes have seen wondrous sights.
“When I was a child, my world was the garden of my father.
“To the west and to the east, to the south and to the north lay the
ranges from the Beginning of Time.
“When I asked what they were hiding, there was a hush and a hasty shaking
of heads. When I insisted, I was taken to the rocks and shown the
bleached bones of those who had dared to defy the Gods.
“When I cried out and said, ‘It is a lie! The Gods love those who are
brave!’ the Men Who Knew came and read to me from their sacred books. The
Law, they explained, had ordained all things of Heaven and Earth. The
Valley was ours to have and to hold. The animals and the flowers, the
fruit and the fishes were ours, to do our bidding. But the mountains were
of the Gods. What lay beyond was to remain unknown until the End of Time.
“So they spoke, and they lied. They lied to me, even as they have lied to
you.
“There are pastures in those hills. Meadows too, as rich as any. And men
and women of our own flesh and blood. And cities resplendent with the
glories of a thousand years of labor.
“I have found the road to a better home. I have seen the promise of a
happier life. Follow me and I shall lead you thither. For the smile of
the Gods is the same there as here and everywhere.”
* * * * *
He stopped and there went up a great cry of horror.
“Blasphemy!” cried the Old Men. “Blasphemy and sacrilege! A fit
punishment for his crime! He has lost his reason. He dares to scoff at
the Law as it was written down a thousand years ago. He deserves to die!”
And they took up heavy stones.
And they killed him.
And his body they threw at the foot of the cliffs, that it might lie
there as a warning to all who questioned the wisdom of the ancestors.
* * * * *
Then it happened a short time later that there was a great drought. The
little Brook of Knowledge ran dry. The cattle died of thirst. The harvest
perished in the fields, and there was hunger in the Valley of Ignorance.
The Old Men Who Knew, however, were not disheartened. Everything would
all come right in the end, they prophesied, for so it was writ in their
most Holy Chapters.
Besides, they themselves needed but little food. They were so very old.
* * * * *
Winter came.
The village was deserted.
More than half of the populace died from sheer want.
The only hope for those who survived lay beyond the mountains.
But the Law said “No!”
And the Law must be obeyed.
* * * * *
One night there was a rebellion.
Despair gave courage to those whom fear had forced into silence.
Feebly the Old Men protested.
They were pushed aside. They complained of their lot. They bewailed the
ingratitude of their children, but when the last wagon pulled out of the
village, they stopped the driver and forced him to take them along.
The flight into the unknown had begun.
* * * * *
It was many years since the Wanderer had returned. It was no easy task to
discover the road he had mapped out.
Thousands fell a victim to hunger and thirst before the first cairn was
found.
From there on the trip was less difficult.
The careful pioneer had blazed a clear trail through the woods and amidst
the endless wilderness of rock.
By easy stages it led to the green pastures of the new land.
Silently the people looked at each other.
“He was right after all,” they said. “He was right, and the Old Men were
wrong....
“He spoke the truth, and the Old Men lied....
“His bones lie rotting at the foot of the cliffs, but the Old Men sit in
our carts and chant their ancient lays....
“He saved us, and we slew him....
“We are sorry that it happened, but of course, if we could have known at
the time....”
Then they unharnessed their horses and their oxen and they drove their
cows and their goats into the pastures and they built themselves houses
and laid out their fields and they lived happily for a long time
afterwards.
* * * * *
A few years later an attempt was made to bury the brave pioneer in the
fine new edifice which had been erected as a home for the Wise Old Men.
A solemn procession went back to the now deserted valley, but when the
spot was reached where his body ought to have been, it was no longer
there.
A hungry jackal had dragged it to his lair.
A small stone was then placed at the foot of the trail (now a magnificent
highway). It gave the name of the man who had first defied the dark
terror of the unknown, that his people might be guided into a new freedom.
And it stated that it had been erected by a grateful posterity.
* * * * *
As it was in the beginning—as it is now—and as some day (so we hope) it
shall no longer be.
CHAPTER I
THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE
In the year 527 Flavius Anicius Justinianus became ruler of the eastern
half of the Roman Empire.
This Serbian peasant (he came from Uskub, the much disputed railroad
junction of the late war) had no use for “book-learnin’.” It was by
his orders that the ancient Athenian school of philosophy was finally
suppressed. And it was he who closed the doors of the only Egyptian
temple that had continued to do business centuries after the valley of
the Nile had been invaded by the monks of the new Christian faith.
This temple stood on a little island called Philae, not far from the
first great waterfall of the Nile. Ever since men could remember, the
spot had been dedicated to the worship of Isis and for some curious
reason, the Goddess had survived where all her African and Greek and
Roman rivals had miserably perished. Until finally, in the sixth
century, the island was the only spot where the old and most holy art of
picture writing was still understood and where a small number of priests
continued to practice a trade which had been forgotten in every other
part of the land of Cheops.
And now, by order of an illiterate farmhand, known as His Imperial
Majesty, the temple and the adjoining school were declared state
property, the statues and images were sent to the museum of
Constantinople and the priests and the writing-masters were thrown into
jail. And when the last of them had died from hunger and neglect, the
age-old trade of making hieroglyphics had become a lost art.
All this was a great pity.
If Justinian (a plague upon his head!) had been a little less thorough
and had saved just a few of those old picture experts in a sort of
literary Noah’s Ark, he would have made the task of the historian a
great deal easier. For while (owing to the genius of Champollion) we can
once more spell out the strange Egyptian words, it remains exceedingly
difficult for us to understand the inner meaning of their message to
posterity.
And the same holds true for all other nations of the ancient world.
What did those strangely bearded Babylonians, who left us whole
brickyards full of religious tracts, have in mind when they exclaimed
piously, “Who shall ever be able to understand the counsel of the Gods
in Heaven?” How did they feel towards those divine spirits which they
invoked so continually, whose laws they endeavored to interpret, whose
commands they engraved upon the granite shafts of their most holy city?
Why were they at once the most tolerant of men, encouraging their priests
to study the high heavens, and to explore the land and the sea, and
at the same time the most cruel of executioners, inflicting hideous
punishments upon those of their neighbors who had committed some breach
of divine etiquette which today would pass unnoticed?
Until recently we did not know.
We sent expeditions to Nineveh, we dug holes in the sand of Sinai and
deciphered miles of cuneiform tablets. And everywhere in Mesopotamia and
Egypt we did our best to find the key that should unlock the front door
of this mysterious store-house of wisdom.
And then, suddenly and almost by accident, we discovered that the back
door had been wide open all the time and that we could enter the premises
at will.
But that convenient little gate was not situated in the neighborhood of
Akkad or Memphis.
It stood in the very heart of the jungle.
And it was almost hidden by the wooden pillars of a pagan temple.
* * * * *
Our ancestors, in search of easy plunder, had come in contact with what
they were pleased to call “wild men” or “savages.”
The meeting had not been a pleasant one.
The poor heathen, misunderstanding the intentions of the white men, had
welcomed them with a salvo of spears and arrows.
The visitors had retaliated with their blunderbusses.
After that there had been little chance for a quiet and unprejudiced
exchange of ideas.
The savage was invariably depicted as a dirty, lazy, good-for-nothing
loafer who worshiped crocodiles and dead trees and deserved all that was
coming to him.
Then came the reaction of the eighteenth century. Jean Jacques Rousseau
began to contemplate the world through a haze of sentimental tears.
His contemporaries, much impressed by his ideas, pulled out their
handkerchiefs and joined in the weeping.
The benighted heathen was one of their most favorite subjects. In their
hands (although they had never seen one) he became the unfortunate victim
of circumstances and the true representative of all those manifold
virtues of which the human race had been deprived by three thousand years
of a corrupt system of civilization.
Today, at least in this particular field of investigation, we know better.
We study primitive man as we study the higher domesticated animals, from
which as a rule he is not so very far removed.
In most instances we are fully repaid for our trouble. The savage,
but for the grace of God, is our own self under much less favorable
conditions. By examining him carefully we begin to understand the early
society of the valley of the Nile and of the peninsula of Mesopotamia
and by knowing him thoroughly we get a glimpse of many of those strange
hidden instincts which lie buried deep down beneath the thin crust of
manners and customs which our own species of mammal has acquired during
the last five thousand years.
This encounter is not always flattering to our pride. On the other hand a
realization of the conditions from which we have escaped, together with
an appreciation of the many things that have actually been accomplished,
can only tend to give us new courage for the work in hand and if anything
it will make us a little more tolerant towards those among our distant
cousins who have failed to keep up the pace.
This is not a handbook of anthropology.
It is a volume dedicated to the subject of tolerance.
But tolerance is a very broad theme.
The temptation to wander will be great. And once we leave the beaten
track, Heaven alone knows where we will land.
I therefore suggest that I be given half a page to state exactly and
specifically what I mean by tolerance.
Language is one of the most deceptive inventions of the human race and
all definitions are bound to be arbitrary. It therefore behooves an
humble student to go to that authority which is accepted as final by
the largest number of those who speak the language in which this book is
written.
I refer to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
There on page 1052 of volume XXVI stands written: “Tolerance (from Latin
_tolerare_—to endure):—The allowance of freedom of action or judgment
to other people, the patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from
one’s own or the generally received course or view.”
There may be other definitions but for the purpose of this book I shall
let myself be guided by the words of the Britannica.
And having committed myself (for better or worse) to a definite policy, I
shall return to my savages and tell you what I have been able to discover
about tolerance in the earliest forms of society of which we have any
record.
* * * * *
It is still generally believed that primitive society was very simple,
that primitive language consisted of a few simple grunts and that
primitive man possessed a degree of liberty which was lost only when the
world became “complex.”
The investigations of the last fifty years made by explorers and
missionaries and doctors among the aborigines of central Africa and the
Polar regions and Polynesia show the exact opposite. Primitive society
was exceedingly complicated, primitive language had more forms and tenses
and declensions than Russian or Arabic, and primitive man was a slave not
only to the present, but also to the past and to the future; in short, an
abject and miserable creature who lived in fear and died in terror.
This may seem far removed from the popular picture of brave red-skins
merrily roaming the prairies in search of buffaloes and scalps, but it is
a little nearer to the truth.
And how could it have been otherwise?
I have read the stories of many miracles.
But one of them was lacking; the miracle of the survival of man.
How and in what manner and why the most defenseless of all mammals should
have been able to maintain himself against microbes and mastodons and ice
and heat and eventually become master of all creation, is something I
shall not try to solve in the present chapter.
One thing, however, is certain. He never could have accomplished all this
alone.
In order to succeed he was obliged to sink his individuality in the
composite character of the tribe.
* * * * *
Primitive society therefore was dominated by a single idea, an
all-overpowering desire to survive.
This was very difficult.
And as a result all other considerations were sacrificed to the one
supreme demand—to live.
The individual counted for nothing, the community at large counted for
everything, and the tribe became a roaming fortress which lived by itself
and for itself and of itself and found safety only in exclusiveness.
But the problem was even more complicated than at first appears. What
I have just said held good only for the visible world, and the visible
world in those early times was a negligible quantity compared to the
realm of the invisible.
In order to understand this fully we must remember that primitive people
are different from ourselves. They are not familiar with the law of cause
and effect.
If I sit me down among the poison ivy, I curse my negligence, send
for the doctor and tell my young son to get rid of the stuff as soon
as he can. My ability to recognize cause and effect tells me that the
poison ivy has caused the rash, that the doctor will be able to give me
something that will make the itch stop and that the removal of the vine
will prevent a repetition of this painful experience.
The true savage would act quite differently. He would not connect the
rash with the poison ivy at all. He lives in a world in which past,
present and future are inextricably interwoven. All his dead leaders
survive as Gods and his dead neighbors survive as spirits and they all
continue to be invisible members of the clan and they accompany each
individual member wherever he goes. They eat with him and sleep with him
and they stand watch over his door. It is his business to keep them at
arm’s length or gain their friendship. If ever he fail to do this he will
be immediately punished and as he cannot possibly know how to please all
those spirits all the time, he is in constant fear of that misfortune
which comes as the revenge of the Gods.
He therefore reduces every event that is at all out of the ordinary
not to a primary cause but to interference on the part of an invisible
spirit and when he notices a rash on his arms he does not say, “Damn that
poison ivy!” but he mumbles, “I have offended a God. The God has punished
me,” and he runs to the medicine-man, not however to get a lotion to
counteract the poison of the ivy but to get a “charm” that shall prove
stronger than the charm which the irate God (and not the ivy) has thrown
upon him.
As for the ivy, the primary cause of all his suffering, he lets it grow
right there where it has always grown. And if perchance the white man
comes with a can of kerosene and burns the shrub down, he will curse him
for his trouble.
It follows that a society in which everything happens as the result of
the direct personal interference on the part of an invisible being must
depend for its continued existence upon a strict obedience of such laws
as seem to appease the wrath of the Gods.
Such a law, according to the opinion of a savage, existed. His ancestors
had devised it and had bestowed it upon him and it was his most sacred
duty to keep that law intact and hand it over in its present and perfect
form to his own children.
This, of course, seems absurd to us. We firmly believe in progress, in
growth, in constant and uninterrupted improvement.
But “progress” is an expression that was coined only year before last,
and it is typical of all low forms of society that the people see no
possible reason why they should improve what (to them) is the best of all
possible worlds because they never knew any other.
* * * * *
Granted that all this be true, then how does one prevent a change in the
laws and in the established forms of society?
The answer is simple.
By the immediate punishment of those who refuse to regard common police
regulations as an expression of the divine will, or in plain language, by
a rigid system of intolerance.
* * * * *
If I hereby state that the savage was the most intolerant of human
beings, I do not mean to insult him, for I hasten to add that given the
circumstances under which he lived, it was his duty to be intolerant. Had
he allowed any one to interfere with the thousand and one rules upon
which his tribe depended for its continued safety and peace of mind, the
life of the tribe would have been put in jeopardy and that would have
been the greatest of all possible crimes.
But (and the question is worth asking) how could a group of people,
relatively limited in number, protect a most complex system of verbal
regulations when we in our own day with millions of soldiers and
thousands of policemen find it difficult to enforce a few plain laws?
Again the answer is simple.
The savage was a great deal cleverer than we are. He accomplished by
shrewd calculation what he could not do by force.
He invented the idea of “taboo.”
Perhaps the word “invented” is not the right expression. Such things are
rarely the product of a sudden inspiration. They are the result of long
years of growth and experiment. Let that be as it may, the wild men of
Africa and Polynesia devised the taboo, and thereby saved themselves a
great deal of trouble.
The word taboo is of Australian origin. We all know more or less what it
means. Our own world is full of taboos, things we simply must not do or
say, like mentioning our latest operation at the dinner table, or leaving
our spoon in our cup of coffee. But our taboos are never of a very
serious nature. They are part of the handbook of etiquette and rarely
interfere with our own personal happiness.
To primitive man, on the other hand, the taboo was of the utmost
importance.
It meant that certain persons or inanimate objects had been “set apart”
from the rest of the world, that they (to use the Hebrew equivalent) were
“holy” and must not be discussed or touched on pain of instant death and
everlasting torture. A fairly large order but woe unto him or her who
dared to disobey the will of the spirit-ancestors.
* * * * *
Whether the taboo was an invention of the priests or the priesthood was
created to maintain the taboo is a problem which had not yet been solved.
As tradition is much older than religion, it seems more than likely
that taboos existed long before the world had heard of sorcerers and
witch-doctors. But as soon as the latter had made their appearance, they
became the staunch supporters of the idea of taboo and used it with such
great virtuosity that the taboo became the “verboten” sign of prehistoric
ages.
When first we hear the names of Babylon and Egypt, those countries were
still in a state of development in which the taboo counted for a great
deal. Not a taboo in the crude and primitive form as it was afterwards
found in New Zealand, but solemnly transformed into negative rules of
conduct, the sort of “thou-shalt-not” decrees with which we are all
familiar through six of our Ten Commandments.
Needless to add that the idea of tolerance was entirely unknown in those
lands at that early age.
What we sometimes mistake for tolerance was merely indifference caused by
ignorance.
But we can find no trace of any willingness (however vague) on the part
of either kings or priests to allow others to exercise that “freedom of
action or judgment” or of that “patient and unprejudiced endurance of
dissent from the generally received cause or view” which has become the
ideal of our modern age.
* * * * *
Therefore, except in a very negative way, this book is not interested in
prehistoric history or what is commonly called “ancient history.”
The struggle for tolerance did not begin until after the discovery of the
individual.
And the credit for this, the greatest of all modern revelations, belongs
to the Greeks.
CHAPTER II
THE GREEKS
How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in a remote corner of the
Mediterranean was able to provide our world in less than two centuries
with the complete framework for all our present day experiments in
politics, literature, drama, sculpture, chemistry, physics and Heaven
knows what else, is a question which has puzzled a great many people for
a great many centuries and to which every philosopher, at one time or
another during his career, has tried to give an answer.
Respectable historians, unlike their colleagues of the chemical and
physical and astronomical and medical faculties, have always looked with
ill-concealed contempt upon all efforts to discover what one might call
“the laws of history.” What holds good of polliwogs and microbes and
shooting stars seems to have no business within the realm of human beings.
I may be very much mistaken, but it seems to me that there must be such
laws. It is true that thus far we have not discovered many of them.
But then again we have never looked very hard. We have been so busy
accumulating facts that we have had no time to boil them and liquefy them
and evaporate them and extract from them the few scraps of wisdom which
might be of some real value to our particular variety of mammal.
It is with considerable trepidation that I approach this new field
of research and taking a leaf out of the scientist’s book, offer the
following historical axiom.
According to the best knowledge of modern scientists, life (animate
existence as differentiated from inanimate existence) began when for once
all physical and chemical elements were present in the ideal proportion
necessary for the creation of the first living cell.
Translate this into terms of history and you get this:
“A sudden and apparently spontaneous outbreak of a very high form of
civilization is only possible when all the racial, climatic, economic and
political conditions are present in an ideal proportion or in as nearly
an ideal condition and proportion as they can be in this imperfect world.”
Let me elaborate this statement by a few negative observations.
A race with the brain development of a cave-man would not prosper, even
in Paradise.
Rembrandt would not have painted pictures, Bach would not have composed
fugues, Praxiteles would not have made statues if they had been born
in an igloo near Upernivik and had been obliged to spend most of their
waking hours watching a seal-hole in an ice-field.
Darwin would not have made his contributions to biology if he had been
obliged to gain his livelihood in a cotton mill in Lancashire. And
Alexander Graham Bell would not have invented the telephone if he had
been a conscripted serf and had lived in a remote village of the Romanow
domains.
In Egypt, where the first high form of civilization was found, the
climate was excellent, but the original inhabitants were not very robust
or enterprising, and political and economic conditions were decidedly
bad. The same held true of Babylonia and Assyria. The Semitic races which
afterwards moved into the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates
were strong and vigorous people. There was nothing the matter with the
climate. But the political and economic environment remained far from
good.
In Palestine the climate was nothing to boast of. Agriculture was
backward and there was little commerce outside of the caravan route
which passed through the country from Africa to Asia and vice versa.
Furthermore, in Palestine politics were entirely dominated by the priests
of the temple of Jerusalem and this of course did not encourage the
development of any sort of individual enterprise.
In Phoenicia, the climate was of little consequence. The race was strong
and trade conditions were good. The country, however, suffered from a
badly balanced economic system. A small class of ship owners had been
able to get hold of all the wealth and had established a rigid commercial
monopoly. Hence the government in Tyre and Sidon had at an early date
fallen into the hands of the very rich. The poor, deprived of all excuse
for the practice of a reasonable amount of industry, grew callous and
indifferent and Phoenicia eventually shared the fate of Carthage and went
to ruin through the short-sighted selfishness of her rulers.
In short, in every one of the early centers of civilization, certain of
the necessary elements for success were always lacking.
When the miracle of a perfect balance finally did occur, in Greece in
the fifth century before our era, it lasted only a very short time, and
strange to say, even then it did not take place in the mother country but
in the colonies across the Aegean Sea.
In another book I have given a description of those famous island-bridges
which connected the mainland of Asia with Europe and across which the
traders from Egypt and Babylonia and Crete since time immemorial had
traveled to Europe. The main point of embarkation, both for merchandise
and ideas bound from Asia to Europe, was to be found on the western coast
of Asia Minor in a strip of land known as Ionia.
A few hundred years before the Trojan war, this narrow bit of mountainous
territory, ninety miles long and only a few miles wide, had been
conquered by Greek tribes from the mainland who there had founded a
number of colonial towns of which Ephesus, Phocaea, Erythrae and Miletus
were the best known, and it was along those cities that at last the
conditions of success were present in such perfect proportion that
civilization reached a point which has sometimes been equaled but never
has been surpassed.
In the first place, these colonies were inhabited by the most active and
enterprising elements from among a dozen different nations.
In the second place, there was a great deal of general wealth derived
from the carrying trade between the old and the new world, between Europe
and Asia.
In the third place, the form of government under which the colonists
lived gave the majority of the freemen a chance to develop their talents
to the very best of their ability.
If I do not mention the climate, the reason is this; that in countries
devoted exclusively to commerce, the climate does not matter much. Ships
can be built and goods can be unloaded, rain or shine. Provided it does
not get so cold that the harbors freeze or so wet that the towns are
flooded, the inhabitants will take very little interest in the daily
weather reports.
But aside from this, the weather of Ionia was distinctly favorable to
the development of an intellectual class. Before the existence of books
and libraries, learning was handed down from man to man by word of mouth
and the town-pump was the earliest of all social centers and the oldest
of universities.
In Miletus it was possible to sit around the town-pump for 350 out of
every 365 days. And the early Ionian professors made such excellent use
of their climatic advantages that they became the pioneers of all future
scientific development.
The first of whom we have any report, the real founder of modern
science, was a person of doubtful origin. Not in the sense that he had
robbed a bank or murdered his family and had fled to Miletus from parts
unknown. But no one knew much about his antecedents. Was he a Boeotian
or a Phoenician, a Nordic (to speak in the jargon of our learned racial
experts) or a Semite?
It shows what an international center this little old city at the mouth
of the Meander was in those days. Its population (like that of New York
today) consisted of so many different elements that people accepted their
neighbors at their face value and did not look too closely into the
family antecedents.
Since this is not a history of mathematics or a handbook of philosophy,
the speculations of Thales do not properly belong in these pages, except
in so far as they tend to show the tolerance towards new ideas which
prevailed among the Ionians at a time when Rome was a small market-town
on a muddy river somewhere in a distant and unknown region, when the Jews
were still captives in the land of Assyria and when northern and western
Europe were naught but a howling wilderness.
In order that we may understand how such a development was possible, we
must know something about the changes which had taken place since the
days when Greek chieftains sailed across the Aegean Sea, intent upon the
plunder of the rich fortress of Troy. Those far-famed heroes were still
the product of an exceedingly primitive form of civilization. They were
over-grown children who regarded life as one long, glorified rough-house,
full of excitement and wrestling matches and running races and all the
many things which we ourselves would dearly love to do if we were not
forced to stick to the routine jobs which provide us with bread and
bananas.
The relationship between these boisterous paladins and their Gods was as
direct and as simple as their attitude towards the serious problems of
every-day existence. For the inhabitants of high Olympus, who ruled the
world of the Hellenes in the tenth century before our era, were of this
earth earthy, and not very far removed from ordinary mortals. Exactly
where and when and how man and his Gods had parted company was a more
or less hazy point, never clearly established. Even then the friendship
which those who lived beyond the clouds had always felt towards their
subjects who crawled across the face of the earth had in no way been
interrupted and it had remained flavored with those personal and intimate
touches which gave the religion of the Greeks its own peculiar charm.
Of course, all good little Greek boys were duly taught that Zeus was a
very powerful and mighty potentate with a long beard who upon occasion
would juggle so violently with his flashes of lightning and his
thunderbolts that it seemed that the world was coming to an end. But
as soon as they were a little older and were able to read the ancient
sagas for themselves, they began to appreciate the limitations of those
terrible personages of whom they had heard so much in their nursery
and who now appeared in the light of a merry family-party—everlastingly
playing practical jokes upon each other and taking such bitter sides in
the political disputes of their mortal friends that every quarrel in
Greece was immediately followed by a corresponding row among the denizens
of the aether.
Of course in spite of all these very human short-comings, Zeus remained a
very great God, the mightiest of all rulers and a personage whom it was
not safe to displease. But he was “reasonable” in that sense of the word
which is so well understood among the lobbyists of Washington. He was
reasonable. He could be approached if one knew the proper way. And best
of all, he had a sense of humor and did not take either himself or his
world too seriously.
This was, perhaps, not the most sublime conception of a divine figure,
but it offered certain very distinct advantages. Among the ancient Greeks
there never was a hard and fast rule as to what people must hold true
and what they must disregard as false. And because there was no “creed”
in the modern sense of the word, with adamantine dogmas and a class
of professional priests, ready to enforce them with the help of the
secular gallows, the people in different parts of the country were able
to reshape their religious ideas and ethical conceptions as best suited
their own individual tastes.
The Thessalians, who lived within hailing distance of Mount Olympus,
showed of course much less respect for their august neighbors than did
the Asopians who dwelled in a distant village on the Laconian Gulf. The
Athenians, feeling themselves under the direct protection of their own
patron saint, Pallas Athene, felt that they could take great liberties
with the lady’s father, while the Arcadians, whose valleys were far
removed from the main trade routes, clung tenaciously to a simpler faith
and frowned upon all levity in the serious matter of religion, and as
for the inhabitants of Phocis, who made a living from the pilgrims bound
for the village of Delphi, they were firmly convinced that Apollo (who
was worshiped at that profitable shrine) was the greatest of all divine
spirits and deserved the special homage of those who came from afar and
still had a couple of drachmas in their pocket.
The belief in only one God which soon afterwards was to set the Jews
apart from all other nations, would never have been possible if the life
of Judaea had not centered around a single city which was strong enough
to destroy all rival places of pilgrimage and was able to maintain an
exclusive religious monopoly for almost ten consecutive centuries.
In Greece such a condition did not prevail. Neither Athens nor Sparta
ever succeeded in establishing itself as the recognized capital of a
united Greek fatherland. Their efforts in this direction only led to long
years of unprofitable civil war.
No wonder that a race composed of such sublime individualists offered
great scope for the development of a very independent spirit of thought.
The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes been called the Bible of the
Greeks. They were nothing of the sort. They were just books. They were
never united into “The Book.” They told the adventures of certain
wonderful heroes who were fondly believed to be the direct ancestors of
the generation then living. Incidentally they contained a certain amount
of religious information because the Gods, without exception, had taken
sides in the quarrel and had neglected all other business for the joy of
watching the rarest prize-fight that had ever been staged within their
domain.
The idea, however, that the works of Homer might either directly or
indirectly have been inspired by Zeus or Minerva or Apollo never even
dawned upon the Greek mind. These were a fine piece of literature and
made excellent reading during the long winter evenings. Furthermore they
caused children to feel proud of their own race.
And that was all.
In such an atmosphere of intellectual and spiritual freedom, in a city
filled with the pungent smell of ships from all the seven seas, rich
with fabrics of the Orient, merry with the laughter of a well fed and
contented populace, Thales was born. In such a city he worked and taught
and in such a city he died. If the conclusions which he reached differed
greatly from the opinions held by most of his neighbors, remember that
his ideas never penetrated beyond a very limited circle. The average
Miletian may have heard the name of Thales, just as the average New
Yorker has probably heard the name of Einstein. Ask him who Einstein is,
and he will answer that he is a fellow with long hair who smokes a pipe
and plays the fiddle and who wrote something about a man walking through
a railroad train, about which there once was an article in a Sunday paper.
That this strange person who smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle has got
hold of a little spark of truth which eventually may upset (or at least
greatly modify) the scientific conclusions of the last sixty centuries,
is a matter of profound indifference to the millions of easy-going
citizens whose interest in mathematics does not reach beyond the conflict
which arises when their favorite batsman tries to upset the law of
gravity.
The text-books of ancient history usually get rid of the difficulty
by printing “Thales of Miletus (640-546 B.C.), the founder of modern
science.” And we can almost see the headlines in the “Miletus Gazette”
saying, “Local graduate discovers secret of true science.”
But just how and where and when Thales left the beaten track and struck
out for himself, I could not possibly tell you. This much is certain,
that he did not live in an intellectual vacuum, nor did he develop his
wisdom out of his inner consciousness. In the seventh century before
Christ, a great deal of the pioneer work in the realm of science had
already been done and there was quite a large body of mathematical
and physical and astronomical information at the disposal of those
intelligent enough to make use of it.
Babylonian star-gazers had searched the heavens.
Egyptian architects had done considerable figuring before they dared
to dump a couple of million tons of granite on top of a little burial
chamber in the heart of a pyramid.
The mathematicians of the Nile Valley had seriously studied the behavior
of the sun that they might predict the wet and dry seasons and give the
peasants a calendar by which they could regulate their work on the farms.
All these problems, however, had been solved by people who still regarded
the forces of nature as the direct and personal expression of the will
of certain invisible Gods who administered the seasons and the course of
the planets and the tides of the ocean as the members of the President’s
cabinet manage the department of agriculture or the post-office or the
treasury.
Thales rejected this point of view. But like most well educated people of
his day, he did not bother to discuss it in public. If the fruit vendors
along the water front wanted to fall upon their faces whenever there was
an eclipse of the sun and invoke the name of Zeus in fear of this unusual
sight, that was their business and Thales would have been the last man
to try to convince them that any schoolboy with an elementary knowledge
of the behavior of heavenly bodies would have foretold that on the 25th
of May of the year 585 B.C., at such and such an hour, the moon would
find herself between the earth and the sun and that therefore the town of
Miletus would experience a few minutes of comparative darkness.
Even when it appeared (as it did appear) that the Persians and the
Lydians had been engaged in battle on the afternoon of this famous
eclipse and had been obliged to cease killing each other for lack
of sufficient light, he refused to believe that the Lydian deities
(following a famous precedent established a few years previously during
a certain battle in the valley of Ajalon) had performed a miracle, and
had suddenly turned off the light of Heaven that the victory might go to
those whom they favored.
For Thales had reached the point (and that was his great merit) where
he dared to regard all nature as the manifestation of one Eternal Will,
subject to one Eternal Law and entirely beyond the personal influence
of those divine spirits which man was forever creating after his own
image. And the eclipse, so he felt, would have taken place just the
same if there had been no more important engagement that particular
afternoon than a dog fight in the streets of Ephesus or a wedding feast
in Halicarnassus.
Drawing the logical conclusions from his own scientific observations, he
laid down one general and inevitable law for all creation and guessed
(and to a certain extent guessed correctly) that the beginning of all
things was to be found in the water which apparently surrounded the world
on all sides and which had probably existed from the very beginning of
time.
Unfortunately we do not possess anything that Thales himself wrote. It
is possible that he may have put his ideas into concrete form (for the
Greeks had already learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians) but not
a page which can be directly attributed to him survives today. For our
knowledge of himself and his ideas we depend upon the scanty bits of
information found in the books of some of his contemporaries. From these,
however, we have learned that Thales in private life was a merchant with
wide connections in all parts of the Mediterranean. That, by the way, was
typical of most of the early philosophers. They were “lovers of wisdom.”
But they never closed their eyes to the fact that the secret of life is
found among the living and that “wisdom for the sake of wisdom” is quite
as dangerous as “art for art’s sake” or a dinner for the sake of the food.
To them, man with all his human qualities, good and bad and indifferent,
was the supreme measure of all things. Wherefore they spent their leisure
time patiently studying this strange creature as he was and not as they
thought that he ought to be.
This made it possible for them to remain on the most amicable terms with
their fellow citizens and allowed them to wield a much greater power
than if they had undertaken to show their neighbors a short cut to the
Millennium.
They rarely laid down a hard and fast rule of conduct.
But by their own example they managed to show how a true understanding of
the forces of nature must inevitably lead to that inner peace of the soul
upon which all true happiness depends and having in this way gained the
good-will of their community they were given full liberty to study and
explore and investigate and were even permitted to venture within those
domains which were popularly believed to be the exclusive property of the
Gods. And as one of the pioneers of this new gospel did Thales spend the
long years of his useful career.
Although he had pulled the entire world of the Greeks apart, although he
had examined each little piece separately, and had openly questioned all
sorts of things which the majority of the people since the beginning of
time had held to be established facts, he was allowed to die peacefully
in his own bed, and if any one ever called him to account for his
heresies, we fail to have a record of the fact.
And once he had shown the way, there were many others eager to follow.
There was, for example, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who left Asia Minor
for Athens at the age of thirty-six and spent the following years as a
“sophist” or private tutor in different Greek cities. He specialized
in astronomy and among other things he taught that the sun was not a
heavenly chariot, driven by a God, as was generally believed, but a
red-hot ball of fire, thousands and thousands of times larger than the
whole of Greece.
When nothing happened to him, when no bolt from Heaven killed him for
his audacity, he went a little further in his theories and stated boldly
that the moon was covered with mountains and valleys and finally he even
hinted at a certain “original matter” which was the beginning and the end
of all things and which had existed from the very beginning of time.
But here, as many other scientists after him were to discover, he trod
upon dangerous ground, for he discussed something with which people were
familiar. The sun and the moon were distant orbs. The average Greek
did not care what names the philosopher wished to call them. But when
the professor began to argue that all things had gradually grown and
developed out of a vague substance called “original matter”—then he went
decidedly too far. Such an assertion was in flat contradiction with the
story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who after the great flood had re-populated
the world by turning bits of stone into men and women. To deny the truth
of a most solemn tale which all little Greek boys and girls had been
taught in their early childhood was most dangerous to the safety of
established society. It would make the children doubt the wisdom of their
elders and that would never do. Hence Anaxagoras was made the subject of
a formidable attack on the part of the Athenian Parents’ League.
During the monarchy and the early days of the republic, the rulers of the
city would have been more than able to protect a teacher of unpopular
doctrines from the foolish hostility of the illiterate Attic peasants.
But Athens by this time had become a full-fledged democracy and the
freedom of the individual was no longer what it used to be. Furthermore,
Pericles, just then in disgrace with the majority of the people,
was himself a favorite pupil of the great astronomer, and the legal
prosecution of Anaxagoras was welcomed as an excellent political move
against the city’s old dictator.
A priest by the name of Diopheites, who also was a ward-leader in
one of the most densely populated suburbs, got a law passed which
demanded “the immediate prosecution of all those who disbelieved in the
established religion or held theories of their own about certain divine
things.” Under this law, Anaxagoras was actually thrown into prison.
Finally, however, the better elements in the city prevailed. Anaxagoras
was allowed to go free after the payment of a small fine and move to
Lampsacus in Asia Minor where he died, full of years and honor, in the
year 428 B.C.
His case shows how little is ever accomplished by the official
suppression of scientific theories. For although Anaxagoras was forced
to leave Athens, his ideas remained behind and two centuries later they
came to the notice of one Aristotle, who in turn used them as a basis
for many of his own scientific speculations. Reaching merrily across a
thousand years of darkness, he handed them on to one Abul-Walid Muhammad
ibn-Ahmad (commonly known as Averroës), the great Arab physician who in
turn popularized them among the students of the Moorish universities of
southern Spain. Then, together with his own observations, he wrote them
down in a number of books. These were duly carried across the Pyrenees
until they reached the universities of Paris and Boulogne. There they
were translated into Latin and French and English and so thoroughly were
they accepted by the people of western and northern Europe that today
they have become an integral part of every primer of science and are
considered as harmless as the tables of multiplication.
But to return to Anaxagoras. For almost an entire generation after his
trial, Greek scientists were allowed to teach doctrines which were at
variance with popular belief. And then, during the last years of the
fifth century, a second case took place.
The victim this time was a certain Protagoras, a wandering teacher who
hailed from the village of Abdera, an Ionian colony in northern Greece.
This spot already enjoyed a doubtful reputation as the birthplace of
Democritus, the original “laughing philosopher,” who had laid down the
law that “only that society is worth while which offers to the largest
number of people the greatest amount of happiness obtainable with the
smallest amount of pain,” and who therefore was regarded as a good
deal of a radical and a fellow who should be under constant police
supervision.
Protagoras, deeply impressed by this doctrine, went to Athens and there,
after many years of study, proclaimed that man was the measure of all
things, that life was too short to waste valuable time upon an inquiry
into the doubtful existence of any Gods, and that all energies ought
to be used for the purpose of making existence more beautiful and more
thoroughly enjoyable.
This statement, of course, went to the very root of the matter and it
was bound to shock the faithful more than anything that had ever been
written or said. Furthermore it was made during a very serious crisis in
the war between Athens and Sparta and the people, after a long series of
defeats and pestilence, were in a state of utter despair. Most evidently
it was not the right moment to incur the wrath of the Gods by an inquiry
into the scope of their supernatural powers. Protagoras was accused of
atheism, of “godlessness,” and was told to submit his doctrines to the
courts.
Pericles, who could have protected him, was dead and Protagoras, although
a scientist, felt little taste for martyrdom.
He fled.
Unfortunately, on the way to Sicily, his ship was wrecked, and it seems
that he was drowned, for we never hear of him again.
As for Diagoras, another victim of Athenian malevolence, he was really
not a philosopher at all but a young writer who harbored a personal
grudge against the Gods because they had once failed to give him their
support in a law-suit. He brooded so long upon his supposed grievance
that finally his mind became affected and he went about saying all sorts
of blasphemous things about the Holy Mysteries which just then enjoyed
great popularity among the people of northern Hellas. For this unseemly
conduct he was condemned to death. But ere the sentence was executed,
the poor devil was given the opportunity to escape. He went to Corinth,
continued to revile his Olympian enemies, and peacefully died of his own
bad temper.
And this brings us at last to the most notorious and the most famous case
of Greek intolerance of which we possess any record, the judicial murder
of Socrates.
When it is sometimes stated that the world has not changed at all and
that the Athenians were no more broadminded than the people of later
times, the name of Socrates is dragged into the debate as a terrible
example of Greek bigotry. But today, after a very exhaustive study of
the case, we know better and the long and undisturbed career of this
brilliant but exasperating soap-box orator is a direct tribute to the
spirit of intellectual liberty which prevailed throughout ancient Greece
in the fifth century before our era.
For Socrates, at a time when the common people still firmly believed in
a large number of divine beings, made himself the prophet of an only
God. And although the Athenians may not always have known what he meant
when he spoke of his “daemon” (that inner voice of divine inspiration
which told him what to do and say), they were fully aware of his very
unorthodox attitude towards those ideals which most of his neighbors
continued to hold in holy veneration and his utter lack of respect for
the established order of things. In the end, however, politics killed the
old man and theology (although dragged in for the benefit of the crowd)
had really very little to do with the outcome of the trial.
Socrates was the son of a stone-cutter who had many children and little
money. The boy therefore had never been able to pay for a regular
college course, for most of the philosophers were practical fellows and
often charged as much as two thousand dollars for a single course of
instruction. Besides, the pursuit of pure knowledge and the study of
useless scientific facts seemed to young Socrates a mere waste of time
and energy. Provided a person cultivated his conscience, so he reasoned,
he could well do without geometry and a knowledge of the true nature of
comets and planets was not necessary for the salvation of the soul.
All the same, the homely little fellow with the broken nose and the
shabby cloak, who spent his days arguing with the loafers on the corner
of the street and his nights listening to the harangues of his wife (who
was obliged to provide for a large family by taking in washing, as her
husband regarded the gaining of a livelihood as an entirely negligible
detail of existence), this honorable veteran of many wars and expeditions
and ex-member of the Athenian senate was chosen among all the many
teachers of his day to suffer for his opinions.
In order to understand how this happened, we must know something about
the politics of Athens in the days when Socrates rendered his painful but
highly useful service to the cause of human intelligence and progress.
All his life long (and he was past seventy when he was executed) Socrates
tried to show his neighbors that they were wasting their opportunities;
that they were living hollow and shallow lives; that they devoted
entirely too much time to empty pleasures and vain triumphs and almost
invariably squandered the divine gifts with which a great and mysterious
God had endowed them for the sake of a few hours of futile glory and
self-satisfaction. And so thoroughly convinced was he of man’s high
destiny that he broke through the bounds of all old philosophies and
went even farther than Protagoras. For whereas the latter had taught
that “man is the measure of all things,” Socrates preached that “man’s
invisible conscience is (or ought to be) the ultimate measure of all
things and that it is not the Gods but we ourselves who shape our
destiny.”
The speech which Socrates made before the judges who were to decide
his fate (there were five hundred of them to be precise and they had
been so carefully chosen by his political enemies that some of them
could actually read and write) was one of the most delightful bits of
commonsense ever addressed to any audience, sympathetic or otherwise.
“No person on earth,” so the philosopher argued, “has the right to tell
another man what he should believe or to deprive him of the right to
think as he pleases,” and further, “Provided that man remain on good
terms with his own conscience, he can well do without the approbation
of his friends, without money, without a family or even a home. But
as no one can possibly reach the right conclusions without a thorough
examination of all the pros and cons of every problem, people must be
given a chance to discuss all questions with complete freedom and without
interference on the part of the authorities.”
Unfortunately for the accused, this was exactly the wrong statement
at the wrong moment. Ever since the Peloponnesian war there had been
a bitter struggle in Athens between the rich and the poor, between
capital and labor. Socrates was a “moderate”—a liberal who saw good and
evil in both systems of government and who tried to find a compromise
which should satisfy all reasonable people. This, of course, had made
him thoroughly unpopular with both sides but thus far they had been too
evenly balanced to take action against him.
When at last in the year 403 B.C. the one-hundred-percent Democrats
gained complete control of the state and expelled the aristocrats,
Socrates was a doomed man.
His friends knew this. They suggested that he leave the city before it
was too late and this would have been a very wise thing to do.
For Socrates had quite as many enemies as friends. During the greater
part of a century he had been a sort of vocal “columnist,” a terribly
clever busy-body who had made it his hobby to expose the shams and the
intellectual swindles of those who regarded themselves as the pillars
of Athenian society. As a result, every one had come to know him. His
name had become a household word throughout eastern Greece. When he said
something funny in the morning, by night the whole town had heard about
it. Plays had been written about him and when he was finally arrested and
taken to prison there was not a citizen in the whole of Attica who was
not thoroughly familiar with all the details of his career.
Those who took the leading part in the actual trial (like that honorable
grain merchant who could neither read nor write but who knew all about
the will of the Gods and therefore was loudest in his accusations)
were undoubtedly convinced that they were rendering a great service to
the community by ridding the city of a highly dangerous member of the
so-called “intelligentsia,” a man whose teaching could only lead to
laziness and crime and discontent among the slaves.
It is rather amusing to remember that even under those circumstances,
Socrates pleaded his case with such tremendous virtuosity that a majority
of the jury was all for letting him go free and suggested that he might
be pardoned if only he would give up this terrible habit of arguing, of
debating, of wrangling and moralizing, in short, if only he would leave
his neighbors and their pet prejudices in peace and not bother them with
his eternal doubts.
But Socrates would not hear of it.
“By no means,” he exclaimed. “As long as my conscience, as long as the
still small voice within me, bids me go forth and show men the true road
to reason, I shall continue to buttonhole whomsoever I happen to meet and
I shall say what is on my mind, regardless of consequences.”
After that, there was no other course but to condemn the prisoner to
death.
Socrates was given a respite of thirty days. The holy ship which made an
annual pilgrimage to Delos had not yet returned from its voyage and until
then, the Athenian law did not allow any executions. The whole of this
month the old man spent quietly in his cell, trying to improve his system
of logic. Although he was repeatedly given the opportunity to escape, he
refused to go. He had lived his life and had done his duty. He was tired
and ready to depart. Until the hour of his execution he continued to talk
with his friends, trying to educate them in what he held to be right
and true, asking them to turn their minds upon the things of the spirit
rather than those of the material world.
Then he drank the beaker of hemlock, laid himself upon his couch and
settled all further argument by sleep everlasting.
For a short time, his disciples, rather terrified by this terrible
outburst of popular wrath, thought it wise to remove themselves from the
scene of their former activities.
But when nothing happened, they returned and resumed their former
occupation as public teachers, and within a dozen years after the death
of the old philosopher, his ideas were more popular than ever.
The city meanwhile had gone through a very difficult period. It was five
years since the struggle for the leadership of the Greek peninsula had
ended with the defeat of Athens and the ultimate victory of the Spartans.
This had been a complete triumph of brawn over brain. Needless to say
that it did not last very long. The Spartans, who never wrote a line
worth remembering or contributed a single idea to the sum total of human
knowledge (with the exception of certain military tactics which survive
in our modern game of football) thought that they had accomplished
their task when the walls of their rival had been pulled down and the
Athenian fleet had been reduced to a dozen ships. But the Athenian mind
had lost none of its shrewd brilliancy. A decade after the end of the
Peloponnesian war, the old harbor of the Piraeus was once more filled
with ships from all parts of the world and Athenian admirals were again
fighting at the head of the allied Greek navies.
Furthermore, the labor of Pericles, although not appreciated by his
own contemporaries, had made the city the intellectual capital of the
world—the Paris of the fourth century before the birth of Christ.
Whosoever in Rome or Spain or Africa was rich enough to give his sons a
fashionable education, felt flattered if the boys were allowed to visit a
school situated within the shadow of the Acropolis.
For this ancient world, which we modern people find so difficult to
understand properly, took the problem of existence seriously.
Under the influence of the early Christian enemies of pagan civilization,
the impression has gained ground that the average Roman or Greek was
a highly immoral person who paid a shallow homage to certain nebulous
Gods and for the rest spent his waking hours eating enormous dinners,
drinking vast bumpers of Salernian wine and listening to the pretty
prattle of Egyptian dancing girls, unless for a change he went to war and
slaughtered innocent Germans and Franks and Dacians for the pure sport of
shedding blood.
Of course, both in Greece and even more so in Rome, there were a great
many merchants and war contractors who had accumulated their millions
without much regard for those ethical principles which Socrates had so
well defined before his judges. Because these people were very wealthy,
they had to be put up with. This, however, did not mean that they
enjoyed the respect of the community or were regarded as commendable
representatives of the civilization of their day.
We dig up the villa of Epaphroditus, who amassed millions as one of
the gang who helped Nero plunder Rome and her colonies. We look at the
ruins of the forty room palace which the old profiteer built out of his
ill-gotten gains. And we shake our heads and say, “What depravity!”
Then we sit down and read the works of Epictetus, who was one of the
house slaves of the old scoundrel, and we find ourselves in the company
of a spirit as lofty and as exalted as ever lived.
I know that the making of generalizations about our neighbors and
about other nations is one of the most popular of indoor sports, but
let us not forget that Epictetus, the philosopher, was quite as truly
a representative of the time in which he lived as Epaphroditus, the
imperial flunkey, and that the desire for holiness was as great twenty
centuries ago as it is today.
Undoubtedly it was a very different sort of holiness from that which is
practiced today. It was the product of an essentially European brain and
had nothing to do with the Orient. But the “barbarians” who established
it as their ideal of what they held to be most noble and desirable were
our own ancestors, and they were slowly developing a philosophy of life
which was highly successful if we agree that a clear conscience and a
simple, straightforward life, together with good health and a moderate
but sufficient income, are the best guarantee for general happiness
and contentment. The future of the soul did not interest these people
overmuch. They accepted the fact that they were a special sort of mammal
which by reason of its intellectual application had risen high above
the other creatures which crawled upon this earth. If they frequently
referred to the Gods, they used the word as we use “atoms” or “electrons”
or “aether.” The beginning of things has got to have a name, but Zeus
in the mouth of Epictetus was as problematical a value as x or y in the
problems of Euclid and meant just as much or as little.
Life it was which interested those men and next to living, art.
Life, therefore, in all its endless varieties, they studied and following
the method of reasoning which Socrates had originated and made popular,
they achieved some very remarkable results.
That sometimes in their zeal for a perfect spiritual world they went to
absurd extremes was regrettable, but no more than human. But Plato is the
only one among all the teachers of antiquity who from sheer love for a
perfect world ever came to preach a doctrine of intolerance.
This young Athenian, as is well known, was the beloved disciple of
Socrates and became his literary executor.
In this capacity he immediately gathered all that Socrates had ever said
or thought into a series of dialogues which might be truthfully called
the Socratian Gospels.
When this had been done, he began to elaborate certain of the more
obscure points in his master’s doctrines and explained them in a series
of brilliant essays. And finally he conducted a number of lecture courses
which spread the Athenian ideas of justice and righteousness far beyond
the confines of Attica.
In all these activities he showed such whole-hearted and unselfish
devotion that we might almost compare him to St. Paul. But whereas St.
Paul had led a most adventurous and dangerous existence, ever traveling
from north to south and from west to east that he might bring the Good
Tidings to all parts of the Mediterranean world, Plato never budged from
his comfortable garden chair and allowed the world to come to him.
Certain advantages of birth and the possession of independent wealth
allowed him to do this.
In the first place he was an Athenian citizen and through his mother
could trace his descent to no one less than Solon. Then as soon as he
came of age he inherited a fortune more than sufficient for his simple
needs.
And finally, his eloquence was such that people willingly traveled to the
Aegean Sea if only they were allowed to follow a few of the lectures in
the Platonic University.
For the rest, Plato was very much like the other young men of his time.
He served in the army, but without any particular interest in military
affairs. He went in for outdoor sports, became a good wrestler, a fairly
good runner, but never achieved any particular fame in the stadium.
Again, like most young men of his time, he spent a great deal of his
time in foreign travel and crossed the Aegean Sea and paid a short visit
to northern Egypt, as his famous grandfather Solon had done before
him. After that, however, he returned home for good and during fifty
consecutive years he quietly taught his doctrines in the shadowy corners
of a pleasure garden which was situated on the banks of the river
Cephissus in the suburbs of Athens and was called the Academy.
He had begun his career as a mathematician, but gradually he switched
over to politics and in this field he laid the foundations for our
modern school of government. He was at heart a confirmed optimist and
believed in a steady process of human evolution. The life of man, so he
taught, rises slowly from a lower plane to a higher one. From beautiful
bodies, the world proceeds to beautiful institutions and from beautiful
institutions to beautiful ideas.
This sounded well on parchment, but when Plato tried to lay down certain
definite principles upon which his perfect state was to be founded, his
zeal for righteousness and his desire for justice were so great that they
made him deaf and blind to all other considerations. His Republic, which
has ever since been regarded as the last word in human perfection by
the manufacturers of paper Utopias, was a very strange commonwealth and
reflected and continues to reflect with great nicety the prejudices of
those retired colonels who have always enjoyed the comforts of a private
income, who like to move in polite circles and who have a profound
distrust of the lower classes, lest they forget “their place” and want to
have a share of those special privileges which by right should go to the
members of the “upper class.”
Unfortunately the books of Plato enjoyed great respect among the medieval
scholars of western Europe and in their hands the famous Republic became
a most formidable weapon in their warfare upon tolerance.
For these learned doctors were apt to forget that Plato had reached his
conclusions from very different premises than those which were popular in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
For instance, Plato had been anything but a pious man in the Christian
sense of the word. The Gods of his ancestors he had always regarded
with deep contempt as ill-mannered rustics from distant Macedonia. He
had been deeply mortified by their scandalous behavior as related in
the chronicles of the Trojan War. But as he grew older and sat and sat
and sat in his little olive grove and became more and more exasperated
by the foolish quarrels of the little city-states of his native land,
and witnessed the utter failure of the old democratic ideal, he grew
convinced that some sort of religion was necessary for the average
citizen, or his imaginary Republic would at once degenerate into a state
of rampant anarchy. He therefore insisted that the legislative body of
his model community should establish a definite rule of conduct for
all citizens and should force both freemen and slaves to obey these
regulations on pain of death or exile or imprisonment. This sounded
like an absolute negation of that broad spirit of tolerance and of that
liberty of conscience for which Socrates had so valiantly fought only a
short time before, and that is exactly what it was meant to be.
The reason for this change in attitude is not hard to find. Whereas
Socrates had been a man among men, Plato was afraid of life and escaped
from an unpleasant and ugly world into the realm of his own day dreams.
He knew of course that there was not the slightest chance of his ideas
ever being realized. The day of the little independent city-states,
whether imaginary or real, was over. The era of centralization had begun
and soon the entire Greek peninsula was to be incorporated into that vast
Macedonian Empire which stretched from the shores of the Maritsa to the
banks of the Indus River.
But ere the heavy hand of the conqueror descended upon the unruly
democracies of the old peninsula, the country had produced the greatest
of those many benefactors who have put the rest of the world under
eternal obligation to the now defunct race of the Greeks.
I refer of course to Aristotle, the wonder-child from Stagira, the man
who in his day and age knew everything that was to be known and added
so much to the sum total of human knowledge that his books became an
intellectual quarry from which fifty successive generations of Europeans
and Asiatics were able to steal to their hearts’ content without
exhausting that rich vein of pure learning.
At the age of eighteen, Aristotle had left his native village in
Macedonia to go to Athens and follow the lectures in Plato’s university.
After his graduation he lectured in a number of places until the year 336
when he returned to Athens and opened a school of his own in a garden
near the temple of Apollo Lyceus, which became known as the Lyceum and
soon attracted pupils from all over the world.
Strangely enough, the Athenians were not at all in favor of increasing
the number of academies within their walls. The town was at last
beginning to lose its old commercial importance and all of her more
energetic citizens were moving to Alexandria and to Marseilles and other
cities of the south and the west. Those who remained behind were either
too poor or too indolent to escape. They were the hide-bound remnant of
those old, turbulent masses of free citizens, who had been at once the
glory and the ruin of the long-suffering Republic. They had regarded
the “goings on” in Plato’s orchard with small favor. When a dozen years
after his death, his most notorious pupil came back and openly taught
still more outrageous doctrines about the beginning of the world and the
limited ability of the Gods, the old fogies shook their solemn heads and
mumbled dark threats against the man who was making their city a by-word
for free thinking and unbelief.
If they had had their own way, they would have forced him to leave their
country. But they wisely kept these opinions to themselves. For this
short-sighted, stoutish gentleman, famous for his good taste in books
and in clothes, was no negligible quantity in the political life of that
day, no obscure little professor who could be driven out of town by a
couple of hired toughs. He was no one less than the son of a Macedonian
court-physician and he had been brought up with the royal princes.
And furthermore, as soon as he had finished his studies, he had been
appointed tutor to the crown prince and for eight years he had been the
daily companion of young Alexander. Hence he enjoyed the friendship and
the protection of the most powerful ruler the world had ever seen and the
regent who administered the Greek provinces during the monarch’s absence
on the Indian front watched carefully lest harm should befall one who had
been the boon companion of his imperial master.
No sooner, however, had news of Alexander’s death reached Athens than
Aristotle’s life was in peril. He remembered what had happened to
Socrates and felt no desire to suffer a similar fate. Like Plato, he had
carefully avoided mixing philosophy with practical politics. But his
distaste for the democratic form of government and his lack of belief
in the sovereign abilities of the common people were known to all. And
when the Athenians, in a sudden outburst of fury, expelled the Macedonian
garrison, Aristotle moved across the Euboean Sound and went to live in
Calchis, where he died a few months before Athens was reconquered by the
Macedonians and was duly punished for her disobedience.
At this far distance it is not easy to discover upon what positive
grounds Aristotle was accused of impiety. But as usual in that nation of
amateur orators, his case was inextricably mixed up with politics and
his unpopularity was due to his disregard of the prejudices of a few
local ward-bosses, rather than to the expression of any startlingly new
heresies, which might have exposed Athens to the vengeance of Zeus.
Nor does it matter very much.
The days of the small independent republics were numbered.
Soon afterwards, the Romans fell heir to the European heritage of
Alexander and Greece became one of their many provinces.
Then there was an end to all further bickering, for the Romans in most
matters were even more tolerant than the Greeks of the Golden Age had
been and they permitted their subjects to think as they pleased, provided
they did not question certain principles of political expediency upon
which the peace and prosperity of the Roman state had, since time
immemorial, been safely builded.
All the same there existed a subtle difference between the ideals which
animated the contemporaries of Cicero and those which had been held
sacred by the followers of such a man as Pericles. The old leaders of
Greek thought had based their tolerance upon certain definite conclusions
which they had reached after centuries of careful experiment and
meditation. The Romans felt that they could do without the preliminary
study. They were merely indifferent, and were proud of the fact. They
were interested in practical things. They were men of action and had a
deep-seated contempt for words.
If other people wished to spend their afternoons underneath an old olive
tree, discussing the theoretical aspects of government or the influence
of the moon upon the tides, they were more than welcome to do so.
If furthermore their knowledge could be turned to some practical use,
then it was worthy of further attention. Otherwise, together with
singing and dancing and cooking, sculpture and science, this business
of philosophizing had better be left to the Greeks and to the other
foreigners whom Jupiter in his mercy had created to provide the world
with those things which were unworthy of a true Roman’s attention.
Meanwhile they themselves would devote their attention to the
administration of their ever increasing domains; they would drill the
necessary companies of foreign infantry and cavalry to protect their
outlying provinces; they would survey the roads that were to connect
Spain with Bulgaria; and generally they would devote their energies to
the keeping of the peace between half a thousand different tribes and
nations.
Let us give honor where honor is due.
The Romans did their job so thoroughly that they erected a structure
which under one form or another has survived until our own time, and that
in itself is no mean accomplishment. As long as the necessary taxes were
paid and a certain outward homage was paid to the few rules of conduct
laid down by their Roman masters, the subject-tribes enjoyed a very
large degree of liberty. They could believe or disbelieve whatever they
pleased. They could worship one God or a dozen Gods or whole temples
full of Gods. It made no difference. But whatever religion they chose to
profess, these strangely assorted members of a world-encircling empire
were forever reminded that the “pax Romana” depended for its success upon
a liberal application of the principle of “live and let live.” They must
under no condition interfere either with their own neighbors or with the
strangers within their gates. And if perchance they thought that their
Gods had been insulted, they must not rush to the magistrate for relief.
“For,” as the Emperor Tiberius remarked upon one memorable occasion, “if
the Gods think that they have just claims for grievance, they can surely
take care of themselves.”
And with such scant words of consolation, all similar cases were
instantly dismissed and people were requested to keep their private
opinions out of the courts.
If a number of Cappadocian traders decided to settle down among the
Colossians, they had a right to bring their own Gods with them and erect
a temple of their own in the town of Colossae. But if the Colossians
should for similar reasons move into the land of the Cappadocians, they
must be granted the same privileges and must be given an equal freedom of
worship.
It has often been argued that the Romans could permit themselves the
luxury of such a superior and tolerant attitude because they felt an
equal contempt for both the Colossians and the Cappadocians and all the
other savage tribes who dwelled outside of Latium. That may have been
true. I don’t know. But the fact remains that for half a thousand years,
a form of almost complete religious tolerance was strictly maintained
within the greater part of civilized and semi-civilized Europe, Asia and
Africa and that the Romans developed a technique of statecraft which
produced a maximum of practical results together with a minimum of
friction.
To many people it seemed that the millennium had been achieved and that
this condition of mutual forbearance would last forever.
But nothing lasts forever. Least of all, an empire built upon force.
Rome had conquered the world, but in the effort she had destroyed herself.
The bones of her young soldiers lay bleaching on a thousand battlefields.
For almost five centuries the brains of her most intelligent citizens
had wasted themselves upon the gigantic task of administering a colonial
empire that stretched from the Irish Sea to the Caspian.
At last the reaction set in.
Both the body and the mind of Rome had been exhausted by the impossible
task of a single city ruling an entire world.
And then a terrible thing happened. A whole people grew tired of life and
lost the zest for living.
They had come to own all the country-houses, all the town-houses, all the
yachts and all the stage-coaches they could ever hope to use.
They found themselves possessed of all the slaves in the world.
They had eaten everything, they had seen everything, they had heard
everything.
They had tried the taste of every drink, they had been everywhere,
they had made love to all the women from Barcelona to Thebes. All the
books that had ever been written were in their libraries. The best
pictures that had ever been painted hung on their walls. The cleverest
musicians of the entire world had entertained them at their meals.
And, as children, they had been instructed by the best professors and
pedagogues who had taught them everything there was to be taught. As a
result, all food and drink had lost its taste, all books had grown dull,
all women had become uninteresting, and existence itself had developed
into a burden which a good many people were willing to drop at the first
respectable opportunity.
There remained only one consolation, the contemplation of the Unknown and
the Invisible.
The old Gods, however, had died years before. No intelligent Roman any
longer took stock in the silly nursery rhymes about Jupiter and Minerva.
There were the philosophic systems of the Epicureans and the Stoics and
the Cynics, all of whom preached charity and self-denial and the virtues
of an unselfish and useful life.
But they were so empty. They sounded well enough in the books of Zeno
and Epicurus and Epictetus and Plutarch, which were to be found in every
cornerstore library.
But in the long run, this diet of pure reason was found to lack the
necessary nourishing qualities. The Romans began to clamor for a certain
amount of “emotion” with their spiritual meals.
Hence the purely philosophical “religions” (for such they really were, if
we associate the idea of religion with a desire to lead useful and noble
lives) could only appeal to a very small number of people, and almost all
of those belonged to the upper classes who had enjoyed the advantages of
private instruction at the hands of competent Greek teachers.
To the mass of the people, these finely-spun philosophies meant less than
nothing at all. They too had reached a point of development at which a
good deal of the ancient mythology seemed the childish invention of rude
and credulous ancestors. But they could not possibly go as far as their
so-called intellectual superiors and deny the existence of any and all
personal Gods.
Wherefore they did what all half-educated people do under such
circumstances. They paid a formal and outward tribute of respect to the
official Gods of the Republic and then betook themselves for real comfort
and happiness to one of the many mystery religions which during the last
two centuries had found a most cordial welcome in the ancient city on the
banks of the Tiber.
The word “mystery” which I have used before was of Greek origin. It
originally meant a gathering of “initiated people”—of men and women whose
“mouth had been shut” against the betrayal of those most holy secrets
which only the true members of the mystery were supposed to know and
which bound them together like the hocus pocus of a college fraternity or
the cabalistic incantations of the Independent Order of Sea-Mice.
During the first century of our era, however, a mystery was nothing more
nor less than a special form of worship, a denomination, a church. If a
Greek or a Roman (if you will pardon a little juggling with time) had
left the Presbyterian church for the Christian Science church, he would
have told his neighbors that he had gone to “another mystery.” For the
word “church,” the “kirk,” the “house of the Lord,” is of comparatively
recent origin and was not known in those days.
If you happen to be especially interested in the subject and wish
to understand what was happening in Rome, buy a New York paper next
Saturday. Almost any paper will do. Therein you will find four or five
columns of announcements about new creeds, about new mysteries, imported
from India and Persia and Sweden and China and a dozen other countries
and all of them offering special promises of health and riches and
salvation everlasting.
Rome, which so closely resembled our own metropolis, was just as full of
imported and domestic religions. The international nature of the city had
made this unavoidable. From the vine-covered mountain slopes of northern
Asia Minor had come the cult of Cybele, whom the Phrygians revered as the
mother of the Gods and whose worship was connected with such unseemly
outbreaks of emotional hilarity that the Roman police had repeatedly been
forced to close the Cybelian temples and had at last passed very drastic
laws against the further propaganda of a faith which encouraged public
drunkenness and many other things that were even worse.
Egypt, the old land of paradox and secrecy, had contributed half a dozen
strange divinities and the names of Osiris, Serapis and Isis had become
as familiar to Roman ears as those of Apollo, Demeter and Hermes.
As for the Greeks, who centuries before had given unto the world a
primary system of abstract truth and a practical code of conduct, based
upon virtue, they now supplied the people of foreign lands who insisted
upon images and incense with the far-famed “mysteries” of Attis and
Dionysus and Orpheus and Adonis, none of them entirely above suspicion as
far as public morals were concerned, but nevertheless enjoying immense
popularity.
The Phoenician traders, who for a thousand years had frequented the
shores of Italy, had made the Romans familiar with their great God Baal
(the arch-enemy of Jehovah) and with Astarte his wife, that strange
creature to whom Solomon in his old age and to the great horror of all
his faithful subjects had built a “high place” in the very heart of
Jerusalem; the terrible Goddess who had been recognized as the official
protector of the city of Carthage during her long struggle for the
supremacy of the Mediterranean and who finally after the destruction of
all her temples in Asia and Africa was to return to Europe in the shape
of a most respectable and demure Christian saint.
But the most important of all, because highly popular among the soldiers
of the army, was a deity whose broken images can still be found
underneath every rubbish pile that marks the Roman frontier from the
mouth of the Rhine to the source of the Tigris.
This was the great God Mithras.
Mithras, as far as we know, was the old Asiatic God of Light and Air and
Truth, and he had been worshiped in the plains of the Caspian lowlands
when our first ancestors took possession of those wonderful grazing
fields and made ready to settle those valleys and hills which afterwards
became known as Europe. To them he had been the giver of all good things
and they believed that the rulers of this earth exercised their power
only by the grace of his mighty will. Hence, as a token of his divine
favor, he sometimes bestowed upon those called to high offices a bit
of that celestial fire by which he himself was forever surrounded, and
although he is gone and his name has been forgotten, the kindly saints
of the Middle Ages, with their halo of light, remind us of an ancient
tradition which was started thousands of years before the Church was ever
dreamed of.
But although he was held in great reverence for an incredibly long time,
it has been very difficult to reconstruct his life with any degree
of accuracy. There was a good reason for this. The early Christian
missionaries abhorred the Mithras myth with a hatred infinitely more
bitter than that reserved for the common, every day mysteries. In their
heart of hearts they knew that the Indian God was their most serious
rival. Hence they tried as hard as possible to remove everything that
might possibly remind people of his existence. In this task they
succeeded so well that all Mithras temples have disappeared and that
not a scrap of written evidence remains about a religion which for
more than half a thousand years was as popular in Rome as Methodism or
Presbyterianism is in the United States of today.
However with the help of a few Asiatic sources and by a careful perusal
of certain ruins which could not be entirely destroyed in the days before
the invention of dynamite, we have been able to overcome this initial
handicap and now possess a fairly accurate idea about this interesting
God and the things for which he stood.
Ages and ages ago, so the story ran, Mithras was mysteriously born of a
rock. As soon as he lay in his cradle, several nearby shepherds came to
worship him and make him happy with their gifts.
As a boy, Mithras had met with all sorts of strange adventures. Many
of these remind us closely of the deeds which had made Hercules such a
popular hero with the children of the Greeks. But whereas Hercules was
often very cruel, Mithras was forever doing good. Once he had engaged in
a wrestling match with the sun and had beaten him. But he was so generous
in his victory, that the sun and he had become like brothers, and were
often mistaken for each other.
When the God of all evil had sent a drought which threatened to kill
the race of man, Mithras had struck a rock with his arrow, and behold!
plentiful water had gushed forth upon the parched fields. When Ahriman
(for that was the name of the arch-enemy) had thereupon tried to achieve
his wicked purpose by a terrible flood, Mithras had heard of it, had
warned one man, had told him to build a big boat and load it with his
relatives and his flocks and in this way had saved the human race from
destruction. Until finally, having done all he could to save the world
from the consequences of its own follies, he had been taken to Heaven to
rule the just and righteous for all time.
Those who wished to join the Mithras cult were obliged to go through an
elaborate form of initiation and were forced to eat a ceremonious meal
of bread and wine in memory of the famous supper eaten by Mithras and
his friend the Sun. Furthermore, they were obliged to accept baptism in
a font of water and do many other things which have no special interest
to us, as that form of religion was completely exterminated more than
fifteen hundred years ago.
Once inside the fold, the faithful were all treated upon a footing of
absolute equality. Together they prayed before the same candle-lit
altars. Together they chanted the same holy hymns and together they took
part in the festivities which were held each year on the twenty-fifth of
December to celebrate the birth of Mithras. Furthermore they abstained
from all work on the first day of the week, which even today is called
Sun-day in honor of the great God. And finally when they died, they were
laid away in patient rows to await the day of resurrection when the good
should enter into their just reward and the wicked should be cast into
the fire everlasting.
The success of these different mysteries, the widespread influence of
Mithraism among the Roman soldiers, points to a condition far removed
from religious indifference. Indeed the early centuries of the empire
were a period of restless search after something that should satisfy the
emotional needs of the masses.
But early in the year 47 of our own era something happened. A small
vessel left Phoenicia for the city of Perga, the starting point for
the overland route to Europe. Among the passengers were two men not
overburdened with luggage.
Their names were Paul and Barnabas.
They were Jews, but one of them carried a Roman passport and was well
versed in the wisdom of the Gentile world.
It was the beginning of a memorable voyage.
Christianity had set out to conquer the world.
CHAPTER III
THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT
The rapid conquest of the western world by the Church is sometimes used
as proof definite that the Christian ideas must have been of divine
origin. It is not my business to debate this point, but I would suggest
that the villainous conditions under which the majority of the Romans
were forced to live had as much to do with the success of the earliest
missionaries as the sound common sense of their message.
Thus far I have shown you one side of the Roman picture—the world of the
soldiers and statesmen and rich manufacturers and scientists, fortunate
folks who lived in delightful and enlightened ease on the slopes of the
Lateran Hill or among the valleys and hills of the Campania or somewhere
along the bay of Naples.
But they were only part of the story.
Amidst the teeming slums of the suburbs there was little enough evidence
of that plentiful prosperity which made the poets rave about the
Millennium and inspired orators to compare Octavian to Jupiter.
There, in the endless and dreary rows of overcrowded and reeking
tenement houses lived those vast multitudes to whom life was merely an
uninterrupted sensation of hunger, sweat and pain. To those men and
women, the wonderful tale of a simple carpenter in a little village
beyond the sea, who had gained his daily bread by the labor of his own
hands, who had loved the poor and downtrodden and who therefore had
been killed by his cruel and rapacious enemies, meant something very
real and tangible. Yes, they had all of them heard of Mithras and Isis
and Astarte. But these Gods were dead, and they had died hundreds and
thousands of years ago and what people knew about them they only knew by
hearsay from other people who had also died hundreds and thousands of
years ago.
Joshua of Nazareth, on the other hand, the Christ, the anointed, as the
Greek missionaries called him, had been on this earth only a short time
ago. Many a man then alive might have known him, might have listened to
him, if by chance he had visited southern Syria during the reign of the
Emperor Tiberius.
And there were others, the baker on the corner, the fruit peddler from
the next street, who in a little dark garden on the Appian Way had spoken
with a certain Peter, a fisherman from the village of Capernaum, who had
actually been near the mountain of Golgotha on that terrible afternoon
when the Prophet had been nailed to the cross by the soldiers of the
Roman governor.
We should remember this when we try to understand the sudden popular
appeal of this new faith.
It was that personal touch, that direct and personal feeling of intimacy
and near-by-ness which gave Christianity such a tremendous advantage
over all other creeds. That and the love which Jesus had so incessantly
expressed for the submerged and disinherited among all nations and which
radiated from everything he had said. Whether he had put it into the
exact terms used by his followers was of very slight importance. The
slaves had ears to hear and they understood. And trembling before the
high promise of a glorious future, they for the first time in their lives
beheld the rays of a new hope.
At last the words had been spoken that were to set them free.
No longer were they poor and despised, an evil thing in the sight of the
great of this world.
On the contrary, they were the predilected children of a loving Father.
They were to inherit the earth and the fullness thereof.
They were to partake of joys withheld from many of those proud masters
who even then dwelled behind the high walls of their Samnian villas.
For that constituted the strength of the new faith. Christianity was the
first concrete religious system which gave the average man a chance.
Of course I am now talking of Christianity as an experience of the
soul—as a mode of living and thinking—and I have tried to explain how, in
a world full of the dry-rot of slavery, the good tidings must spread with
the speed and fury of an emotional prairie fire. But history, except upon
rare occasions, does not concern itself with the spiritual adventures of
private citizens, be they free or in bondage. When these humble creatures
have been neatly organized into nations, guilds, churches, armies,
brotherhoods and federations; when they have begun to obey a single
directing head; when they have accumulated sufficient wealth to pay taxes
and can be forced into armies for the purpose of national conquest,
then at last they begin to attract the attention of our chroniclers
and are given serious attention. Hence we know a great deal about the
early Church, but exceedingly little about the people who were the true
founders of that institution. That is rather a pity, for the early
development of Christianity is one of the most interesting episodes in
all history.
The Church which finally was built upon the ruins of the ancient empire
was really a combination of two conflicting interests. On the one side
it stood forth as the champion of those all-embracing ideals of love and
charity which the Master himself had taught. But on the other side it
found itself ineradicably bound up with that arid spirit of provincialism
which since the beginning of time had set the compatriots of Jesus apart
from the rest of the world.
In plain language, it combined Roman efficiency with Judaean intolerance
and as a result it established a reign of terror over the minds of men
which was as efficient as it was illogical.
To understand how this could have happened, we must go back once more to
the days of Paul and to the first fifty years after the death of Christ,
and we must firmly grasp the fact that Christianity had begun as a reform
movement within the bosom of the Jewish church and had been a purely
nationalistic movement which in the beginning had threatened the rulers
of the Jewish state and no one else.
The Pharisees who had happened to be in power when Jesus lived had
understood this only too clearly. Quite naturally they had feared the
ultimate consequences of an agitation which boldly threatened to question
a spiritual monopoly which was based upon nothing more substantial than
brute force. To save themselves from being wiped out they had been forced
to act in a spirit of panic and had sent their enemy to the gallows
before the Roman authorities had had time to intervene and deprive them
of their victim.
What Jesus would have done had he lived it is impossible to say. He was
killed long before he was able to organize his disciples into a special
sect nor did he leave a single word of writing from which his followers
could conclude what he wanted them to do.
In the end, however, this had proved to be a blessing in disguise.
The absence of a written set of rules, of a definite collection of
ordinances and regulations, had left the disciples free to follow the
spirit of their master’s words rather than the letter of his law. Had
they been bound by a book, they would very likely have devoted all their
energies to a theological discussion upon the ever enticing subject of
commas and semi-colons.
In that case, of course, no one outside of a few professional scholars
could have possibly shown the slightest interest in the new faith and
Christianity would have gone the way of so many other sects which begin
with elaborate written programs and end when the police are called upon
to throw the haggling theologians into the street.
At the distance of almost twenty centuries, when we realize what
tremendous damage Christianity did to the Roman Empire, it is a matter
of surprise that the authorities took practically no steps to quell a
movement which was fully as dangerous to the safety of the state as an
invasion by Huns or Goths. They knew of course that the fate of this
eastern prophet had caused great excitement among their house slaves,
that the women were forever telling each other about the imminent
reappearance of the King of Heaven, and that quite a number of old men
had solemnly predicted the impending destruction of this world by a ball
of fire.
But it was not the first time that the poorer classes had gone into
hysterics about some new religious hero. Most likely it would not be the
last time, either. Meanwhile the police would see to it that these poor,
frenzied fanatics did not disturb the peace of the realm.
And that was that.
The police did watch out, but found little occasion to act. The
followers of the new mystery went about their business in a most
exemplary fashion. They did not try to overthrow the government. At
first, several slaves had expected that the common fatherhood of God and
the common brotherhood of man would imply a cessation of the old relation
between master and servant. The apostle Paul, however, had hastened
to explain that the Kingdom of which he spoke was an invisible and
intangible kingdom of the soul and that people on this earth had better
take things as they found them, in expectation of the final reward which
awaited them in Heaven.
Similarly, a good many wives, chafing at the bondage of matrimony as
established by the harsh laws of Rome, had rushed to the conclusion that
Christianity was synonymous with emancipation and full equality of rights
between men and women. But again Paul had stepped forward and in a number
of tactful letters had implored his beloved sisters to refrain from all
those extremes which would make their church suspect in the eyes of the
more conservative pagans and had persuaded them to continue in that state
of semi-slavery which had been woman’s share ever since Adam and Eve had
been driven out of Paradise. All this showed a most commendable respect
for the law and as far as the authorities were concerned, the Christian
missionaries could therefore come and go at will and preach as best
suited their own individual tastes and preferences.
But as has happened so often in history, the masses had shown themselves
less tolerant than their rulers. Just because people are poor it does
not necessarily follow that they are high-minded citizens who could be
prosperous and happy if their conscience would only permit them to make
those compromises which are held to be necessary for the accumulation of
wealth.
And the Roman proletariat, since centuries debauched by free meals and
free prize-fights, was no exception to this rule. At first it derived a
great deal of rough pleasure from those sober-faced groups of men and
women who with rapt attention listened to the weird stories about a God
who had ignominiously died on a cross, like any other common criminal,
and who made it their business to utter loud prayers for the hoodlums who
pelted their gatherings with stones and dirt.
The Roman priests, however, were not able to take such a detached view of
this new development.
The religion of the empire was a state religion. It consisted of certain
solemn sacrifices made upon certain specified occasions and paid for in
cash. This money went toward the support of the church officers. When
thousands of people began to desert the old shrines and went to another
church which did not charge them anything at all, the priests were faced
by a very serious reduction in their salary. This of course did not
please them at all, and soon they were loud in their abuse of the godless
heretics who turned their backs upon the Gods of their fathers and burned
incense to the memory of a foreign prophet.
But there was another class of people in the city who had even better
reason to hate the Christians. Those were the fakirs, who as Indian Yogis
and Pooughies and hierophants of the great and only mysteries of Isis
and Ishtar and Baal and Cybele and Attis had for years made a fat and
easy living at the expense of the credulous Roman middle classes. If the
Christians had set up a rival establishment and had charged a handsome
price for their own particular revelations, the guild of spook-doctors
and palmists and necromancers would have had no reason for complaint.
Business was business and the soothsaying fraternity did not mind if a
bit of their trade went elsewhere. But these Christians—a plague upon
their silly notions!—refused to take any reward. Yea, they even gave
away what they had, fed the hungry and shared their own roof with the
homeless. And all that for nothing! Surely that was going too far and
they never could have done this unless they were possessed of certain
hidden sources of revenue, the origin of which no one thus far had been
able to discover.
Rome by this time was no longer a city of free-born burghers. It was
the temporary dwelling place of hundreds of thousands of disinherited
peasants from all parts of the empire. Such a mob, obeying the mysterious
laws that rule the behavior of crowds, is always ready to hate those
who behave differently from themselves and to suspect those who for no
apparent reason prefer to live a life of decency and restraint. The
hail-fellow-well-met who will take a drink and (occasionally) will pay
for one is a fine neighbor and a good fellow. But the man who holds
himself aloof and refuses to go to the wild-animal show in the Coliseum,
who does not cheer when batches of prisoners of war are being dragged
through the streets of the Capitoline Hill, is a spoil-sport and an enemy
of the community at large.
When in the year 64 a great conflagration destroyed that part of Rome
inhabited by the poorer classes, the scene was set for the first
organized attacks upon the Christians.
At first it was rumored that the Emperor Nero, in a fit of drunken
conceit, had ordered his capital to be set on fire that he might get rid
of the slums and rebuild the city according to his own plans. The crowd,
however, knew better. It was the fault of those Jews and Christians who
were forever telling each other about the happy day when large balls of
fire would descend from Heaven and the homes of the wicked would go up in
flames.
Once this story had been successfully started, others followed in rapid
succession. One old woman had heard the Christians talk with the dead.
Another knew that they stole little children and cut their throats and
smeared their blood upon the altar of their outlandish God. Of course,
no one had ever been able to detect them at any of these scandalous
practices, but that was only because they were so terribly clever and had
bribed the police. But now at last they had been caught red-handed and
they would be made to suffer for their vile deeds.
Of the number of faithful who were lynched upon this occasion, we
know nothing. Paul and Peter, so it seems, were among the victims for
thereafter their names are never heard again.
That this terrible outbreak of popular folly accomplished nothing, it
is needless to state. The noble dignity with which the martyrs accepted
their fate was the best possible propaganda for the new ideas and for
every Christian who perished, there were a dozen pagans, ready and eager
to take his place. As soon as Nero had committed the only decent act
of his short and useless life (he killed himself in the year 68), the
Christians returned to their old haunts and everything was as it had been
before.
By this time the Roman authorities were making a great discovery. They
began to suspect that a Christian was not exactly the same thing as a Jew.
We can hardly blame them for having committed this error. The historical
researches of the last hundred years have made it increasingly clear that
the Synagogue was the clearing-house through which the new faith was
passed on to the rest of the world.
Remember that Jesus himself was a Jew and that he had always been most
careful in observing the ancient laws of his fathers and that he had
addressed himself almost exclusively to Jewish audiences. Once, and then
only for a short time, had he left his native country, but the task
which he had set himself he had accomplished with and by and for his
fellow-Jews. Nor was there anything in what he had ever said which could
have given the average Roman the impression that there was a deliberate
difference between Christianity and Judaism.
What Jesus had actually tried to do was this. He had clearly seen the
terrible abuses which had entered the church of his fathers. He had
loudly and sometimes successfully protested against them. But he had
fought his battles for reform from within. Never apparently had it dawned
upon him that he might be the founder of a new religion. If some one had
mentioned the possibility of such a thing to him, he would have rejected
the idea as preposterous. But like many a reformer before his day and
after, he had gradually been forced into a position where compromise
was no longer possible. His untimely death alone had saved him from a
fate like that of Luther and so many other advocates of reform, who
were deeply perplexed when they suddenly found themselves at the head
of a brand new party “outside” the organization to which they belonged,
whereas they were merely trying to do some good from the “inside.”
For many years after the death of Jesus, Christianity (to use the name
long before it had been coined) was the religion of a small Jewish sect
which had a few adherents in Jerusalem and in the villages of Judaea and
Galilee and which had never been heard of outside of the province of
Syria.
It was Gaius Julius Paulus, a full-fledged Roman citizen of Jewish
descent, who had first recognized the possibilities of the new doctrine
as a religion for all the world. The story of his suffering tells us
how bitterly the Jewish Christians had been opposed to the idea of a
universal religion instead of a purely national denomination, membership
to which should only be open to people of their own race. They had hated
the man who dared preach salvation to Jews and Gentiles alike so bitterly
that on his last visit to Jerusalem Paul would undoubtedly have suffered
the fate of Jesus if his Roman passport had not saved him from the fury
of his enraged compatriots.
But it had been necessary for half a battalion of Roman soldiers to
protect him and conduct him safely to the coastal town from where he
could be shipped to Rome for that famous trial which never took place.
A few years after his death, that which he had so often feared during his
lifetime and which he had repeatedly foretold actually occurred.
Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. On the place of the temple of
Jehovah a new temple was erected in honor of Jupiter. The name of the
city was changed to Aelia Capitolina and Judaea itself had become part of
the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. As for the inhabitants, they were
either killed or driven into exile and no one was allowed to live within
several miles of the ruins on pain of death.
It was the final destruction of their holy city which had been so
disastrous to the Jewish-Christians. During several centuries afterwards,
in the little villages of the Judaean hinterland colonies might have
been found of strange people who called themselves “poor men” and who
waited with great patience and amidst everlasting prayers for the end
of the world which was at hand. They were the remnants of the old
Jewish-Christian community in Jerusalem. From time to time we hear them
mentioned in books written during the fifth and sixth centuries. Far away
from civilization, they developed certain strange doctrines of their own
in which hatred for the apostle Paul took a prominent place. After the
seventh century however we no longer find any trace of these so-called
Nazarenes and Ebionites. The victorious Mohammedans had killed them all.
And, anyway, if they had managed to exist a few hundred years longer,
they would not have been able to avert the inevitable.
Rome, by bringing east and west and north and south into one large
political union, had made the world ready for the idea of a universal
religion. Christianity, because it was both simple and practical and
full of a direct appeal, was predestined to succeed where Judaism and
Mithraism and all of the other competing creeds were predestined to fail.
But, unfortunately, the new faith never quite rid itself of certain
rather unpleasant characteristics which only too clearly betrayed its
origin.
The little ship which had brought Paul and Barnabas from Asia to Europe
had carried a message of hope and mercy.
But a third passenger had smuggled himself on board.
He wore a mask of holiness and virtue.
But the face beneath bore the stamp of cruelty and hatred.
And his name was Religious Intolerance.
CHAPTER IV
THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
The early church was a very simple organization. As soon as it became
apparent that the end of the world was not at hand, that the death
of Jesus was not to be followed immediately by the last judgment and
that the Christians might expect to dwell in this vale of tears for a
good long time, the need was felt for a more or less definite form of
government.
Originally the Christians (since all of them were Jews) had come together
in the synagogue. When the rift had occurred between the Jews and the
Gentiles, the latter had betaken themselves to a room in some one’s house
and if none could be found big enough to hold all the faithful (and the
curious) they had met out in the open or in a deserted stone quarry.
At first these gatherings had taken place on the Sabbath, but when
bad feeling between the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians
increased, the latter began to drop the habit of keeping the Sabbath-day
and preferred to meet on Sunday, the day on which the resurrection had
taken place.
These solemn celebrations, however, had borne witness to the popular as
well as to the emotional character of the entire movement. There were no
set speeches or sermons. There were no preachers. Both men and women,
whenever they felt themselves inspired by the Holy Fire, had risen up in
meeting to give evidence of the faith that was in them. Sometimes, if we
are to trust the letters of Paul, these devout brethren, “speaking with
tongues,” had filled the heart of the great apostle with apprehension for
the future. For most of them were simple folk without much education. No
one doubted the sincerity of their impromptu exhortations but very often
they got so excited that they raved like maniacs and while a church may
survive persecution, it is helpless against ridicule. Hence the efforts
of Paul and Peter and their successors to bring some semblance of order
into this chaos of spiritual divulgation and divine enthusiasm.
At first these efforts met with little success. A regular program seemed
in direct contradiction to the democratic nature of the Christian faith.
In the end, however, practical considerations supervened and the meetings
became subject to a definite ritual.
They began with the reading of one of the Psalms (to placate the Jewish
Christians who might be present). Then the congregation united in a song
of praise of more recent composition for the benefit of the Roman and the
Greek worshipers.
The only prescribed form of oration was the famous prayer in which Jesus
had summed up his entire philosophy of life. The preaching, however, for
several centuries remained entirely spontaneous and the sermons were
delivered only by those who felt that they had something to say.
But when the number of those gatherings increased, when the police,
forever on the guard against secret societies, began to make inquiries,
it was necessary that certain men be elected to represent the Christians
in their dealings with the rest of the world. Already Paul had spoken
highly of the gift of leadership. He had compared the little communities
which he visited in Asia and Greece to so many tiny vessels which were
tossed upon a turbulent sea and were very much in need of a clever pilot
if they were to survive the fury of the angry ocean.
And so the faithful came together once more and elected deacons and
deaconesses, pious men and women who were the “servants” of the
community, who took care of the sick and the poor (an object of great
concern to the early Christians) and who looked after the property of the
community and took care of all the small daily chores.
Still later when the church continued to grow in membership and the
business of administration had become too intricate for mere amateurs,
it was entrusted to a small group of “elders.” These were known by their
Greek name of Presbyters and hence our word “priest.”
After a number of years, when every village or city possessed a Christian
church of its own, the need was felt for a common policy. Then an
“overseer” (an Episkopos or Bishop) was elected to superintend an entire
district and direct its dealings with the Roman government.
Soon there were bishops in all the principal towns of the empire, and
those in Antioch and Constantinople and Jerusalem and Carthage and Rome
and Alexandria and Athens were reputed to be very powerful gentlemen who
were almost as important as the civil and military governors of their
provinces.
In the beginning of course the bishop who presided over that part of the
world where Jesus had lived and suffered and died enjoyed the greatest
respect. But after Jerusalem had been destroyed and the generation which
had expected the end of the world and the triumph of Zion had disappeared
from the face of the earth, the poor old bishop in his ruined palace saw
himself deprived of his former prestige.
And quite naturally his place as leader of the faithful was taken by
the “overseer” who lived in the capital of the civilized world and who
guarded the sites where Peter and Paul, the great apostles of the west,
had suffered their martyrdom—the Bishop of Rome.
This bishop, like all others, was known as Father or Papa, the common
expression of love and respect bestowed upon members of the clergy.
In the course of centuries, the title of Papa however became almost
exclusively associated in people’s minds with the particular “Father”
who was the head of the metropolitan diocese. When they spoke of the
Papa or Pope they meant just one Father, the Bishop of Rome, and not by
any chance the Bishop of Constantinople or the Bishop of Carthage. This
was an entirely normal development. When we read in our newspaper about
“the President” it is not necessary to add “of the United States.” We
know that the head of our government is meant and not the President of
the Pennsylvania Railroad or the President of Harvard University or the
President of the League of Nations.
The first time the name occurred officially in a document was in the
year 258. At that time Rome was still the capital of a highly successful
empire and the power of the bishops was entirely overshadowed by that of
the emperors. But during the next three hundred years, under the constant
menace of both foreign and domestic invasions, the successors of Caesar
began to look for a new home that would offer them greater safety. This
they found in a city in a different part of their domains. It was called
Byzantium, after a mythical hero by the name of Byzas who was said to
have landed there shortly after the Trojan war. Situated on the straits
which separated Europe from Asia and dominating the trade route between
the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, it controlled several important
monopolies and was of such great commercial importance that already
Sparta and Athens had fought for the possession of this rich fortress.
Byzantium, however, had held its own until the days of Alexander and
after having been for a short while part of Macedonia it had finally been
incorporated into the Roman Empire.
And now, after ten centuries of increasing prosperity, its Golden Horn
filled with the ships from a hundred nations, it was chosen to become the
center of the empire.
The people of Rome, left to the mercy of Visigoths and Vandals and Heaven
knows what other sort of barbarians, felt that the end of the world had
come when the imperial palaces stood empty for years at a time; when
one department of state after another was removed to the shores of the
Bosphorus and when the inhabitants of the capital were asked to obey laws
made a thousand miles away.
But in the realm of history, it is an ill wind that does not blow some
one good. With the emperors gone, the bishops remained behind as the
most important dignitaries of the town, the only visible and tangible
successors to the glory of the imperial throne.
And what excellent use they made of their new independence! They were
shrewd politicians, for the prestige and the influence of their office
had attracted the best brains of all Italy. They felt themselves to be
the representatives of certain eternal ideas. Hence they were never in a
hurry, but proceeded with the deliberate slowness of a glacier and dared
to take chances where others, acting under the pressure of immediate
necessity, made rapid decisions, blundered and failed.
But most important of all, they were men of a single purpose, who moved
consistently and persistently towards one goal. In all they did and said
and thought they were guided by the desire to increase the glory of God
and the strength and power of the organization which represented the
divine will on earth.
How well they wrought, the history of the next ten centuries was to show.
While everything else perished in the deluge of savage tribes which
hurled itself across the European continent, while the walls of the
empire, one after the other, came crumbling down, while a thousand
institutions as old as the plains of Babylon were swept away like so much
useless rubbish, the Church stood strong and erect, the rock of ages, but
more particularly the rock of the Middle Ages.
The victory, however, which was finally won, was bought at a terrible
cost.
For Christianity which had begun in a stable was allowed to end in a
palace. It had been started as a protest against a form of government in
which the priest as the self-appointed intermediary between the deity and
mankind had insisted upon the unquestioning obedience of all ordinary
human beings. This revolutionary body grew and in less than a hundred
years it developed into a new supertheocracy, compared to which the
old Jewish state had been a mild and liberal commonwealth of happy and
carefree citizens.
And yet all this was perfectly logical and quite unavoidable, as I shall
now try to show you.
Most of the people who visit Rome make a pilgrimage to the Coliseum and
within those wind-swept walls they are shown the hallowed ground where
thousands of Christian martyrs fell as victims of Roman intolerance.
But while it is true that upon several occasions there were persecutions
of the adherents of the new faith, these had very little to do with
religious intolerance.
They were purely political.
The Christian, as a member of a religious sect, enjoyed the greatest
possible freedom.
But the Christian who openly proclaimed himself a conscientious objector,
who bragged of his pacifism even when the country was threatened with
foreign invasion and openly defied the laws of the land upon every
suitable and unsuitable occasion, such a Christian was considered an
enemy of the state and was treated as such.
That he acted according to his most sacred convictions did not make the
slightest impression upon the mind of the average police judge. And when
he tried to explain the exact nature of his scruples, that dignitary
looked puzzled and was entirely unable to follow him.
A Roman police judge after all was only human. When he suddenly found
himself called upon to try people who made an issue of what seemed to him
a very trivial matter, he simply did not know what to do. Long experience
had taught him to keep clear of all theological controversies. Besides
he remembered many imperial edicts, admonishing public servants to use
“tact” in their dealings with the new sect. Hence he used tact and
argued. But as the whole dispute boiled down to a question of principles,
very little was ever accomplished by an appeal to logic.
In the end, the magistrate was placed before the choice of surrendering
the dignity of the law or insisting upon a complete and unqualified
vindication of the supreme power of the state. But prison and torture
meant nothing to people who firmly believed that life did not begin until
after death and who shouted with joy at the idea of being allowed to
leave this wicked world for the joys of Heaven.
The guerilla warfare therefore which finally broke out between the
authorities and their Christian subjects was long and painful. We
possess very few authentic figures upon the total number of victims.
According to Origen, the famous church father of the third century,
several of whose own relatives had been killed in Alexandria during one
of the persecutions, “the number of true Christians who died for their
convictions could easily be enumerated.”
On the other hand, when we peruse the lives of the early saints we
find ourselves faced by such incessant tales of bloodshed that we
begin to wonder how a religion exposed to these constant and murderous
persecutions could ever have survived at all.
No matter what figures I shall give, some one is sure to call me a
prejudiced liar. I will therefore keep my opinion to myself and let my
readers draw their own conclusions. By studying the lives of the Emperors
Decius (249-251) and Valerian (253-260) they will be able to form a
fairly accurate opinion as to the true character of Roman intolerance
during the worst era of persecution.
Furthermore if they will remember that as wise and liberal minded a ruler
as Marcus Aurelius confessed himself unable to handle the problem of his
Christian subjects successfully, they will derive some idea about the
difficulties which beset obscure little officials in remote corners of
the empire, who tried to do their duty and must either be unfaithful to
their oath of office or execute those of their relatives and neighbors
who could not or would not obey those few and very simple ordinances upon
which the imperial government insisted as a matter of self-preservation.
Meanwhile the Christians, not hindered by false sentimentality towards
their pagan fellow-citizens, were steadily extending the sphere of their
influence.
Late in the fourth century, the Emperor Gratian at the request of the
Christian members of the Roman senate who complained that it hurt their
feelings to gather in the shadow of a heathenish idol, ordered the
removal of the statue of Victory which for more than four hundred years
had stood in the hall built by Julius Caesar. Several senators protested.
This did very little good and only caused a number of them to be sent
into exile.
It was then that Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a devoted patriot of great
personal distinction, wrote his famous letter in which he tried to
suggest a compromise.
“Why,” so he asked, “should we Pagans and our Christian neighbors
not live in peace and harmony? We look up to the same stars, we are
fellow-passengers on the same planet and dwell beneath the same sky.
What matters it along which road each individual endeavors to find the
ultimate truth? The riddle of existence is too great that there should be
only one path leading to an answer.”
He was not the only man who felt that way and saw the danger which
threatened the old Roman tradition of a broadminded religious policy.
Simultaneously with the removal of the statue of Victory in Rome a
violent quarrel had broken out between two contending factions of the
Christians who had found a refuge in Byzantium. This dispute gave rise
to one of the most intelligent discussions of tolerance to which the
world had ever listened. Themistius the philosopher, who was the author,
had remained faithful to the Gods of his fathers. But when the Emperor
Valens took sides in the fight between his orthodox and his non-orthodox
Christian subjects, Themistius felt obliged to remind him of his true
duty.
“There is,” so he said, “a domain over which no ruler can hope to
exercise any authority. That is the domain of the virtues and especially
that of the religious beliefs of individuals. Compulsion within that
field causes hypocrisy and conversions that are based upon fraud. Hence
it is much better for a ruler to tolerate all beliefs, since it is only
by toleration that civic strife can be averted. Moreover, tolerance is
a divine law. God himself has most clearly demonstrated his desire for
a number of different religions. And God alone can judge the methods by
which humanity aspires to come to an understanding of the Divine Mystery.
God delights in the variety of homage which is rendered to him. He likes
the Christians to use certain rites, the Greeks others, the Egyptians
again others.”
Fine words, indeed, but spoken in vain.
The ancient world together with its ideas and ideals was dead and all
efforts to set back the clock of history were doomed beforehand. Life
means progress, and progress means suffering. The old order of society
was rapidly disintegrating. The army was a mutinous mob of foreign
mercenaries. The frontier was in open revolt. England and the other
outlying districts had long since been surrendered to the barbarians.
When the final catastrophe took place, those brilliant young men who in
centuries past had entered the service of the state found themselves
deprived of all but one chance for advancement. That was a career in the
Church. As Christian archbishop of Spain, they could hope to exercise
the power formerly held by the proconsul. As Christian authors, they
could be certain of a fairly large public if they were willing to devote
themselves exclusively to theological subjects. As Christian diplomats,
they could be sure of rapid promotion if they were willing to represent
the bishop of Rome at the imperial court of Constantinople or undertake
the hazardous job of gaining the good will of some barbarous chieftain in
the heart of Gaul or Scandinavia. And finally, as Christian financiers,
they could hope to make fortunes administering those rapidly increasing
estates which had made the occupants of the Lateran Palace the largest
landowners of Italy and the richest men of their time.
We have seen something of the same nature during the last five years.
Up to the year 1914 the young men of Europe who were ambitious and did
not depend upon manual labor for their support almost invariably entered
the service of the state. They became officers of the different imperial
and royal armies and navies. They filled the higher judicial positions,
administered the finances or spent years in the colonies as governors
or military commanders. They did not expect to grow very rich, but the
social prestige of the offices which they held was very great and by the
application of a certain amount of intelligence, industry and honesty,
they could look forward to a pleasant life and an honorable old age.
Then came the war and swept aside these last remnants of the old feudal
fabric of society. The lower classes took hold of the government. Some
few among the former officials were too old to change the habits of a
lifetime. They pawned their orders and died. The vast majority, however,
surrendered to the inevitable. From childhood on they had been educated
to regard business as a low profession, not worthy of their attention.
Perhaps business was a low profession, but they had to choose between
an office and the poor house. The number of people who will go hungry
for the sake of their convictions is always relatively small. And so
within a few years after the great upheaval, we find most of the former
officers and state officials doing the sort of work which they would not
have touched ten years ago and doing it not unwillingly. Besides, as most
of them belonged to families which for generations had been trained in
executive work and were thoroughly accustomed to handle men, they have
found it comparatively easy to push ahead in their new careers and are
today a great deal happier and decidedly more prosperous than they had
ever expected to be.
What business is today, the Church was sixteen centuries ago.
It may not always have been easy for young men who traced their ancestry
back to Hercules or to Romulus or to the heroes of the Trojan war to take
orders from a simple cleric who was the son of a slave, but the simple
cleric who was the son of a slave had something to give which the young
men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules and Romulus and the heroes
of the Trojan war wanted and wanted badly. And therefore if they were
both bright fellows (as they well may have been) they soon learned to
appreciate the other fellow’s good qualities and got along beautifully.
For it is one of the other strange laws of history that the more things
appear to be changing, the more they remain the same.
Since the beginning of time it has seemed inevitable that there shall
be one small group of clever men and women who do the ruling and a much
larger group of not-quite-so-bright men and women who shall do the
obeying. The stakes for which these two groups play are at different
periods known by different names. Invariably they represent Strength and
Leadership on the one hand and Weakness and Compliance on the other.
They have been called Empire and Church and Knighthood and Monarchy and
Democracy and Slavery and Serfdom and Proletariat. But the mysterious
law which governs human development works the same in Moscow as it does
in London or Madrid or Washington, for it is bound to neither time nor
place. It has often manifested itself under strange forms and disguises.
More than once it has worn a lowly garb and has loudly proclaimed its
love for humanity, its devotion to God, its humble desire to bring
about the greatest good for the greatest number. But underneath such
pleasant exteriors it has always hidden and continues to hide the grim
truth of that primeval law which insists that the first duty of man
is to keep alive. People who resent the fact that they were born in a
world of mammals are apt to get angry at such statements. They call us
“materialistics” and “Cynics” and what not. Because they have always
regarded history as a pleasant fairy tale, they are shocked to discover
that it is a science which obeys the same iron rules which govern the
rest of the universe. They might as well fight against the habits of
parallel lines or the results of the tables of multiplication.
Personally I would advise them to accept the inevitable.
For then and only then can history some day be turned into something
that shall have a practical value to the human race and cease to be the
ally and confederate of those who profit by racial prejudice, tribal
intolerance and the ignorance of the vast majority of their fellow
citizens.
And if any one doubts the truth of this statement, let him look for the
proof in the chronicles of those centuries of which I was writing a few
pages back.
Let him study the lives of the great leaders of the Church during the
first four centuries.
Almost without exception he will find that they came from the ranks of
the old Pagan society, that they had been trained in the schools of the
Greek philosophers and had only drifted into the Church afterwards, when
they had been obliged to choose a career. Several of them of course were
attracted by the new ideas and accepted the words of Christ with heart
and soul. But the great majority changed its allegiance from a worldly
master to a Heavenly ruler because the chances for advancement with the
latter were infinitely greater.
The Church from her side, always very wise and very understanding, did
not look too closely into the motives which had impelled many of her new
disciples to take this sudden step. And most carefully she endeavored to
be all things to all men. Those who felt inclined towards a practical
and worldly existence were given a chance to make good in the field of
politics and economics. While those of a different temperament, who took
their faith more emotionally, were offered every possible opportunity
to escape from the crowded cities that they might cogitate in silence
upon the evils of existence and so might acquire that degree of personal
holiness which they deemed necessary for the eternal happiness of their
souls.
In the beginning it had been quite easy to lead such a life of devotion
and contemplation.
The Church during the first centuries of her existence had been merely
a loose spiritual bond between humble folks who dwelled far away from
the mansions of the mighty. But when the Church succeeded the empire as
ruler of the world, and became a strong political organization with vast
real-estate holdings in Italy and France and Africa, there were less
opportunities for a life of solitude. Many pious men and women began to
harken back to the “good old days” when all true Christians had spent
their waking hours in works of charity and in prayer. That they might
again be happy, they now artificially re-created what once had been a
natural development of the times.
This movement for a monastic form of life which was to exercise such an
enormous influence upon the political and economic development of the
next thousand years and which was to give the Church a devoted group of
very useful shock-troops in her warfare upon heathen and heretics was of
Oriental origin.
This need not surprise us.
In the countries bordering upon the eastern shores of the Mediterranean,
civilization was very, very old and the human race was tired to the point
of exhaustion. In Egypt alone, ten different and separate cycles of
culture had succeeded each other since the first settlers had occupied
the valley of the Nile. The same was true of the fertile plain between
the Tigris and the Euphrates. The vanity of life, the utter futility of
all human effort, lay visible in the ruins of thousands of bygone temples
and palaces. The younger races of Europe might accept Christianity as
an eager promise of life, a constant appeal to their newly regained
energy and enthusiasm. But Egyptians and Syrians took their religious
experiences in a different mood.
To them it meant the welcome prospect of relief from the curse of being
alive. And in anticipation of the joyful hour of death, they escaped from
the charnel-house of their own memories and they fled into the desert
that they might be alone with their grief and their God and nevermore
look upon the reality of existence.
For some curious reason the business of reform always seems to have
had a particular appeal to soldiers. They, more than all other people,
have come into direct contact with the cruelty and the horrors of
civilization. Furthermore they have learned that nothing can be
accomplished without discipline. The greatest of all modern warriors
to fight the battles of the Church was a former captain in the army of
the Emperor Charles V. And the man who first gathered the spiritual
stragglers into a single organization had been a private in the army of
the Emperor Constantine. His name was Pachomius and he was an Egyptian.
When he got through with his military service, he joined a small group
of hermits who under the leadership of a certain Anthony, who hailed
from his own country, had left the cities and were living peacefully
among the jackals of the desert. But as the solitary life seemed to lead
to all sorts of strange afflictions of the mind and caused certain very
regrettable excesses of devotion which made people spend their days on
the top of an old pillar or at the bottom of a deserted grave (thereby
giving cause for great mirth to the pagans and serious reason for grief
to the true believers) Pachomius decided to put the whole movement upon a
more practical basis and in this way he became the founder of the first
religious order. From that day on (the middle of the fourth century)
hermits living together in small groups obeyed one single commander who
was known as the “superior general” and who in turn appointed the abbots
who were responsible for the different monasteries which they held as so
many fortresses of the Lord.
Before Pachomius died in 346 his monastic idea had been carried from
Egypt to Rome by the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius and thousands of
people had availed themselves of this opportunity to flee the world, its
wickedness and its too insistent creditors.
The climate of Europe, however, and the nature of the people made it
necessary that the original plans of the founder be slightly changed.
Hunger and cold were not quite so easy to bear under a wintry sky as in
the valley of the Nile. Besides, the more practical western mind was
disgusted rather than edified by that display of dirt and squalor which
seemed to be an integral part of the Oriental ideal of holiness.
“What,” so the Italians and the Frenchmen asked themselves, “is to become
of those good works upon which the early Church has laid so much stress?
Are the widows and the orphans and the sick really very much benefited by
the self-mortification of small groups of emaciated zealots who live in
the damp caverns of a mountain a million miles away from everywhere?”
The western mind therefore insisted upon a modification of the monastic
institution along more reasonable lines, and credit for this innovation
goes to a native of the town of Nursia in the Apennine mountains. His
name was Benedict and he is invariably spoken of as Saint Benedict. His
parents had sent him to Rome to be educated, but the city had filled his
Christian soul with horror and he had fled to the village of Subiaco in
the Abruzzi mountains to the deserted ruins of an old country palace that
once upon a time had belonged to the Emperor Nero.
There he had lived for three years in complete solitude. Then the fame
of his great virtue began to spread throughout the countryside and the
number of those who wished to be near him was soon so great that he had
enough recruits for a dozen full-fledged monasteries.
He therefore retired from his dungeon and became the lawgiver of European
monasticism. First of all he drew up a constitution. In every detail it
showed the influence of Benedict’s Roman origin. The monks who swore to
obey his rules could not look forward to a life of idleness. Those hours
which they did not devote to prayer and meditation were to be filled
with work in the fields. If they were too old for farm work, they were
expected to teach the young how to become good Christians and useful
citizens and so well did they acquit themselves of this task that the
Benedictine monasteries for almost a thousand years had a monopoly of
education and were allowed to train most of the young men of exceptional
ability during the greater part of the Middle Ages.
In return for their labors, the monks were decently clothed, received a
sufficient amount of eatable food and were given a bed upon which they
could sleep the two or three hours of each day that were not devoted to
work or to prayer.
But most important, from an historical point of view, was the fact that
the monks ceased to be laymen who had merely run away from this world and
their obligations to prepare their souls for the hereafter. They became
the servants of God. They were obliged to qualify for their new dignity
by a long and most painful period of probation and furthermore they were
expected to take a direct and active part in spreading the power and the
glory of the kingdom of God.
The first elementary missionary work among the heathen of Europe had
already been done. But lest the good accomplished by the apostles come
to naught, the labors of the individual preachers must be followed up
by the organized effort of permanent settlers and administrators. The
monks now carried their spade and their ax and their prayer-book into the
wilderness of Germany and Scandinavia and Russia and far-away Iceland.
They plowed and they harvested and they preached and they taught school
and brought unto those distant lands the first rudimentary elements of a
civilization which most people only knew by hearsay.
In this way did the Papacy, the executive head of the entire Church, make
use of all the manifold forces of the human spirit.
The practical man of affairs was given quite as much of an opportunity to
distinguish himself as the dreamer who found happiness in the silence of
the woods. There was no lost motion. Nothing was allowed to go to waste.
And the result was such an increase of power that soon neither emperor
nor king could afford to rule his realm without paying humble attention
to the wishes of those of his subjects who confessed themselves the
followers of the Christ.
The way in which the final victory was gained is not without interest.
For it shows that the triumph of Christianity was due to practical
causes and was not (as is sometimes believed) the result of a sudden and
overwhelming outburst of religious ardor.
The last great persecution of the Christians took place under the Emperor
Diocletian.
Curiously enough, Diocletian was by no means one of the worst among those
many potentates who ruled Europe by the grace of their body-guards. But
he suffered from a complaint which alas! is quite common among those who
are called upon to govern the human race. He was densely ignorant upon
the subject of elementary economics.
He found himself possessed of an empire that was rapidly going to pieces.
Having spent all his life in the army, he believed the weak point lay
in the organization of the Roman military system, which entrusted the
defenses of the outlying districts to colonies of soldiers who had
gradually lost the habit of fighting and had become peaceful rustics,
selling cabbages and carrots to the very barbarians whom they were
supposed to keep at a safe distance from the frontiers.
It was impossible for Diocletian to change this venerable system. He
therefore tried to solve the difficulty by creating a new field army,
composed of young and agile men who at a few weeks’ notice could be
marched to any particular part of the empire that was threatened with an
invasion.
This was a brilliant idea, but like all brilliant ideas of a military
nature, it cost an awful lot of money. This money had to be produced in
the form of taxes by the people in the interior of the country. As was
to be expected, they raised a great hue and cry and claimed that they
could not pay another denarius without going stone broke. The emperor
answered that they were mistaken and bestowed upon his tax-gatherers
certain powers thus far only possessed by the hangman. But all to no
avail. For the subjects, rather than work at a regular trade which
assured them a deficit at the end of a year’s hard work, deserted house
and home and family and herds and flocked to the cities or became hobos.
His Majesty, however, did not believe in half-way measures and he solved
the difficulty by a decree which shows how completely the old Roman
Republic had degenerated into an Oriental despotism. By a stroke of
his pen he made all government offices and all forms of handicraft and
commerce hereditary professions. That is to say, the sons of officers
were supposed to become officers, whether they liked it or not. The sons
of bakers must themselves become bakers, although they might have greater
aptitude for music or pawn-broking. The sons of sailors were foredoomed
to a life on shipboard, even if they were sea-sick when they rowed across
the Tiber. And finally, the day laborers, although technically they
continued to be freemen, were constrained to live and die on the same
piece of soil on which they had been born and were henceforth nothing but
a very ordinary variety of slaves.
To expect that a ruler who had such supreme confidence in his own ability
either could or would tolerate the continued existence of a relatively
small number of people who only obeyed such parts of his regulations and
edicts as pleased them would be absurd. But in judging Diocletian for
his harshness in dealing with the Christians, we must remember that he
was fighting with his back against the wall and that he had good cause
to suspect the loyalty of several million of his subjects who profited
by the measures he had taken for their protection but refused to carry
their share of the common burden.
You will remember that the earliest Christians had not taken the trouble
to write anything down. They expected the world to come to an end at
almost any moment. Therefore why waste time and money upon literary
efforts which in less than ten years would be consumed by the fire from
Heaven? But when the New Zion failed to materialize and when the story
of Christ (after a hundred years of patient waiting) was beginning to
be repeated with such strange additions and variations that a true
disciple hardly knew what to believe and what not, the need was felt for
some authentic book upon the subject and a number of short biographies
of Jesus and such of the original letters of the apostles as had been
preserved were combined into one large volume which was called the New
Testament.
This book contained among others a chapter called the Book of Revelations
and therein were to be found certain references and certain prophecies
about and anent a city built on “seven mountains.” That Rome was built
on seven hills had been a commonly known fact ever since the days of
Romulus. It is true that the anonymous author of this curious chapter
carefully called the city of his abomination Babylon. But it took no
great degree of perspicacity on the part of the imperial magistrate to
understand what was meant when he read these pleasant references to the
“Mother of Harlots” and the “Abomination of the Earth,” the town that was
drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs, foredoomed to become
the habitation of all devils, the home of every foul spirit, the cage of
every unclean and hateful bird, and more expressions of a similar and
slightly uncomplimentary nature.
Such sentences might have been explained away as the ravings of a poor
fanatic, blinded by pity and rage as he thought of his many friends
who had been killed during the last fifty years. But they were part of
the solemn services of the Church. Week after week they were repeated
in those places where the Christians came together and it was no more
than natural that outsiders should think that they represented the true
sentiments of all Christians towards the mighty city on the Tiber. I do
not mean to imply that the Christians may not have had excellent reason
to feel the way they did, but we can hardly blame Diocletian because he
failed to share their enthusiasm.
But that was not all.
The Romans were becoming increasingly familiar with an expression which
the world thus far had never heard. That was the word “heretics.”
Originally the name “heretic” was given only to those people who had
“chosen” to believe certain doctrines, or, as we would say, a “sect.”
But gradually the meaning had narrowed down to those who had chosen
to believe certain doctrines which were not held “correct” or “sound”
or “true” or “orthodox” by the duly established authorities of the
Church and which therefore, to use the language of the Apostles, were
“heretical, unsound, false and eternally wrong.”
The few Romans who still clung to the ancient faith were technically
free from the charge of heresy because they had remained outside of the
fold of the Church and therefore could not, strictly speaking, be held
to account for their private opinions. All the same, it did not flatter
the imperial pride to read in certain parts of the New Testament that
“heresy was as terrible an evil as adultery, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
idolatry, witchcraft, wrath, strife, murder, sedition and drunkenness”
and a few other things which common decency prevents me from repeating on
this page.
All this led to friction and misunderstanding and friction and
misunderstanding led to persecution and once more Roman jails were filled
with Christian prisoners and Roman executioners added to the number of
Christian martyrs and a great deal of blood was shed and nothing was
accomplished and finally Diocletian, in utter despair, went back to his
home town of Salonae on the Dalmatian coast, retired from the business of
ruling and devoted himself exclusively to the even more exciting pastime
of raising great big cabbages in his back yard.
His successor did not continue the policy of repression. On the contrary,
since he could not hope to eradicate the Christian evil by force, he
decided to make the best of a bad bargain and gain the good will of his
enemies by offering them some special favors.
This happened in the year 313 and the honor of having been the first to
“recognize” the Christian church officially belongs to a man by the name
of Constantine.
Some day we shall possess an International Board of Revisioning
Historians before whom all emperors, kings, pontiffs, presidents and
mayors who now enjoy the title of the “great” shall have to submit their
claims for this specific qualification. One of the candidates who will
have to be watched very carefully when he appears before this tribunal is
the aforementioned Emperor Constantine.
This wild Serbian who had wielded a spear on every battle field of
Europe, from York in England to Byzantium on the shores of the Bosphorus,
was among other things the murderer of his wife, the murderer of his
brother-in-law, the murderer of his nephew (a boy of seven) and the
executioner of several other relatives of minor degree and importance.
Nevertheless and notwithstanding, because in a moment of panic just
before he marched against his most dangerous rival, Maxentius, he had
made a bold bid for Christian support, he gained great fame as the
“second Moses” and was ultimately elevated to sainthood both by the
Armenian and by the Russian churches. That he lived and died a barbarian
who had outwardly accepted Christianity, yet until the end of his days
tried to read the riddle of the future from the steaming entrails of
sacrificial sheep, all this was most considerately overlooked in view
of the famous Edict of Tolerance by which the Emperor guaranteed unto
his beloved Christian subjects the right to “freely profess their
private opinions and to assemble in their meeting place without fear of
molestation.”
For the leaders of the Church in the first half of the fourth century,
as I have repeatedly stated before, were practical politicians and when
they had finally forced the Emperor to sign this ever memorable decree,
they elevated Christianity from the rank of a minor sect to the dignity
of the official church of the state. But they knew how and in what manner
this had been accomplished and the successors of Constantine knew it, and
although they tried to cover it up by a display of oratorical fireworks
the arrangement never quite lost its original character.
* * * * *
“Deliver me, oh mighty ruler,” exclaimed Nestor the Patriarch unto
Theodosius the Emperor, “deliver me of all the enemies of my church and
in return I will give thee Heaven. Stand by me in putting down those who
disagree with our doctrines and we in turn will stand by thee in putting
down thine enemies.”
There have been other bargains during the history of the last twenty
centuries.
But few have been so brazen as the compromise by which Christianity came
to power.
CHAPTER V
IMPRISONMENT
Just before the curtain rings down for the last time upon the ancient
world, a figure crosses the stage which had deserved a better fate than
an untimely death and the unflattering appellation of “the Apostate.”
The Emperor Julian, to whom I refer, was a nephew of Constantine the
Great and was born in the new capital of the empire in the year 331. In
337 his famous uncle died. At once his three sons fell upon their common
heritage and upon each other with the fury of famished wolves.
To rid themselves of all those who might possibly lay claim to part of
the spoils, they ordered that those of their relatives who lived in or
near the city be murdered. Julian’s father was one of the victims. His
mother had died a few years after his birth. In this way, at the age
of six, the boy was left an orphan. An older half-brother, an invalid,
shared his loneliness and his lessons. These consisted mostly of lectures
upon the advantages of the Christian faith, given by a kindly but
uninspired old bishop by the name of Eusebius.
But when the children grew older, it was thought wiser to send them
a little further away where they would be less conspicuous and might
possibly escape the usual fate of junior Byzantine princes. They were
removed to a little village in the heart of Asia Minor. It was a dull
life, but it gave Julian a chance to learn many useful things. For his
neighbors, the Cappadocian mountaineers, were a simple people and still
believed in the gods of their ancestors.
There was not the slightest chance that the boy would ever hold a
responsible position and when he asked permission to devote himself to a
life of study, he was told to go ahead.
First of all he went to Nicomedia, one of the few places where the old
Greek philosophy continued to be taught. There he crammed his head so
full of literature and science that there was no space left for the
things he had learned from Eusebius.
Next he obtained leave to go to Athens, that he might study on the very
spot hallowed by the recollections of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.
Meanwhile, his half-brother too had been assassinated and Constantius,
his cousin and the one and only remaining son of Constantine, remembering
that he and his cousin, the boy philosopher, were by this time the only
two surviving male members of the imperial family, sent for Julian,
received him kindly, married him, still in the kindest of spirits, to his
own sister, Helena, and ordered him to proceed to Gaul and defend that
province against the barbarians.
It seems that Julian had learned something more practical from his Greek
teachers than an ability to argue. When in the year 357 the Alamanni
threatened France, he destroyed their army near Strassburg, and for good
measure added all the country between the Meuse and the Rhine to his
own province and went to live in Paris, filled his library with a fresh
supply of books by his favorite authors and was as happy as his serious
nature allowed him to be.
When news of these victories reached the ears of the Emperor, little
Greek fire was wasted in celebration of the event. On the contrary,
elaborate plans were laid to get rid of a competitor who might be just a
trifle too successful.
But Julian was very popular with his soldiers. When they heard that
their commander-in-chief had been ordered to return home (a polite
invitation to come and have one’s head cut off), they invaded his palace
and then and there proclaimed him emperor. At the same time they let it
be known that they would kill him if he should refuse to accept.
Julian, like a sensible fellow, accepted.
Even at that late date, the Roman roads must have been in a remarkably
good state of preservation. Julian was able to break all records by the
speed with which he marched his troops from the heart of France to the
shores of the Bosphorus. But ere he reached the capital, he heard that
his cousin Constantius had died.
And in this way, a pagan once more became ruler of the western world.
Of course the thing which Julian had undertaken to do was impossible.
It is a strange thing indeed that so intelligent a man should have been
under the impression that the dead past could ever be brought back to
life by the use of force; that the age of Pericles could be revived by
reconstructing an exact replica of the Acropolis and populating the
deserted groves of the Academy with professors dressed up in togas of a
bygone age and talking to each other in a tongue that had disappeared
from the face of the earth more than five centuries before.
And yet that is exactly what Julian tried to do.
All his efforts during the two short years of his reign were directed
towards the reëstablishment of that ancient science which was now held in
profound contempt by the majority of his people; towards the rekindling
of a spirit of research in a world ruled by illiterate monks who felt
certain that everything worth knowing was contained in a single book and
that independent study and investigation could only lead to unbelief and
hell fire; towards the requickening of the joy-of-living among those who
had the vitality and the enthusiasm of ghosts.
Many a man of greater tenacity than Julian would have been driven to
madness and despair by the spirit of opposition which met him on all
sides. As for Julian, he simply went to pieces under it. Temporarily at
least he clung to the enlightened principles of his great ancestors. The
Christian rabble of Antioch might pelt him with stones and mud, yet he
refused to punish the city. Dull-witted monks might try to provoke him
into another era of persecution, yet the Emperor persistently continued
to instruct his officials “not to make any martyrs.”
In the year 363 a merciful Persian arrow made an end to this strange
career.
It was the best thing that could have happened to this, the last and
greatest of the Pagan rulers.
Had he lived any longer, his sense of tolerance and his hatred of
stupidity would have turned him into the most intolerant man of his age.
Now, from his cot in the hospital, he could reflect that during his
rule, not a single person had suffered death for his private opinions.
For this mercy, his Christian subjects rewarded him with their undying
hatred. They boasted that an arrow from one of his own soldiers (a
Christian legionary) had killed the Emperor and with rare delicacy
they composed eulogies in praise of the murderer. They told how, just
before he collapsed, Julian had confessed the errors of his ways and had
acknowledged the power of Christ. And they emptied the arsenal of foul
epithets with which the vocabulary of the fourth century was so richly
stocked to disgrace the fame of an honest man who had lived a life of
ascetic simplicity and had devoted all his energies to the happiness of
the people who had been entrusted to his care.
When he had been carried to his grave the Christian bishops could at last
consider themselves the veritable rulers of the Empire and immediately
began the task of destroying whatever opposition to their domination
might remain in isolated corners of Europe, Asia and Africa.
Under Valentinian and Valens, two brothers who ruled from 364 to 378, an
edict was passed forbidding all Romans to sacrifice animals to the old
Gods. The pagan priests were thereby deprived of their revenue and forced
to look for other employment.
But the regulations were mild compared to the law by which Theodosius
ordered all his subjects not only to accept the Christian doctrines,
but to accept them only in the form laid down by the “universal” or
“Catholic” church of which he had made himself the protector and which
was to have a monopoly in all matters spiritual.
All those who after the promulgation of this ordinance stuck to their
“erroneous opinions”—who persisted in their “insane heresies”—who
remained faithful to their “scandalous doctrines”—were to suffer the
consequences of their willful disobedience and were to be exiled or put
to death.
From then on the old world marched rapidly to its final doom. In Italy
and Gaul and Spain and England hardly a pagan temple remained. They were
either wrecked by the contractors who needed stones for new bridges and
streets and city-walls and water-works, or they were remodeled to serve
as meeting places for the Christians. The thousands of golden and silver
images which had been accumulated since the beginning of the Republic
were publicly confiscated and privately stolen and such statues as
remained were made into mortar.
The Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple which Greeks and Romans and
Egyptians alike had held in the greatest veneration for more than six
centuries, was razed to the ground. There remained the university,
famous all over the world ever since it had been founded by Alexander
the Great. It had continued to teach and explain the old philosophies
and as a result attracted a large number of students from all parts of
the Mediterranean. When it was not closed at the behest of the Bishop
of Alexandria, the monks of his diocese took the matter into their own
hands. They broke into the lecture rooms, lynched Hypatia, the last
of the great Platonic teachers, and threw her mutilated body into the
streets where it was left to the mercy of the dogs.
In Rome things went no better.
The temple of Jupiter was closed, the Sibylline books, the very basis of
the old Roman faith, were burned. The capital was left a ruin.
In Gaul, under the leadership of the famous bishop of Tours, the old Gods
were declared to be the predecessors of the Christian devils and their
temples were therefore ordered to be wiped off the face of the earth.
If, as sometimes happened in remote country districts, the peasants
rushed forth to the defense of their beloved shrines, the soldiers were
called out and by means of the ax and the gallows made an end to such
“insurrections of Satan.”
In Greece, the work of destruction proceeded more slowly. But finally in
the year 394, the Olympic games were abolished. As soon as this center of
Greek national life (after an uninterrupted existence of eleven hundred
and seventy years) had come to an end, the rest was comparatively easy.
One after the other, the philosophers were expelled from the country.
Finally, by order of the Emperor Justinian, the University of Athens was
closed. The funds established for its maintenance were confiscated. The
last seven professors, deprived of their livelihood, fled to Persia
where King Chosroes received them hospitably and allowed them to spend
the rest of their days peacefully playing the new and mysterious Indian
game called “chess.”
In the first half of the fifth century, archbishop Chrysostomus could
truthfully state that the works of the old authors and philosophers had
disappeared from the face of the earth. Cicero and Socrates and Virgil
and Homer (not to mention the mathematicians and the astronomers and
the physicians who were an object of special abomination to all good
Christians) lay forgotten in a thousand attics and cellars. Six hundred
years were to go by before they were called back to life, and in the
meantime the world would be obliged to subsist on such literary fare as
it pleased the theologians to place before it.
A strange diet, and not exactly (in the jargon of the medical faculty) a
balanced one.
For the Church, although triumphant over its pagan enemies, was beset by
many and serious tribulations. The poor peasant in Gaul and Lusitania,
clamoring to burn incense in honor of his ancient Gods, could be silenced
easily enough. He was a heathen and the law was on the side of the
Christian. But the Ostrogoth or the Alaman or the Longobard who declared
that Arius, the priest of Alexandria, was right in his opinion upon the
true nature of Christ and that Athanasius, the bishop of that same city
and Arius’ bitter enemy, was wrong (or vice versa)—the Longobard or Frank
who stoutly maintained that Christ was not “of the same nature” but of
a “like nature only” with God (or vice versa)—the Vandal or the Saxon
who insisted that Nestor spoke the truth when he called the Virgin Mary
the “mother of Christ” and not the “mother of God” (or vice versa)—the
Burgundian or Frisian who denied that Jesus was possessed of two natures,
one human and one divine (or vice versa)—all these simple-minded but
strong-armed barbarians who had accepted Christianity and were, outside
of their unfortunate errors of opinion, staunch friends and supporters
of the Church—these indeed could not be punished with a general anathema
and a threat of perpetual hell fire. They must be persuaded gently that
they were wrong and must be brought within the fold with charitable
expressions of love and devotion. But before all else they must be given
a definite creed that they might know for once and for all what they must
hold to be true and what they must reject as false.
It was that desire for unity of some sort in all matters pertaining to
the faith which finally caused those famous gatherings which have become
known as Oecumenical or Universal Councils, and which since the middle
of the fourth century have been called together at irregular intervals
to decide what doctrine is right and what doctrine contains the germ of
heresy and should therefore be adjudged erroneous, unsound, fallacious
and heretical.
The first of those Oecumenical councils was held in the town of Nicaea,
not far from the ruins of Troy, in the year 325. The second one,
fifty-six years later, was held in Constantinople. The third one in
the year 431 in Ephesus. Thereafter they followed each other in rapid
succession in Chalcedon, twice again in Constantinople, once more in
Nicaea and finally once again in Constantinople in the year 869.
After that, however, they were held in Rome or in some particular town of
western Europe designated by the Pope. For it was generally accepted from
the fourth century on that although the emperor had the technical right
to call together such meetings (a privilege which incidentally obliged
him to pay the traveling expenses of his faithful bishops) that very
serious attention should be paid to the suggestions made by the powerful
Bishop of Rome. And although we do not know with any degree of certainty
who occupied the chair in Nicaea, all later councils were dominated by
the Popes and the decisions of these holy gatherings were not regarded
as binding unless they had obtained the official approval of the supreme
pontiff himself or one of his delegates.
Hence we can now say farewell to Constantinople and travel to the more
congenial regions of the west.
The field of Tolerance and Intolerance has been fought over so repeatedly
by those who hold tolerance the greatest of all human virtues and those
who denounce it as an evidence of moral weakness, that I shall pay
very little attention to the purely theoretical aspects of the case.
Nevertheless it must be confessed that the champions of the Church follow
a plausible line of reasoning when they try to explain away the terrible
punishments which were inflicted upon all heretics.
“A church,” so they argue, “is like any other organization. It is
almost like a village or a tribe or a fortress. There must be a
commander-in-chief and there must be a definite set of laws and
by-laws, which all members are forced to obey. It follows that those
who swear allegiance to the Church make a tacit vow both to respect the
commander-in-chief and to obey the law. And if they find it impossible to
do this, they must suffer the consequences of their own decisions and get
out.”
All of which, so far, is perfectly true and reasonable.
If today a minister feels that he can no longer believe in the articles
of faith of the Baptist Church, he can turn Methodist, and if for some
reason he ceases to believe in the creed as laid down by the Methodist
Church, he can become a Unitarian or a Catholic or a Jew, or for that
matter, a Hindoo or a Turk. The world is wide. The door is open. There
is no one outside his own hungry family to say him nay.
But this is an age of steamships and railroad trains and unlimited
economic opportunities.
The world of the fifth century was not quite so simple. It was far from
easy to discover a region where the influence of the Bishop of Rome did
not make itself felt. One could of course go to Persia or to India, as
a good many heretics did, but the voyage was long and the chances of
survival were small. And this meant perpetual banishment for one’s self
and one’s children.
And finally, why should a man surrender his good right to believe what he
pleased if he felt sincerely that his conception of the idea of Christ
was the right one and that it was only a question of time for him to
convince the Church that its doctrines needed a slight modification?
For that was the crux of the whole matter.
The early Christians, both the faithful and the heretics, dealt with
ideas which had a relative and not a positive value.
A group of mathematicians, sending each other to the gallows because they
cannot agree upon the absolute value of x would be no more absurd than
a council of learned theologians trying to define the undefinable and
endeavoring to reduce the substance of God to a formula.
But so thoroughly had the spirit of self-righteousness and intolerance
got hold of the world that until very recently all those who advocated
tolerance upon the basis that “we cannot ever possibly know who is right
and who is wrong” did so at the risk of their lives and usually couched
their warnings in such careful Latin sentences that not more than one or
two of their most intelligent readers ever knew what they meant.
CHAPTER VI
THE 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:
[Illustration: I]
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 been greatly shortened. Others, and
especially CD, have been lengthened.
[Illustration: II]
Now transfer the problem from mathematics to history. Let us for the sake
of argument suppose that
AB represents politics
CD ” trade
EF ” art
GH ” militarism
In the figure I the 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 in figure 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.
[Illustration: 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 could find 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 whatever they 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 lasted more 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 a
loving 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 off
and 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 of every 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 and there 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!
CHAPTER VII
THE INQUISITION
In the year 1198 a certain Lotario, Count of Segni, succeeded to the high
honors which his uncle Paolo had held only a few years before and as
Innocent III took possession of the papal chair.
He was one of the most remarkable men who ever resided in the Lateran
Palace. Thirty-seven years old at the time of his ascension. An
honor-student in the universities of Paris and Boulogne. Rich, clever,
full of energy and high ambition, he used his office so well that he
could rightly claim to exercise the “government not of the Church alone
but of the entire world.”
He set Italy free from German interference by driving the imperial
governor of Rome from that city; by reconquering those parts of
the peninsula which were held by imperial troops; and finally by
excommunicating the candidate to the imperial throne until that poor
prince found himself beset by so many difficulties that he withdrew
entirely from his domains on the other side of the Alps.
He organized the famous fourth Crusade which never even came within sight
of the Holy Land but sailed for Constantinople, murdered a goodly number
of the inhabitants of that town, stole whatever could be carried away and
generally behaved in such a way that thereafter no crusader could show
himself in a Greek port without running the chance of being hanged as
an outlaw. It is true that Innocent expressed his disapproval of these
proceedings which shrieked to high Heaven and filled the respectable
minority of Christendom with disgust and despair. But Innocent was a
practical man of affairs. He soon accepted the inevitable and appointed
a Venetian to the vacant post of Patriarch of Constantinople. By this
clever stroke he brought the eastern Church once more under Roman
jurisdiction and at the same time gained the good will of the Venetian
Republic which henceforth regarded the Byzantine domains as part of her
eastern colonies and treated them accordingly.
In spiritual matters too His Holiness showed himself a most accomplished
and tactful person.
The Church, after almost a thousand years of hesitation, had at last
begun to insist that marriage was not merely a civil contract between
a man and a woman but a most holy sacrament which needed the public
blessing of a priest to be truly valid. When Philip August of France
and Alphonso IX of Leon undertook to regulate their domestic affairs
according to their own particular preferences, they were speedily
reminded of their duties and being men of great prudence they hastened to
comply with the papal wishes.
Even in the high north, gained only recently for Christianity, people
were shown in unmistakable manner who was their master. King Haakon IV
(known familiarly among his fellow pirates as Old Haakon) who had just
conquered a neat little empire including besides his own Norway, part of
Scotland and all of Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys and the Hebrides, was
obliged to submit the somewhat tangled problem of his birth to a Roman
tribunal before he could get himself crowned in his old cathedral of
Trondhjem.
And so it went.
The king of Bulgaria, who invariably murdered his Greek prisoners of
war, and was not above torturing an occasional Byzantine emperor, who
therefore was not the sort of person one might expect to take a deep
interest in religious matters, traveled all the way to Rome and humbly
asked that he be recognized as vassal of His Holiness. While in England,
certain barons who had undertaken to discipline their sovereign master
were rudely informed that their charter was null and void because “it
had been obtained by force” and next found themselves excommunicated for
having given unto this world the famous document known as Magna Charta.
From all this it will appear that Innocent III was not the sort of person
who would deal lightly with the pretensions of a few simple linen-weavers
and illiterate shepherds who undertook to question the laws of his Church.
And yet, some there were found who had the courage to do this very thing
as we shall now see.
The subject of all heresies is extremely difficult.
Heretics, almost invariably, are poor people who have small gift for
publicity. The occasional clumsy little pamphlets they write to explain
their ideas and to defend themselves against their enemies fall an easy
prey to the ever watchful detectives of whatever inquisition happens to
be in force at that particular moment and are promptly destroyed. Hence
we depend for our knowledge of most heresies upon such information as we
are able to glean from the records of their trials and upon such articles
as have been written by the enemies of the false doctrines for the
express purpose of exposing the new “conspiracy of Satan” to the truly
faithful that all the world may be duly scandalized and warned against
doing likewise.
As a result we usually get a composite picture of a long-haired
individual in a dirty shirt, who lives in an empty cellar somewhere in
the lowest part of the slums, who refuses to touch decent Christian food
but subsists entirely upon vegetables, who drinks naught but water, who
keeps away from the company of women and mumbles strange prophecies about
the second coming of the Messiah, who reproves the clergy for their
worldliness and wickedness and generally disgusts his more respectable
neighbors by his ill-guided attacks upon the established order of things.
Undoubtedly a great many heretics have succeeded in making a nuisance of
themselves, for that seems to be the fate of people who take themselves
too seriously.
Undoubtedly a great many of them, driven by their almost unholy zeal
for a holy life, were dirty, looked like the devil and did not smell
pleasantly and generally upset the quiet routine of their home town by
their strange ideas anent a truly Christian existence.
But let us give them credit for their courage and their honesty.
They had mighty little to gain and everything to lose.
As a rule, they lost it.
Of course, everything in this world tends to become organized. Eventually
even those who believe in no organization at all must form a Society
for the Promotion of Disorganization, if they wish to accomplish
anything. And the medieval heretics, who loved the mysterious and
wallowed in emotions, were no exception to this rule. Their instinct
of self-preservation made them flock together and their feeling of
insecurity forced them to surround their sacred doctrines by a double
barrier of mystic rites and esoteric ceremonials.
But of course the masses of the people, who remained faithful to the
Church, were unable to make any distinction between these different
groups and sects. And they bunched them all together and called them
dirty Manichaeans or some other unflattering name and felt that that
solved the problem.
In this way did the Manichaeans become the Bolshevists of the Middle
Ages. Of course I do not use the latter name as indicating membership in
a certain well-defined political party which a few years ago established
itself as the dominant factor in the old Russian Empire. I refer to a
vague and ill-defined term of abuse which people nowadays bestow upon all
their personal enemies from the landlord who comes to collect the rent
down to the elevator boy who neglects to stop at the right floor.
A Manichaean, to a medieval super-Christian, was a most objectionable
person. But as he could not very well try him upon any positive charges,
he condemned him upon hearsay, a method which has certain unmistakable
advantages over the less spectacular and infinitely slower procedure
followed by the regular courts of law but which sometimes suffers from a
lack of accuracy and is responsible for a great many judicial murders.
What made this all the more reprehensible in the case of the poor
Manichaeans was the fact that the founder of the original sect, a Persian
by the name of Mani, had been the very incarnation of benevolence and
charity. He was an historical figure and was born during the first
quarter of the third century in the town of Ecbatana where his father,
Patak, was a man of considerable wealth and influence.
He was educated in Ctesiphon, on the river Tigris, and spent the years
of his youth in a community as international, as polyglot, as pious, as
godless, as material and as idealistically-spiritual as the New York of
our own day. Every heresy, every religion, every schism, every sect of
east and west and south and north had its followers among the crowds that
visited the great commercial centers of Mesopotamia. Mani listened to
all the different preachers and prophets and then distilled a philosophy
of his own which was a _mixtum-compositum_ of Buddhism, Christianity,
Mithraism and Judaism, with a slight sprinkling of half a dozen old
Babylonian superstitions.
Making due allowance for certain extremes to which his followers
sometimes carried his doctrines, it can be stated that Mani merely
revived the old Persian myth of the Good God and the Evil God who are
eternally fighting for the soul of man and that he associated the ancient
God of Evil with the Jehovah of the Old Testament (who thus became his
Devil) and the God of All Good Things with that Heavenly Father whom we
find revealed within the pages of the Four Gospels. Furthermore (and that
is where Buddhistic influence made itself felt) Mani believed that the
body of man was by nature a vile and despicable thing; that all people
should try to rid themselves of their worldly ambitions by the constant
mortification of the flesh and should obey the strictest rules of diet
and behavior lest they fall into the clutches of the Evil God (the Devil)
and burn in Hell. As a result he revived a large number of taboos about
things that must not be eaten or drunk and prescribed for his followers a
menu composed exclusively of cold water, dried vegetables and dead fish.
This latter ordinance may surprise us, but the inhabitants of the sea,
being cold-blooded animals, have always been regarded as less harmful to
man’s immortal soul than their warm-blooded brethren of the dry land,
and the self-same people who would rather suffer death than eat a veal
chop cheerfully consume quantities of fish and never feel a qualm of
conscience.
Mani showed himself a true Oriental in his contempt for women. He forbade
his disciples to marry and advocated the slow extinction of the human
race.
As for baptism and the other ceremonies instituted originally by the
Jewish sect of which John the Baptist had been the exponent, Mani
regarded them all with horror and instead of being submerged in water,
his candidates for holy orders were initiated by the laying on of hands.
At the age of twenty-five, this strange man undertook to explain his
ideas unto all mankind. First he visited India and China where he was
fairly successful. Then he turned homeward to bring the blessings of his
creed to his own neighbors.
But the Persian priests who began to find themselves deprived of much
secret revenue by the success of these unworldly doctrines turned against
him and asked that he be killed. In the beginning, Mani enjoyed the
protection of the king, but when this sovereign died and was succeeded
by some one else who had no interest whatsoever in religious questions,
Mani was surrendered to the priestly class. They took him to the walls
of the town and crucified him and flayed his corpse and publicly exposed
his skin before the city gate as an example to all those who might feel
inclined to take an interest in the heresies of the Ecbatanian prophet.
By this violent conflict with the authorities, the Manichaean church
itself was broken up. But little bits of the prophet’s ideas, like so
many spiritual meteors, were showered far and wide upon the landscape of
Europe and Asia and for centuries afterwards continued to cause havoc
among the simple and the poor who inadvertently had picked them up, had
examined them and had found them singularly to their taste.
Exactly how and when Manichaeism entered Europe, I do not know.
Most likely it came by way of Asia Minor, the Black Sea and the Danube.
Then it crossed the Alps and soon enjoyed immense popularity in Germany
and France. There the followers of the new creed called themselves by the
Oriental name of the Cathari, or “the people who lead a pure life,” and
so widespread was the affliction that all over western Europe the word
“Ketzer” or “Ketter” came to mean the same as “heretic.”
But please don’t think of the Cathari as members of a definite religious
denomination. No effort was made to establish a new sect. The Manichaean
ideas exercised great influence upon a large number of people who would
have stoutly denied that they were anything but most devout sons of the
Church. And that made this particular form of heresy so dangerous and so
difficult of detection.
It is comparatively easy for the average doctor to diagnose a disease
caused by microbes of such gigantic structure that their presence can be
detected by the microscope of a provincial board-of-health.
But Heaven protect us against the little creatures who can maintain their
incognito in the midst of an ultra-violet illumination, for they shall
inherit the earth.
Manichaeism, from the point of view of the Church, was therefore the most
dangerous expression of all social epidemics and it filled the higher
authorities of that organization with a terror not felt before the more
common varieties of spiritual afflictions.
It was rarely mentioned above a whisper, but some of the staunchest
supporters of the early Christian faith had shown unmistakable symptoms
of the disease. Yea, great Saint Augustine, that most brilliant and
indefatigable warrior of the Cross, who had done more than any one else
to destroy the last stronghold of heathenism, was said to have been at
heart considerable of a Manichaean.
Priscillian, the Spanish bishop who was burned at the stake in the year
385 and who gained the distinction of being the first victim of the law
against heretics, was accused of Manichaean tendencies.
Even the heads of the Church seemed gradually to have fallen under the
spell of the abominable Persian doctrines.
They were beginning to discourage laymen from reading the Old Testament
and finally, during the twelfth century, promulgated that famous order by
which all clergymen were henceforth condemned to a state of celibacy. Not
to forget the deep impression which these Persian ideals of abstinence
were soon to make upon one of the greatest leaders of spiritual reform,
causing that most lovable of men, good Francis of Assisi, to establish
a new monastic order of such strict Manichaean purity that it rightly
earned him the title of the Buddha of the West.
But when these high and noble ideals of voluntary poverty and humility
of soul began to filter down to the common people, at the very moment
when the world was filled with the din of yet another war between emperor
and pope, when foreign mercenaries, bearing the banners of the cross
and the eagle, were fighting each other for the most valuable bits of
territory along the Mediterranean shores, when hordes of Crusaders were
rushing home with the ill-gotten plunder they had taken from friend and
enemy alike, when abbots lived in luxurious palaces and maintained a
staff of courtiers, when priests galloped through the morning’s mass that
they might hurry to the hunting breakfast, then indeed something very
unpleasant was bound to happen, and it did.
Little wonder that the first symptoms of open discontent with the state
of the Church made themselves felt in that part of France where the old
Roman tradition of culture had survived longest and where civilization
had never been quite absorbed by barbarism.
You will find it on the map. It is called the Provence and consists of
a small triangle situated between the Mediterranean, the Rhone and the
Alps. Marseilles, a former colony of the Phoenicians, was and still is
its most important harbor and it possessed no mean number of rich towns
and villages. It had always been a very fertile land and it enjoyed an
abundance of sunshine and rain.
While the rest of medieval Europe still listened to the barbaric deeds
of hairy Teuton heroes, the troubadours, the poets of the Provence, had
already invented that new form of literature which in time was to give
birth to our modern novel. Furthermore, the close commercial relations
of these Provençals with their neighbors, the Mohammedans of Spain and
Sicily, were making the people familiar with the latest publications
in the field of science at a time when the number of such books in the
northern part of Europe could be counted on the fingers of two hands.
In this country, the back-to-early-Christianity movement had begun to
make itself manifest as early as the first decade of the eleventh century.
But there had not been anything which, however remotely, could be
construed into open rebellion. Here and there in certain small villages
certain people were beginning to hint that their priests might live as
simply and as unostentatiously as their parishioners; who refused (oh,
memory of the ancient martyrs!) to fight when their lords went forth to
war; who tried to learn a little Latin that they might read and study the
Gospels for themselves; who let it be known that they did not approve
of capital punishment; who denied the existence of that Purgatory which
six centuries after the death of Christ had been officially proclaimed as
part of the Christian Heaven; and who (a most important detail) refused
to surrender a tenth of their income to the Church.
Whenever possible the ring leaders of such rebellions against clerical
authority were sought out and sometimes, if they were deaf to persuasion,
they were discreetly put out of the way.
But the evil continued to spread and finally it was deemed necessary to
call together a meeting of all the bishops of the Provence to discuss
what measures should be taken to put a stop to this very dangerous and
highly seditious agitation. They duly convened and continued their
debates until the year 1056.
By that time it had been plainly shown that the ordinary forms of
punishment and excommunication did not produce any noticeable results.
The simple country folk who desired to lead a “pure life” were delighted
whenever they were given a chance to demonstrate their principles of
Christian charity and forgiveness behind the locked doors of a jail and
if perchance they were condemned to death, they marched to the stake with
the meekness of a lamb. Furthermore, as always happens in such cases, the
place left vacant by a single martyr was immediately occupied by a dozen
fresh candidates for holiness.
Almost an entire century was spent in the quarrels between the papal
delegates who insisted upon more severe persecutions and the local
nobility and clergy who (knowing the true nature of their subjects)
refused to comply with the orders from Rome and protested that violence
only encouraged the heretics to harden their souls against the voice of
reason and therefore was a waste both of time and energy.
And then, late in the twelfth century, the movement received a fresh
impetus from the north.
In the town of Lyons, connected with the Provence by way of the Rhone,
there lived a merchant by the name of Peter Waldo. A very serious man,
a good man, a most generous man, almost fanatically obsessed by his
eagerness to follow the example of his Saviour. Jesus had taught that
it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for
a rich young man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Thirty generations of
Christians had tried to explain just what Jesus had actually meant when
he uttered these words. Not so Peter Waldo. He read and he believed. He
divided whatever he had among the poor, retired from business and refused
to accumulate fresh wealth.
John had written, “Search ye the scriptures.”
Twenty popes had commented upon this sentence and had carefully
stipulated under what conditions it might perhaps be desirable for the
laity to study the holy books directly and without the assistance of a
priest.
Peter Waldo did not see it that way.
John had said, “Search ye the scriptures.”
Very well. Then Peter Waldo would search.
And when he discovered that the things he found did not tally with the
conclusions of Saint Jerome, he translated the New Testament into his own
language and spread copies of his manuscript throughout the good land of
Provence.
At first his activities did not attract much attention. His enthusiasm
for poverty did not seem dangerous. Most likely he could be persuaded to
found some new and very ascetic monastic order for the benefit of those
who wished to lead a life of real hardships and who complained that the
existing monasteries were a bit too luxurious and too comfortable.
Rome had always been very clever at finding fitting outlets for those
people whose excess of faith might make them troublesome.
But all things must be done according to rule and precedent. And in that
respect the “pure men” of the Provence and the “poor men” of Lyons were
terrible failures. Not only did they neglect to inform their bishops
of what they were doing, they even went further and boldly proclaimed
the startling doctrine that one could be a perfectly good Christian
without the assistance of a professional member of the priesthood and
that the Bishop of Rome had no more right to tell people outside of
his jurisdiction what to do and what to believe than the Grand Duke of
Tartary or the Caliph of Bagdad.
The Church was placed before a terrible dilemma and truth compels me
to state that she waited a long time before she finally decided to
exterminate this heresy by force.
But an organization based upon the principle that there is only one
right way of thinking and living and that all other ways are infamous
and damnable is bound to take drastic measures whenever its authority is
being openly questioned.
If it failed to do so it could not possibly hope to survive and this
consideration at last compelled Rome to take definite action and devise
a series of punishments that should put terror into the hearts of all
future dissenters.
The Albigenses (the heretics were called after the city of Albi which was
a hotbed of the new doctrine) and the Waldenses (who bore the name of
their founder, Peter Waldo) living in countries without great political
value and therefore not well able to defend themselves, were selected as
the first of her victims.
The murder of a papal delegate who for several years had ruled the
Provence as if it were so much conquered territory, gave Innocent III an
excuse to interfere.
He preached a formal crusade against both the Albigenses and the
Waldenses.
Those who for forty consecutive days would join the expedition against
the heretics would be excused from paying interest on their debts; they
would be absolved from all past and future sins and for the time being
they would be exempted from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts of
law. This was a fair offer and it greatly appealed to the people of
northern Europe.
Why should they bother about going all the way to Palestine when a
campaign against the rich cities of the Provence offered the same
spiritual and economic rewards as a trip to the Orient and when a man
could gain an equal amount of glory in exchange for a much shorter term
of service?
For the time being the Holy Land was forgotten and the worst elements
among the nobility and gentry of northern France and southern England,
of Austria, Saxony and Poland came rushing southward to escape the local
sheriff and incidentally replenish its depleted coffers at the expense of
the prosperous Provençals.
The number of men, women and children hanged, burned, drowned,
decapitated and quartered by these gallant crusaders is variously given.
I have not any idea how many thousands perished. Here and there, whenever
a formal execution took place, we are provided with a few concrete
figures, and these vary between two thousand and twenty thousand,
according to the size of each town.
After the city of Béziers had been captured, the soldiers were in a
quandary how to know who were heretics and who were not. They placed
their problem before the papal delegate, who followed the army as a sort
of spiritual adviser.
“My children,” the good man answered, “go ahead and kill them all. The
Lord will know his own people.”
But it was an Englishman by the name of Simon de Montfort, a veteran of
the real crusades, who distinguished himself most of all by the novelty
and the ingenuity of his cruelties. In return for his valuable services,
he afterwards received large tracts of land in the country which he had
just pillaged and his subordinates were rewarded in proportion.
As for the few Waldenses who survived the massacre, they fled to the more
inaccessible valleys of Piedmont and there maintained a church of their
own until the days of the Reformation.
The Albigenses were less fortunate. After a century of flogging and
hanging, their name disappears from the court reports of the Inquisition.
But three centuries later, in a slightly modified form, their doctrines
were to crop up again and propagated by a Saxon priest called Martin
Luther, they were to cause that reform which was to break the monopoly
which the papal super-state had enjoyed for almost fifteen hundred years.
All that, of course, was hidden to the shrewd eyes of Innocent III. As
far as he was concerned, the difficulty was at an end and the principle
of absolute obedience had been triumphantly re-asserted. The famous
command in Luke xiv: 23 where Christ tells how a certain man who wished
to give a party, finding that there still was room in his banqueting hall
and that several of the guests had remained away, had said unto his
servant, “Go out into the highways and compel them to come in,” had once
more been fulfilled.
“They,” the heretics, had been compelled to come in.
The problem how to make them stay in still faced the Church and this was
not solved until many years later.
Then, after many unsuccessful experiments with local tribunals, special
courts of inquiry, such as had been used for the first time during the
Albigensian uprising, were instituted in the different capitals of
Europe. They were given jurisdiction over all cases of heresy and they
came to be known simply as the Inquisition.
Even today when the Inquisition has long since ceased to function, the
mere name fills our hearts with a vague feeling of unrest. We have
visions of dark dungeons in Havanna, of torture chambers in Lisbon, of
rusty cauldrons and branding irons in the museum of Cracow, of yellow
hoods and black masks, of a king with a heavy lower jaw leering at an
endless row of old men and women, slowly shuffling to the gibbet.
Several popular novels written during the latter half of the nineteenth
century have undoubtedly had something to do with this impression of
sinister brutality. Let us therefore deduct twenty-five per cent for the
phantasy of our romantic scribes and another twenty-five for Protestant
prejudice and we shall find that enough horror remains to justify those
who claim that all secret tribunals are an insufferable evil and should
never again be tolerated in a community of civilized people.
Henry Charles Lea has treated the subject of the Inquisition in eight
ponderous volumes. I shall have to reduce these to two or three pages,
and it will be quite impossible to give a concise account of one of the
most complicated problems of medieval history within so short a space.
For there never was an Inquisition as there is a Supreme Court or an
International Court of Arbitration.
There were all sorts of Inquisitions in all sorts of countries and
created for all sorts of purposes.
The best known of these was the Royal Inquisition of Spain and the Holy
Inquisition of Rome. The former was a local affair which watched over the
heretics in the Iberian peninsula and in the American colonies.
The latter had its ramifications all over Europe and burned Joan of Arc
in the northern part of the continent as it burned Giordano Bruno in the
southern.
It is true that the Inquisition, strictly speaking, never killed any one.
After sentence had been pronounced by the clerical judges, the convicted
heretic was surrendered to the secular authorities. These could then do
with him what they thought fit. But if they failed to pronounce the death
penalty, they exposed themselves to a great deal of inconvenience and
might even find themselves excommunicated or deprived of their support
at the papal court. If, as sometimes happened, the prisoner escaped
this fate and was not given over to the magistrates his sufferings only
increased. For he then ran the risk of solitary confinement for the rest
of his natural life in one of the inquisitorial prisons.
As death at the stake was preferable to the slow terror of going insane
in a dark hole in a rocky castle, many prisoners confessed all sorts
of crimes of which they were totally innocent that they might be found
guilty of heresy and thus be put out of their misery.
It is not easy to write upon this subject without appearing to be
hopelessly biased.
It seems incredible that for more than five centuries hundreds of
thousands of harmless people in all parts of the world were overnight
lifted from their beds at the mere whispered hearsay of some loquacious
neighbors; that they were held for months or for years in filthy
cells awaiting an opportunity to appear before a judge whose name and
qualifications were unknown to them; that they were never informed of the
nature of the accusation that was brought against them; that they were
not allowed to know the names of those who had acted as witnesses against
them; that they were not permitted to communicate with their relatives
or consult a lawyer; that if they continued to protest their innocence,
they could be tortured until all the limbs of their body were broken;
that other heretics could testify against them but were not listened to
if they offered to tell something favorable of the accused; and finally
that they could be sent to their death without the haziest notion as to
the cause of their terrible fate.
It seems even more incredible that men and women who had been buried for
fifty or sixty years could be dug out of their graves, could be found
guilty “in absentia” and that the heirs of people who were condemned
in this fashion could be deprived of their worldly possessions half a
century after the death of the offending parties.
But such was the case and as the inquisitors depended for their
maintenance upon a liberal share of all the goods that were confiscated,
absurdities of this sort were by no means an uncommon occurrence
and frequently the grandchildren were driven to beggary on account
of something which their grandfather was supposed to have done two
generations before.
Those of us who followed the newspapers twenty years ago when Czarist
Russia was in the heyday of its power, remember the agent provocateur. As
a rule the agent provocateur was a former burglar or a retired gambler
with a winning personality and a “grievance.” He let it be secretly known
that his sorrow had made him join the revolution and in this way he often
gained the confidence of those who were genuinely opposed to the imperial
government. But as soon as he had learned the secrets of his new friends,
he betrayed them to the police, pocketed the reward and went to the next
city, there to repeat his vile practices.
During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, southern and
western Europe was overrun by this nefarious tribe of private spies.
They made a living denouncing those who were supposed to have criticized
the Church or who had expressed doubts upon certain points of doctrine.
If there were no heretics in the neighborhood, it was the business of
such an agent provocateur to manufacture them.
As he could rest assured that torture would make his victims confess, no
matter how innocent they might be, he ran no risks and could continue his
trade ad infinitum.
In many countries a veritable reign of terror was introduced by this
system of allowing anonymous people to denounce those whom they suspected
of spiritual deficiencies. At last, no one dared trust his nearest and
dearest friends. Members of the same family were forced to be on their
guard against each other.
The mendicant friars who handled a great deal of the inquisitorial work
made excellent use of the panic which their methods created and for
almost two centuries they lived on the fat of the land.
Yes, it is safe to say that one of the main underlying causes of the
Reformation was the disgust which a large number of people felt for those
arrogant beggars who under a cloak of piety forced themselves into the
homes of respectable citizens, who slept in the most comfortable beds,
who partook of the best dishes, who insisted that they be treated as
honored guests and who were able to maintain themselves in comfort by the
mere threat that they would denounce their benefactors to the Inquisition
if ever they were deprived of any of those luxuries which they had come
to regard as their just due.
The Church of course could answer to all this that the Inquisition merely
acted as a spiritual health officer whose sworn duty it was to prevent
contagious errors from spreading among the masses. It could point to the
leniency shown to all heathen who acted in ignorance and therefore could
not be held responsible for their opinions. It could even claim that few
people ever suffered the penalty of death unless they were apostates and
were caught in a new offense after having forsworn their former errors.
But what of it?
The same trick by which an innocent man was changed into a desperate
criminal could afterwards be used to place him in an apparent position of
recantation.
The agent provocateur and the forger have ever been close friends.
And what are a few faked documents between spies?
CHAPTER VIII
THE CURIOUS ONES
Modern intolerance, like ancient Gaul, is divided into three parts; the
intolerance of laziness, the intolerance of ignorance and the intolerance
of self-interest.
The first of these is perhaps the most general. It is to be met with in
every country and among all classes of society. It is most common in
small villages and old-established towns, and it is not restricted to
human beings.
Our old family horse, having spent the first twenty-five years of his
placid life in a warm stable in Coley Town, resents the equally warm barn
of Westport for no other reason than that he has always lived in Coley
Town, is familiar with every stick and stone in Coley Town and knows
that no new and unfamiliar sights will frighten him on his daily ambles
through that pleasant part of the Connecticut landscape.
Our scientific world has thus far spent so much time learning the defunct
dialects of Polynesian islands that the language of dogs and cats and
horses and donkeys has been sadly neglected. But could we know what Dude
says to his former neighbors of Coley Town, we would hear an outburst
of the most ferocious equine intolerance. For Dude is no longer young
and therefore is “set” in his ways. His horsey habits were all formed
years and years ago and therefore all the Coley Town manners, customs and
habits seem right to him and all the Westport customs and manners and
habits will be declared wrong until the end of his days.
It is this particular variety of intolerance which makes parents shake
their heads over the foolish behavior of their children, which has caused
the absurd myth of “the good old days”; which makes savages and civilized
creatures wear uncomfortable clothes; which fills the world with a great
deal of superfluous nonsense and generally turns all people with a new
idea into the supposed enemies of mankind.
Otherwise, however, this sort of intolerance is comparatively harmless.
We are all of us bound to suffer from it sooner or later. In ages past it
has caused millions of people to leave home, and in this way it has been
responsible for the permanent settlement of vast tracts of uninhabited
land which otherwise would still be a wilderness.
The second variety is much more serious.
An ignorant man is, by the very fact of his ignorance, a very dangerous
person.
But when he tries to invent an excuse for his own lack of mental
faculties, he becomes a holy terror. For then he erects within his soul a
granite bulwark of self-righteousness and from the high pinnacle of this
formidable fortress, he defies all his enemies (to wit, those who do not
share his own prejudices) to show cause why they should be allowed to
live.
People suffering from this particular affliction are both uncharitable
and mean. Because they live constantly in a state of fear, they easily
turn to cruelty and love to torture those against whom they have a
grievance. It was among people of this ilk that the strange notion
of a predilected group of a “chosen people” first took its origin.
Furthermore, the victims of this delusion are forever trying to bolster
up their own courage by an imaginary relationship which exists between
themselves and the invisible Gods. This, of course, in order to give a
flavor of spiritual approbation to their intolerance.
For instance, such citizens never say, “We are hanging Danny Deever
because we consider him a menace to our own happiness, because we hate
him with a thousand hates and because we just love to hang him.” Oh,
no! They get together in solemn conclave and deliberate for hours and
for days and for weeks upon the fate of said Danny Deever. When finally
sentence is read, poor Danny, who has perhaps committed some petty sort
of larceny, stands solemnly convicted as a most terrible person who has
dared to offend the Divine Will (as privately communicated to the elect
who alone can interpret such messages) and whose execution therefore
becomes a sacred duty, bringing great credit upon the judges who have the
courage to convict such an ally of Satan.
That good-natured and otherwise kind-hearted people are quite as apt to
fall under the spell of this most fatal delusion as their more brutal and
blood-thirsty neighbors is a commonplace both of history and psychology.
The crowds that gaped delightedly at the sad plight of a thousand poor
martyrs were most assuredly not composed of criminals. They were decent,
pious folk and they felt sure that they were doing something very
creditable and pleasing in the sight of their own particular Divinity.
Had one spoken to them of tolerance, they would have rejected the idea as
an ignoble confession of Moral weakness. Perhaps they were intolerant,
but in that case they were proud of the fact and with good right. For
there, out in the cold dampness of early morning, stood Danny Deever,
clad in a saffron colored shirt and in a pair of pantaloons adorned with
little devils, and he was going, going slowly but surely, to be hanged in
the Market Place. While they themselves, as soon as the show was over,
would return to a comfortable home and a plentiful meal of bacon and
beans.
Was not that in itself proof enough that they were acting and thinking
correctly?
Otherwise would they be among the spectators? Would not the rôles be
reversed?
A feeble argument, I confess, but a very common one and hard to answer
when people feel sincerely convinced that their own ideas are the ideas
of God and are unable to understand how they could possibly be mistaken.
There remains as a third category the intolerance caused by
self-interest. This, of course, is really a variety of jealousy and as
common as the measles.
When Jesus came to Jerusalem, there to teach that the favor of Almighty
God could not be bought by the killing of a dozen oxen or goats, all
those who made a living from the ceremonial sacrifices in the temple
decried him as a dangerous revolutionist and caused him to be executed
before he could do any lasting damage to their main source of income.
When Saint Paul, a few years later, came to Ephesus and there preached
a new creed which threatened to interfere with the prosperity of the
jewelers who derived great profit from the sale of little images of the
local Goddess Diana, the Guild of the Goldsmiths almost lynched the
unwelcome intruder.
And ever since there has been open warfare between those who depend for
their livelihood upon some established form of worship and those whose
ideas threaten to take the crowd away from one temple in favor of another.
When we attempt to discuss the intolerance of the Middle Ages, we must
constantly remember that we have to deal with a very complicated problem.
Only upon very rare occasions do we find ourselves confronted with only
one manifestation of these three separate forms of intolerance. Most
frequently we can discover traces of all three varieties in the cases of
persecution which are brought to our attention.
That an organization, enjoying great wealth, administering thousands
of square miles of land and owning hundreds of thousands of serfs,
should have turned the full vigor of its anger against a group of
peasants who had undertaken to reëstablish a simple and unpretentious
Kingdom-of-Heaven-on-Earth was entirely natural.
And in that case, the extermination of heretics became a matter
of economic necessity and belonged to class C, the intolerance of
self-interest.
But when we begin to consider another group of men who were to feel
the heavy hand of official disapprobation, the scientists, the problem
becomes infinitely more complicated.
And in order to understand the perverse attitude of the Church
authorities towards those who tried to reveal the secrets of nature, we
must go back a good many centuries and study what had actually happened
in Europe during the first six centuries of our era.
The invasion of the Barbarians had swept across the continent with the
ruthless thoroughness of a flood. Here and there a few pieces of the old
Roman fabric of state had remained standing erect amidst the wastes of
the turbulent waters. But the society that had once dwelled within these
walls had perished. Their books had been carried away by the waves. Their
art lay forgotten in the deep mud of a new ignorance. Their collections,
their museums, their laboratories, their slowly accumulated mass of
scientific facts, all these had been used to stoke the camp-fires of
uncouth savages from the heart of Asia.
We possess several catalogues of libraries of the tenth century. Of
Greek books (outside of the city of Constantinople, then almost as far
removed from central Europe as the Melbourne of today) the people of the
west possessed hardly any. It seems incredible, but they had completely
disappeared. A few translations (badly done) of a few chapters from the
works of Aristotle and Plato were all the scholar of that time could find
when he wanted to familiarize himself with the thoughts of the ancients.
If he desired to learn their language, there was no one to teach it to
him, unless a theological dispute in Byzantium had driven a handful of
Greek monks from their customary habitats and had forced them to find a
temporary asylum in France or Italy.
Latin books there were in great quantity, but most of those dated from
the fourth and fifth centuries. The few manuscripts of the classics
that survived had been copied so often and so indifferently that their
contents were no longer understandable to any one who had not made a life
study of paleography.
As for books of science, with the possible exception of some of the
simplest problems of Euclid, they were no longer to be found in any of
the available libraries and what was much more regrettable, they were no
longer wanted.
For the people who now ruled the world regarded science with a hostile
eye and discouraged all independent labor in the field of mathematics,
biology and zoology, not to mention medicine and astronomy, which had
descended to such a low state of neglect that they were no longer of the
slightest practical value.
It is exceedingly difficult for a modern mind to understand such a state
of affairs.
We men and women of the twentieth century, whether rightly or wrongly,
profoundly believe in the idea of progress. Whether we ever shall be able
to make this world perfect, we do not know. In the meantime we feel it to
be our most sacred duty to try.
Yea, sometimes this faith in the unavoidable destiny of progress seems to
have become the national religion of our entire country.
But the people of the Middle Ages did not and could not share such a view.
The Greek dream of a world filled with beautiful and interesting things
had lasted such a lamentably short time! It had been so rudely disturbed
by the political cataclysm that had overtaken the unfortunate country
that most Greek writers of the later centuries had been confirmed
pessimists who, contemplating the ruins of their once happy fatherland,
had become abject believers in the doctrine of the ultimate futility of
all worldly endeavor.
The Roman authors, on the other hand, who could draw their conclusions
from almost a thousand years of consecutive history, had discovered a
certain upward trend in the development of the human race and their
philosophers, notably the Epicureans, had cheerfully undertaken the task
of educating the younger generation for a happier and better future.
Then came Christianity.
The center of interest was moved from this world to the other. Almost
immediately people fell back into a deep and dark abyss of hopeless
resignation.
Man was evil. He was evil by instinct and by preference. He was conceived
in sin, born in sin, he lived in sin and he died repenting of his sins.
But there was a difference between the old despair and the new.
The Greeks were convinced (and perhaps rightly so) that they were more
intelligent and better educated than their neighbors and they felt rather
sorry for those unfortunate barbarians. But they never quite reached the
point at which they began to consider themselves as a race that had been
set apart from all others because it was the chosen people of Zeus.
Christianity on the other hand was never able to escape from its own
antecedents. When the Christians adopted the Old Testament as one of the
Holy Books of their own faith, they fell heir to the incredible Jewish
doctrine that their race was “different” from all others and that only
those who professed a belief in certain officially established doctrines
could hope to be saved while the rest were doomed to perdition.
This idea was, of course, of enormous direct benefit to those who
were lacking sufficiently in humility of spirit to believe themselves
predilected favorites among millions and millions of their fellow
creatures. During many highly critical years it had turned the Christians
into a closely-knit, self-contained little community which floated
unconcernedly upon a vast ocean of paganism.
What happened elsewhere on those waters that stretched far and wide
towards the north and the south and the east and the west was a subject
of the most profound indifference to Tertullian or St. Augustine, or any
of those other early writers who were busily engaged in putting the ideas
of their Church into the concrete form of written books. Eventually
they hoped to reach a safe shore and there to build their city of God.
Meanwhile, what those in other climes hoped to accomplish and to achieve
was none of their concern.
Hence they created for themselves entirely new conceptions about the
origin of man and about the limits of time and space. What the Egyptians
and Babylonians and the Greeks and the Romans had discovered about
these mysteries did not interest them in the least. They were sincerely
convinced that all the old values had been destroyed with the birth of
Christ.
There was for example the problem of our earth.
The ancient scientists held it to be one among a couple of billion of
other stars.
The Christians flatly rejected this idea. To them, the little round disk
on which they lived was the heart and center of the universe.
It had been created for the special purpose of providing one particular
group of people with a temporary home. The way in which this had been
brought about was very simple and was fully described in the first
chapter of Genesis.
When it became necessary to decide just how long this group of
predilected people had been on this earth, the problem became a little
more complicated. On all sides there were evidences of great antiquity,
of buried cities, of extinct monsters and of fossilized plants. But
these could be reasoned away or overlooked or denied or shouted out of
existence. And after this had been done, it was a very simple matter to
establish a fixed date for the beginning of time.
In a universe like that, a universe which was static, which had begun
at a certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, and would end at
another certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, which existed
for the exclusive benefit of one and only one denomination, in such a
universe there was no room for the prying curiosity of mathematicians
and biologists and chemists and all sorts of other people who only
cared for general principles and juggled with the idea of eternity and
unlimitedness both in the field of time and in the realm of space.
True enough, many of those scientific people protested that at heart they
were devout sons of the Church. But the true Christians knew better. No
man, who was sincere in his protestations of love and devotion for the
faith, had any business to know so much or to possess so many books.
One book was enough.
That book was the Bible, and every letter in it, every comma, every
semicolon and exclamation point had been written down by people who were
divinely inspired.
A Greek of the days of Pericles would have been slightly amused if he
had been told of a supposedly holy volume which contained scraps of
ill-digested national history, doubtful love poems, the inarticulate
visions of half-demented prophets and whole chapters devoted to the
foulest denunciation of those who for some reason or another were
supposed to have incurred the displeasure of one of Asia’s many tribal
deities.
But the barbarian of the third century had a most humble respect for
the “written word” which to him was one of the great mysteries of
civilization, and when this particular book, by successive councils of
his Church, was recommended to him as being without error, flaw or slip,
he willingly enough accepted this extraordinary document as the sum total
of everything that man had ever known, or ever could hope to know, and
joined in the denunciation and persecution of those who defied Heaven
by extending their researches beyond the limits indicated by Moses and
Isaiah.
The number of people willing to die for their principles has always been
necessarily limited.
At the same time the thirst for knowledge on the part of certain people
is so irrepressible that some outlet must be found for their pent up
energy. As a result of this conflict between curiosity and repression
there grew up that stunted and sterile intellectual sapling which came to
be known as Scholasticism.
It dated back to the middle of the eighth century. It was then that
Bertha, wife to Pépin the Short, king of the Franks, gave birth to a son
who has better claims to be considered the patron saint of the French
nation than that good King Louis who cost his countrymen a ransom of
eight hundred thousand Turkish gold pieces and who rewarded his subjects’
loyalty by giving them an inquisition of their own.
When the child was baptized it was given the name of Carolus, as you may
see this very day at the bottom of many an ancient charter. The signature
is a little clumsy. But Charles was never much of a hand at spelling. As
a boy he learned to read Frankish and Latin, but when he took up writing,
his fingers were so rheumatic from a life spent fighting the Russians and
the Moors that he had to give up the attempt and hired the best scribes
of his day to act as his secretaries and do his writing for him.
For this old frontiersman, who prided himself upon the fact that only
twice within fifty years had he worn “city clothes” (the toga of a Roman
nobleman), had a most genuine appreciation of the value of learning, and
turned his court into a private university for the benefit of his own
children and for the sons and daughters of his officials.
There, surrounded by the most famous men of his time, the new imperator
of the west loved to spend his hours of leisure. And so great was his
respect for academic democracy that he dropped all etiquette and as
simple Brother David took an active share in the conversation and allowed
himself to be contradicted by the humblest of his professors.
But when we come to examine the problems that interested this goodly
company and the questions they discussed, we are reminded of the list of
subjects chosen by the debating teams of a rural high school in Tennessee.
They were very naïve, to say the least. And what was true in the
year 800 held equally good for 1400. This was not the fault of the
medieval scholar, whose brain was undoubtedly quite as good as that of
his successors of the twentieth century. But he found himself in the
position of a modern chemist or doctor who is given complete liberty
of investigation, provided he does not say or do anything at variance
with the chemical and medical information contained in the volumes of
the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of the year 1768 when
chemistry was practically an unknown subject and surgery was closely akin
to butchery.
As a result (I am mixing my metaphors anyway) the medieval scientist
with his tremendous brain capacity and his very limited field of
experimentation reminds one somewhat of a Rolls-Royce motor placed upon
the chassis of a flivver. Whenever he stepped on the gas, he met with
a thousand accidents. But when he played safe and drove his strange
contraption according to the rules and regulations of the road he became
slightly ridiculous and wasted a terrible lot of energy without getting
anywhere in particular.
Of course the best among these men were desperate at the rate of speed
which they were forced to observe.
They tried in every possible way to escape from the everlasting
observation of the clerical policemen. They wrote ponderous volumes,
trying to prove the exact opposite of what they held to be true, in order
that they might give a hint of the things that were uppermost in their
minds.
They surrounded themselves with all sorts of hocus pocus; they wore
strange garments; they had stuffed crocodiles hanging from their
ceilings; they displayed shelves full of bottled monsters and threw evil
smelling herbs in the furnace that they might frighten their neighbors
away from their front door and at the same time establish a reputation
of being the sort of harmless lunatics who could be allowed to say
whatever they liked without being held too closely responsible for their
ideas. And gradually they developed such a thorough system of scientific
camouflage that even today it is difficult for us to decide what they
actually meant.
That the Protestants a few centuries later showed themselves quite as
intolerant towards science and literature as the Church of the Middle
Ages had done is quite true, but it is beside the point.
The great reformers could fulminate and anathematize to their hearts’
content, but they were rarely able to turn their threats into positive
acts of repression.
The Roman Church on the other hand not only possessed the power to crush
its enemies but it made use of it, whenever the occasion presented itself.
The difference may seem trivial to those of us who like to indulge
in abstract cogitations upon the theoretical values of tolerance and
intolerance.
But it was a very real issue to those poor devils, who were placed
before the choice of a public recantation or an equally public flogging.
And if they sometimes lacked the courage to say what they held to be
true, and preferred to waste their time on cross-word puzzles made up
exclusively from the names of the animals mentioned in the Book of
Revelations, let us not be too hard on them.
I am quite certain that I never would have written the present volume,
six hundred years ago.
CHAPTER IX
THE WAR UPON THE PRINTED WORD
I find it increasingly difficult to write history. I am rather like a man
who has been trained to be a fiddler and then at the age of thirty-five
is suddenly given a piano and ordered to make his living as a virtuoso of
the Klavier, because that too “is music.” I learned my trade in one sort
of a world and I must practice it in an entirely different one. I was
taught to look upon all events of the past in the light of a definitely
established order of things; a universe more or less competently managed
by emperors and kings and arch-dukes and presidents, aided and abetted by
congressmen and senators and secretaries of the treasury. Furthermore, in
the days of my youth, the good Lord was still tacitly recognized as the
ex-officio head of everything, and a personage who had to be treated with
great respect and decorum.
Then came the war.
The old order of things was completely upset, emperors and kings were
abolished, responsible ministers were superseded by irresponsible secret
committees, and in many parts of the world, Heaven was formally closed
by an order in council and a defunct economic hack-writer was officially
proclaimed successor and heir to all the prophets of ancient times.
Of course all this will not last. But it will take civilization several
centuries to catch up and by then I shall be dead.
Meanwhile I have to make the best of things, but it will not be easy.
Take the question of Russia. When I spent some time in that Holy Land,
some twenty years ago, fully one quarter of the pages of the foreign
papers that reached us were covered with a smeary black substance, known
technically as “caviar.” This stuff was rubbed upon those items which a
careful government wished to hide from its loving subjects.
The world at large regarded this sort of supervision as an insufferable
survival of the Dark Ages and we of the great republic of the west saved
copies of the American comic papers, duly “caviared,” to show the folks
at home what backward barbarians those far famed Russians actually were.
Then came the great Russian revolution.
For the last seventy-five years the Russian revolutionist had howled that
he was a poor, persecuted creature who enjoyed no “liberty” at all and as
evidence thereof he had pointed to the strict supervision of all journals
devoted to the cause of socialism. But in the year 1918, the under-dog
turned upper-dog. And what happened? Did the victorious friends of
freedom abolish censorship of the press? By no means. They padlocked all
papers and magazines which did not comment favorably upon the acts of the
new masters, they sent many unfortunate editors to Siberia or Archangel
(not much to choose) and in general showed themselves a hundred times
more intolerant than the much maligned ministers and police sergeants of
the Little White Father.
It happens that I was brought up in a fairly liberal community, which
heartily believed in the motto of Milton that the “liberty to know, to
utter and to argue freely according to our own conscience, is the highest
form of liberty.”
“Came the war,” as the movies have it, and I was to see the day when the
Sermon on the Mount was declared to be a dangerous pro-German document
which must not be allowed to circulate freely among a hundred million
sovereign citizens and the publication of which would expose the editors
and the printers to fines and imprisonment.
In view of all this it would really seem much wiser to drop the further
study of history and to take up short story writing or real estate.
But this would be a confession of defeat. And so I shall stick to my job,
trying to remember that in a well regulated state, every decent citizen
is supposed to have the right to say and think and utter whatever he
feels to be true, provided he does not interfere with the happiness and
comfort of his neighbors, does not act against the good manners of polite
society or break one of the rules of the local police.
This places me, of course, on record as an enemy of all official
censorship. As far as I can see, the police ought to watch out for
certain magazines and papers which are being printed for the purpose of
turning pornography into private gain. But for the rest, I would let
every one print whatever he liked.
I say this not as an idealist or a reformer, but as a practical person
who hates wasted efforts, and is familiar with the history of the last
five hundred years. That period shows clearly that violent methods
of suppression of the printed or spoken word have never yet done the
slightest good.
Nonsense, like dynamite, is only dangerous when it is contained in a
small and hermetically closed space and subjected to a violent impact
from without. A poor devil, full of half-baked economic notions, when
left to himself will attract no more than a dozen curious listeners and
as a rule will be laughed at for his pains.
The same creature handcuffed to a crude and illiterate sheriff, dragged
to jail and condemned to thirty-five years of solitary confinement,
will become an object of great pity and in the end will be regarded and
honored as a martyr.
But it will be well to remember one thing.
There have been quite as many martyrs for bad causes as martyrs for good
causes. They are tricky people and one never can tell what they will do
next.
Hence I would say, let them talk and let them write. If they have
anything to say that is good, we ought to know it, and if not, they will
soon be forgotten. The Greeks seem to have felt that way, and the Romans
did until the days of the Empire. But as soon as the commander-in-chief
of the Roman armies had become an imperial and semi-divine personage, a
second-cousin to Jupiter and a thousand miles removed from all ordinary
mortals, this was changed.
The crime of “laesa majestas,” the heinous offense of “offering insult
to his Majesty,” was invented. It was a purely political misdemeanor and
from the time of Augustus until the days of Justinian, many people were
sent to prison because they had been a little too outspoken in their
opinions about their rulers. But if one let the person of the emperor
alone, there was practically no other subject of conversation which the
Roman must avoid.
This happy condition came to an end when the world was brought under
the domination of the Church. The line between good and bad, between
orthodox and heretical, was definitely drawn before Jesus had been dead
more than a few years. During the second half of the first century, the
apostle Paul spent quite a long time in the neighborhood of Ephesus in
Asia Minor, a place famous for its amulets and charms. He went about
preaching and casting out devils, and with such great success that he
convinced many people of the error of their heathenish ways. As a token
of repentance they came together one fine day with all their books of
magic and burned more than ten thousand dollars worth of secret formulae,
as you may read in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.
This, however, was an entirely voluntary act on the part of a group of
repentant sinners and it is not stated that Paul made an attempt to
forbid the other Ephesians from reading or owning similar books.
Such a step was not taken until a century later.
Then, by order of a number of bishops convened in this same city of
Ephesus, a book containing the life of St. Paul was condemned and the
faithful were admonished not to read it.
During the next two hundred years, there was very little censorship.
There also were very few books.
But after the Council of Nicaea (325) when the Christian Church had
become the official church of the Empire, the supervision of the written
word became part of the routine duty of the clergy. Some books were
absolutely forbidden. Others were described as “dangerous” and the people
were warned that they must read them at their own risk. Until authors
found it more convenient to assure themselves of the approval of the
authorities before they published their works and made it a rule to send
their manuscripts to the local bishops for their approbation.
Even then, a writer could not always be sure that his works would be
allowed to exist. A book which one Pope had pronounced harmless might be
denounced as blasphemous and indecent by his successor.
On the whole, however, this method protected the scribes quite
effectively against the risk of being burned together with their
parchment offspring and the system worked well enough as long as books
were copied by hand and it took five whole years to get out an edition of
three volumes.
All this of course was changed by the famous invention of Johann
Gutenberg, alias John Gooseflesh.
After the middle of the fifteenth century, an enterprising publisher was
able to produce as many as four or five hundred copies in less than two
weeks’ time and in the short period between 1453 and 1500 the people
of western and southern Europe were presented with not less than forty
thousand different editions of books that had thus far been obtainable
only in some of the better stocked libraries.
The Church regarded this unexpected increase in the number of available
books with very serious misgivings. It was difficult enough to catch a
single heretic with a single home made copy of the Gospels. What then of
twenty million heretics with twenty million copies of cleverly edited
volumes? They became a direct menace to all idea of authority and it was
deemed necessary to appoint a special tribunal to inspect all forthcoming
publications at their source and say which could be published and which
must never see the light of day.
Out of the different lists of books which from time to time were
published by this committee as containing “forbidden knowledge” grew that
famous Index which came to enjoy almost as nefarious a reputation as the
Inquisition.
But it would be unfair to create the impression that such a supervision
of the printing-press was something peculiar to the Catholic Church.
Many states, frightened by the sudden avalanche of printed material that
threatened to upset the peace of the realm, had already forced their
local publishers to submit their wares to the public censor and had
forbidden them to print anything that did not bear the official mark of
approbation.
But nowhere, except in Rome, has the practice been continued until today.
And even there it has been greatly modified since the middle of the
sixteenth century. It had to be. The presses worked so fast and furiously
that even that most industrious Commission of Cardinals, the so-called
Congregation of the Index, which was supposed to inspect all printed
works, was soon years behind in its task. Not to mention the flood of
rag-pulp and printers-ink which was poured upon the landscape in the form
of newspapers and magazines and tracts and which no group of men, however
diligent, could hope to read, let alone inspect and classify, in less
than a couple of thousand years.
But rarely has it been shown in a more convincing fashion how terribly
this sort of intolerance avenges itself upon the rulers who force it upon
their unfortunate subjects.
Already Tacitus, during the first century of the Roman Empire, had
declared himself against the persecution of authors as “a foolish thing
which tended to advertise books which otherwise would never attract any
public attention.”
The Index proved the truth of this statement. No sooner had the
Reformation been successful than the list of forbidden books was promoted
to a sort of handy guide for those who wished to keep themselves
thoroughly informed upon the subject of current literature. More than
that. During the seventeenth century, enterprising publishers in Germany
and in the Low Countries maintained special agents in Rome whose business
it was to get hold of advance copies of the Index Expurgatorius. As soon
as they had obtained these, they entrusted them to special couriers who
raced across the Alps and down the valley of the Rhine that the valuable
information might be delivered to their patrons with the least possible
loss of time. Then the German and the Dutch printing shops would set to
work and would get out hastily printed special editions which were sold
at an exorbitant profit and were smuggled into the forbidden territory by
an army of professional book-leggers.
But the number of copies that could be carried across the frontier
remained necessarily very small and in such countries as Italy and Spain
and Portugal, where the Index was actually enforced until a short time
ago, the results of this policy of repression became very noticeable.
If such nations gradually dropped behind in the race for progress, the
reason was not difficult to find. Not only were the students in their
universities deprived of all foreign text-books, but they were forced to
use a domestic product of very inferior quality.
And worst of all, the Index discouraged people from occupying themselves
seriously with literature or science. For no man in his senses would
undertake to write a book when he ran the risk of seeing his work
“corrected” to pieces by an incompetent censor or emendated beyond
recognition by the inconsequential secretary of an Inquisitorial Board of
Investigators.
Instead, he went fishing or wasted his time playing dominoes in a
wine-shop.
Or he sat down and in sheer despair of himself and his people, he wrote
the story of Don Quixote.
CHAPTER X
CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN GENERAL AND THIS BOOK IN PARTICULAR
In the correspondence of Erasmus, which I recommend most eagerly to
those who are tired of modern fiction, there occurs a stereotype sort of
warning in many of the letters sent unto the learned Desiderius by his
more timid friends.
“I hear that you are thinking of a pamphlet upon the Lutheran
controversy,” writes Magister X. “Please be very careful how you handle
it, because you might easily offend the Pope, who wishes you well.”
Or again: “Some one who has just returned from Cambridge tells me that
you are about to publish a book of short essays. For Heaven’s sake, do
not incur the displeasure of the Emperor, who might be in a position to
do you great harm.”
Now it is the Bishop of Louvain, then the King of England or the faculty
of the Sorbonne or that terrible professor of theology in Cambridge who
must be treated with special consideration, lest the author be deprived
of his income or lose the necessary official protection or fall into the
clutches of the Inquisition or be broken on the wheel.
Nowadays the wheel (except for purposes of locomotion) is relegated to
the museum of antiquities. The Inquisition has closed its doors these
hundred years, protection is of little practical use in a career devoted
to literature and the word “income” is hardly ever mentioned where
historians come together.
But all the same, as soon as it was whispered that I intended to write
a “History of Tolerance,” a different sort of letters of admonition and
advice began to find their way to my cloistered cell.
“Harvard has refused to admit a negro to her dormitories,” writes
the secretary of the S.P.C.C.P. “Be sure that you mention this most
regrettable fact in your forthcoming book.”
Or again: “The local K.K.K. in Framingham, Mass., has started to boycott
a grocer who is a professed Roman Catholic. You will want to say
something about this in your story of tolerance.”
And so on.
No doubt all these occurrences are very stupid, very silly and altogether
reprehensible. But they hardly seem to come within the jurisdiction of a
volume on tolerance. They are merely manifestations of bad manners and a
lack of decent public spirit. They are very different from that official
form of intolerance which used to be incorporated into the laws of the
Church and the State and which made persecution a holy duty on the part
of all good citizens.
History, as Bagehot has said, ought to be like an etching by Rembrandt.
It must cast a vivid light upon certain selected causes, on those which
are best and most important, and leave all the rest in the shadow and
unseen.
Even in the midst of the most idiotic outbreaks of the modern spirit of
intolerance which are so faithfully chronicled in our news sheets, it is
possible to discern signs of a more hopeful future.
For nowadays many things which previous generations would have accepted
as self-evident and which would have been passed by with the remark that
“it has always been that way,” are cause for serious debate. Quite often
our neighbors rush to the defense of ideas which would have been regarded
as preposterously visionary and unpractical by our fathers and our
grandfathers and not infrequently they are successful in their warfare
upon some particularly obnoxious demonstration of the mob spirit.
This book must be kept very short.
I can’t bother about the private snobbishness of successful pawn-brokers,
the somewhat frayed glory of Nordic supremacy, the dark ignorance of
backwoods evangelists, the bigotry of peasant priests or Balkan rabbis.
These good people and their bad ideas have always been with us.
But as long as they do not enjoy the official support of the State,
they are comparatively harmless and in most civilized countries, such a
possibility is entirely precluded.
Private intolerance is a nuisance which can cause more discomfort in any
given community than the combined efforts of measles, small-pox and a
gossiping woman. But private intolerance does not possess executioners of
its own. If, as sometimes happens in this and other countries, it assumes
the rôle of the hangman, it places itself outside the law and becomes a
proper subject for police supervision.
Private intolerance does not dispose of jails and cannot prescribe to an
entire nation what it shall think and say and eat and drink. If it tries
to do this, it creates such a terrific resentment among all decent folk,
that the new ordinance becomes a dead letter and cannot be carried out
even in the District of Columbia.
In short, private intolerance can go only as far as the indifference of
the majority of the citizens of a free country will allow it to go, and
no further. Whereas official intolerance is practically almighty.
It recognizes no authority beyond its own power.
It provides no mode of redress for the innocent victims of its meddlesome
fury. It will listen to no argument. And ever again it backs up its
decisions by an appeal to the Divine Being and then undertakes to explain
the will of Heaven as if the key to the mysteries of existence were an
exclusive possession of those who had been successful at the most recent
elections.
If in this book the word intolerance is invariably used in the sense
of official intolerance, and if I pay little attention to the private
variety, have patience with me.
I can only do one thing at a time.
CHAPTER XI
RENAISSANCE
There is a learned cartoonist in our land who takes pleasure in asking
himself, what do billiard-balls and cross-word puzzles and bull-fiddles
and boiled shirts and door-mats think of this world?
But what I would like to know is the exact psychological reaction of the
men who are ordered to handle the big modern siege guns. During the war
a great many people performed a great many strange tasks, but was there
ever a more absurd job than firing dicke Berthas?
All other soldiers knew more or less what they were doing.
A flying man could judge by the rapidly spreading red glow whether he had
hit the gas factory or not.
The submarine commander could return after a couple of hours to judge by
the abundance of flotsam in how far he had been successful.
The poor devil in his dug-out had the satisfaction of realizing that
by his mere continued presence in a particular trench he was at least
holding his own.
Even the artillerist, working his field-piece upon an invisible object,
could take down the telephone and could ask his colleague, hidden in a
dead tree seven miles away, whether the doomed church tower was showing
signs of deterioration or whether he should try again at a different
angle.
But the brotherhood of the big guns lived in a strange and unreal world
of their own. Even with the assistance of a couple of full-fledged
professors of ballistics, they were unable to foretell what fate awaited
those projectiles which they shot so blithely into space. Their shells
might actually hit the object for which they were destined. They might
land in the midst of a powder factory or in the heart of a fortress. But
then again they might strike a church or an orphan asylum or they might
bury themselves peacefully in a river or in a gravel pit without doing
any harm whatsoever.
Authors, it seems to me, have much in common with the siege-gunners. They
too handle a sort of heavy artillery. Their literary missiles may start a
revolution or a conflagration in the most unlikely spots. But more often
they are just poor duds and lie harmless in a nearby field until they are
used for scrap iron or converted into an umbrella-stand or a flower pot.
Surely there never was a period in history when so much rag-pulp was
consumed within so short a space as the era commonly known as the
Renaissance.
Every Tomasso, Ricardo and Enrico of the Italian peninsula, every Doctor
Thomasius, Professor Ricardus and Dominus Heinrich of the great Teuton
plain rushed into print with at least a dozen duodecimos. Not to mention
the Tomassinos who wrote pretty little sonnets in imitation of the
Greeks, the Ricardinos who reeled off odes after the best pattern of
their Roman grandfathers, and the countless lovers of coins, statuary,
images, pictures, manuscripts and ancient armor who for almost three
centuries kept themselves busy classifying, ordering, tabulating,
listing, filing and codifying what they had just dug out of the ancestral
ruins and who then published their collections in countless folios
illuminated with the most beautiful of copper engravings and the most
ponderous of wood-cuts.
This great intellectual curiosity was very lucrative for the Frobens and
the Alduses and the Etiennes and the other new firms of printers who were
making a fortune out of the invention which had ruined Gutenberg, but
otherwise the literary output of the Renaissance did not very greatly
affect the state of that world in which the authors of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries happened to find themselves. The distinction of
having contributed something new was restricted to only a very few heroes
of the quill and they were like our friends of the big guns. They rarely
discovered during their own lifetime in how far they had been successful
and how much damage their writings had actually done. But first and last
they managed to demolish a great many of the obstacles which stood in
the way of progress. And they deserve our everlasting gratitude for the
thoroughness with which they cleaned up a lot of rubbish which otherwise
would continue to clutter our intellectual front yard.
Strictly speaking, however, the Renaissance was not primarily a
forward-looking movement. It turned its back in disgust upon the recent
past, called the works of its immediate predecessors “barbaric” (or
“Gothic” in the language of the country where the Goths had enjoyed the
same reputation as the Huns), and concentrated its main interest upon
those arts which seem to be pervaded with that curious substance known as
the “classical spirit.”
If nevertheless the Renaissance struck a mighty blow for the liberty
of conscience and for tolerance and for a better world in general, it
was done in spite of the men who were considered the leaders of the new
movement.
Long before the days of which we are now speaking, there had been people
who had questioned the rights of a Roman bishop to dictate to Bohemian
peasants and to English yeomen in what language they should say their
prayers, in what spirit they should study the words of Jesus, how much
they should pay for an indulgence, what books they should read and how
they should bring up their children. And all of them had been crushed by
the strength of that super-state, the power of which they had undertaken
to defy. Even when they had acted as champions and representatives of a
national cause, they had failed.
The smoldering ashes of great John Huss, thrown ignominiously into the
river Rhine, were a warning to all the world that the Papal Monarchy
still ruled supreme.
The corpse of Wycliffe, burned by the public executioner, told the humble
peasants of Leicestershire that councils and Popes could reach beyond the
grave.
Frontal attacks, evidently, were impossible.
The mighty fortress of tradition, builded slowly and carefully during
fifteen centuries of unlimited power, could not be taken by assault.
The scandals which had taken place within these hallowed enclosures;
the wars between three rival Popes, each claiming to be the legitimate
and exclusive heir to the chair of Holy Peter; the utter corruption of
the courts of Rome and Avignon, where laws were made for the purpose
of being broken by those who were willing to pay for such favors; the
utter demoralization of monastic life; the venality of those who used
the recently increased horrors of purgatory as an excuse to blackmail
poor parents into paying large sums of money for the benefit of their
dead children; all these things, although widely known, never really
threatened the safety of the Church.
But the chance shots fired at random by certain men and women who were
not at all interested in ecclesiastical matters, who had no particular
grievance against either pope or bishop, these caused the damage which
finally made the old edifice collapse.
What the “thin, pale man” from Prague had failed to accomplish with his
high ideals of Christian virtue was brought about by a motley crowd
of private citizens who had no other ambition than to live and die
(preferably at a ripe old age) as loyal patrons of all the good things of
this world and faithful sons of the Mother Church.
They came from all the seven corners of Europe. They represented every
sort of profession and they would have been very angry, had an historian
told them what they were doing.
For instance, take the case of Marco Polo.
We know him as a mighty traveler, a man who had seen such wondrous sights
that his neighbors, accustomed to the smaller scale of their western
cities, called him “Million Dollar Marc” and laughed uproariously when he
told them of golden thrones as high as a tower and of granite walls that
would stretch all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
All the same, the shriveled little fellow played a most important rôle
in the history of progress. He was not much of a writer. He shared the
prejudice of his class and his age against the literary profession. A
gentleman (even a Venetian gentleman who was supposed to be familiar
with double-entry bookkeeping) handled a sword and not a goose-quill.
Hence the unwillingness of Messire Marco to turn author. But the fortunes
of war carried him into a Genoese prison. And there, to while away the
tedious hours of his confinement, he told a poor scribbler, who happened
to share his cell, the strange story of his life. In this roundabout way
the people of Europe learned many things about this world which they had
never known before. For although Polo was a simple-minded fellow who
firmly believed that one of the mountains he had seen in Asia Minor had
been moved a couple of miles by a pious saint who wanted to show the
heathen “what true faith could do,” and who swallowed all the stories
about people without heads and chickens with three legs which were
so popular in his day, his report did more to upset the geographical
theories of the Church than anything that had appeared during the
previous twelve hundred years.
Polo, of course, lived and died a faithful son of the Church. He
would have been terribly upset if any one had compared him with his
near-contemporary, the famous Roger Bacon, who was an out and out
scientist and paid for his intellectual curiosity with ten years of
enforced literary idleness and fourteen years of prison.
And yet of the two he was by far the more dangerous.
For whereas only one person in a hundred thousand could follow Bacon when
he went chasing rainbows, and spun those fine evolutionary theories which
threatened to upset all the ideas held sacred in his own time, every
citizen who had been taught his ABCs could learn from Polo that the world
was full of a number of things the existence of which the authors of the
Old Testament had never even suspected.
I do not mean to imply that the publication of a single book caused that
rebellion against scriptural authority which was to occur before the
world could gain a modicum of freedom. Popular enlightenment is ever
the result of centuries of painstaking preparation. But the plain and
straightforward accounts of the explorers and the navigators and the
travelers, understandable to all the people, did a great deal to bring
about that spirit of scepticism which characterizes the latter half of
the Renaissance and which allowed people to say and write things which
only a few years before would have brought them into contact with the
agents of the Inquisition.
Take that strange story to which the friends of Boccaccio listened on
the first day of their agreeable exile from Florence. All religious
systems, so it told, were probably equally true and equally false. But
if this were true, and they were all equally true and false, then how
could people be condemned to the gallows for ideas which could neither be
proven nor contradicted?
Read the even stranger adventures of a famous scholar like Lorenzo Valla.
He died as a highly respectable member of the government of the Roman
Church. Yet in the pursuit of his Latin studies he had incontrovertibly
proven that the famous donation of “Rome and Italy and all the provinces
of the West,” which Constantine the Great was supposed to have made to
Pope Sylvester (and upon which the Popes had ever since based their
claims to be regarded as super-lords of all Europe), was nothing but
a clumsy fraud, perpetrated hundreds of years after the death of the
Emperor by an obscure official of the papal chancery.
Or to return to more practical questions, what were faithful Christians,
carefully reared in the ideas of Saint Augustine who had taught that
a belief in the presence of people on the other side of the earth was
both blasphemous and heretical, since such poor creatures would not be
able to see the second coming of Christ and therefore had no reason to
exist, what indeed were the good people of the year 1499 to think of this
doctrine when Vasco da Gama returned from his first voyage to the Indies
and described the populous kingdoms which he had found on the other side
of this planet?
What were these same simple folk, who had always been told that our world
was a flat dial and that Jerusalem was the center of the universe, what
were they to believe when the little “Vittoria” returned from her voyage
around the globe and when the geography of the Old Testament was shown to
contain some rather serious errors?
I repeat what I have said before. The Renaissance was not an era of
conscious scientific endeavor. In spiritual matters it often showed a
most regrettable lack of real interest. Everything during these three
hundred years was dominated by a desire for beauty and entertainment.
Even the Popes, who fulminated loudest against the iniquitous doctrines
of some of their subjects, were only too happy to invite those self-same
rebels for dinner if they happened to be good conversationalists and knew
something about printing or architecture. And eager zealots for virtue,
like Savonarola, ran quite as great a risk of losing their lives as the
bright young agnostics who in poetry and prose attacked the fundaments of
the Christian faith with a great deal more violence than good taste.
But throughout all these manifestations of a new interest in the business
of living, there undoubtedly ran a severe undercurrent of discontent
with the existing order of society and the restrictions put upon the
development of human reason by the claims of an all-powerful Church.
Between the days of Boccaccio and those of Erasmus, there is an interval
of almost two centuries. During these two centuries, the copyist and the
printer never enjoyed an idle moment. And outside of the books published
by the Church herself, it would be difficult to find an important piece
of work which did not contain some indirect reference to the sad plight
into which the world had fallen when the ancient civilizations of Greece
and Rome had been superseded by the anarchy of the barbarian invaders
and western society was placed under the tutelage of ignorant monks.
The contemporaries of Machiavelli and Lorenzo de’ Medici were not
particularly interested in ethics. They were practical men who made the
best of a practical world. Outwardly they remained at peace with the
Church because it was a powerful and far-reaching organization which was
capable of doing them great harm and they never consciously took part
in any of the several attempts at reform or questioned the institutions
under which they lived.
But their insatiable curiosity concerning old facts, their continual
search after new emotions, the very instability of their restless minds,
caused a world which had been brought up in the conviction “We know” to
ask the question “Do we really know?”
And that is a greater claim to the gratitude of all future generations
than the collected sonnets of Petrarch or the assembled works of Raffael.
CHAPTER XII
THE REFORMATION
Modern psychology has taught us several useful things about ourselves.
One of them is the fact that we rarely do anything actuated by one single
motive. Whether we give a million dollars for a new university or refuse
a nickel to a hungry tramp; whether we proclaim that the true life of
intellectual freedom can only be lived abroad or vow that we will never
again leave the shores of America; whether we insist upon calling black
white or white black, there are always a number of divergent reasons
which have caused us to make our decision, and way down deep in our
hearts we know this to be true. But as we would cut a sorry figure with
the world in general if we should ever dare to be quite honest with
ourselves or our neighbors, we instinctively choose the most respectable
and deserving among our many motives, brush it up a bit for public
consumption and then expose it for all the world to behold as “the reason
why we did so and so.”
But whereas it has been repeatedly demonstrated that it is quite possible
to fool most of the people most of the time, no one has as yet discovered
a method by which the average individual can fool himself for more than a
few minutes.
We are all of us familiar with this most embarrassing truth and therefore
ever since the beginning of civilization people have tacitly agreed with
each other that this should never under any circumstances be referred to
in public.
What we think in private, that is our own business. As long as we
maintain an outward air of respectability, we are perfectly satisfied
with ourselves and merrily act upon the principle “You believe my fibs
and I will believe yours.”
Nature, which has no manners, is the one great exception to this generous
rule of conduct. As a result, nature is rarely allowed to enter the
sacred portals of civilized society. And as history thus far has been
a pastime of the few, the poor muse known as Clio has led a very dull
life, especially when we compare it to the career of many of her less
respectable sisters who have been allowed to dance and sing and have been
invited to every party ever since the beginning of time. This of course
has been a source of great annoyance to poor Clio and repeatedly in her
own subtle way she has managed to get her revenge.
A perfectly human trait, this, but a very dangerous one and ofttimes very
expensive in the matter of human lives and property.
For whenever the old lady undertakes to show us that systematic lying,
continued during the course of centuries, will eventually play hob with
the peace and happiness of the entire world, our planet is at once
enveloped in the smoke of a thousand batteries. Regiments of cavalry
begin to dash hither and yon and interminable rows of foot soldiers
commence to crawl slowly across the landscape. And ere all these people
have been safely returned to their respective homes or cemeteries, whole
countries have been laid bare and innumerable exchequers have been
drained down to the last kopek.
Very slowly, as I have said before, it is beginning to dawn upon the
members of our guild that history is a science as well as an art and is
therefore subject to certain of the immutable laws of nature which thus
far have only been respected in chemical laboratories and astronomical
observatories. And as a result we are now doing some very useful
scientific house-cleaning which will be of inestimable benefit to all
coming generations.
Which brings me at last to the subject mentioned at the head of this
chapter, to wit: the Reformation.
Until not so very long ago there were only two opinions regarding this
great social and spiritual upheaval. It was either wholly good or wholly
bad.
According to the adherents of the former opinion it had been the result
of a sudden outbreak of religious zeal on the part of a number of noble
theologians who, profoundly shocked by the wickedness and the venality
of the papal super-state, had established a separate church of their own
where the true faith was to be henceforward taught to those who were
seriously trying to be true Christians.
Those who had remained faithful to Rome were less enthusiastic.
The Reformation, according to the scholars from beyond the Alps, was the
result of a damnable and most reprehensible conspiracy on the part of a
number of despicable princes who wanted to get unmarried and who besides
hoped to acquire the possessions which had formerly belonged to their
Holy Mother the Church.
As usual, both sides were right and both sides were wrong.
The Reformation was the work of all sorts of people with all sorts of
motives. And it is only within very recent times that we have begun to
realize how religious discontent played only a minor rôle in this great
upheaval and that it was really an unavoidable social and economic
revolution with a slightly theological background.
Of course it is much easier to teach our children that good Prince
Philip was a very enlightened ruler who took a profound personal interest
in the reformed doctrines, than to explain to them the complicated
machinations of an unscrupulous politician who willingly accepted the
help of the infidel Turks in his warfare upon other Christians. In
consequence whereof we Protestants have for hundreds of years made a
magnanimous hero out of an ambitious young landgrave who hoped to see
the house of Hesse play the rôle thus far played by the rival house of
Hapsburg.
On the other hand it is so much simpler to turn Pope Clement into a
loving shepherd who wasted the last remnants of his declining strength
trying to prevent his flocks from following false leaders, than to
depict him as a typical prince of the house of Medici who regarded
the Reformation as an unseemly brawl of drunken German monks and used
the power of the Church to further the interests of his own Italian
fatherland, that we need feel no surprise if such a fabulous figure
smiles at us from the pages of most Catholic text-books.
But while that sort of history may be necessary in Europe, we fortunate
settlers in a new world are under no obligation to persist in the errors
of our continental ancestors and are at liberty to draw a few conclusions
of our own.
Just because Philip of Hesse, the great friend and supporter of Luther,
was a man dominated by an enormous political ambition, it does not
necessarily follow that he was insincere in his religious convictions.
By no means.
When he put his name to the famous “Protest” of the year 1529, he knew
as well as his fellow signers that they were about to “expose themselves
to the violence of a terrible storm,” and might end their lives on the
scaffold. If he had not been a man of extraordinary courage, he would
never have undertaken to play the rôle he actually played.
But the point I am trying to make is this: that it is exceedingly
difficult, yes, almost impossible, to judge an historical character (or
for that matter, any of our immediate neighbors) without a profound
knowledge of all the many motives which have inspired him to do what he
has done or forced him to omit doing what he has omitted to do.
The French have a proverb that “to know everything is to forgive
everything.” That seems too easy a solution. I would like to offer an
amendment and change it as follows: “To know everything is to understand
everything.” We can leave the business of pardoning to the good Lord who
ages ago reserved that right to himself.
Meanwhile we ourselves can humbly try to “understand” and that is more
than enough for our limited human ability.
And now let me return to the Reformation, which started me upon this
slight detour.
As far as I “understand” that movement, it was primarily a manifestation
of a new spirit which had been born as a result of the economic and
political development of the last three centuries and which came to be
known as “nationalism” and which therefore was the sworn enemy of that
foreign super-state into which all European countries had been forced
during the course of the last five centuries.
Without the common denominator of some such grievance, it would never
have been possible to unite Germans and Finns and Danes and Swedes and
Frenchmen and Englishmen and Norsemen into a single cohesive party,
strong enough to batter down the walls of the prison in which they had
been held for such a long time.
If all these heterogeneous and mutually envious elements had not been
temporarily bound together by one great ideal, far surpassing their
own private grudges and aspirations, the Reformation could never have
succeeded.
It would have degenerated into a series of small local uprisings, easily
suppressed by a regiment of mercenaries and half a dozen energetic
inquisitors.
The leaders would have suffered the fate of Huss. Their followers would
have been killed as the little groups of Waldenses and Albigenses had
been slaughtered before them. And the Papal Monarchy would have scored
another easy triumph, followed by an era of Schrecklichkeit among those
guilty of a “breach of discipline.”
Even so, the great movement for reform only succeeded by the smallest of
all possible margins. And as soon as the victory had been won and the
menace which had threatened the existence of all the rebels had been
removed, the Protestant camp was dissolved into an infinitesimal number
of small hostile groups who tried on a greatly diminished scale to repeat
all the errors of which their enemies had been guilty in the heyday of
their power.
A French abbé (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, but a very wise
fellow) once said that we must learn to love humanity in spite of itself.
To look back from the safe distance of almost four centuries upon this
era of great hope and even greater disappointment, to think of the
sublime courage of so many men and women who wasted their lives on the
scaffold and on the field of battle for an ideal that was never to be
realized, to contemplate the sacrifice made by millions of obscure
citizens for the things they held to be holy and then to remember the
utter failure of the Protestant rebellion as a movement towards a more
liberal and more intelligent world, is to put one’s charity to a most
severe test.
For Protestantism, if the truth must be told, took away from this world
many things that were good and noble and beautiful and it added a great
many others that were narrow and hateful and graceless. And instead of
making the history of the human race simpler and more harmonious, it made
it more complicated and less orderly. All that, however, was not so much
the fault of the Reformation as of certain inherent weaknesses in the
mental habits of most people.
They refuse to be hurried.
They cannot possibly keep up with the pace set by their leaders.
They are not lacking in good will. Eventually they will all cross the
bridge that leads into the newly discovered territory. But they will do
so in their own good time and bringing with them as much of the ancestral
furniture as they can possibly carry.
As a result the Great Reform, which was to establish an entirely new
relationship between the individual Christian and his God, which was
to do away with all the prejudices and all the corruptions of a bygone
era, became so thoroughly cluttered up with the medieval baggage of its
trusted followers that it could move neither forward nor backward and
soon looked for all the world like a replica of that papal establishment
which it held in such great abhorrence.
For that is the great tragedy of the Protestant rebellion. It could
not rise above the mean average of intelligence of the majority of its
adherents.
And as a result the people of western and northern Europe did not
progress as much as might have been expected.
Instead of a man who was supposed to be infallible, the Reformation gave
the world a book which was held to be infallible.
Instead of one potentate who ruled supreme, there arose a thousand and
one little potentates, each one of whom in his own way tried to rule
supreme.
Instead of dividing all Christendom into two well defined halves, the
ins and the outs, the faithful and the heretics, it created endless
little groups of dissenters who had nothing in common but a most intense
hatred for all those who failed to share their own opinions. Instead of
establishing a reign of tolerance, it followed the example of the early
Church and as soon as it had attained power and was firmly entrenched
behind numberless catechisms, creeds and confessions, it declared bitter
warfare upon those who dared to disagree with the officially established
doctrines of the community in which they happened to live.
All this was, no doubt, most regrettable.
But it was unavoidable in view of the mental development of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
To describe the courage of leaders like Luther and Calvin, there exists
only one word, and rather a terrible word, “colossal.”
A simple Dominican monk, a professor in a little tidewater college
somewhere in the backwoods of the German hinterland, who boldly burns
a Papal Bull and hammers his own rebellious opinions to the door of a
church; a sickly French scholar who turns a small Swiss town into a
fortress which successfully defies the whole power of the papacy; such
men present us with examples of fortitude so unique that the modern world
can offer no adequate comparison.
That these bold rebels soon found friends and supporters, friends with a
purpose of their own and supporters who hoped to fish successfully in
troubled waters, all this is neither here nor there.
When these men began to gamble with their lives for the sake of their
conscience, they could not foresee that this would happen and that most
of the nations of the north would eventually enlist under their banners.
But once they had been thrown into this maelstrom of their own making,
they were obliged to go whither the current carried them.
Soon the mere question of keeping themselves above water took all of
their strength. In far away Rome the Pope had at last learned that this
contemptible disturbance was something more serious than a personal
quarrel between a few Dominican and Augustinian friars, and an intrigue
on the part of a former French chaplain. To the great joy of his many
creditors, he temporarily ceased building his pet cathedral and called
together a council of war. The papal bulls and excommunications flew fast
and furiously. Imperial armies began to move. And the leaders of the
rebellion, with their backs against the wall, were forced to stand and
fight.
It was not the first time in history that great men in the midst of a
desperate conflict lost their sense of proportion. The same Luther who at
one time proclaims that it is “against the Holy Spirit to burn heretics,”
a few years later goes into such a tantrum of hate when he thinks of the
wickedness of those Germans and Dutchmen who have a leaning towards the
ideas of the Anabaptists, that he seems to have lost his reason.
The intrepid reformer who begins his career by insisting that we must
not force our own system of logic upon God, ends his days by burning an
opponent whose power of reasoning was undoubtedly superior to his own.
The heretic of today becomes the arch-enemy of all dissenters of tomorrow.
And with all their talk of a new era in which the dawn has at last
followed upon the dark, both Calvin and Luther remained faithful sons of
the Middle Ages as long as they lived.
Tolerance did not and could not possibly show itself to them in the light
of a virtue. As long as they themselves were outcasts, they were willing
to invoke the divine right of freedom of conscience that they might use
it as an argument against their enemies. Once the battle was won, this
trusted weapon was carefully deposited in a corner of the Protestant
junk-room, already cluttered with so many other good intentions that had
been discarded as unpractical. There it lay, forgotten and neglected,
until a great many years later, when it was discovered behind a trunk
full of old sermons. But the people who picked it up, scraped off the
rust and once more carried it into battle were of a different nature from
those who had fought the good fight in the early days of the sixteenth
century.
And yet, the Protestant revolution contributed greatly to the cause of
tolerance. Not through what it accomplished directly. In that field the
gain was small indeed. But indirectly the results of the Reformation were
all on the side of progress.
In the first place, it made people familiar with the Bible. The Church
had never positively forbidden people to read the Bible, but neither had
it encouraged the study of the sacred book by ordinary laymen. Now at
last every honest baker and candlestick maker could own a copy of the
holy work; could peruse it in the privacy of his workshop and could draw
his own conclusions without running the risk of being burned at the stake.
Familiarity is apt to kill those sentiments of awe and fear which we
feel before the mysteries of the unknown. During the first two hundred
years which followed immediately upon the Reformation, pious Protestants
believed everything they read in the Old Testament from Balaam’s ass
to Jonah’s whale. And those who dared to question a single comma (the
“inspired” vowel-points of learned Abraham Colovius!) knew better than
to let their sceptical tittering be heard by the community at large. Not
because they were afraid any longer of the Inquisition, but Protestant
pastors could upon occasion make a man’s life exceedingly unpleasant and
the economic consequences of a public ministerial censure were often very
serious, not to say disastrous.
Gradually however this eternally repeated study of a book which was
really the national history of a small nation of shepherds and traders
was to bear results which Luther and Calvin and the other reformers had
never foreseen.
If they had, I am certain they would have shared the Church’s dislike
of Hebrew and Greek and would have kept the scriptures carefully out of
the hands of the uninitiated. For in the end, an increasing number of
serious students began to appreciate the Old Testament as a singularly
interesting book, but containing such dreadful and blood-curdling tales
of cruelty, greed and murder that it could not possibly have been
inspired and must, by the very nature of its contents, be the product of
a people who had still lived in a state of semi-barbarism.
After that, of course, it was impossible for many people to regard the
Bible as the only font of all true wisdom. And once this obstacle to free
speculation had been removed, the current of scientific investigation,
dammed up for almost a thousand years, began to flow in its natural
channel and the interrupted labors of the old Greek and Roman
philosophers were picked up where they had been left off twenty centuries
before.
And in the second place, and this is even more important from the point
of view of tolerance, the Reformation delivered northern and western
Europe from the dictatorship of a power which under the guise of a
religious organization had been in reality nothing but a spiritual and
highly despotic continuation of the Roman Empire.
With these statements, our Catholic readers will hardly agree. But
they too have reason to be grateful to a movement which was not only
unavoidable, but which was to render a most salutary service to their
own faith. For, thrown upon her own resources, the Church made an heroic
effort to rid herself of those abuses which had made her once sacred name
a byword for rapacity and tyranny.
And she succeeded most brilliantly.
After the middle of the sixteenth century, no more Borgias were tolerated
in the Vatican. The Popes as ever before continued to be Italians. A
deflection from this rule was practically impossible, as the Roman
proletariat would have turned the city upside down if the cardinals
entrusted with the election of a new pontiff had chosen a German or a
Frenchman or any other foreigner.
The new pontiffs, however, were selected with great care and only
candidates of the highest character could hope to be considered. And
these new masters, faithfully aided by their devoted Jesuit auxiliaries,
began a thorough house-cleaning.
The sale of indulgences came to an end.
Monastic orders were enjoined to study (and henceforth to obey) the rules
laid down by their founders.
Mendicant friars disappeared from the streets of civilized cities.
And the general spiritual indifference of the Renaissance was replaced by
an eager zeal for holy and useful lives spent in good deeds and in humble
service towards those unfortunate people who were not strong enough to
carry the burden of existence by themselves.
Even so, the greater part of the territory which had been lost was never
regained. Speaking with a certain geographical freedom, the northern half
of Europe remained Protestant, while the southern half stayed Catholic.
But when we translate the result of the Reformation into the language
of pictures, the actual changes which took place in Europe become more
clearly revealed.
During the Middle Ages there had been one universal spiritual and
intellectual prison-house.
The Protestant rebellion had ruined the old building and out of part of
the available material it had constructed a jail of its own.
After the year 1517 there are therefore two dungeons, one reserved
exclusively for the Catholics, the other for the Protestants.
At least that had been the original plan.
But the Protestants, who did not have the advantage of centuries of
training along the lines of persecution and repression, failed to make
their lockup dissenter-proof.
Through windows and chimneys and cellar-doors a large number of the
unruly inmates escaped.
Ere long the entire building was a wreck.
At night the miscreants came and took away whole cartloads of stones and
beams and iron bars which they used the next morning to build a little
fortress of their own. But although this had the outward appearance of
that original jail, constructed a thousand years before by Gregory the
Great and Innocent III, it lacked the necessary inner strength.
No sooner was it ready for occupancy, no sooner had a new set of
rules and regulations been posted upon the gates, than a wholesale
walk-out occurred among the disgruntled trustees. As their keepers, now
called ministers, had been deprived of the old methods of discipline
(excommunication, torture, execution, confiscation and exile) they were
absolutely helpless before this determined mob and were forced to stand
by and look on while the rebels put up such a stockade as pleased their
own theological preferences and proclaimed such new doctrines as happened
to suit their temporary convictions.
This process was repeated so often that finally there developed a sort of
spiritual no-man’s-land between the different lockups where curious souls
could roam at random and where honest people could think whatever they
pleased without hindrance or molestation.
And this is the great service which Protestantism rendered to the cause
of tolerance.
It reëstablished the dignity of the individual man.
CHAPTER XIII
ERASMUS
In the writing of every book there occurs a crisis. Sometimes it comes
during the first fifty pages. Upon other occasions it does not make
itself manifest until the manuscript is almost finished. Indeed, a book
without a crisis is like a child that has never had the measles. There
probably is something the matter with it.
The crisis in the present volume happened a few minutes ago, for I have
now reached the point where the idea of a work upon the subject of
tolerance in the year of grace 1925 seems quite preposterous; where all
the labor spent thus far upon a preliminary study appears in the light
of so much valuable time wasted; where I would like best of all to make
a bonfire of Bury and Lecky and Voltaire and Montaigne and White and use
the carbon copies of my own work to light the stove.
How to explain this?
There are many reasons. In the first place, there is the inevitable
feeling of boredom which overtakes an author when he has been living with
his topic on a very intimate footing for too long a time. In the second
place, the suspicion that books of this sort will not be of the slightest
practical value. And in the third place the fear that the present
volume will be merely used as a quarry from which our less tolerant
fellow-citizens will dig a few easy facts with which to bolster up their
own bad causes.
But apart from these arguments (which hold good for most serious books)
there is in the present case the almost insurmountable difficulty of
“system.”
A story in order to be a success must have a beginning and an end. This
book has a beginning, but can it ever have an end?
What I mean is this.
I can show the terrible crimes apparently committed in the name of
righteousness and justice, but really caused by intolerance.
I can depict the unhappy days upon which mankind fell when intolerance
was elevated to the rank of one of the major virtues.
I can denounce and deride intolerance until my readers shout with one
accord, “Down with this curse, and let us all be tolerant!”
But there is one thing I cannot do. I cannot tell how this highly
desirable goal is to be reached. There are handbooks which undertake
to give us instruction in everything from after-dinner speaking to
ventriloquism. In an advertisement of a correspondence course last Sunday
I read of no less than two hundred and forty-nine subjects which the
institute guaranteed to teach to perfection in exchange for a very small
gratuity. But no one thus far has offered to explain in forty (or in
forty thousand) lessons “how to become tolerant.”
And even history, which is supposed to hold the key to so many secrets,
refuses to be of any use in this emergency.
Yes, it is possible to compose learned tomes devoted to slavery or free
trade or capital punishment or the growth and development of Gothic
architecture, for slavery and free trade and capital punishment and
Gothic architecture are very definite and concrete things. For lack of
all other material we could at least study the lives of the men and
women who had been the champions of free trade and slavery and capital
punishment and Gothic architecture or those who had opposed them.
And from the manner in which those excellent people had approached
their subjects, from their personal habits, their associations, their
preferences in food and drink and tobacco, yea, from the very breeches
they had worn, we could draw certain conclusions about the ideals which
they had so energetically espoused or so bitterly denounced.
But there never were any professional protagonists of tolerance. Those
who worked most zealously for the great cause did so incidentally. Their
tolerance was a by-product. They were engaged in other pursuits. They
were statesmen or writers or kings or physicians or modest artisans.
In the midst of the king business or their medical practice or making
steel engravings they found time to say a few good words for tolerance,
but the struggle for tolerance was not the whole of their careers.
They were interested in it as they may have been interested in playing
chess or fiddling. And because they were part of a strangely assorted
group (imagine Spinoza and Frederick the Great and Thomas Jefferson and
Montaigne as boon companions!) it is almost impossible to discover that
common trait of character which as a rule is to be found in all those
who are engaged upon a common task, be it soldiering or plumbing or
delivering the world from sin.
In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere
in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma. But upon this
particular subject, the Bible and Shakespeare and Izaak Walton and even
old Benham leave us in the lurch. Perhaps Jonathan Swift (I quote from
memory) came nearest to the problem when he said that most men had just
enough religion to hate their neighbors but not quite enough to love
them. Unfortunately that bright remark does not quite cover our present
difficulty. There have been people possessed of as much religion as
any one individual could safely hold who have hated their neighbors as
cordially as the best of them. There have been others who were totally
devoid of the religious instinct who squandered their affection upon all
the stray cats and dogs and human beings of Christendom.
No, I shall have to find an answer of my own. And upon due cogitation
(but with a feeling of great uncertainty) I shall now state what I
suspect to be the truth.
The men who have fought for tolerance, whatever their differences, had
all of them one thing in common; their faith was tempered by doubt;
they might honestly believe that they themselves were right, but they
never reached the point where that suspicion hardened into an absolute
conviction.
In this day and age of super-patriotism, with our enthusiastic clamoring
for a hundred-percent this and a hundred-percent that, it may be well to
point to the lesson taught by nature which seems to have a constitutional
aversion to any such ideal of standardization.
Purely bred cats and dogs are proverbial idiots who are apt to die
because no one is present to take them out of the rain. Hundred-percent
pure iron has long since been discarded for the composite metal called
steel. No jeweler ever undertook to do anything with hundred-percent pure
gold or silver. Fiddles, to be any good, must be made of six or seven
different varieties of wood. And as for a meal composed entirely of a
hundred-percent mush, I thank you, no!
In short, all the most useful things in this world are compounds and I
see no reason why faith should be an exception. Unless the base of our
“certainty” contains a certain amount of the alloy of “doubt,” our faith
will sound as tinkly as a bell made of pure silver or as harsh as a
trombone made of brass.
It was a profound appreciation of this fact which set the heroes of
tolerance apart from the rest of the world.
As far as personal integrity went, honesty of conviction, unselfish
devotion to duty and all the other household virtues, most of these men
could have passed muster before a board of Puritan Inquisitors. I would
go further than that and state that at least half of them lived and died
in such a way that they would now be among the saints, if their peculiar
trend of conscience had not forced them to be the open and avowed enemies
of that institution which has taken upon itself the exclusive right of
elevating ordinary human beings to certain celestial dignities.
But fortunately they were possessed of the divine doubt.
They knew (as the Romans and the Greeks had known before them) that the
problem which faced them was so vast that no one in his right senses
would ever expect it to be solved. And while they might hope and pray
that the road which they had taken would eventually lead them to a
safe goal, they could never convince themselves that it was the only
right one, that all other roads were wrong and that the enchanting
by-paths which delighted the hearts of so many simple people were evil
thoroughfares leading to damnation.
All this sounds contrary to the opinions expressed in most of our
catechisms and our text-books on ethics. These preach the superior virtue
of a world illuminated by the pure white flame of absolute faith. Perhaps
so. But during those centuries when that flame was supposed to be burning
at its brightest, the average rank and file of humanity cannot be said
to have been either particularly happy or extraordinarily comfortable. I
don’t want to suggest any radical reforms, but just for a change we might
try that other light, by the rays of which the brethren of the tolerant
guild have been in the habit of examining the affairs of the world. If
that does not prove successful, we can always go back to the system of
our fathers. But if it should prove to throw an agreeable luster upon a
society containing a little more kindness and forbearance, a community
less beset by ugliness and greed and hatred, a good deal would have been
gained and the expense, I am sure, would be quite small.
And after this bit of advice, offered for what it is worth, I must go
back to my history.
When the last Roman was buried, the last citizen of the world (in the
best and broadest sense of the word) perished. And it was a long time
before society was once more placed upon such a footing of security
that the old spirit of an all-encompassing humanity, which had been
characteristic of the best minds of the ancient world, could safely
return to this earth.
That, as we saw, happened during the Renaissance.
The revival of international commerce brought fresh capital to the
poverty stricken countries of the west. New cities arose. A new class
of men began to patronize the arts, to spend money upon books, to endow
those universities which followed so closely in the wake of prosperity.
And it was then that a few devoted adherents of the “humanities,” of
those sciences which boldly had taken all mankind as their field of
experiment, arose in rebellion against the narrow limitations of the
old scholasticism and strayed away from the flock of the faithful who
regarded their interest in the wisdom and the grammar of the ancients as
a manifestation of a wicked and impure curiosity.
Among the men who were in the front ranks of this small group of
pioneers, the stories of whose lives will make up the rest of this book,
few deserve greater credit than that very timid soul who came to be known
as Erasmus.
For timid he was, although he took part in all the great verbal
encounters of his day and successfully managed to make himself the terror
of his enemies, by the precision with which he handled that most deadly
of all weapons, the long-range gun of humor.
Far and wide the missiles containing the mustard-gas of his wit were
shot into the enemy’s country. And those Erasmian bombs were of a very
dangerous variety. At a first glance they looked harmless enough. There
was no sputtering of a tell-tale fuse. They had the appearance of an
amusing new variety of fire-cracker, but God help those who took them
home and allowed the children to play with them. The poison was sure to
get into their little minds and it was of such a persistent nature that
four centuries have not sufficed to make the race immune against the
effects of the drug.
It is strange that such a man should have been born in one of the dullest
towns of the mudbanks which are situated along the eastern coast of the
North Sea. In the fifteenth century those water soaked lands had not yet
attained the glories of an independent and fabulously rich commonwealth.
They formed a group of little insignificant principalities, somewhere
on the outskirts of civilized society. They smelled forever of herring,
their chief article of export. And if ever they attracted a visitor, it
was some helpless mariner whose ship had been wrecked upon their dismal
shores.
But the very horror of a childhood spent among such unpleasant
surroundings may have spurred this curious infant into that fury of
activity which eventually was to set him free and make him one of the
best known men of his time.
From the beginning of life, everything was against him. He was an
illegitimate child. The people of the Middle Ages, being on an intimate
and friendly footing both with God and with nature, were a great deal
more sensible about such children than we are. They were sorry. Such
things ought not to occur and of course they greatly disapproved. For the
rest, however, they were too simple-minded to punish a helpless creature
in a cradle for a sin which most certainly was not of its own making.
The irregularity of his birth certificate inconvenienced Erasmus only in
so far as both his father and his mother seem to have been exceedingly
muddle-headed citizens, totally incapable of handling the situation and
leaving their children to the care of relatives who were either boobs or
scoundrels.
These uncles and guardians had no idea of what to do with their two
little wards and after the mother had died, the children never had a
home of their own. First of all they were sent to a famous school in
Deventer, where several of the teachers belonged to the Society of the
Brothers of the Common Life, but if we are to judge by the letters which
Erasmus wrote later in life, these young men were only “common” in a
very different sense of the word. Next the two boys were separated and
the younger was taken to Gouda, where he was placed under the immediate
supervision of the head-master of the Latin school, who was also one of
the three guardians appointed to administer his slender inheritance. If
that school in the days of Erasmus was as bad as when I visited it four
centuries later, I can only feel sorry for the poor kid. And to make
matters worse, the guardians by this time had wasted every penny of his
money and in order to escape prosecution (for the old Dutch courts were
strict upon such matters) they hurried the infant into a cloister, rushed
him into holy orders and bade him be happy because “now his future was
secure.”
The mysterious mills of history eventually ground this terrible
experience into something of great literary value. But I hate to think of
the many terrible years this sensitive youngster was forced to spend in
the exclusive company of the illiterate boors and thick-fingered rustics
who during the end of the Middle Ages made up the population of fully
half of all monasteries.
Fortunately the laxity of discipline at Steyn permitted Erasmus to spend
most of his time among the Latin manuscripts which a former abbot had
collected and which lay forgotten in the library. He absorbed those
volumes until he finally became a walking encyclopedia of classical
learning. In later years this stood him in good stead. Forever on the
move, he rarely was within reach of a reference library. But that was not
necessary. He could quote from memory. Those who have ever seen the ten
gigantic folios which contain his collected works, or who have managed
to read through part of them (life is so short nowadays) will appreciate
what a “knowledge of the classics” meant in the fifteenth century.
Of course, eventually Erasmus was able to leave his old monastery. People
like him are never influenced by circumstances. They make their own
circumstances and they make them out of the most unlikely material.
And the rest of his life Erasmus was a free man, searching restlessly
after a spot where he might work without being disturbed by a host of
admiring friends.
But not until the fateful hour when with an appeal to the “lieve God” of
his childhood he allowed his soul to slip into the slumber of death, did
he enjoy a moment of that “true leisure” which has always appeared as the
highest good to those who have followed the footsteps of Socrates and
Zeno and which so few of them have ever found.
These peregrinations have often been described and I need not repeat
them here in detail. Wherever two or more men lived together in the name
of true wisdom, there Erasmus was sooner or later bound to make his
appearance.
He studied in Paris, where as a poor scholar he almost died of hunger
and cold. He taught in Cambridge. He printed books in Basel. He tried
(quite in vain) to carry a spark of enlightenment into that stronghold
of orthodox bigotry, the far-famed University of Louvain. He spent much
of his time in London and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity in the
University of Turin. He was familiar with the Grand Canal of Venice
and cursed as familiarly about the terrible roads of Zeeland as those
of Lombardy. The sky, the parks, the walks and the libraries of Rome
made such a profound impression upon him that even the waters of Lethe
could not wash the Holy City out of his memory. He was offered a liberal
pension if he would only move to Venice and whenever a new university was
opened, he was sure to be honored with a call to whatever chair he wished
to take or to no chair at all, provided he would grace the Campus with
his occasional presence.
But he steadily refused all such invitations because they seemed to
contain a threat of permanence and dependency. Before all things he
wanted to be free. He preferred a comfortable room to a bad one, he
preferred amusing companions to dull ones, he knew the difference
between the good rich wine of the land called Burgundy and the thin red
ink of the Apennines, but he wanted to live life on his own terms and
this he could not do if he had to call any man “master.”
The rôle which he had chosen for himself was really that of an
intellectual search-light. No matter what object appeared above the
horizon of contemporary events, Erasmus immediately let the brilliant
rays of his intellect play upon it, did his best to make his neighbors
see the thing as it really was, denuded of all frills and divested of
that “folly,” that ignorance which he hated so thoroughly.
That he was able to do this during the most turbulent period of our
history, that he managed to escape the fury of the Protestant fanatics
while keeping himself aloof from the fagots of his friends of the
Inquisition, this is the one point in his career upon which he has been
most often condemned.
Posterity seems to have a veritable passion for martyrdom as long as it
applies to the ancestors.
“Why didn’t this Dutchman stand up boldly for Luther and take his chance
together with the other reformers?” has been a question which seems
to have puzzled at least twelve generations of otherwise intelligent
citizens.
The answer is, “Why should he?”
It was not in his nature to do violent things and he never regarded
himself as the leader of any movement. He utterly lacked that sense
of self-righteous assurance which is so characteristic of those who
undertake to tell the world how the millennium ought to be brought
about. Besides he did not believe that it is necessary to demolish the
old home every time we feel the necessity of rearranging our quarters.
Quite true, the premises were sadly in need of repairs. The drainage
was old-fashioned. The garden was all cluttered up with dirt and odds
and ends left behind by people who had moved out long before. But all
this could be changed if the landlord was made to live up to his promises
and would only spend some money upon immediate improvements. Beyond
that, Erasmus did not wish to go. And although he was what his enemies
sneeringly called a “moderate,” he accomplished quite as much (or more)
than those out and out “radicals” who gave the world two tyrannies where
only one had been before.
Like all truly great men, he was no friend of systems. He believed that
the salvation of this world lies in our individual endeavors. Make over
the individual man and you have made over the entire world!
Hence he made his attack upon existing abuses by way of a direct appeal
to the average citizen. And he did this in a very clever way.
In the first place he wrote an enormous amount of letters. He wrote them
to kings and to emperors and to popes and to abbots and to knights and
to knaves. He wrote them (and this in the days before the stamped and
self-addressed envelope) to any one who took the trouble to approach him
and whenever he took his pen in hand he was good for at least eight pages.
In the second place, he edited a large number of classical texts which
had been so often and so badly copied that they no longer made any sense.
For this purpose he had been obliged to learn Greek. His many attempts
to get hold of a grammar of that forbidden tongue was one of the reasons
why so many pious Catholics insisted that at heart he must be as bad as a
real heretic. This of course sounds absurd but it was the truth. In the
fifteenth century, respectable Christians would never have dreamed of
trying to learn this forbidden language. It was a tongue of evil repute
like modern Russian. A knowledge of Greek might lead a man into all sorts
of difficulties. It might tempt him to compare the original gospels with
those translations that had been given to him with the assurance that
they were a true reproduction of the original. And that would only be the
beginning. Soon he would make a descent into the Ghetto to get hold of a
Hebrew grammar. From that point to open rebellion against the authority
of the Church was only a step and for a long time the possession of a
book with strange and outlandish pothooks was regarded as ipso facto
evidence of secret revolutionary tendencies.
Quite often rooms were raided by ecclesiastical authorities in search of
this contraband, and Byzantine refugees who were trying to eke out an
existence by teaching their native tongue were not infrequently forced to
leave the city in which they had found an asylum.
In spite of all these many obstacles, Erasmus had learned Greek and in
the asides which he added to his editions of Cyprian and Chrysostom and
the other Church fathers, he hid many sly observations upon current
events which could never have been printed had they been the subject of a
separate pamphlet.
But this impish spirit of annotation manifested itself in an entirely
different sort of literature of which he was the inventor. I mean his
famous collections of Greek and Latin proverbs which he had brought
together in order that the children of his time might learn to write the
classics with becoming elegance. These so-called “Adagia” are filled with
clever comments which in the eyes of his conservative neighbors were
by no means what one had the right to expect of a man who enjoyed the
friendship of the Pope.
And finally he was the author of one of those strange little books which
are born of the spirit of the moment, which are really a joke conceived
for the benefit of a few friends and then assume the dignity of a great
literary classic before the poor author quite realizes what he has done.
It was called “The Praise of Folly” and we happen to know how it came to
be written.
It was in the year 1515 that the world had been startled by a pamphlet
written so cleverly that no one could tell whether it was meant as an
attack upon the friars or as a defense of the monastic life. No name
appeared upon the title page, but those who knew what was what in the
world of letters recognized the somewhat unsteady hand of one Ulrich
von Hutten. And they guessed right; for that talented young man, poet
laureate and town bum extraordinary, had taken no mean share in the
production of this gross but useful piece of buffoonery and he was proud
of it. When he heard that no one less than Thomas More, the famous
champion of the New Learning in England, had spoken well of his work, he
wrote to Erasmus and asked him for particulars.
Erasmus was no friend of von Hutten. His orderly mind (reflected in his
orderly way of living) did not take kindly to those blowsy Teuton Ritters
who spent their mornings and afternoons valiantly wielding pen and rapier
for the cause of enlightenment and then retired to the nearest pot-house
that they might forget the corruption of the times by drinking endless
bumpers of sour beer.
But von Hutten, in his own way, was really a man of genius and Erasmus
answered him civilly enough. Yea, as he wrote, he grew eloquent upon
the virtues of his London friend and depicted so charming a scene of
domestic contentment that the household of Sir Thomas might well serve
as a model for all other families until the end of time. It was in this
letter that he mentions how More, himself a humorist of no small parts,
had given him the original idea for his “Praise of Folly” and very likely
it was the good-natured horse-play of the More establishment (a veritable
Noah’s ark of sons and daughters-in-law and daughters and sons-in-law and
birds and dogs and a private zoo and private theatricals and bands of
amateur fiddlers) which had inspired him to write that delightful piece
of nonsense with which his name is forever associated.
In some vague way the book reminds me of the Punch and Judy shows which
for so many centuries were the only amusement of little Dutch children.
Those Punch and Judy shows, with all the gross vulgarity of their
dialogue, invariably maintained a tone of lofty moral seriousness. The
hollow voiced figure of Death dominated the scene. One by one the other
actors were forced to appear before this ragged hero and give an account
of themselves. And one by one, to the everlasting delight of the youthful
audience, they were knocked on the head with an enormous cudgel and were
thrown on an imaginary scrap-heap.
In the “Praise of Folly,” the whole social fabric of the age is carefully
taken apart while Folly, as a sort of inspired Coroner, stands by and
favors the public at large with her comments. No one is spared. The whole
of Medieval Main Street is ransacked for suitable characters. And of
course, the go-getters of that day, the peddling friars of salvation with
all their sanctimonius sales-talk, their gross ignorance and the futile
pomposity of their arguments, came in for a drubbing which was never
forgotten and never forgiven.
But the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops, incongruous successors to
the poverty stricken fishermen and carpenters from the land of Galilee,
were also on the bill and held the stage for several chapters.
The “Folly” of Erasmus however was a much more substantial personage than
the usual Jack-in-the-Box of humorous literature. Throughout this little
book (as indeed throughout everything he wrote) Erasmus preached a gospel
of his own which one might call the philosophy of tolerance.
It was this willingness to live and let live; this insistence upon the
spirit of the divine law rather than upon the commas and the semi-colons
in the original version of that divine law; this truly human acceptance
of religion as a system of ethics rather than as a form of government
which made serious-minded Catholics and Protestants inveigh against
Erasmus as a “godless knave” and an enemy of all true religion who
“slandered Christ” but hid his real opinions behind the funny phrases of
a clever little book.
This abuse (and it lasted until the day of his death) did not have any
effect. The little man with the long pointed nose, who lived until the
age of seventy at a time when the addition or omission of a single word
from an established text might cause a man to be hanged, had no liking
at all for the popular-hero business and he said so openly. He expected
nothing from an appeal to swords and arquebusses and knew only too well
the risk the world was running when a minor theological dispute was
allowed to degenerate into an international religious war.
And so, like a gigantic beaver, he worked day and night to finish that
famous dam of reason and common sense which he vaguely hoped might stem
the waxing tide of ignorance and intolerance.
Of course he failed. It was impossible to stop those floods of ill-will
and hatred which were sweeping down from the mountains of Germany and the
Alps, and a few years after his death his work had been completely washed
away.
But so well had he wrought that many bits of wreckage, thrown upon
the shores of posterity, proved exceedingly good material for those
irrepressible optimists who believe that some day we shall have a set of
dykes that will actually hold.
Erasmus departed this life in July of the year 1586.
His sense of humor never deserted him. He died in the house of his
publisher.
CHAPTER XIV
RABELAIS
Social upheavals make strange bed-fellows.
The name of Erasmus can be printed in a respectable book intended for the
entire family. But to mention Rabelais in public is considered little
short of a breach of good manners. Indeed, so dangerous is this fellow
that laws have been passed in our country to keep his wicked works out of
the hands of our innocent children and that in many states copies of his
books can only be obtained from the more intrepid among our book-leggers.
This of course is merely one of the absurdities which have been forced
upon us by the reign of terror of a flivver aristocracy.
In the first place, the works of Rabelais to the average citizen of the
twentieth century are about as dull reading as “Tom Jones” or “The House
of the Seven Gables.” Few people ever get beyond the first interminable
chapter.
And in the second place, there is nothing intentionally suggestive in
what he says. Rabelais used the common vocabulary of his time. That does
not happen to be the common vernacular of our own day. But in the era of
the bucolic blues, when ninety percent of the human race lived close to
the soil, a spade was actually a spade and lady-dogs were not “lady-dogs.”
No, the current objections to the works of this distinguished surgeon go
much deeper than a mere disapproval of his rich but somewhat outspoken
collection of idioms. They are caused by the horror which many excellent
people experience when they come face to face with the point of view of a
man who point blank refuses to be defeated by life.
The human race, as far as I can make out, is divided into two sorts of
people; those who say “yes” unto life and those who say “no.” The former
accept it and courageously they endeavor to make the best of whatever
bargain fate has handed out to them.
The latter accept it too (how could they help themselves?) but they hold
the gift in great contempt and fret about it like children who have been
given a new little brother when they really wanted a puppy or a railroad
train.
But whereas the cheerful brethren of “yes” are willing to accept their
morose neighbors at their own valuation and tolerate them, and do not
hinder them when they fill the landscape with their lamentations and the
hideous monuments to their own despair, the fraternity of “no” rarely
extends this same courtesy to the parties of the first part.
Indeed if they had their own way, the “nays” would immediately purge this
planet of the “yeas.”
As this cannot very well be done, they satisfy the demands of their
jealous souls by the incessant persecution of those who claim that the
world belongs to the living and not to the dead.
Dr. Rabelais belonged to the former class. Few of his patients or
his thoughts ever went out to the cemetery. This, no doubt, was very
regrettable, but we cannot all be grave-diggers. There have to be a
few Poloniuses and a world composed exclusively of Hamlets would be a
terrible place of abode.
As for the story of Rabelais’ life, there was nothing very mysterious
about it. The few details which are omitted in the books written by his
friends are found in the works of his enemies and as a result we can
follow his career with a fair degree of accuracy.
Rabelais belonged to the generation which followed immediately upon
Erasmus but he was born into a world still largely dominated by monks,
nuns, deacons, and a thousand and one varieties of mendicant friars.
He was born in Chinon. His father was either an apothecary or a dealer
in spirits (which were different professions in the fifteenth century)
and the old man was sufficiently well-to-do to send his son to a good
school. There young François was thrown into the company of the scions
of a famous local family called du Bellay-Langey. These boys, like their
father, had a streak of genius. They wrote well. Upon occasion they could
fight well. They were men of the world in the good sense of that oft
misunderstood expression. They were faithful servitors of their master
the king, held endless public offices, became bishops and cardinals and
ambassadors, translated the classics, edited manuals of infantry drill
and ballistics and brilliantly performed all the many useful services
that were expected of the aristocracy in a day when a title condemned a
man to a life of few pleasures and many duties and responsibilities.
The friendship which the du Bellays afterwards bestowed upon Rabelais
shows that he must have been something more than an amusing table
companion. During the many ups and downs of his life he could always
count upon the assistance and the support of his former classmates.
Whenever he was in trouble with his clerical superiors he found the door
of their castle wide open and if perchance the soil of France became
a little too hot for this blunt young moralist, there was always a du
Bellay, conveniently going upon a foreign mission and greatly in need
of a secretary who should be somewhat of a physician besides being a
polished Latin scholar.
This was no small detail. More than once when it seemed that the career
of our learned doctor was about to come to an abrupt and painful end,
the influence of his old friends saved him from the fury of the Sorbonne
or from the anger of those much disappointed Calvinists who had counted
upon him as one of their own and who were greatly incensed when he
pilloried the jaundiced zeal of their Genevan master as mercilessly as
he had derided the three-bottled sanctity of his erstwhile colleagues in
Fontenay and Maillezais.
Of these two enemies, the former was of course by far the more dangerous.
Calvin could fulminate to his heart’s content, but outside of the narrow
boundaries of a small Swiss canton, his lightning was as harmless as a
fire-cracker.
The Sorbonne, on the other hand, which together with the University of
Oxford stood firmly for orthodoxy and the Old Learning, knew of no mercy
when her authority was questioned and could always count upon the hearty
coöperation of the king of France and his hangman.
And alas! Rabelais, as soon as he left school, was a marked man. Not
because he liked to drink good wine and told funny stories about his
fellow-monks. He had done much worse, he had succumbed to the lure of the
wicked Greek tongue.
When rumor thereof had first reached the abbot of his cloister, it
was decided to search his cell. It was found to be full of literary
contraband, a copy of Homer, one of the New Testament, one of Herodotus.
This was a terrible discovery and it had taken a great deal of
wire-pulling on the part of his influential friends to get him out of
this scrape.
It was a curious period in the development of the Church.
Originally, as I told you before, the monasteries had been advance posts
of civilization and both friars and nuns had rendered inestimable service
in promoting the interest of the Church. More than one Pope, however, had
foreseen the danger that might come from a too powerful development of
the monastic institutions. But as so often happens, just because every
one knew that something ought to be done about these cloisters, nothing
was ever done.
Among the Protestants there seems to be a notion that the Catholic Church
is a placid institution which is run silently and almost automatically
by a small body of haughty autocrats and which never suffers from those
inner upheavals which are an integral part of every other organization
composed of ordinary mortals.
Nothing is further from the truth.
Perhaps, as is so often the case, this opinion has been caused by the
misinterpretation of a single word.
A world addicted to democratic ideals is easily horrified at the idea of
an “infallible” human being.
“It must be easy,” so the popular argument runs, “to administer this big
institution when it is enough for one man to say that a thing is so to
have all the others fall upon their knees and shout amen and obey him.”
It is extremely difficult for one brought up in Protestant countries to
get a correct and fair view of this rather intricate subject. But if I am
not mistaken, the “infallible” utterances of the supreme pontiff are as
rare as constitutional amendments in the United States.
Furthermore, such important decisions are never reached until the subject
has been thoroughly discussed and the debates which precede the final
verdict often rock the very body of the Church. Such pronunciamentos
are therefore “infallible” in the sense that our own constitutional
amendments are infallible, because they are “final” and because all
further argument is supposed to come to an end as soon as they have been
definitely incorporated into the highest law of the land.
If any one were to proclaim that it is an easy job to govern these United
States because in case of an emergency all the people are found to stand
firmly behind the Constitution, he would be just as much in error as
if he were to state that all Catholics who in supreme matters of faith
recognize the absolute authority of their pope are docile sheep and have
surrendered every right to an opinion of their own.
If this were true, the occupants of the Lateran and the Vatican palaces
would have had an easy life. But even the most superficial study of
the last fifteen hundred years will show the exact opposite. And those
champions of the reformed faith who sometimes write as if the Roman
authorities had been ignorant of the many evils which Luther and Calvin
and Zwingli denounced with such great vehemence are either ignorant of
the facts or are not quite fair in their zeal for the good cause.
Such men as Adrian VI and Clement VII knew perfectly well that something
very serious was wrong with their Church. But it is one thing to express
the opinion that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. It is
quite a different matter to correct the evil, as even poor Hamlet was to
learn.
Nor was that unfortunate prince the last victim of the pleasant delusion
that hundreds of years of misgovernment can be undone overnight by the
unselfish efforts of an honest man.
Many intelligent Russians knew that the old official structure which
dominated their empire was corrupt, inefficient and a menace to the
safety of the nation.
They made Herculean efforts to bring about reforms and they failed.
How many of our citizens who have ever given the matter an hour’s thought
fail to see that a democratic instead of a representative form of
government (as intended by the founders of the Republic) must eventually
lead to systematized anarchy?
And yet, what can they do about it?
Such problems, by the time they have begun to attract public attention,
have become so hopelessly complicated that they are rarely solved except
by a social cataclysm. And social cataclysms are terrible things from
which most men shy away. Rather than run to such extremes, they try to
patch up the old, decrepit machinery and meanwhile they pray that some
miracle will occur which will make it work.
An insolent religious and social dictatorship, set up and maintained by
a number of religious orders, was one of the most flagrant evils of the
out-going Middle Ages.
For the so-many-eth time in history, the army was about to run away with
the commander-in-chief. In plain words, the situation had grown entirely
beyond the control of the popes. All they could do was to sit still,
improve their own party organization, and meanwhile try to mitigate the
fate of those who had incurred the displeasure of their common enemies,
the friars.
Erasmus was one of the many scholars who had frequently enjoyed the
protection of the Pope. Let Louvain storm and the Dominicans rave, Rome
would stand firm and woe unto him who disregarded her command, “Leave the
old man alone!”
And after these few introductory remarks, it will be no matter of
surprise that Rabelais, a mutinous soul but a brilliant mind withal,
could often count upon the support of the Holy See when the superiors
of his own order wished to punish him and that he readily obtained
permission to leave his cloister when constant interference with his
studies began to make his life unbearable.
And so with a sigh of relief, he shook the dust of Maillezais off his
feet and went to Montpellier and to Lyons to follow a course in medicine.
Surely here was a man of extraordinary talents! Within less than two
years the former Benedictine monk had become chief physician of the city
hospital of Lyons. But as soon as he had achieved these new honors, his
restless soul began to look for pastures new. He did not give up his
powders and pills but in addition to his anatomical studies (a novelty
almost as dangerous as the study of Greek) he took up literature.
Lyons, situated in the center of the valley of the Rhone, was an ideal
city for a man who cared for belles lettres. Italy was nearby. A few days
easy travel carried the traveler to the Provence and although the ancient
paradise of the Troubadours had suffered dreadfully at the hands of the
Inquisition, the grand old literary tradition had not yet been entirely
lost. Furthermore, the printing-presses of Lyons were famous for the
excellence of their product and her book stores were well stocked with
all the latest publications.
When one of the master printers, Sebastian Gryphius by name, looked for
some one to edit his collection of medieval classics, it was natural
that he should bethink himself of the new doctor who was also known as
a scholar. He hired Rabelais and set him to work. In rapid succession
almanachs and chap-books followed upon the learned treatises of Galen
and Hippocrates. And out of these inconspicuous beginnings grew that
strange tome which was to make its author one of the most popular writers
of his time.
The same talent for novelty which had turned Rabelais into a successful
medical practitioner brought him his success as a novelist. He did what
few people had dared to do before him. He began to write in the language
of his own people. He broke with a thousand-year-old tradition which
insisted that the books of a learned man must be in a tongue unknown
to the vulgar multitude. He used French and, furthermore, he used the
unadorned vernacular of the year 1532.
I gladly leave it to the professors of literature to decide where and
how and when Rabelais discovered his two pet heroes, Gargantua and
Pantagruel. Maybe they were old heathenish Gods who, after the nature
of their species, had managed to live through fifteen hundred years of
Christian persecution and neglect.
Then again, he may have invented them in an outburst of gigantic hilarity.
However that be, Rabelais contributed enormously to the gayety of nations
and greater praise no author can gain than that he has added something
to the sum total of human laughter. But at the same time, his works were
not funny books in the terrible modern sense of the word. They had their
serious side and struck a bold blow for the cause of tolerance by their
caricature of the people who were responsible for that clerical reign of
terror which caused such untold misery during the first fifty years of
the sixteenth century.
Rabelais, a skillfully trained theologian, was able to avoid all such
direct statements as might have got him into trouble, and acting upon the
principle that one cheerful humorist out of jail is better than a dozen
gloomy reformers behind the bars, refrained from a too brazen exposition
of his highly unorthodox opinions.
But his enemies knew perfectly well what he was trying to do. The
Sorbonne condemned his books in unmistakable terms and the Parliament
of Paris put him on their index and confiscated and burned all such
copies of his works as could be found within their jurisdiction. But
notwithstanding the activities of the hangman (who in those days was also
the official book destroyer) the “Lives and Heroic Deeds and Sayings
of Gargantua and his Sonne Pantagruel” remained a popular classic. For
almost four centuries it has continued to edify those who can derive
pleasure from a clever mixture of good-natured laughter and bantering
wisdom and it will never cease to irritate those others who firmly
believe that the Goddess of Truth, caught with a smile on her lips,
cannot possibly be a good woman.
As for the author himself, he was and is a “man of one book.” His
friends, the du Bellays, remained faithful to him until the end, but most
of his life Rabelais practiced the virtue of discretion and kept himself
at a polite distance from the residence of that Majesty by whose supposed
“privilege” he published his nefarious works.
He ventured however upon a visit to Rome and met with no difficulties,
but on the contrary was received with every manifestation of a cordial
welcome. In the year 1550 he returned to France and went to live in
Meudon. Three years later he died.
It is of course quite impossible to measure the exact and positive
influence exercised by such a man. After all, he was a human being and
not an electric current or a barrel of gasoline.
It has been said that he was merely destructive.
Perhaps so.
But he was destructive in an age when there was a great and crying need
for a social wrecking crew, headed by just such people as Erasmus and
Rabelais.
That many of the new buildings were going to be just as uncomfortable and
ugly as the old ones which they were supposed to replace was something
which no one was able to foresee.
And, anyway, that was the fault of the next generation.
They are the people we ought to blame.
They were given a chance such as few people ever enjoyed to make a fresh
start.
May the Lord have mercy upon their souls for the way in which they
neglected their opportunities.
CHAPTER XV
NEW SIGNBOARDS FOR OLD
The greatest of modern poets saw the world as a large ocean upon which
sailed many ships. Whenever these little vessels bumped against each
other, they made a “wonderful music” which people call history.
I would like to borrow Heine’s ocean, but for a purpose and a simile
of my own. When we were children it was fun to drop pebbles into a
pond. They made a nice splash and then the pretty little ripples caused
a series of ever widening circles and that was very nice. If bricks
were handy (which sometimes was the case) one could make an Armada of
nutshells and matches and submit this flimsy fleet to a nice artificial
storm, provided the heavy projectile did not create that fatal loss of
equilibrium which sometimes overtakes small children who play too near
the water’s edge and sends them to bed without their supper.
In that special universe reserved for grown-ups, the same pastime is not
entirely unknown, but the results are apt to be far more disastrous.
Everything is placid and the sun is shining and the water-wigglers are
skating merrily, and then suddenly a bold, bad boy comes along with a
piece of mill-stone (Heaven only knows where he found it!) and before any
one can stop him he has heaved it right into the middle of the old duck
pond and then there is a great ado about who did it and how he ought to
be spanked and some say, “Oh, let him go,” and others, out of sheer envy
of the kid who is attracting all the attention, pick up any old thing
that happens to lie around and they dump it into the water and everybody
gets splashed and one thing leading to another, the usual result is a
free-for-all fight and a few million broken heads.
Alexander was such a bold, bad boy.
And Helen of Troy, in her own charming way, was such a bad, bold girl,
and history is just full of them.
But by far the worst offenders are those wicked citizens who play this
game with ideas and use the stagnant pool of man’s spiritual indifference
as their playground. And I for one don’t wonder that they are hated by
all right-thinking citizens and are punished with great severity if ever
they are unfortunate enough to let themselves be caught.
Think of the damage they have done these last four hundred years.
There were the leaders of the rebirth of the ancient world. The stately
moats of the Middle Ages reflected the image of a society that was
harmonious in both color and texture. It was not perfect. But people
liked it. They loved to see the blending of the brick-red walls of their
little homes with the somber gray of those high cathedral towers that
watched over their souls.
Came the terrible splash of the Renaissance and overnight everything was
changed. But it was only a beginning. For just when the poor burghers had
almost recovered from the shock, that dreadful German monk appeared with
a whole cartload of specially prepared bricks and dumped them right into
the heart of the pontifical lagoon. Really, that was too much. And no
wonder that it took the world three centuries to recover from the shock.
The older historians who studied this period often fell into a slight
error. They saw the commotion and decided that the ripples had been
started by a common cause, which they alternately called the Renaissance
and the Reformation.
Today we know better.
The Renaissance and the Reformation were movements which professed to be
striving after a common purpose. But the means by which they hoped to
accomplish their ultimate object were so utterly different that Humanist
and Protestant not infrequently came to regard each other with bitter
hostility.
They both believed in the supreme rights of man. During the Middle Ages
the individual had been completely merged in the community. He did not
exist as John Doe, a bright citizen who came and went at will, who sold
and bought as he liked, who went to any one of a dozen churches (or to
none at all, as suited his tastes and his prejudices). His life from the
time of his birth to the hour of his death was lived according to a rigid
handbook of economic and spiritual etiquette. This taught him that his
body was a shoddy garment, casually borrowed from Mother Nature and of no
value except as a temporary receptacle for his immortal soul.
It trained him to believe that this world was a halfway house to future
glory and should be regarded with that profound contempt which travelers
destined for New York bestow upon Queenstown and Halifax.
And now unto the excellent John, living happily in the best of all
possible worlds (since it was the only world he knew), came the two
fairy god-mothers, Renaissance and Reformation, and said: “Arise, noble
citizen, from now on thou art to be free.”
But when John asked, “Free to do what?” the answers greatly differed.
“Free to go forth in quest of Beauty,” the Renaissance replied.
“Free to go in quest of Truth,” the Reformation admonished him.
“Free to search the records of the past when the world was truly the
realm of men. Free to realize those ideals which once filled the hearts
of poets and painters and sculptors and architects. Free to turn the
universe into thine eternal laboratory, that thou mayest know all her
secrets,” was the promise of the Renaissance.
“Free to study the word of God, that thou mayest find salvation for thy
soul and forgiveness for thy sins,” was the warning of the Reformation.
And they turned on their heels and left poor John Doe in the possession
of a new freedom which was infinitely more embarrassing than the
thralldom of his former days.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the Renaissance soon made her peace with
the established order of things. The successors of Phidias and Horace
discovered that a belief in the established Deity and outward conformity
to the rules of the Church were two very different things and that one
could paint pagan pictures and compose heathenish sonnets with complete
impunity if one took the precaution to call Hercules, John the Baptist,
and Hera, the Virgin Mary.
They were like tourists who go to India and who obey certain laws which
mean nothing to them at all in order that they may gain entrance to the
temples and travel freely without disturbing the peace of the land.
But in the eyes of an honest follower of Luther, the most trifling
of details at once assumed enormous importance. An erroneous comma
in Deuteronomy might mean exile. As for a misplaced full stop in the
Apocalypse, it called for instant death.
To people like these who took what they considered their religious
convictions with bitter seriousness, the merry compromise of the
Renaissance seemed a dastardly act of cowardice.
As a result, Renaissance and Reformation parted company, never to meet
again.
Whereupon the Reformation, alone against all the world, buckled on the
armor of righteousness and made ready to defend her holiest possessions.
In the beginning, the army of revolt was composed almost exclusively of
Germans. They fought and suffered with extreme bravery, but that mutual
jealousy which is the bane and the curse of all northern nations soon
lamed their efforts and forced them to accept a truce. The strategy which
led to the ultimate victory was provided by a very different sort of
genius. Luther stepped aside to make room for Calvin.
It was high time.
In that same French college where Erasmus had spent so many of his
unhappy Parisian days, a black-bearded young Spaniard with a limp (the
result of a Gallic gunshot) was dreaming of the day when he should march
at the head of a new army of the Lord to rid the world of the last of the
heretics.
It takes a fanatic to fight a fanatic.
And only a man of granite, like Calvin, would have been able to defeat
the plans of Loyola.
Personally, I am glad that I was not obliged to live in Geneva in the
sixteenth century. At the same time I am profoundly grateful that the
Geneva of the sixteenth century existed.
Without it, the world of the twentieth century would have been a great
deal more uncomfortable and I for one would probably be in jail.
The hero of this glorious fight, the famous Magister Joannes Calvinus (or
Jean Calvini or John Calvin) was a few years younger than Luther. Date
of birth: July 10, 1509. Place of birth: the city of Noyon in northern
France. Background: French middle class. Father: a small clerical
official. Mother: the daughter of an inn-keeper. Family: five sons and
two daughters. Characteristic qualities of early education: thrift,
simplicity, and a tendency to do all things in an orderly manner, not
stingily, but with minute and efficient care.
John, the second son, was meant for the priesthood. The father had
influential friends, and could eventually get him into a good parish.
Before he was thirteen years old, he already held a small office in the
cathedral of his home city. This gave him a small but steady income. It
was used to send him to a good school in Paris. A remarkable boy. Every
one who came in contact with him said, “Watch out for that youngster!”
The French educational system of the sixteenth century was well able to
take care of such a child and make the best of his many gifts. At the age
of nineteen, John was allowed to preach. His future as a duly established
deacon seemed assured.
But there were five sons and two daughters. Advancement in the Church
was slow. The law offered better opportunities. Besides, it was a time
of great religious excitement and the future was uncertain. A distant
relative, a certain Pierre Olivétan, had just translated the Bible into
French. John, while in Paris, had spent much time with his cousin. It
would never do to have two heretics in one family. John was packed off
to Orleans and was apprenticed to an old lawyer that he might learn the
business of pleading and arguing and drawing up briefs.
Here the same thing happened as in Paris. Before the end of the year,
the pupil had turned teacher and was coaching his less industrious
fellow-students in the principles of jurisprudence. And soon he knew all
there was to know and was ready to start upon that course which, so his
father fondly hoped, would some day make him the rival of those famous
avocats who got a hundred gold pieces for a single opinion and who drove
in a coach and four when they were called upon to see the king in distant
Compiègne.
But nothing came of these dreams. John Calvin never practiced law.
Instead, he returned to his first love, sold his digests and his
pandects, devoted the proceeds to a collection of theological works and
started in all seriousness upon that task which was to make him one of
the most important historical figures of the last twenty centuries.
The years, however, which he had spent studying the principles of Roman
law put their stamp upon all his further activities. It was impossible
for him to approach a problem by way of his emotions. He felt things
and he felt them deeply. Read his letters to those of his followers who
had fallen into the hands of Catholics and who had been condemned to be
roasted to death over slow burning coal fires. In their helpless agony
they are as fine a bit of writing as anything of which we have a record.
And they show such a delicate understanding of human psychology that
the poor victims went to their death blessing the name of the man whose
teaching had brought them into their predicament.
No, Calvin was not, as so many of his enemies have said, a man without a
heart. But life to him was a sacred duty.
And he tried so desperately hard to be honest with himself and with his
God that he must first reduce every question to certain fundamental
principles of faith and doctrine before he dared to expose it to the
touchstone of human sentiment.
When Pope Pius IV heard of his death, he remarked, “The power of that
heretic lay in the fact that he was indifferent to money.” If His
Holiness meant to pay his enemy the compliment of absolute personal
disinterestedness, he was right. Calvin lived and died a poor man and
refused to accept his last quarterly salary because “illness had made it
impossible for him to earn that money as he should have done.”
But his strength lay elsewhere.
He was a man of one idea, his life centered around one all-overpowering
impulse; the desire to find the truth of God as revealed in the
Scriptures. When he finally had reached a conclusion that seemed proof
against every possible form of argument and objection, then at last he
incorporated it into his own code of life. And thereafter he went his way
with such utter disregard for the consequences of his decision that he
became both invincible and irresistible.
This quality, however, was not to make itself manifest until many years
later. During the first decade after his conversion he was obliged to
direct all his energies toward the very commonplace problem of keeping
alive.
A short triumph of the “new learning” in the University of Paris, an
orgy of Greek declensions, Hebrew irregular verbs and other forbidden
intellectual fruit had been followed by the usual reaction. When it
appeared that even the rector of that famous seat of learning had been
contaminated with the pernicious new German doctrines, steps were taken
to purge the institution of all those who in terms of our modern medical
science might be considered “idea carriers.” Calvin, who, ’twas said,
had given the rector the material for several of his most objectionable
speeches, was among those whose names appeared at the top of the list of
suspects. His rooms were searched. His papers were confiscated and an
order was issued for his arrest.
He heard of it and hid himself in the house of a friend.
But storms in an academic tea-pot never last very long. All the same, a
career in the Church of Rome had become an impossibility. The moment had
arrived for a definite choice.
In the year 1534 Calvin broke away from the old faith. Almost at the same
moment, on the hills of Montmartre, high above the French capital, Loyola
and a handful of his fellow students were taking that solemn vow which
shortly afterwards was to be incorporated into the constitution of the
Society of Jesus.
Thereupon they both left Paris.
Ignatius set his face towards the east, but remembering the unfortunate
outcome of his first assault upon the Holy Land, he retraced his steps,
went to Rome and there began those activities which were to carry his
fame (or otherwise) to every nook and corner of our planet.
John was of a different caliber. His Kingdom of God was bound to neither
time nor place and he wandered forth that he might find a quiet spot
and devote the rest of his days to reading, to contemplation and to the
peaceful expounding of his ideas.
He happened to be on his way to Strassburg when the outbreak of a war
between Charles V and Francis I forced him to make a detour through
western Switzerland. In Geneva he was welcomed by Guillaume Farel, one
of the stormy petrels of the French Reformation, fugitive extraordinary
from all ecclesiastical and inquisitorial dungeons. Farel welcomed
him with open arms, spoke to him of the wondrous things that might be
accomplished in this little Swiss principality and bade him stay. Calvin
asked time to consider. Then he stayed.
In this way did the chances of war decree that the New Zion should be
built at the foot of the Alps.
It is a strange world.
Columbus sets forth to discover the Indies and stumbles upon a new
continent.
Calvin, in search of a quiet spot where he may spend the rest of his
days in study and holy meditation, wanders into a third-rate Swiss town
and makes it the spiritual capital of those who soon afterwards turn
the domains of their most Catholic Majesties into a gigantic Protestant
empire.
Why should any one ever read fiction when history serves all purposes?
I do not know whether the family Bible of Calvin has been preserved.
But if it still exists, the volume will show considerable wear on that
particular page which contains the sixth chapter of the book of Daniel.
The French reformer was a modest man, but often he must have found
consolation in the story of that other steadfast servant of the living
God who also had been cast into a den of lions and whose innocence had
saved him from a gruesome and untimely death.
Geneva was no Babylon. It was a respectable little city inhabited by
respectable Swiss cloth makers. They took life seriously, but not quite
so seriously as that new master who was now holding forth in the pulpit
of their Saint Peter.
And furthermore, there was a Nebuchadnezzar in the form of a Duke of
Savoy. It was during one of their interminable quarrels with the house
of Savoy that the descendants of Caesar’s Allobroges had decided to make
common cause with the other Swiss cantons and join the Reformation.
The alliance therefore between Geneva and Wittenberg was a marriage of
convenience, an engagement based upon common interests rather than common
affection.
But no sooner had the news spread abroad that “Geneva had gone
Protestant,” than all the eager apostles of half a hundred new and crazy
creeds flocked to the shores of Lake Leman. With tremendous energy they
began to preach some of the queerest doctrines ever conceived by mortal
man.
Calvin detested these amateur prophets with all his heart. He fully
appreciated what a menace they would prove to the cause of which they
were such ardent but ill-guided champions. And the first thing he did
as soon as he had enjoyed a few months leisure was to write down as
precisely and briefly as he could what he expected his new parishioners
to hold true and what he expected them to hold false. And that no man
might claim the ancient and time-worn excuse, “I did not know the law,”
he, together with his friend Farel, personally examined all Genevans in
batches of ten and allowed only those to the full rights of citizenship
who swore the oath of allegiance to this strange religious constitution.
Next he composed a formidable catechism for the benefit of the younger
generation.
Next he prevailed upon the Town Council to expel all those who still
clung to their old erroneous opinions.
Then, having cleared the ground for further action, he set about to found
him a state along the lines laid down by the political economists of the
books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. For Calvin, like so many other of the
great reformers, was really much more of an ancient Jew than a modern
Christian. His lips did homage to the God of Jesus, but his heart went
out to the Jehovah of Moses.
This, of course, is a phenomenon often observed during periods of great
emotional stress. The opinions of the humble Nazarene carpenter upon the
subject of hatred and strife are so definite and so clear cut that no
compromise has ever been found possible between them and those violent
methods by which nations and individuals have, during the last two
thousand years, tried to accomplish their ends.
Hence, as soon as a war breaks out, by silent consent of all concerned,
we temporarily close the pages of the Gospels and cheerfully wallow
in the blood and thunder and the eye-for-an-eye philosophy of the Old
Testament.
And as the Reformation was really a war and a very atrocious one, in
which no quarter was asked and very little quarter was given, it need
not surprise us that the state of Calvin was in reality an armed camp in
which all semblance of personal liberty was gradually suppressed.
Of course, all this was not accomplished without tremendous opposition,
and in the year 1538 the attitude of the more liberal elements in the
community became so threatening that Calvin was forced to leave the city.
But in 1541 his adherents returned to power. Amidst the ringing of many
bells and the loud hosannas of the deacons, Magister Joannes returned to
his citadel on the river Rhone. Thereafter he was the uncrowned King of
Geneva and the next twenty-three years he devoted to the establishment
and the perfection of a theocratic form of government, the like of which
the world had not seen since the days of Ezekiel and Ezra.
The word “discipline” according to the Oxford Concise Dictionary, means
“to bring under control, to train to obedience and order, to drill.” It
expresses best the spirit which permeated the entire political-clerical
structure of Calvin’s dreams.
Luther, after the nature of most Germans, had been a good deal of a
sentimentalist. The Word of God alone, so it seemed to him, would show a
man the way to the life everlasting.
This was much too indefinite to suit the taste of the great French
reformer. The Word of God might be a beacon light of hope, but the road
was long and dark and many were the temptations that made people forget
their true destination.
The minister, however, could not go astray. He was a man set apart.
He knew all pitfalls. He was incorruptible. And if perchance he felt
inclined to wander from the straight path, the weekly meetings of the
clergy, at which these worthy gentlemen were invited to criticize each
other freely, would speedily bring him back to a realization of his
duties. Hence he was the ideal held before all those who truly aspired
after salvation.
Those of us who have ever climbed mountains know that professional guides
can upon occasion be veritable tyrants. They know the perils of a pile
of rocks, the hidden dangers of an innocent-looking snowfield. Wherefore
they assume complete command of the party that has entrusted itself to
their care and profanity raineth richly upon the head of the foolish
tourist who dares to disobey their orders.
The ministers of Calvin’s ideal state had a similar conception of their
duties. They were ever delighted to extend a helping hand to those
who stumbled and asked that they be supported. But when willful people
purposely left the beaten track and wandered away from the flock, then
that hand was withdrawn and became a fist which meted out punishment that
was both quick and terrible.
In many other communities the dominies would have been delighted to
exercise a similar power. But the civil authorities, jealous of their
own prerogatives, rarely allowed the clergy to compete with the courts
and the executioners. Calvin knew this and within his own bailiwick he
established a form of church discipline which practically superseded the
laws of the land.
Among the curious historical misconceptions which have gained such
popularity since the days of the great war, none is more surprising than
the belief that the French people (in contrast to their Teuton neighbors)
are a liberty-loving race and detest all regimentation. The French have
for centuries submitted to the rule of a bureaucracy quite as complicated
and infinitely less efficient than the one which existed in Prussia in
the pre-war days. The officials are a little less punctual about their
office hours and the spotlessness of their collars and they are given to
sucking a particularly vile sort of cigarette. Otherwise they are quite
as meddlesome and as obnoxious as those in the eastern republic, and the
public accepts their rudeness with a meekness that is astonishing in a
race so addicted to rebellion.
Calvin was the ideal Frenchman in his love for centralization. In some
details he almost approached the perfection for detail which was the
secret of Napoleon’s success. But unlike the great emperor, he was
utterly devoid of all personal ambition. He was just a dreadfully serious
man with a weak stomach and no sense of humor.
He ransacked the Old Testament to discover what would be agreeable
to his particular Jehovah. And then the people of Geneva were asked
to accept this interpretation of the Jewish chronicles as a direct
revelation of the divine will.
Almost over night the merry city on the Rhone became a community of
rueful sinners. A civic inquisition composed of six ministers and twelve
elders watched night and day over the private opinions of all citizens.
Whosoever was suspected of an inclination towards “forbidden heresies”
was cited to appear before an ecclesiastic tribunal that he might be
examined upon all points of doctrine and explain where, how and in what
way he had obtained the books which had given him the pernicious ideas
which had led him astray. If the culprit showed a repentant spirit, he
might escape with a sentence of enforced attendance at Sunday School.
But in case he showed himself obstinate, he must leave the city within
twenty-four hours and never again show himself within the jurisdiction of
the Genevan commonwealth.
But a proper lack of orthodox sentiment was not the only thing that could
get a man into trouble with the so-called Consistorium. An afternoon
spent at a bowling-alley in a nearby village, if properly reported
(as such things invariably are), could be reason enough for a severe
admonition. Jokes, both practical and otherwise, were considered the
height of bad form. An attempt at wit during a wedding ceremony was
sufficient cause for a jail sentence.
Gradually the New Zion was so encumbered with laws, edicts, regulations,
rescripts and decrees that life became a highly complicated affair and
lost a great deal of its old flavor.
Dancing was not allowed. Singing was not allowed. Card playing was not
allowed. Gambling, of course, was not allowed. Birthday parties were
not allowed. County fairs were not allowed. Silks and satins and all
manifestations of external splendor were not allowed. What was allowed
was going to church and going to school. For Calvin was a man of positive
ideas.
The verboten sign could keep out sin, but it could not force a man to
love virtue. That had to come through an inner persuasion. Hence the
establishment of excellent schools and a first-rate university and
the encouragement of all learning. And the establishment of a rather
interesting form of communal life which absorbed a good deal of the
surplus energy of the community and which made the average man forget the
many hardships and restrictions to which he was submitted. If it had been
entirely lacking in human qualities, the system of Calvin could never
have survived and it certainly would not have played such a very decisive
rôle in the history of the last three hundred years. All of which however
belongs in a book devoted to the development of political ideas. This
time we are interested in the question of what Geneva did for tolerance
and we come to the conclusion that the Protestant Rome was not a whit
better than its Catholic namesake.
The extenuating circumstances I have enumerated a few pages back. In a
world which was forced to stand by and witness such bestial occurrences
as the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the wholesale extermination of
scores of Dutch cities, it was unreasonable to expect that one side (the
weaker one at that) should practice a virtue which was equivalent to a
self-imposed sentence of death.
This, however, does not absolve Calvin from the crime of having aided and
abetted in the legal murder of Gruet and Servetus.
In the case of the former, Calvin might have put up the excuse that
Jacques Gruet was seriously suspected of having incited his fellow
citizens to riot and that he belonged to a political party which was
trying to bring about the downfall of the Calvinists. But Servetus could
hardly be called a menace to the safety of the community, as far as
Geneva was concerned.
He was what the modern passport regulations call a “transient.” Another
twenty-four hours and he would have been gone. But he missed his boat.
And so he came to lose his life, and it is a pretty terrible story.
Miguel Serveto, better known as Michael Servetus, was a Spaniard. His
father was a respectable notary-public (a semi-legal position in Europe
and not just a young man with a stamping machine who charges you a
quarter for witnessing your signature) and Miguel was also destined for
the law. He was sent to the University of Toulouse, for in those happy
days when all lecturing was done in Latin learning was international and
the wisdom of the entire world was open to those who had mastered five
declensions and a few dozen irregular verbs.
At the French university Servetus made the acquaintance of one Juan de
Quintana who shortly afterwards became the confessor of the Emperor
Charles V.
During the Middle Ages, an imperial coronation was a good deal like a
modern international exhibition. When Charles was crowned in Bologna in
the year 1530, Quintana took his friend Michael with him as his secretary
and the bright young Spaniard saw all there was to be seen. Like so many
men of his time, he was of an insatiable curiosity and he spent the
next ten years dabbling in an infinite variety of subjects, medicine,
astronomy, astrology, Hebrew, Greek, and, most fatal of all, theology.
He was a very competent doctor and in the pursuit of his theological
studies he hit upon the idea of the circulation of the blood. It is to be
found in the fifteenth chapter of the first one of his books against the
doctrine of the Trinity. It shows the one-sidedness of the theological
mind of the sixteenth century that none of those who examined the works
of Servetus ever discovered that this man had made one of the greatest
discoveries of all ages.
If only Servetus had stuck to his medical practice! He might have died
peacefully in his bed at a ripe old age.
But he simply could not keep away from the burning questions of his day,
and having access to the printing shops of Lyons, he began to give vent
to his opinions upon sundry subjects.
Nowadays a generous millionaire can persuade a college to change its name
from Trinity College to that of a popular brand of tobacco and nothing
happens. The press says, “Isn’t it good of Mr. Dingus to be so generous
with his money!” and the public at large shouts “Amen!”
In a world which seems to have lost all capacity for being shocked by
such a thing as blasphemy, it is not easy to write of a time when the
mere suspicion that one of its fellow citizens had spoken disrespectfully
of the Trinity would throw an entire community into a state of panic.
But unless we fully appreciate this fact, we shall never be able to
understand the horror in which Servetus was held by all good Christians
of the first half of the sixteenth century.
And yet he was by no means a radical.
He was what today we would call a liberal.
He rejected the old belief in the Trinity as held both by the Protestants
and the Catholics, but he believed so sincerely (one feels inclined
to say, so naïvely) in the correctness of his own views, that he
committed the grave error of writing letters to Calvin suggesting that
he be allowed to visit Geneva for a personal interview and a thorough
discussion of the entire problem.
He was not invited.
And, anyway, it would have been impossible for him to accept. The
Inquisitor General of Lyons had already taken a hand in the affair and
Servetus was in jail. This inquisitor (curious readers will find a
description of him in the works of Rabelais who refers to him as Doribus,
a pun upon his name, which was Ory) had got wind of the Spaniard’s
blasphemies through a letter which a private citizen of Geneva, with the
connivance of Calvin, had sent to his cousin in Lyons.
Soon the case against him was further strengthened by several samples of
Servetus’ handwriting, also surreptitiously supplied by Calvin. It really
looked as if Calvin did not care who hanged the poor fellow as long as he
got hung, but the inquisitors were negligent in their sacred duties and
Servetus was able to escape.
First he seems to have tried to reach the Spanish frontier. But the long
journey through southern France would have been very dangerous to a man
who was so well known and so he decided to follow the rather round-about
route via Geneva, Milan, Naples and the Mediterranean Sea.
Late one Saturday afternoon in August of the year 1553 he reached Geneva.
He tried to find a boat to cross to the other side of the lake, but boats
were not supposed to sail so shortly before the Sabbath day and he was
told to wait until Monday.
The next day was Sunday. As it was a misdemeanor for both natives and
strangers to stay away from divine service, Servetus went to church. He
was recognized and arrested. By what right he was put into jail was never
explained. Servetus was a Spanish subject and was not accused of any
crime against the laws of Geneva. But he was a liberal in the matter of
doctrine, a blasphemous and profane person who dared to have opinions of
his own upon the subject of the Trinity. It was absurd that such a person
should invoke the protection of the law. A common criminal might do so. A
heretic, never! And without further ado he was locked up in a filthy and
damp hole, his money and his personal belongings were confiscated and two
days later he was taken to court and was asked to answer a questionnaire
containing thirty-eight different points.
The trial lasted two months and twelve days.
In the end he was found guilty of “heresies against the foundations
of the Christian religion.” The answers which he had given during the
discussions of his opinions had exasperated his judges. The usual
punishment for cases of his sort, especially if the accused were a
foreigner, was perpetual banishment from the territory of the city of
Geneva. In the case of Servetus an exception was made. He was condemned
to be burned alive.
In the meantime the French tribunal had re-opened the case of the
fugitive and the officials of the Inquisition had come to the same
conclusion as their Protestant colleagues. They too had condemned
Servetus to death and had dispatched their sheriff to Geneva with the
request that the culprit be surrendered to him and be brought back to
France.
This request was refused.
Calvin was able to do his own burning.
As for that terrible walk to the place of execution, with a delegation
of arguing ministers surrounding the heretic upon his last journey, the
agony which lasted for more than half an hour and did not really come to
an end until the crowd, in their pity for the poor martyr, had thrown
a fresh supply of fagots upon the flames, all this makes interesting
reading for those who care for that sort of thing, but it had better be
omitted. One execution more or less, what difference did it make during a
period of unbridled religious fanaticism?
But the case of Servetus really stands by itself. Its consequences were
terrible. For now it was shown, and shown with brutal clearness, that
those Protestants who had clamored so loudly and persistently for “the
right to their own opinions” were merely Catholics in disguise, that
they were just as narrow-minded and cruel to those who did not share
their own views as their enemies and that they were only waiting for the
opportunity to establish a reign of terror of their own.
This accusation is a very serious one. It cannot be dismissed by a mere
shrug of the shoulders and a “Well, what would you expect?”
We possess a great deal of information upon the trial and know in detail
what the rest of the world thought of this execution. It makes ghastly
reading. It is true that Calvin, in an outburst of generosity, suggested
that Servetus be decapitated instead of burned. Servetus thanked him for
his kindness, but offered still another solution. He wanted to be set
free. Yea, he insisted (and the logic was all on his side) that the court
had no jurisdiction over him, that he was merely an honest man in search
for the truth and that therefore he had the right to be heard in open
debate with his opponent, Dr. Calvin.
But of this Calvin would not hear.
He had sworn that this heretic, once he fell into his hands, should never
be allowed to escape with his life, and he was going to be as good as
his word. That he could not get a conviction without the coöperation
of his arch-enemy, the Inquisition, made no difference to him. He
would have made common cause with the pope if His Holiness had been
in the possession of some documents that would further incriminate the
unfortunate Spaniard.
But worse was to follow.
On the morning of his death, Servetus asked to see Calvin and the latter
came to the dark and filthy dungeon that had served his enemy as a prison.
Upon this occasion at least he might have been generous; more, he might
have been human.
He was neither.
He stood in the presence of a man who within another hour would be able
to plead his case before the throne of God and he argued. He debated
and sputtered, grew green and lost his temper. But not a word of pity,
of charity, or kindliness. Not a word. Only bitterness and hatred, the
feeling of “Serve you right, you obstinate scoundrel. Burn and be damned!”
* * * * *
All this happened many, many years ago.
Servetus is dead.
All our statues and memorial tablets will not bring him back to life
again.
Calvin is dead.
A thousand volumes of abuse will not disturb the ashes of his unknown
grave.
They are all of them dead, those ardent reformers who during the trial
had shuddered with fear lest the blasphemous scoundrel be allowed to
escape, those staunch pillars of the Church who after the execution broke
forth into paeans of praise and wrote each other, “All hail to Geneva!
The deed is done.”
They are all of them dead, and perhaps it were best they were forgotten
too.
Only let us have a care.
Tolerance is like liberty.
No one ever gets it merely by asking for it. No one keeps it except by
the exercise of eternal care and vigilance.
For the sake of some future Servetus among our own children, we shall do
well to remember this.
CHAPTER XVI
THE ANABAPTISTS
Every generation has a bogey-man all its own.
We have our “Reds.”
Our fathers had their Socialists.
Our grandfathers had their Molly Maguires.
Our great-great-grandfathers had their Jacobins.
And our ancestors of three hundred years ago were not a bit better off.
They had their Anabaptists.
The most popular “Outline of History” of the sixteenth century was a
certain “World Book” or chronicle, which Sebastian Frank, soap-boiler,
prohibitionist and author, living in the good city of Ulm, published in
the year 1534.
Sebastian knew the Anabaptists. He had married into an Anabaptist family.
He did not share their views, for he was a confirmed free-thinker. But
this is what he wrote about them: “that they taught nothing but love and
faith and the crucifixion of the flesh, that they manifested patience and
humility under all suffering, assisted one another with true helpfulness,
called each other brother and believed in having all things in common.”
It is surely a curious thing that people of whom all those nice things
could be truthfully said should for almost a hundred years have been
hunted down like wild animals, and should have been exposed to all the
most cruel punishments of the most bloodthirsty of centuries.
But there was a reason and in order to appreciate it you must remember
certain facts about the Reformation.
The Reformation really settled nothing.
It gave the world two prisons instead of one, made a book infallible in
the place of a man and established (or rather, tried to establish) a rule
by black garbed ministers instead of white garbed priests.
Such meager results after half a century of struggle and sacrifice had
filled the hearts of millions of people with desperate disappointment.
They had expected a millennium of social and religious righteousness
and they were not at all prepared for a new Gehenna of persecution and
economic slavery.
They had been ready for a great adventure. Then something had happened.
They had slipped between the wall and the ship. And they had been obliged
to strike out for themselves and keep above water as best they could.
They were in a terrible position. They had left the old church. Their
conscience did not allow them to join the new faith. Officially they had,
therefore, ceased to exist. And yet they lived. They breathed. They were
sure that they were God’s beloved children. As such it was their duty to
keep on living and breathing, that they might save a wicked world from
its own folly.
Eventually they survived, but do not ask how!
Deprived of their old associations, they were forced to form groups of
their own, to look for a new leadership.
But what man in his senses would take up with these poor fanatics?
As a result, shoemakers with second sight and hysterical midwives with
visions and hallucinations assumed the rôle of prophets and prophetesses
and they prayed and preached and raved until the rafters of their
dingy meeting places shook with the hosannas of the faithful and the
tip-staffs of the village were forced to take notice of the unseemly
disturbance.
Then half a dozen men and women were sent to jail and their High and
Mightinesses, the town councilors, began what was good-naturedly called
“an investigation.”
These people did not go to the Catholic Church. They did not worship in
the Protestant kirk. Then would they please explain who they were and
what they believed?
To give the poor councilors their due, they were in a difficult
predicament. For their prisoners were the most uncomfortable of all
heretics, people who took their religious convictions absolutely
seriously. Many of the most respectable reformers were of this earth
earthy and willingly made such small compromises as were absolutely
necessary, if one hoped to lead an agreeable and respectable existence.
Your true Anabaptist was of a different caliber. He frowned upon all
half-way measures. Jesus had told his followers to turn the other cheek
when smitten by an enemy, and had taught that all those who take the
sword shall perish by the sword. To the Anabaptists this meant a positive
ordinance to use no violence. They did not care to dilly-dally with
words and murmur that circumstances alter cases, that, of course, they
were against war, but that this was a different kind of a war and that
therefore they felt that for this once God would not mind if they threw a
few bombs or fired an occasional torpedo.
A divine ordinance was a divine ordinance, and that was all there was to
it.
And so they refused to enlist and refused to carry arms and in case they
were arrested for their pacifism (for that is what their enemies called
this sort of applied Christianity) they went willingly forth to meet
their fate and recited Matthew xxvi: 52 until death made an end to their
suffering.
But anti-militarism was only a small detail in their program of
queerness. Jesus had preached that the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom
of Caesar were two entirely different entities and could not and should
not be reconciled. Very well. These words were clear. Henceforth all
good Anabaptists carefully abstained from taking part in their country’s
government, refused to hold public office and spent the time which other
people wasted upon politics, reading and studying the holy scriptures.
Jesus had cautioned his disciples against unseemly quarrels and the
Anabaptists would rather lose their rightful possessions than submit a
difference of opinion to a law court.
There were several other points which set these peculiar people apart
from the rest of the world, but these few examples of their odd behavior
will explain the suspicion and detestation in which they were held by
their fat and happy neighbors who invariably mixed their piety with a
dose of that comfortable doctrine which bids us live and let live.
Even so, the Anabaptists, like the Baptists and many other dissenters,
might in the end have discovered a way to placate the authorities, if
only they had been able to protect themselves from their own friends.
Undoubtedly there are many honest Bolshevists who dearly love their
fellow proletarians and who spend their waking hours trying to make this
world a better and happier place. But when the average person hears
the word “Bolshevik,” he thinks of Moscow and of a reign of terror
established by a handful of scholarly cut-throats, of jails full of
innocent people and firing squads jeering at the victims they are about
to shoot. This picture may be slightly unfair, but it is no more than
natural that it should be part of the popular myth after the unspeakable
things which have happened in Russia during the last seven years.
The really good and peaceful Anabaptists of the sixteenth century
suffered from a similar disadvantage. As a sect they were suspected of
many strange crimes, and with good reason. In the first place, they were
inveterate Bible readers. This, of course, is not a crime at all, but let
me finish my sentence. The Anabaptists studied the scriptures without any
discrimination and that is a very dangerous thing when one has a strong
predilection for the Book of Revelation.
This strange work which even as late as the fifth century was rejected
as a bit of “spurious writing” was just the sort of thing to appeal to
people who lived during a period of intense emotional passions. The exile
of Patmos spoke a language which these poor, hunted creatures understood.
When his impotent rage drove him into hysterical prophecies anent the
modern Babylon, all the Anabaptists shouted amen and prayed for the
speedy coming of the New Heaven and the New Earth.
It was not the first time that weak minds gave way under the stress of
a great excitement. And almost every persecution of the Anabaptists was
followed by violent outbursts of religious insanity. Men and women would
rush naked through the streets, announcing the end of the world, trying
to indulge in weird sacrifices that the fury of God might be appeased.
Old hags would enter the divine services of some other sect and break up
the meeting, stridently shrieking nonsense about the coming of the Dragon.
Of course, this sort of affliction (in a mild degree) is always with us.
Read the daily papers and you will see how in some remote hamlet of Ohio
or Iowa or Florida a woman has butchered her husband with a meat cleaver
because “she was told to do so” by the voice of an angel; or how an
otherwise reasonable father has just killed his wife and eight children
in anticipation of the sounding of the Seven Trumpets. Such cases,
however, are rare exceptions. They can be easily handled by the local
police and they really do not have great influence upon the life or the
safety of the Republic.
But what had happened in the year 1534 in the good town of Münster was
something very different. There the New Zion, upon strictly Anabaptist
principles, had actually been proclaimed.
And people all over northern Europe shuddered when they thought of that
terrible winter and spring.
The villain in the case was a good-looking young tailor by the name of
Jan Beukelszoon. History knows him as John of Leiden, for Jan was a
native of that industrious little city and had spent his childhood along
the banks of the sluggish old Rhine. Like all other apprentices of that
day, he had traveled extensively and had wandered far and wide to learn
the secrets of his trade.
He could read and write just enough to produce an occasional play, but
he had no real education. Neither was he possessed of that humility of
spirit which we so often find in people who are conscious of their social
disadvantages and their lack of knowledge. But he was a very good-looking
young man, endowed with unlimited cheek and as vain as a peacock.
After a long absence in England and Germany, he went back to his native
land and set up in the cloak and suit business. At the same time he went
in for religion and that was the beginning of his extraordinary career.
For he became a disciple of Thomas Münzer.
This man Münzer, a baker by profession, was a famous character. He was
one of the three Anabaptist prophets who, in the year 1521, had suddenly
made their appearance in Wittenberg that they might show Luther how to
find the true road to salvation. Although they had acted with the best
of intentions, their efforts had not been appreciated and they had been
chased out of the Protestant stronghold with the request that never again
they show their unwelcome selves within the jurisdiction of the Dukes of
Saxony.
Came the year 1534 and the Anabaptists had suffered so many defeats that
they decided to risk everything on one big, bold stroke.
That they selected the town of Münster in Westphalia as the spot
for their final experiment surprised no one. Franz von Waldeck, the
prince-bishop of that city, was a drunken bounder who for years had lived
openly with a score of women and who ever since his sixteenth year had
offended all decent people by the outrageous bad taste of his private
conduct. When the town went Protestant, he compromised. But being known
far and wide for a liar and a cheat, his treaty of peace did not give
his Protestant subjects that feeling of personal security without which
life is indeed a very uncomfortable experience. In consequence whereof
the inhabitants of Münster remained in a state of high agitation until
the next elections. These brought a surprise. The city government fell
into the hands of the Anabaptists. The chairman became one Bernard
Knipperdollinck, a cloth merchant by day and a prophet after dark.
The bishop took one look at his new councilors and fled.
It was then that John of Leiden appeared upon the scene. He had come to
Münster as the apostle of a certain Jan Matthysz, a Haarlem baker who had
started a new sect of his own and was regarded as a very holy man. And
when he heard of the great blow that had been struck for the good cause,
he remained to help celebrate the victory and purge the bishopric of all
popish contamination. The Anabaptists were nothing if not thorough. They
turned the churches into stone quarries. They confiscated the convents
for the benefit of the homeless. All books except the Bible were publicly
burned. And as a fitting climax, those who refused to be re-baptized
after the Anabaptist fashion were driven into the camp of the Bishop, who
decapitated them or drowned them on the general principle that they were
heretics and small loss to the community.
That was the prologue.
The play itself was no less terrible.
From far and wide the high priests of half a hundred new creeds hastened
to the New Jerusalem. There they were joined by all those who believed
themselves possessed of a call for the great uplift, honest and sincere
citizens, but as innocent as babes when it came to politics or statecraft.
The siege of Münster lasted five months and during that time, every
scheme, system and program of social and spiritual regeneration was tried
out; every new-fangled prophet had his day in court.
But, of course, a little town chuck full of fugitives, pestilence and
hunger, was not a fit place for a sociological laboratory and the
dissensions and quarrels between the different factions lamed all the
efforts of the military leaders. During that crisis John the tailor
stepped forward.
The short hour of his glory had come.
In that community of starving men and suffering children, all things
were possible. John began his régime by introducing an exact replica of
that old theocratic form of government of which he had read in his Old
Testament. The burghers of Münster were divided into the twelve tribes
of Israel and John himself was chosen to be their king. He had already
married the daughter of one prophet, Knipperdollinck. Now he married the
widow of another, the wife of his former master, John Matthysz. Next he
remembered Solomon and added a couple of concubines. And then the ghastly
farce began.
All day long John sat on the throne of David in the market place and all
day long the people stood by while the royal court chaplain read the
latest batch of ordinances. These came fast and furiously, for the fate
of the city was daily growing more desperate and the people were in dire
need.
John, however, was an optimist and thoroughly believed in the omnipotence
of paper decrees.
The people complained that they were hungry. John promised that he would
tend to it. And forthwith a royal ukase, duly signed by His Majesty,
ordained that all wealth in the city be divided equally among the rich
and the poor, that the streets be broken up and used as vegetable
gardens, that all meals be eaten in common.
So far so good. But there were those who said that some of the rich
people had hidden part of their treasures. John bade his subjects not to
worry. A second decree proclaimed that all those who broke a single law
of the community would be immediately decapitated. And, mind you, such
a warning was no idle threat. For this royal tailor was as handy with
his sword as with his scissors and frequently undertook to be his own
executioner.
Then came the period of hallucinations when the populace suffered from a
diversity of religious manias; when the market place was crowded day and
night with thousands of men and women, awaiting the trumpet blasts of
the angel Gabriel.
Then came the period of terror, when the prophet kept up the courage of
his flock by a constant orgy of blood and cut the throat of one of his
own queens.
And then came the terrible day of retribution when two citizens in their
despair opened the gates to the soldiers of the bishop and when the
prophet, locked in an iron cage, was shown at all the Westphalian country
fairs and was finally tortured to death.
A weird episode, but of terrible consequence to many a God-fearing and
simple soul.
From that moment on, all Anabaptists were outlawed. Such leaders as
had escaped the carnage of Münster were hunted down like rabbits and
were killed wherever found. From every pulpit, ministers and priests
fulminated against the Anabaptists and with many curses and anathemas
they denounced them as communists and traitors and rebels, who wanted to
upset the existing order of things and deserved less mercy than wolves or
mad dogs.
Rarely has a heresy hunt been so successful. As a sect, the Anabaptists
ceased to exist. But a strange thing happened. Many of their ideas
continued to live, were picked up by other denominations, were
incorporated into all sorts of religious and philosophic systems, became
respectable, and are today part and parcel of everybody’s spiritual and
intellectual inheritance.
It is a simple thing to state such a fact. To explain how it actually
came about, that is quite a different story.
Almost without exception the Anabaptists belonged to that class of
society which regards an inkstand as an unnecessary luxury.
Anabaptist history, therefore, was writ by those who regarded the sect
as a particularly venomous land of denominational radicalism. Only now,
after a century of study, are we beginning to understand the great
rôle the ideas of these humble peasants and artisans have played in
the further development of a more rational and more tolerant form of
Christianity.
But ideas are like lightning. One never knows where they will strike
next. And what is the use of lightning rods in Münster, when the storm
breaks loose over Sienna?
CHAPTER XVII
THE SOZZINI FAMILY
In Italy the Reformation had never been successful. It could not be. In
the first place, the people of the south did not take their religion
seriously enough to fight about it and in the second place, the close
proximity of Rome, the center of a particularly well equipped office of
the Inquisition, made indulgence in private opinions a dangerous and
costly pastime.
But, of course, among all the thousands of humanists who populated the
peninsula, there were bound to be a few black sheep who cared a great
deal more for the good opinion of Aristotle than for that of Saint
Chrysostom. Those good people, however, were given many opportunities
to get rid of their surplus spiritual energy. There were clubs and
coffee-houses and discreet salons where men and women could give vent to
their intellectual enthusiasm without upsetting empires. All of which was
very pleasant and restful. And besides, wasn’t all life a compromise?
Hadn’t it always been a compromise? Would it not in all likelihood be a
compromise until the end of time?
Why get excited about such a small detail as one’s faith?
After these few introductory remarks, the reader will surely not expect
to hear a loud fanfaronade or the firing of guns when our next two heroes
make their appearance. For they are soft-spoken gentlemen, and go about
their business in a dignified and pleasant way.
In the end, they are to do more to upset the dogmatic tyranny under
which the world had suffered for such a long time than a whole army of
noisy reformers. But that is one of those curious things which no one
can foresee. They happen. We are grateful. But how it comes about, that,
alas, is something which we do not fully understand.
The name of these two quiet workmen in the vineyard of reason was Sozzini.
They were uncle and nephew.
For some unknown reason, the older man, Lelio Francesco, spelled his name
with one “z” and the younger, Fausto Paolo, spelled his with two “zs.”
But as they are both of them much better known by the Latinized form of
their name, Socinius, than by the Italian Sozzini, we can leave that
detail to the grammarians and etymologists.
As far as their influence was concerned, the uncle was much less
important than the nephew. We shall, therefore, deal with him first and
speak of the nephew afterwards.
Lelio Sozini was a Siennese, the descendant of a race of bankers and
judges and himself destined for a career at the bar, via the University
of Bologna. But like so many of his contemporaries, he allowed himself
to slip into theology, stopped reading law, played with Greek and Hebrew
and Arabic and ended (as so often happens with people of his type) as a
rationalistic mystic—a man who was at once very much of this world and
yet never quite of it. This sounds complicated. But those who understand
what I mean will understand without any further explanation, and the
others would not understand, no matter what I said.
His father, however, seems to have had a suspicion that the son might
amount to something in the world of letters. He gave his boy a check and
bade him go forth and see whatever there was to be seen. And so Lelio
left Sienna and during the next ten years, he traveled from Venice to
Geneva and from Geneva to Zürich and from Zürich to Wittenberg and then
to London and then to Prague and then to Vienna and then to Cracow,
spending a few months or years in every town and hamlet where he hoped
to find interesting company and might be able to learn something new
and interesting. It was an age when people talked religion just as
incessantly as today they talk business. Lelio must have collected a
strange assortment of ideas and by keeping his ears open he was soon
familiar with every heresy between the Mediterranean and the Baltic.
When, however, he carried himself and his intellectual luggage to
Geneva, he was received politely but none too cordially. The pale eyes
of Calvin looked upon this Italian visitor with grave suspicion. He was
a distinguished young man of excellent family and not a poor, friendless
wanderer like Servetus. It was said, however, that he had Servetian
inclinations. And that was most disturbing. The case for or against the
Trinity, so Calvin thought, had been definitely settled when the Spanish
heretic was burned. On the contrary! The fate of Servetus had become a
subject of conversation from Madrid to Stockholm, and serious-minded
people all over the world were beginning to take the side of the
anti-trinitarian. But that was not all. They were using Gutenberg’s
devilish invention to spread their views broadcast and being at a safe
distance from Geneva they were often far from complimentary in their
remarks.
Only a short while before a very learned tract had appeared which
contained everything the fathers of the Church had ever said or written
upon the subject of persecuting and punishing heretics. It had an
instantaneous and enormous sale among those who “hated God,” as Calvin
said, or who “hated Calvin,” as they themselves protested. Calvin had
let it be known that he would like to have a personal interview with the
author of this precious booklet. But the author, anticipating such a
request, had wisely omitted his name from the title-page.
It was said that he was called Sebastian Castellio, that he had been a
teacher in one of the Geneva high schools and that his moderate views
upon diverse theological enormities had gained him the hatred of Calvin
and the approbation of Montaigne. No one, however, could prove this. It
was mere hearsay. But where one had gone before, others might follow.
Calvin, therefore, was distantly polite to Sozzini, but suggested that
the mild air of Basel would suit his Siennese friend much better than the
damp climate of Savoy and heartily bade him Godspeed when he started on
his way to the famous old Erasmian stronghold.
Fortunately for Calvin, the Sozzini family soon afterwards fell under the
suspicion of the Inquisition, Lelio was deprived of his funds and falling
ill of a fever, he died in Zürich at the age of only thirty-seven.
Whatever joy his untimely demise may have caused in Geneva, it was
short-lived.
For Lelio, besides a widow and several trunks of notes, left a nephew,
who not only fell heir to his uncle’s unpublished manuscripts but soon
gained for himself the reputation of being even more of a Servetus
enthusiast than his uncle had been.
During his younger years, Faustus Socinius had traveled almost as
extensively as the older Lelio. His grandfather had left him a small
estate and as he did not marry until he was nearly fifty, he was able to
devote all his time to his favorite subject, theology.
For a short while he seems to have been in business in Lyons.
What sort of a salesman he made, I do not know, but his experience in
buying and selling and dealing in concrete commodities rather than
spiritual values seems to have strengthened him in his conviction that
very little is ever gained by killing a competitor or losing one’s temper
if the other man has the better of a deal. And as long as he lived,
he showed himself possessed of that sober common sense which is often
found in a counting-house but is very rarely part of the curriculum of a
religious seminary.
In the year 1563 Faustus returned to Italy. On his way home he visited
Geneva. It does not appear that he ever paid his respects to the local
patriarch. Besides, Calvin was a very sick man at that time. The visit
from a member of the Sozzini family would only have disturbed him.
The next dozen years, young Socinius spent in the service of Isabella de’
Medici. But in the year 1576 this lady, after a few days of matrimonial
bliss, was murdered by her husband, Paolo Orsini. Thereupon Socinius
resigned, left Italy for good and went to Basel to translate the Psalms
into colloquial Italian and write a book on Jesus.
Faustus, so it appeared from his writings, was a careful man. In the
first place, he was very deaf and such people are by nature cautious.
In the second place, he derived his income from certain estates situated
on the other side of the Alps and the Tuscan authorities had given him
a hint that it might be just as well for one suspected of “Lutheran
leanings” not to be too bold while dealing with subjects which were held
in disfavor by the Inquisition. Hence he used a number of pseudonyms
and never printed a book unless it had been passed upon by a number of
friends and had been declared to be fairly safe.
Thus it happened that his books were not placed on the Index. It also
happened that a copy of his life of Jesus was carried all the way to
Transylvania and there fell into the hands of another liberal-minded
Italian, the private physician of a number of Milanese and Florentine
ladies who had married into the Polish and Transylvanian nobility.
Transylvania in those days was the “far east” of Europe. A wilderness
until the early part of the twelfth century, it had been used as a
convenient home for the surplus population of Germany. The hard working
Saxon peasants had turned this fertile land into a prosperous and well
regulated little country with cities and schools and an occasional
university. But it remained a country far removed from the main roads of
travel and trade. Hence it had always been a favorite place of residence
for those who for one reason or another preferred to keep a few miles of
marsh and mountain between themselves and the henchmen of the Inquisition.
As for Poland, this unfortunate country has for so many centuries been
associated with the general idea of reaction and jingoism that it will
come as an agreeable surprise to many of my readers when I tell them that
during the first half of the sixteenth century, it was a veritable asylum
for all those who in other parts of Europe suffered on account of their
religious convictions.
This unexpected state of affairs had been brought about in a typically
Polish fashion.
That the Republic for quite a long time had been the most scandalously
mismanaged country of the entire continent was even then a generally
known fact. The extent, however, to which the higher clergy had neglected
their duties was not appreciated quite so clearly in those days when
dissolute bishops and drunken village priests were the common affliction
of all western nations.
But during the latter half of the fifteenth century it was noticed that
the number of Polish students in the different German universities was
beginning to increase at a rate of speed which caused great concern
among the authorities of Wittenberg and Leipzig. They began to ask
questions. And then it developed that the ancient Polish academy of
Cracow, administered by the Polish church, had been allowed to fall into
such a state of utter decay that the poor Polanders were forced to go
abroad for their education or do without. A little later, when the Teuton
universities fell under the spell of the new doctrines, the bright young
men from Warsaw and Radom and Czenstochowa quite naturally followed suit.
And when they returned to their home towns, they did so as full-fledged
Lutherans.
At that early stage of the Reformation it would have been quite easy for
the king and the nobility and the clergy to stamp out this epidemic of
erroneous opinions. But such a step would have obliged the rulers of the
republic to unite upon a definite and common policy and that of course
was directly in contradiction to the most hallowed traditions of this
strange country where a single dissenting vote could upset a law which
had the support of all the other members of the diet.
And when (as happened shortly afterwards) it appeared that the religion
of the famous Wittenberg professor carried with it a by-product of an
economic nature, consisting of the confiscation of all Church property,
the Boleslauses and the Wladislauses and the other knights, counts,
barons, princes and dukes who populated the fertile plains between the
Baltic and the Black Sea began to show a decided leaning towards a faith
which meant money in their pockets.
The unholy scramble for monastic real estate which followed upon the
discovery caused one of those famous “interims” with which the Poles,
since time immemorial, have tried to stave off the day of reckoning.
During such periods all authority came to a standstill and the
Protestants made such a good use of their opportunity that in less than
a year they had established churches of their own in every part of the
kingdom.
Eventually of course the incessant theological haggling of the new
ministers drove the peasants back into the arms of the Church and Poland
once more became one of the strongholds of a most uncompromising form
of Catholicism. But during the latter half of the sixteenth century,
the country enjoyed complete religious license. When the Catholics and
Protestants of western Europe began their war of extermination upon the
Anabaptists, it was a foregone conclusion that the survivors should flee
eastward and should eventually settle down along the banks of the Vistula
and it was then that Doctor Blandrata got hold of Socinius’ book on Jesus
and expressed a wish to make the author’s acquaintance.
Giorgio Blandrata was an Italian, a physician and a man of parts. He
had graduated at the University of Montpellier and had been remarkably
successful as a woman’s specialist. First and last he was a good deal of
a scoundrel, but a clever one. Like so many doctors of his time (think of
Rabelais and Servetus) he was as much of a theologian as a neurologist
and frequently played one rôle out against the other. For example, he
cured the Queen Dowager of Poland, Bona Sforza (widow of King Sigismund),
so successfully of the obsession that those who doubted the Trinity were
wrong, that she repented of her errors and thereafter only executed those
who held the doctrine of the Trinity to be true.
The good queen, alas, was gone (murdered by one of her lovers) but two
of her daughters had married local noblemen and as their medical adviser,
Blandrata exercised a great deal of influence upon the politics of his
adopted land. He knew that the country was ripe for civil war and that
it would happen very soon unless something be done to make an end to the
everlasting religious quarrels. Wherefore he set to work to bring about
a truce between the different opposing sects. But for this purpose he
needed some one more skilled in the intricacies of a religious debate
than he was himself. Then he had an inspiration. The author of the life
of Jesus was his man.
He sent Socinius a letter and asked him to come east.
Unfortunately when Socinius reached Transylvania the private life of
Blandrata had just led to so grave a public scandal that the Italian had
been forced to resign and leave for parts unknown. Socinius, however,
remained in this far away land, married a Polish girl and died in his
adopted country in the year 1604.
These last two decades of his life proved to be the most interesting
period of his career. For it was then that he gave a concrete expression
to his ideas upon the subject of tolerance.
They are to be found in the so-called “Catechism of Rakow,” a document
which Socinius composed as a sort of common constitution for all those
who meant well by this world and wished to make an end to future
sectarian strife.
The latter half of the sixteenth century was an era of catechism,
confessions of faith, credos and creeds. People were writing them
in Germany and in Switzerland and in France and in Holland and in
Denmark. But everywhere these carelessly printed little booklets gave
expression to the ghastly belief that they (and they alone) contained
the real Truth with a great big capital T and that it was the duty of
all authorities who had solemnly pledged themselves to uphold this one
particular form of Truth with a great big capital T to punish with the
sword and the gallows and the stake those who willfully remained faithful
to a different sort of truth (which was only written with a small t and
therefore was of an inferior quality).
The Socinian confession of faith breathed an entirely different spirit.
It began by the flat statement that it was not the intention of those who
had signed this document to quarrel with anybody else.
“With good reason,” it continued, “many pious people complain that the
various confessions and catechisms which have hitherto been published and
which the different churches are now publishing are apples of discord
among the Christians because they all try to impose certain principles
upon people’s conscience and to consider those who disagree with them as
heretics.”
Thereupon it denied in the most formal way that it was the intention of
the Socinians to proscribe or oppress any one else on account of his
religious convictions and turning to humanity in general, it made the
following appeal:
“Let each one be free to judge of his own religion, for this is the rule
set forth by the New Testament and by the example of the earliest church.
Who are we, miserable people, that we would smother and extinguish in
others the fire of divine spirit which God has kindled in them? Have
any of us a monopoly of the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures? Why do
we not remember that our only master is Jesus Christ and that we are
all brothers and that to no one has been given power over the souls of
others? It may be that one of our brothers is more learned than the
others, yet in regard to liberty and the relationship with Christ we are
all equal.”
All this was very fine and very wonderful, but it was said three hundred
years ahead of the times. Neither the Socinians nor any of the other
Protestant sects could in the long run hope to hold their own in this
turbulent part of the world. The counter-reformation had begun in all
seriousness. Veritable hordes of Jesuit fathers were beginning to be
turned loose upon the lost provinces. While they worked, the Protestants
quarreled. Soon the people of the eastern frontier were back within
the fold of Rome. Today the traveler who visits these distant parts of
civilized Europe would hardly guess that, once upon a time, they were
a stronghold of the most advanced and liberal thought of the age. Nor
would he suspect that somewhere among those dreary Lithuanian hills there
lies a village where the world was for the first time presented with a
definite program for a practical system of tolerance.
Driven by idle curiosity, I took a morning off recently and went to the
library and read through the index of all our most popular text-books
out of which the youth of our country learns the story of the past. Not
a single one mentioned Socinianism or the Sozzinis. They all jumped from
Social Democrats to Sophia of Hanover and from Sobieski to Saracens. The
usual leaders of the great religious revolution were there, including
Oecolampadius and the lesser lights.
One volume only contained a reference to the two great Siennese humanists
but they appeared as a vague appendix to something Luther or Calvin had
said or done.
It is dangerous to make predictions, but I have a suspicion that in the
popular histories of three hundred years hence, all this will have been
changed and that the Sozzinis shall enjoy the luxury of a little chapter
of their own and that the traditional heroes of the Reformation shall be
relegated to the bottom of the page.
They have the sort of names that look terribly imposing in footnotes.
CHAPTER XVIII
MONTAIGNE
In the Middle Ages it used to be said that city air made for freedom.
That was true.
A man behind a high stone wall could thumb his nose safely at baron and
priest.
A little later, when conditions upon the European continent had improved
so much that international commerce was once more becoming a possibility,
another historical phenomenon began to make itself manifest.
Done into words of three syllables it read: “Business makes for
tolerance.”
You can verify this statement any day of the week and most of all on
Sunday in any part of our country.
Winesberg, Ohio, can afford to support the Ku Klux Klan, but New York
cannot. If the people of New York should ever start a movement for the
exclusion of all Jews and all Catholics and all foreigners in general,
there would be such a panic in Wall Street and such an upheaval in the
labor movement that the town would be ruined beyond the hope of repair.
The same held true during the latter half of the Middle Ages. Moscow, the
seat of a small grand ducal count, might rage against the pagans, but
Novgorod, the international trading post, must be careful lest she offend
the Swedes and Norwegians and the Germans and the Flemish merchants who
visited her market place and drive them to Wisby.
A purely agricultural state could with impunity regale its peasantry with
a series of festive autos da fé. But if the Venetians or the Genoese
or the people of Bruges had started a pogrom among the heathen within
their walls, there would have been an immediate exodus of all those who
represented foreign business houses and the subsequent withdrawal of
capital would have driven the city into bankruptcy.
A few countries which were constitutionally unable to learn from
experience (like Spain and the papal dominions and certain possessions
of the Habsburgs), actuated by a sentiment which they proudly called
“loyalty to their convictions,” ruthlessly expelled the enemies of
the true faith. As a result they either ceased to exist altogether or
dwindled down to the rank of seventh rate Ritter states.
Commercial nations and cities, however, are as a rule governed by men
who have a profound respect for established facts, who know on which
side their bread is buttered, and who therefore maintain such a state of
spiritual neutrality that their Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and
Chinese customers can do business as usual and yet remain faithful to
their own particular religion.
For the sake of outward respectability Venice might pass a law against
the Calvinists, but the Council of Ten was careful to explain to their
gendarmes that this decree must not be taken too seriously and that
unless the heretics actually tried to get hold of San Marco and convert
it into a meeting-house of their own, they must be left alone and must be
allowed to worship as they saw fit.
Their good friends in Amsterdam did likewise. Every Sunday their
ministers fulminated against the sins of the “Scarlet Woman.” But in
the next block the terrible Papists were quietly saying mass in some
inconspicuous looking house, and outside the Protestant chief-of-police
stood watch lest an over-zealous admirer of the Geneva catechism try to
break up this forbidden meeting and frighten the profitable French and
Italian visitors away.
This did not in the least mean that the mass of the people in Venice or
Amsterdam ceased to be faithful sons of their respective churches. They
were as good Catholics or Protestants as they had ever been. But they
remembered that the good will of a dozen profitable heretics from Hamburg
or Lübeck or Lisbon was worth more than the approbation of a dozen shabby
clerics from Geneva or Rome and they acted accordingly.
It may seem a little far-fetched to connect the enlightened and liberal
opinions (they are not always the same) of Montaigne with the fact that
his father and grandfather had been in the herring business and that
his mother was of Spanish-Jewish descent. But it seems to me that these
commercial antecedents had a great deal to do with the man’s general
point of view and that the intense dislike of fanaticism and bigotry
which characterized his entire career as a soldier and statesman had
originated in a little fish-shop somewhere off the main quai of Bordeaux.
Montaigne himself would not have thanked me if I had been able to make
this statement to his face. For when he was born, all vestiges of mere
“trade” had been carefully wiped off the resplendent family escutcheon.
His father had acquired a bit of property called Montaigne and had spent
money lavishly that his son might be brought up as a gentleman. Before
he was fairly able to walk private tutors had stuffed his poor little
head full of Latin and Greek. At the age of six he had been sent to
high-school. At thirteen he had begun to study law. And before he was
twenty he was a full-fledged member of the Bordeaux town council.
Then followed a career in the army and a period at court, until at the
age of thirty-eight, after the death of his father, he retired from all
active business and spent the last twenty-one years of his life, (with
the exception of a few unwilling excursions into politics), among his
horses and his dogs and his books and learned as much from the one as he
did from the other.
Montaigne was very much a man of his time and suffered from several
weaknesses. He was never quite free from certain affections and
mannerisms which he, the fish-monger’s grandson, believed to be a part of
true gentility. Until the end of his days he protested that he was not
really a writer at all, only a country gentleman who occasionally whiled
away the tedious hours of winter by jotting down a few random ideas upon
subjects of a slightly philosophic nature. All this was pure buncombe. If
ever a man put his heart and his soul and his virtues and his vices and
everything he had into his books, it was this cheerful neighbor of the
immortal d’Artagnan.
And as this heart and this soul and these virtues and these vices were
the heart and the soul and the virtues and the vices of an essentially
generous, well-bred and agreeable person, the sum total of Montaigne’s
works has become something more than literature. It has developed into
a definite philosophy of life, based upon common sense and an ordinary
practical variety of decency.
Montaigne was born a Catholic. He died a Catholic, and in his younger
years he was an active member of that League of Catholic Noblemen which
was formed among the French nobility to drive Calvinism out of France.
But after that fateful day in August of the year 1572 when news reached
him of the joy with which Pope Gregory XIII had celebrated the murder of
thirty thousand French Protestants, he turned away from the Church for
good. He never went so far as to join the other side. He continued to go
through certain formalities that he might keep his neighbors’ tongues
from wagging, but those of his chapters written after the night of Saint
Bartholomew might just as well have been the work of Marcus Aurelius or
Epictetus or any of a dozen other Greek or Roman philosophers. And in
one memorable essay, entitled “On the Freedom of Conscience,” he spoke
as if he had been a contemporary of Pericles rather than a servant of
Her Majesty Catherine de’ Medici and he used the career of Julian the
Apostate as an example of what a truly tolerant statesman might hope to
accomplish.
It is a very short chapter. It is only five pages long and you will find
it in part nineteen of the second book.
Montaigne had seen too much of the incorrigible obstinacy of both
Protestants and Catholics to advocate a system of absolute freedom, which
(under the existing circumstances) could only provoke a new outbreak
of civil war. But when circumstances allowed it, when Protestants and
Catholics no longer slept with a couple of daggers and pistols underneath
their pillows, then an intelligent government should keep away as much
as possible from interfering with other people’s consciences and should
permit all of its subjects to love God as best suited the happiness of
their own particular souls.
Montaigne was neither the only, nor the first Frenchman who had hit upon
this idea or had dared to express it in public. As early as the year
1560, Michel de l’Hôpital, a former chancellor of Catherine de’ Medici
and a graduate of half a dozen Italian universities (and incidentally
suspected of being tarred with the Anabaptist brush) had suggested that
heretics be attacked exclusively with verbal arguments. He had based his
somewhat startling opinion upon the ground that conscience being what it
was, it could not possibly be changed by force, and two years later he
had been instrumental in bringing about that royal Edict of Toleration
which had given the Huguenots the right to hold meetings of their own,
to call synods to discuss the affairs of their church and in general to
behave as if they were a free and independent denomination and not merely
a tolerated little sect.
Jean Bodin, a Parisian lawyer, a most respectable citizen (the man who
had defended the rights of private property against the communistic
tendencies expressed in Thomas More’s “Utopia”), had spoken in a similar
vein when he denied the right of sovereigns to use violence in driving
their subjects to this or that church.
But the speeches of chancellors and the Latin treatises of political
philosophers very rarely make best sellers. Whereas Montaigne was read
and translated and discussed wherever civilized people came together in
the name of intelligent company and good conversation and continued to be
read and translated and discussed for more than three hundred years.
His very amateurishness, his insistence that he just wrote for the fun
of it and had no axes to grind, made him popular with large numbers of
people who otherwise would never dream of buying (or borrowing) a book
that was officially classified under “philosophy.”
CHAPTER XIX
ARMINIUS
The struggle for tolerance is part of the age-old conflict between
“organized society” which places the continued safety of the “group”
ahead of all other considerations and those private citizens of unusual
intelligence or energy who hold that such improvement as the world has
thus far experienced was invariably due to the efforts of the individual
and not due to the efforts of the mass (which by its very nature is
distrustful of all innovations) and that therefore the rights of the
individual are far more important than those of the mass.
If we agree to accept these premises as true, it follows that the amount
of tolerance in any given country must be in direct proportion to the
degree of individual liberty enjoyed by the majority of its inhabitants.
Now in the olden days it sometimes happened that an exceptionally
enlightened ruler spake unto his children and said, “I firmly believe in
the principle of live and let live. I expect all my beloved subjects to
practice tolerance towards their neighbors or bear the consequences.”
In that case, of course, eager citizens hastened to lay in a supply of
the official buttons bearing the proud inscription, “Tolerance first.”
But these sudden conversions, due to a fear of His Majesty’s hangman,
were rarely of a lasting nature and only bore fruit if the sovereign
accompanied his threat by an intelligent system of gradual education
along the lines of practical every day politics.
Such a fortunate combination of circumstances occurred in the Dutch
Republic during the latter half of the sixteenth century.
In the first place the country consisted of several thousand
semi-independent towns and villages and these for the greater part were
inhabited by fishermen, sailors and traders, three classes of people who
are accustomed to a certain amount of independence of action and who are
forced by the nature of their trade to make quick decisions and to judge
the casual occurrences of the day’s work upon their own merits.
I would not for a moment claim that, man for man, they were a whit more
intelligent or broadminded than their neighbors in other parts of the
world. But hard work and tenacity of purpose had made them the grain
and fish carriers of all northern and western Europe. They knew that
the money of a Catholic was just as good as that of a Protestant and
they preferred a Turk who paid cash to a Presbyterian who asked for six
months’ credit. An ideal country therefore to start a little experiment
in tolerance and furthermore the right man was in the right place and
what is infinitely more important the right man was in the right place at
the right moment.
William the Silent was a shining example of the old maxim that “those
who wish to rule the world must know the world.” He began life as a very
fashionable and rich young man, enjoying a most enviable social position
as the confidential secretary of the greatest monarch of his time. He
wasted scandalous sums of money upon dinners and dances, married several
of the better known heiresses of his day and lived gayly without a care
for the day of tomorrow. He was not a particularly studious person and
racing charts interested him infinitely more than religious tracts.
The social unrest which followed in the wake of the Reformation did not
at first impress him as anything more serious than still another quarrel
between capital and labor, the sort of thing that could be settled by the
use of a little tact and the display of a few brawny police constables.
But once he had grasped the true nature of the issue that had arisen
between the sovereign and his subjects, this amiable grand seigneur was
suddenly transformed into the exceedingly able leader of what, to all
intents and purposes, was the prime lost cause of the age. The palaces
and horses, the gold plate and the country estates were sold at short
notice (or confiscated at no notice at all) and the sporting young man
from Brussels became the most tenacious and successful enemy of the house
of Habsburg.
This change of fortune, however, did not affect his private character.
William had been a philosopher in the days of plenty. He remained a
philosopher when he lived in a couple of furnished rooms and did not know
how to pay for Saturday’s clean wash. And just as in the olden days he
had worked hard to frustrate the plans of a cardinal who had expressed
the intention of building a sufficient number of gallows to accommodate
all Protestants, he now made it a point to bridle the energy of those
ardent Calvinists who wished to hang all Catholics.
His task was wellnigh hopeless.
Between twenty and thirty thousand people had already been killed, the
prisons of the Inquisition were full of new candidates for martyrdom and
in far off Spain new armies were being recruited to smash the rebellion
before it should spread to other parts of the Empire.
To tell people who were fighting for their lives that they must love
those who had just hanged their sons and brothers and uncles and
grandfathers was out of the question. But by his personal example, by his
conciliatory attitude towards those who opposed him, William was able to
show his followers how a man of character can invariably rise superior to
the old Mosaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
In this campaign for public decency he enjoyed the support of a very
remarkable man. In the church of Gouda you may this very day read a
curious monosyllabic epitaph which enumerates the virtues of one Dirck
Coornhert, who lies buried there. This Coornhert was an interesting
fellow. He was the son of well-to-do people and had spent many years
of his youth traveling in foreign lands and getting some first hand
information about Germany, Spain and France. As soon as he had returned
home from this trip he fell in love with a girl who did not have a
cent. His careful Dutch father had forbidden the marriage. When his son
married the girl just the same, he did what those ancestral patriarchs
were supposed to do under the circumstances; he talked about filial
ingratitude and disinherited the boy.
This was inconvenient, in so far as young Coornhert was now obliged to go
to work for a living. But he was a young man of parts, learned a trade
and set up as a copper-engraver.
Alas! once a Dutchman, always a dominie. When evening came, he hastily
dropped the burin, picked up the goose-quill and wrote articles upon the
events of the day. His style was not exactly what one would nowadays
call “amusing.” But his books contained a great deal of that amiable
common sense which had distinguished the work of Erasmus and they made
him many friends and brought him into contact with William the Silent
who thought so highly of his abilities that he employed him as one of his
confidential advisers.
Now William was engaged in a strange sort of debate. King Philip, aided
and abetted by the Pope, was trying to rid the world of the enemy of
the human race (to wit, his own enemy, William) by a standing offer
of twenty-five thousand golden ducats and a patent of nobility and
forgiveness of all sins to whomsoever would go to Holland and murder the
arch-heretic. William, who had already lived through five attempts upon
his life, felt it his duty to refute the arguments of good King Philip in
a series of pamphlets and Coornhert assisted him.
That the house of Habsburg, for whom these arguments were intended,
should thereby be converted to tolerance was of course an idle hope. But
as all the world was watching the duel between William and Philip, those
little pamphlets were translated and read everywhere and they caused a
healthy discussion of many subjects that people had never before dared to
mention above a whisper.
Unfortunately the debates did not last very long. On the ninth of July of
the year 1584 a young French Catholic gained that reward of twenty-five
thousand ducats and six years later Coornhert died before he had been
able to finish the translation of the works of Erasmus into the Dutch
vernacular.
As for the next twenty years, they were so full of the noise of battle
that even the fulminations of the different theologians went unheard.
And when finally the enemy had been driven from the territory of the
new republic, there was no William to take hold of internal affairs and
three score sects and denominations, who had been forced into temporary
but unnatural friendship by the presence of a large number of Spanish
mercenaries, flew at each other’s throats.
Of course, they had to have a pretext for their quarrel but who ever
heard of a theologian without a grievance?
In the University of Leiden there were two professors who disagreed. That
was nothing either new or unusual. But these two professors disagreed
upon the question of the freedom of the will and that was a very serious
matter. At once the delighted populace took a hand in the discussion and
within less than a month the entire country was divided into two hostile
camps.
On the one side, the friends of Arminius.
On the other, the followers of Gomarus.
The latter, although born of Dutch parents, had lived all his life in
Germany and was a brilliant product of the Teuton system of pedagogy.
He possessed immense learning combined with a total absence of ordinary
horse-sense. His mind was versed in the mysteries of Hebrew prosody but
his heart beat according to the rules of the Aramaic syntax.
His opponent, Arminius, was a very different sort of man. He was born
in Oudewater, a little city not far away from that cloister Steyn where
Erasmus had spent the unhappy years of his early manhood. As a child
he had won the friendship of a neighbor, a famous mathematician and
professor of astronomy in the University of Marburg. This man, Rudolf
Snellius, had taken Arminius back with him to Germany that he might be
properly educated. But when the boy went home for his first vacation he
found that his native town had been sacked by the Spaniards and that all
his relatives had been murdered.
That seemed to end his career but fortunately some rich people with kind
hearts heard of the sad plight of the young orphan and they put up a
purse and sent him to Leiden to study theology. He worked hard and after
half a dozen years he had learned all there was to be learned and looked
for fresh intellectual grazing grounds.
In those days, brilliant students could always find a patron willing
to invest a few dollars in their future. Soon Arminius, provided with
a letter of credit issued by certain guilds of Amsterdam, was merrily
trotting southward in search of future educational opportunities.
As behooved a respectable candidate of theology, he went first of all to
Geneva. Calvin was dead, but his man Friday, the learned Theodore Beza,
had succeeded him as shepherd of the seraphic flock. The fine nose of
this old heresy hunter at once detected a slight odor of Ramism in the
doctrines of the young Dutchman and the visit of Arminius was cut short.
The word Ramism means nothing to modern readers. But three hundred years
ago it was considered a most dangerous religious novelty, as those who
are familiar with the assembled works of Milton will know. It had been
invented or originated (or what you please) by a Frenchman, a certain
Pierre de la Ramée. As a student, de la Ramée had been so utterly
exasperated by the antiquated methods of his professors that he had
chosen as subject for his doctor’s dissertation the somewhat startling
text, “Everything ever taught by Aristotle is absolutely wrong.”
Needless to say this subject did not gain him the good will of his
teachers. When a few years afterwards he elaborated his idea in a number
of learned volumes, his death was a foregone conclusion. He fell as one
of the first victims of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.
But his books, those pesky books which refuse to be assassinated together
with their authors, had survived and Ramée’s curious system of logic had
gained great popularity throughout northern and western Europe. Truly
pious people however believed that Ramism was the password to Hades
and Arminius was advised to go to Basel where “libertines” (a sixteenth
century colloquialism meaning “liberals”) had been considered good form
ever since that unfortunate city had fallen under the spell of the
quizzical Erasmus.
Arminius, thus forewarned, traveled northward and then decided upon
something quite unusual. He boldly invaded the enemy’s territory, studied
for a few semesters in the University of Padua and paid a visit to Rome.
This made him a dangerous person in the eyes of his fellow countrymen
when he returned to his native country in the year 1587. But as he
seemed to develop neither horns nor a tail, he was gradually taken back
into their good favor and was allowed to accept a call as minister to
Amsterdam.
There he made himself not only useful but he gained quite a reputation
as a hero during one of the many outbreaks of the plague. Soon he was
held in such genuine esteem that he was entrusted with the task of
reorganizing the public school system of that big city and when in
the year 1603 he was called to Leiden as a full-fledged professor of
theology, he left the capital amidst the sincere regrets of the entire
population.
If he had known beforehand what was awaiting him in Leiden, I am sure
he would never have gone. He arrived just when the battle between the
Infralapsarians and the Supralapsarians was at its height.
Arminius was both by nature and education an Infralapsarian. He tried
to be fair to his colleague, the Supralapsarian Gomarus. But alas, the
differences between the Supralapsarians and the Infralapsarians were such
as allowed of no compromise. And Arminius was forced to declare himself
an out and out Infralapsarian.
Of course, you will ask me what Supra- and Infralapsarians were. I
don’t know, and I seem unable to learn such things. But as far as I can
make out, it was the age-old quarrel between those who believed (as did
Arminius) that man is to a certain extent possessed of a free will and
able to shape his own destinies and those who like Sophocles and Calvin
and Gomarus taught that everything in our lives has been pre-ordained
ages before we were born and that our fate therefore depends upon a throw
of the divine dice at the hour of creation.
In the year 1600 by far the greater number of the people of northern
Europe were Supralapsarians. They loved to listen to sermons which
doomed the majority of their neighbors to eternal perdition and those
few ministers who dared to preach a gospel of good will and charity
were at once suspected of criminal weakness, fit rivals of those tender
hearted doctors who fail to prescribe malodorous medicines and kill their
patients by their kindness.
As soon as the gossiping old women of Leiden had discovered that Arminius
was an Infralapsarian, his usefulness had come to an end. The poor man
died under the torrent of abuse that was let loose upon him by his former
friends and supporters. And then, as seemed unavoidable during the
seventeenth century, Infralapsarianism and Supralapsarianism made their
entrance into the field of politics and the Supralapsarians won at the
polls and the Infralapsarians were declared enemies of the public order
and traitors to their country.
Before this absurd quarrel had come to an end, Oldenbarnevelt, the man
who next to William the Silent had been responsible for the foundation
of the Republic, lay dead with his head between his feet; Grotius, whose
moderation had made him the first great advocate of an equitable system
of international law, was eating the bread of charity at the court of
the Queen of Sweden; and the work of William the Silent seemed entirely
undone.
But Calvinism did not gain the triumph it had hoped.
The Dutch Republic was a republic only in name. It was really a sort
of merchants’ and bankers’ club, ruled by a few hundred influential
families. These gentlemen were not at all interested in equality and
fraternity, but they did believe in law and order. They recognized and
supported the established church. On Sundays with a great display of
unction they proceeded to the large white-washed sepulchers which in
former days had been Catholic Cathedrals and which now were Protestant
lecture halls. But on Monday, when the clergy paid its respects to the
Honorable Burgomaster and Town Councilor, with a long list of grievances
against this and that and the other person, their lordships were “in
conference” and unable to receive the reverend gentlemen. If the reverend
gentlemen insisted, and induced (as frequently happened) a few thousand
of their loyal parishioners to “demonstrate” in front of the town hall,
then their lordships would graciously deign to accept a neatly written
copy of the reverend gentlemen’s complaints and suggestions. But as
soon as the door had been closed upon the last of the darkly garbed
petitioners, their lordships would use the document to light their pipes.
For they had adopted the useful and practical maxim of “once is enough
and too many” and they were so horrified by what had happened during
the terrible years of the great Supralapsarian civil war that they
uncompromisingly suppressed all further forms of religious frenzy.
Posterity has not always been kind to those aristocrats of the ledger.
Undoubtedly they regarded the country as their private property and did
not always differentiate with sufficient nicety between the interests
of their fatherland and those of their own firm. They lacked that
broad vision which goes with empire and almost invariably they were
penny-wise and pound-foolish. But they did something which deserves our
hearty commendation. They turned their country into an international
clearing-house where all sorts of people with all sorts of ideas were
given the widest degree of liberty to say, think, write and print
whatever pleased them.
I do not want to paint too rosy a picture. Here and there, under a threat
of ministerial disapprobation, the Town Councilors were sometimes obliged
to suppress a secret society of Catholics or to confiscate the pamphlets
printed by a particularly noisy heretic. But generally speaking, as long
as one did not climb on a soap-box in the middle of the market place
to denounce the doctrine of predestination or carry a big rosary into
a public dining-hall or deny the existence of God in the South Side
Methodist Church of Haarlem, one enjoyed a degree of personal immunity
which for almost two centuries made the Dutch Republic a veritable haven
of rest for all those who in other parts of the world were persecuted for
the sake of their opinions.
Soon the rumor of this Paradise Regained spread abroad. And during the
next two hundred years, the print shops and the coffee-houses of Holland
were filled with a motley crew of enthusiasts, the advance guard of a
strange new army of spiritual liberation.
CHAPTER XX
BRUNO
It has been said (and with a good deal of reason) that the Great War was
a war of non-commissioned officers.
While the generals and the colonels and the three-star strategists sat in
solitary splendor in the halls of some deserted château and contemplated
miles of maps until they could evolve a new bit of tactics that was to
give them half a square mile of territory (and lose some thirty thousand
men), the junior officers, the sergeants and the corporals, aided and
abetted by a number of intelligent privates, did the so-called “dirty
work” and eventually brought about the collapse of the German line of
defense.
The great crusade for spiritual independence was fought along similar
lines.
There were no frontal attacks which drew into action half a million
soldiers.
There were no desperate charges to provide the enemy’s gunners with an
easy and agreeable target.
I might go even further and say that the vast majority of the people
never knew that there was any fighting at all. Now and then, curiosity
may have compelled them to ask who was being burned that morning or who
was going to be hanged the next afternoon. Then perhaps they discovered
that a few desperate individuals continued to fight for certain
principles of freedom of which both Catholics and Protestants disapproved
most heartily. But I doubt whether such information affected them beyond
the point of mild regret and the comment that it must be very sad for
their poor relatives to bear, that uncle had come to such a terrible end.
It could hardly have been otherwise. What martyrs actually accomplish for
the cause for which they give their lives cannot possibly be reduced to
mathematical formulae or be expressed in terms of amperes or horsepower.
Any industrious young man in search of a Ph.D. may read carefully through
the assembled works of Giordano Bruno and by the patient collection of
all sentences containing such sentiments as “the state has no right to
tell people what to think” or “society may not punish with the sword
those who dissent from the generally approved dogmas,” he may be able to
write an acceptable dissertation upon “Giordano Bruno (1549-1600) and the
principles of religious freedom.”
But those of us no longer in search of those fatal letters must approach
the subject from a different angle.
There were, so we say in our final analysis, a number of devout men who
were so profoundly shocked by the fanaticism of their day, by the yoke
under which the people of all countries were forced to exist, that they
rose in revolt. They were poor devils. They rarely owned more than the
cloak upon their back and they were not always certain of a place to
sleep. But they burned with a divine fire. Up and down the land they
traveled, talking and writing, drawing the learned professors of learned
academies into learned disputes, arguing humbly with the humble country
folk in humble rustic inns, eternally preaching a gospel of good will,
of understanding, of charity towards others. Up and down the land they
traveled in their shabby clothes with their little bundles of books and
pamphlets until they died of pneumonia in some miserable village in the
hinterland of Pomerania or were lynched by drunken peasants in a Scotch
hamlet or were broken on the wheel in a provincial borough of France.
And if I mention the name of Giordano Bruno, I do not mean to imply that
he was the only one of his kind. But his life, his ideas, his restless
zeal for what he held to be true and desirable, were so typical of that
entire group of pioneers that he will serve very well as an example.
The parents of Bruno were poor people. Their son, an average Italian
boy of no particular promise, followed the usual course and went into a
monastery. Later he became a Dominican monk. He had no business in that
order for the Dominicans were the most ardent supporters of all forms of
persecution, the “police-dogs of the true faith,” as their contemporaries
called them. And they were clever. It was not necessary for a heretic
to have his ideas put into print to be nosed out by one of those eager
detectives. A single glance, a gesture of the hand, a shrug of the
shoulders were often sufficient to give a man away and bring him into
contact with the Inquisition.
How Bruno, brought up in an atmosphere of unquestioning obedience,
turned rebel and deserted the Holy Scriptures for the works of Zeno and
Anaxagoras, I do not know. But before this strange novice had finished
his course of prescribed studies, he was expelled from the Dominican
order and henceforth he was a wanderer upon the face of the earth.
He crossed the Alps. How many other young men before him had braved the
dangers of those ancient mountain passes that they might find freedom in
the mighty fortress which the new faith had erected at the junction of
the Rhone and the Arve!
And how many of them had turned away, broken hearted when they discovered
that here as there it was the inner spirit which guided the hearts of
men and that a change of creed did not necessarily mean a change of heart
and mind.
Bruno’s residence in Geneva lasted less than three months. The town was
full of Italian refugees. These brought their fellow-countryman a new
suit of clothes and found him a job as proof-reader. In the evenings he
read and wrote. He got hold of a copy of de la Ramée’s works. There at
last was a man after his own heart. De la Ramée believed too that the
world could not progress until the tyranny of the medieval text-books
was broken. Bruno did not go as far as his famous French teacher and did
not believe that everything the Greeks had ever taught was wrong. But
why should the people of the sixteenth century be bound by words and
sentences that were written in the fourth century before the birth of
Christ? Why indeed?
“Because it has always been that way,” the upholders of the orthodox
faith answered him.
“What have we to do with our grandfathers and what have they to do with
us? Let the dead bury the dead,” the young iconoclast answered.
And very soon afterwards the police paid him a visit and suggested that
he had better pack his satchels and try his luck elsewhere.
Bruno’s life thereafter was one endless peregrination in search of
a place where he might live and work in some degree of liberty and
security. He never found it. From Geneva he went to Lyons and then to
Toulouse. By that time he had taken up the study of astronomy and had
become an ardent supporter of the ideas of Copernicus, a dangerous step
in an age when all the contemporary Bryans brayed, “The world turning
around the sun! The world a commonplace little planet turning around the
sun! Ho-ho and hee-hee! Who ever heard such nonsense?”
Toulouse became uncomfortable. He crossed France, walking to Paris. And
next to England as private secretary to a French ambassador. But there
another disappointment awaited him. The English theologians were no
better than the continental ones. A little more practical, perhaps. In
Oxford, for example, they did not punish a student when he committed an
error against the teachings of Aristotle. They fined him ten shillings.
Bruno became sarcastic. He began to write brilliantly dangerous bits of
prose, dialogues of a religious-philosophic-political nature in which the
entire existing order of things was turned topsy turvy and submitted to a
minute but none too flattering examination.
And he did some lecturing upon his favorite subject, astronomy.
But college authorities rarely smile upon professors who please the
hearts of their students. Bruno once more found himself invited to
leave. And so back again to France and then to Marburg, where not so
long before Luther and Zwingli had debated upon the true nature of the
transubstantiation in the castle of pious Elisabeth of Hungary.
Alas! his reputation as a “Libertine” had preceded him. He was not
even allowed to lecture. Wittenberg proved more hospitable. That old
stronghold of the Lutheran faith, however, was beginning to be overrun by
the disciples of Dr. Calvin. After that there was no further room for a
man of Bruno’s liberal tendencies.
Southward he wended his way to try his luck in the land of John Huss.
Further disappointment awaited him. Prague had become a Habsburg capital
and where the Habsburg entered, freedom went out by the city gates. Back
to the road and a long, long walk to Zürich.
There he received a letter from an Italian youth, Giovanni Mocenigo,
who asked him to come to Venice. What made Bruno accept, I do not know.
Perhaps the Italian peasant in him was impressed by the luster of an old
patrician name and felt flattered by the invitation.
Giovanni Mocenigo, however, was not made of the stuff which had enabled
his ancestors to defy both Sultan and Pope. He was a weakling and a
coward and did not move a finger when officers of the Inquisition
appeared at his house and took his guest to Rome.
As a rule, the government of Venice was terribly jealous of its rights.
If Bruno had been a German merchant or a Dutch skipper, they would have
protested violently and they might even have gone to war when a foreign
power dared to arrest some one within their own jurisdiction. But why
incur the hostility of the pope on account of a vagabond who had brought
nothing to their city but his ideas?
It was true he called himself a scholar. The Republic was highly
flattered, but she had scholars enough of her own.
And so farewell to Bruno and may San Marco have mercy upon his soul.
Seven long years Bruno was kept in the prison of the Inquisition.
On the seventeenth of February of the year 1600 he was burned at the
stake and his ashes were blown to the winds.
He was executed on the Campo dei Fiori. Those who know Italian may
therein find inspiration for a pretty little allegory.
CHAPTER XXI
SPINOZA
There are certain things in history which I have never been able to
understand and one of these is the amount of work done by some of the
artists and literary men of bygone ages.
The modern members of our writing guild, with typewriters and dictaphones
and secretaries and fountain pens, can turn out between three and four
thousand words a day. How did Shakespeare, with half a dozen other jobs
to distract his mind, with a scolding wife and a clumsy goose-quill,
manage to write thirty-seven plays?
Where did Lope de Vega, veteran of the Invincible Armada and a busy man
all his life, find the necessary ink and paper for eighteen hundred
comedies and five hundred essays?
What manner of man was this strange Hofkonzertmeister, Johann Sebastian
Bach, who in a little house filled with the noise of twenty children
found time to compose five oratorios, one hundred and ninety church
cantatas, three wedding cantatas, and a dozen motets, six solemn masses,
three fiddle concertos, a concerto for two violins which alone would
have made his name immortal, seven concertos for piano and orchestra,
three concertos for two pianos, two concertos for three pianos, thirty
orchestral scores and enough pieces for the flute, the harpsichord, the
organ, the bull-fiddle and the French horn to keep the average student of
music busy for the rest of his days.
Or again, by what process of industry and application could painters
like Rembrandt and Rubens produce a picture or an etching at the rate
of almost four a month during more than thirty years? How could an
humble citizen like Antonio Stradivarius turn out five hundred and forty
fiddles, fifty violoncellos and twelve violas in a single lifetime?
I am not now discussing the brains capable of devising all these plots,
hearing all these melodies, seeing all those diversified combinations
of color and line, choosing all this wood. I am just wondering at the
physical part of it. How did they do it? Didn’t they ever go to bed?
Didn’t they sometimes take a few hours off for a game of billiards? Were
they never tired? Had they ever heard of nerves?
Both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were full of that sort of
people. They defied all the laws of hygiene, ate and drank everything
that was bad for them, were totally unconscious of their high destinies
as members of the glorious human race, but they had an awfully good time
and their artistic and intellectual output was something terrific.
And what was true of the arts and the sciences held equally true of such
finicky subjects as theology.
Go to any of the libraries that date back two hundred years and you
will find their cellars and attics filled with tracts and homilies and
discussions and refutations and digests and commentaries in duodecimo
and octodecimo and octavo, bound in leather and in parchment and in
paper, all of them covered with dust and oblivion, but without exception
containing an enormous if useless amount of learning.
The subjects of which they treated and many of the words they used have
lost all meaning to our modern ears. But somehow or other these moldy
compilations served a very useful purpose. If they accomplished nothing
else, they at least cleared the air. For they either settled the
questions they discussed to the general satisfaction of all concerned,
or they convinced their readers that those particular problems could
not possibly be decided with an appeal to logic and argument and might
therefore just as well be dropped right then and there.
This may sound like a back-handed compliment. But I hope that critics of
the thirtieth century shall be just as charitable when they wade through
the remains of our own literary and scientific achievements.
* * * * *
Baruch de Spinoza, the hero of this chapter, did not follow the fashion
of his time in the matter of quantity. His assembled works consist of
three or four small volumes and a few bundles of letters.
But the amount of study necessary for the correct mathematical solution
of his abstract problems in ethics and philosophy would have staggered
any normally healthy man. It killed the poor consumptive who had
undertaken to reach God by way of the table of multiplication.
Spinoza was a Jew. His people, however, had never suffered the
indignities of the Ghetto. Their ancestors had settled down in the
Spanish peninsula when that part of the world was a Moorish province.
After the reconquest and the introduction of that policy of “Spain for
the Spaniard” which eventually forced that country into bankruptcy, the
Spinozas had been forced to leave their old home. They had sailed for
the Netherlands, had bought a small house in Amsterdam, had worked hard,
had saved their money and soon were known as one of the most respectable
families of the “Portuguese colony.”
If nevertheless their son Baruch was conscious of his Jewish origin,
this was due more to the training he received in his Talmud school than
to the gibes of his little neighbors. For the Dutch Republic was so
chock full of class prejudice that there was little room left for mere
race prejudice and therefore lived in perfect peace and harmony with all
the alien races that had found a refuge along the banks of the North
and Zuider Seas. And this was one of the most characteristic bits of
Dutch life which contemporary travelers never failed to omit from their
“Souvenirs de Voyage” and with good reason.
In most other parts of Europe, even at that late age, the relation
between the Jew and the non-Jew was far from satisfactory. What made the
quarrel between the two races so hopeless was the fact that both sides
were equally right and equally wrong and that both sides could justly
claim to be the victim of their opponent’s intolerance and prejudice.
In the light of the theory put forward in this book that intolerance
is merely a form of self-protection of the mob, it becomes clear that
as long as they were faithful to their own respective religions, the
Christian and the Jew must have conceded each other as enemies. In the
first place, they both of them maintained that their God was the only
true God and that all the other Gods of all the other nations were false.
In the second place, they were each other’s most dangerous commercial
rival. The Jews had come to western Europe as they had originally come
to Palestine, as immigrants in search of a new home. The labor unions
of that day, the Guilds, had made it impossible for them to take up a
trade. They had therefore been obliged to content themselves with such
economic makeshifts as pawnbroking and banking. In the Middle Ages these
two professions, which closely resembled each other, were not thought
fit occupations for decent citizens. Why the Church, until the days
of Calvin, should have felt such a repugnance towards money (except
in the form of taxes) and should have regarded the taking of interest
as a crime, is hard to understand. Usury, of course, was something
no government could tolerate and already the Babylonians, some forty
centuries before, had passed drastic laws against the money changers who
tried to make a profit out of other people’s money. In several chapters
of the Old Testament, written two thousand years later, we read how Moses
too had expressly forbidden his followers to lend money at exorbitant
rates of interest to any one except foreigners. Still later, the great
Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato, had given expression
to their great disapproval of money that was born of other money. The
Church fathers had been even more explicit upon this subject. All during
the Middle Ages the money lenders were held in profound contempt. Dante
even provided a special little alcove in his Hell for the exclusive
benefit of his banker friends.
Theoretically perhaps it could be proved that the pawnbroker and his
colleague, the man behind the “banco,” were undesirable citizens and
that the world would be better off without them. At the same time,
as soon as the world had ceased to be entirely agricultural, it was
found to be quite impossible to transact even the simplest business
operations without the use of credit. The money lender therefore had
become a necessary evil and the Jew, who (according to the views of the
Christians) was doomed to eternal damnation any way, was urged to occupy
himself with a trade which was necessary but which no respectable man
would touch.
In this way these unfortunate exiles were forced into certain unpleasant
trades which made them the natural enemy of both the rich and the poor,
and then, as soon as they had established themselves, these same enemies
turned against them, called them names, locked them up in the dirtiest
part of the city and in moments of great emotional stress, hanged them as
wicked unbelievers or burned them as renegade Christians.
It was all so terribly silly. And besides it was so stupid. These endless
annoyances and persecutions did not make the Jews any fonder of their
Christian neighbors. And as a direct result, a large volume of first-rate
intelligence was withdrawn from public circulation, thousands of bright
young fellows, who might have advanced the cause of commerce and science
and the arts, wasted their brains and energy upon the useless study of
certain old books filled with abstruse conundrums and hair-splitting
syllogisms and millions of helpless boys and girls were doomed to lead
stunted lives in stinking tenements, listening on the one hand to their
elders who told them that they were God’s chosen people who would surely
inherit the earth and all the wealth thereof, and on the other hand being
frightened to death by the curses of their neighbors who never ceased to
inform them that they were pigs and only fit for the gallows or the wheel.
To ask that people (any people) doomed to live under such adverse
circumstances shall retain a normal outlook upon life is to demand the
impossible.
Again and again the Jews were goaded into some desperate act by their
Christian compatriots and then, when white with rage, they turned upon
their oppressors, they were called “traitors” and “ungrateful villains”
and were subjected to further humiliations and restrictions. But these
restrictions had only one result. They increased the number of Jews who
had a grievance, turned the others into nervous wrecks and generally made
the Ghetto a ghastly abode of frustrated ambitions and pent-up hatreds.
Spinoza, because he was born in Amsterdam, escaped the misery which was
the birthright of most of his relatives. He went first of all to the
school maintained by his synagogue (appropriately called “the Tree of
Life”) and as soon as he could conjugate his Hebrew verbs was sent to the
learned Dr. Franciscus Appinius van den Ende, who was to drill him in
Latin and in the sciences.
Dr. Franciscus, as his name indicates, was of Catholic origin. Rumor had
it that he was a graduate of the University of Louvain and if one were to
believe the best informed deacons of the town, he was really a Jesuit in
disguise and a very dangerous person. This however was nonsense. Van den
Ende in his youth had actually spent a few years at a Catholic seminary.
But his heart was not in his work and he had left his native city of
Antwerp, had gone to Amsterdam and there had opened a private school of
his own.
He had such a tremendous flair for choosing the methods that would make
his pupils like their classical lessons, that heedless of the man’s
popish past, the Calvinistic burghers of Amsterdam willingly entrusted
their children to his care and were very proud of the fact that the
pupils of his school invariably out-hexametered and out-declined the
little boys of all other local academies.
Van den Ende taught little Baruch his Latin, but being an enthusiastic
follower of all the latest discoveries in the field of science and a
great admirer of Giordano Bruno, he undoubtedly taught the boy several
things which as a rule were not mentioned in an orthodox Jewish household.
For young Spinoza, contrary to the customs of the times, did not board
with the other boys, but lived at home. And he so impressed his family by
his profound learning that all the relations proudly pointed to him as
the little professor and liberally supplied him with pocket money. He
did not waste it upon tobacco. He used it to buy books on philosophy.
One author especially fascinated him.
That was Descartes.
René Descartes was a French nobleman born in that region between Tours
and Poitiers where a thousand years before the grandfather of Charlemagne
had stopped the Mohammedan conquest of Europe. Before he was ten years
old he had been sent to the Jesuits to be educated and he spent the next
decade making a nuisance of himself. For this boy had a mind of his own
and accepted nothing without “being shown.” The Jesuits are probably the
only people in the world who know how to handle such difficult children
and who can train them successfully without breaking their spirit.
The proof of the educational pudding is in the eating. If our modern
pedagogues would study the methods of Brother Loyola, we might have a few
Descartes of our own.
When he was twenty years old, René entered military service and went to
the Netherlands where Maurice of Nassau had so thoroughly perfected his
military system that his armies were the post-graduate school for all
ambitious young men who hoped to become generals. Descartes’ visit to
the headquarters of the Nassau prince was perhaps a little irregular.
A faithful Catholic taking service with a Protestant chieftain! It
sounds like high treason. But Descartes was interested in problems of
mathematics and artillery but not of religion or politics. Therefore
as soon as Holland had concluded a truce with Spain, he resigned his
commission, went to Munich and fought for a while under the banner of the
Catholic Duke of Bavaria.
But that campaign did not last very long. The only fighting of any
consequence then still going on was near La Rochelle, the city which the
Huguenots were defending against Richelieu. And so Descartes went back to
France that he might learn the noble art of siege-craft. But camp life
was beginning to pall upon him. He decided to give up a military career
and devote himself to philosophy and science.
He had a small income of his own. He had no desire to marry. His wishes
were few. He anticipated a quiet and happy life and he had it.
Why he chose Holland as a place of residence, I do not know. But it was
a country full of printers and publishers and bookshops and as long as
one did not openly attack the established form of government or religion,
the existing law on censorship remained a dead letter. Furthermore, as
he never learned a single word of the language of his adopted country (a
trick not difficult to a true Frenchman), Descartes was able to avoid
undesirable company and futile conversations and could give all of his
time (some twenty hours per day) to his own work.
This may seem a dull existence for a man who had been a soldier. But
Descartes had a purpose in life and it seems that he was perfectly
contented with his self-inflicted exile. He had during the course of
years become convinced that the world was still plunged in a profound
gloom of abysmal ignorance; that what was then being called science
had not even the remotest resemblance to true science, and that no
general progress would be possible until the whole ancient fabric of
error and falsehood had first of all been razed to the ground. No small
order, this. Descartes however was possessed of endless patience and at
the age of thirty he set to work to give us an entirely new system of
philosophy. Warming up to his task he added geometry and astronomy and
physics to his original program and he performed his task with such noble
impartiality of mind that the Catholics denounced him as a Calvinist and
the Calvinists cursed him for an atheist.
This clamor, if ever it reached him, did not disturb him in the least.
He quietly continued his researches and died peacefully in the city of
Stockholm, whither he had gone to talk philosophy with the Queen of
Sweden.
Among the people of the seventeenth century, Cartesianism (the name under
which his philosophies became known) made quite as much of a stir as
Darwinism was to make among the contemporaries of Queen Victoria. To be
a Cartesian in the year 1680 meant something terrible, something almost
indecent. It proclaimed one an enemy of the established order of society,
a Socinian, a low fellow who by his own confession had set himself apart
from the companionship of his respectable neighbors. This did not prevent
the majority of the intelligent classes from accepting Cartesianism as
readily and as eagerly as our grandfathers accepted Darwinism. But among
the orthodox Jews of Amsterdam, such subjects were never even mentioned.
Cartesianism was not mentioned in either Talmud or Torah. Hence it did
not exist. And when it became apparent that it existed just the same in
the mind of one Baruch de Spinoza, it was a foregone conclusion that said
Baruch de Spinoza would himself cease to exist as soon as the authorities
of the synagogue had been able to investigate the case and take official
action.
The Amsterdam synagogue had at that moment passed through a severe
crisis. When little Baruch was fifteen years old, another Portuguese
exile by the name of Uriel Acosta had arrived in Amsterdam, had forsworn
Catholicism, which he had accepted under a threat of death, and had
returned to the faith of his fathers. But this fellow Acosta had not been
an ordinary Jew. He was a gentleman accustomed to carry a feather in his
hat and a sword at his side. To him the arrogance of the Dutch rabbis,
trained in the German and Polish schools of learning, had come as a most
unpleasant surprise, and he had been too proud and too indifferent to
hide his opinions.
In a small community like that, such open defiance could not possibly be
tolerated. A bitter struggle had followed. On the one side a solitary
dreamer, half prophet, half hidalgo. On the other side the merciless
guardians of the law.
It had ended in tragedy.
First of all Acosta had been denounced to the local police as the author
of certain blasphemous pamphlets which denied the immortality of the
soul. This had got him into trouble with the Calvinist ministers. But
the matter had been straightened out and the charge had been dropped.
Thereupon the synagogue had excommunicated the stiff-necked rebel and had
deprived him of his livelihood.
For months thereafter the poor man had wandered through the streets
of Amsterdam until destitution and loneliness had driven him back to
his own flock. But he was not re-admitted until he had first of all
publicly apologized for his evil conduct and had then suffered himself
to be whipped and kicked by all the members of the congregation. These
indignities had unbalanced his mind. He had bought a pistol and had blown
his brains out.
This suicide had caused a tremendous lot of talk among the principal
citizens of Amsterdam. The Jewish community felt that it could not risk
the chance of another public scandal. When it became evident that the
most promising pupil of the “Tree of Life” had been contaminated by the
new heresies of Descartes, a direct attempt was made to hush things up.
Baruch was approached and was offered a fixed annual sum if he would give
his word that he would be good, would continue to show himself in the
synagogue and would not publish or say anything against the law.
Now Spinoza was the last man to consider such a compromise. He curtly
refused to do anything of the sort. In consequence whereof he was duly
read out of his own church according to that famous ancient Formula of
Damnation which leaves very little to the imagination and goes back all
the way to the days of Jericho to find the appropriate number of curses
and execrations.
As for the victim of these manifold maledictions, he remained quietly in
his room and read about the occurrence in next day’s paper. Even when an
attempt was made upon his life by an over zealous follower of the law, he
refused to leave town.
This came as a great blow to the prestige of the Rabbis who apparently
had invoked the names of Joshua and Elisha in vain and who saw themselves
publicly defied for the second time in less than half a dozen years. In
their anxiety they went so far as to make an appeal to the town hall.
They asked for an interview with the Burgomasters and explained that this
Baruch de Spinoza whom they had just expelled from their own church was
really a most dangerous person, an agnostic who refused to believe in God
and who therefore ought not to be tolerated in a respectable Christian
community like the city of Amsterdam.
Their lordships, after their pleasant habit, washed their hands of the
whole affair and referred the matter to a sub-committee of clergymen. The
sub-committee studied the question, discovered that Baruch de Spinoza had
done nothing that could be construed as an offense against the ordinances
of the town, and so reported to their lordships. At the same time
they considered it to be good policy for members of the cloth to stand
together and therefore they suggested that the Burgomasters ask this
young man, who seemed to be so very independent, to leave Amsterdam for a
couple of months and not to return until the thing had blown over.
From that moment on the life of Spinoza was as quiet and uneventful as
the landscape upon which he looked from his bedroom windows. He left
Amsterdam and hired a small house in the village of Rijnsberg near
Leiden. He spent his days polishing lenses for optical instruments and
at night he smoked his pipe and read or wrote as the spirit moved him.
He never married. There was rumor of a love affair between him and a
daughter of his former Latin teacher, van den Ende. But as the child was
ten years old when Spinoza left Amsterdam, this does not seem very likely.
He had several very loyal friends and at least twice a year they offered
to give him a pension that he might devote all his time to his studies.
He answered that he appreciated their good intentions but that he
preferred to remain independent and with the exception of an allowance
of eighty dollars a year from a rich young Cartesian, he never touched
a penny and spent his days in the respectable poverty of the true
philosopher.
He had a chance to become a professor in Germany, but he declined.
He received word that the illustrious King of Prussia would be happy
to become his patron and protector, but he answered nay and remained
faithful to the quiet routine of his pleasant exile.
After a number of years in Rijnsberg he moved to the Hague. He had never
been very strong and the particles of glass from his half-finished lenses
had affected his lungs.
He died quite suddenly and alone in the year 1677.
To the intense disgust of the local clergy, not less than six private
carriages belonging to prominent members of the court followed the
“atheist” to his grave. And when two hundred years later a statue was
unveiled to his memory, the police reserves had to be called out to
protect the participants in this solemn celebration against the fury of a
rowdy crowd of ardent Calvinists.
So much for the man. What about his influence? Was he merely another
of those industrious philosophers who fill endless books with endless
theories and speak a language which drove even Omar Khayyam to an
expression of exasperated annoyance?
No, he was not.
Neither did he accomplish his results by the brilliancy of his wit or the
plausible truth of his theories. Spinoza was great mainly by force of his
courage. He belonged to a race that knew only one law, a set of hard and
fast rules laid down for all times in the dim ages of a long forgotten
past, a system of spiritual tyranny created for the benefit of a class of
professional priests who had taken it upon themselves to interpret this
sacred code.
He lived in a world in which the idea of intellectual freedom was almost
synonymous with political anarchy.
He knew that his system of logic must offend both Jews and Gentiles.
But he never wavered.
He approached all problems as universal problems. He regarded them
without exception as the manifestation of an omnipresent will and
believed them to be the expression of an ultimate reality which would
hold good on Doomsday as it had held good at the hour of creation.
And in this way he greatly contributed to the cause of human tolerance.
Like Descartes before him, Spinoza discarded the narrow boundaries laid
down by the older forms of religion and boldly built himself a new system
of thought based upon the rocks of a million stars.
By so doing he made man what man had not been since the days of the
ancient Greeks and Romans, a true citizen of the universe.
CHAPTER XXII
THE NEW ZION
There was little reason to fear that the works of Spinoza would ever be
popular. They were as amusing as a text-book on trigonometry and few
people ever get beyond the first two or three sentences of any given
chapter.
It took a different sort of man to spread the new ideas among the mass of
the people.
In France the enthusiasm for private speculation and investigation had
come to an end as soon as the country had been turned into an absolute
monarchy.
In Germany the poverty and the horror which had followed in the wake of
the Thirty Years War had killed all personal initiative for at least two
hundred years.
During the second half of the seventeenth century, therefore, England was
the only one among the larger countries of Europe where further progress
along the lines of independent thought was still possible and the
prolonged quarrel between the Crown and Parliament was adding an element
of instability which proved to be of great help to the cause of personal
freedom.
First of all we must consider the English sovereigns. For years these
unfortunate monarchs had been between the devil of Catholicism and the
deep sea of Puritanism.
Their Catholic subjects (which included a great many faithful
Episcopalians with a secret leaning towards Rome) were forever clamoring
for a return to that happy era when the British kings had been vassals of
the pope.
Their Puritan subjects on the other hand, with one eye firmly glued upon
the example of Geneva, dreamed of the day when there should be no king at
all and England should be a replica of the happy commonwealth tucked away
in a little corner of the Swiss mountains.
But that was not all.
The men who ruled England were also kings of Scotland and their Scottish
subjects, when it came to religion, knew exactly what they wanted. And so
thoroughly were they convinced that they themselves were right that they
were firmly opposed to the idea of liberty of conscience. They thought
it wicked that other denominations should be suffered to exist and to
worship freely within the confines of their own Protestant land. And they
insisted not only that all Catholics and Anabaptists be exiled from the
British Isles but furthermore that Socinians, Arminians, Cartesians, in
short all those who did not share their own views upon the existence of a
living God, be hanged.
This triangle of conflicts, however, produced an unexpected result. It
forced the men who were obliged to keep peace between those mutually
hostile parties to be much more tolerant than they would have been
otherwise.
If both the Stuarts and Cromwell at different times of their careers
insisted upon equal rights for all denominations, and history tells
us they did, they were most certainly not animated by a love for
Presbyterians or High Churchmen, or vice versa. They were merely making
the best of a very difficult bargain. The terrible things which happened
in the colonies along the Bay of Massachusetts, where one sect finally
became all powerful, show us what would have been the fate of England if
any one of the many contending factions had been able to establish an
absolute dictatorship over the entire country.
Cromwell of course reached the point where he was able to do as he liked.
But the Lord Protector was a very wise man. He knew that he ruled by the
grace of his iron brigade and carefully avoided such extremes of conduct
or of legislation as would have forced his opponents to make common
cause. Beyond that, however, his ideas concerning tolerance did not go.
As for the abominable “atheists”—the aforementioned Socinians and
Arminians and Cartesians and other apostles of the divine right of the
individual human being, their lives were just as difficult as before.
Of course, the English “Libertines” enjoyed one enormous advantage. They
lived close to the sea. Only thirty-six hours of sickness separated them
from the safe asylum of the Dutch cities. As the printing shops of these
cities were turning out most of the contraband literature of southern
and western Europe, a trip across the North Sea really meant a voyage to
one’s publisher and gave the enterprising traveler a chance to gather in
his royalties and see what were the latest additions to the literature of
intellectual protest.
Among those who at one time or another availed themselves of this
convenient opportunity for quiet study and peaceful reflection, no one
has gained a more deserving fame than John Locke.
He was born in the same year as Spinoza. And like Spinoza (indeed like
most independent thinkers) he was the product of an essentially pious
household. The parents of Baruch were orthodox Jews. The parents of John
were orthodox Christians. Undoubtedly they both meant well by their
children when they trained them in the strict doctrines of their own
respective creeds. But such an education either breaks a boy’s spirit or
it turns him into a rebel. Baruch and John, not being the sort that ever
surrenders, gritted their teeth, left home and struck out for themselves.
At the age of twenty Locke went to Oxford and there for the first time
heard of Descartes. But among the dusty book-stalls of St. Catherine
Street he found certain other volumes that were much to his taste. For
example, there were the works of Thomas Hobbes.
An interesting figure, this former student of Magdalen College, a
restless person who had visited Italy and had held converse with Galileo,
who had exchanged letters with the great Descartes himself and who had
spent the greater part of his life on the continent, an exile from the
fury of the Puritans. Between times he had composed an enormous book
which contained all his ideas upon every conceivable subject and which
bore the inviting title of “Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a
Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil.”
This learned tome made its appearance when Locke was in his Sophomore
year. It was so outspoken upon the nature of princes, their rights
and most especially their duties, that even the most thorough going
Cromwellian must approve of it, and that many of Cromwell’s partisans
felt inclined to pardon this doubting Thomas who was a full-fledged
royalist yet exposed the royalist pretensions in a volume that weighed
not less than five pounds. Of course Hobbes was the sort of person whom
it has never been easy to classify. His contemporaries called him a
Latitudinarian. That meant that he was more interested in the ethics
of the Christian religion than in the discipline and the dogmas of the
Christian church and believed in allowing people a fair degree of
“latitude” in their attitude upon those questions which they regarded as
non-essential.
Locke had the same temperament as Hobbes. He too remained within the
Church until the end of his life but he was heartily in favor of a most
generous interpretation both of life and of faith. What was the use,
Locke and his friends argued, of ridding the country of one tyrant (who
wore a golden crown) if it only led up to a fresh abuse of power by
another tyrant (who wore a black slouch hat)? Why renounce allegiance
to one set of priests and then the next day accept the rule of another
set of priests who were fully as overbearing and arrogant as their
predecessors? Logic undoubtedly was on their side but such a point of
view could not possibly be popular among those who would have lost their
livelihood if the “latitude men” had been successful and had changed a
rigid social system into an ethical debating society?
And although Locke, who seems to have been a man of great personal charm,
had influential friends who could protect him against the curiosity of
the sheriffs, the day was soon to come when he would no longer be able to
escape the suspicion of being an atheist.
That happened in the fall of the year 1683, and Locke thereupon went
to Amsterdam. Spinoza had been dead for half a dozen years, but the
intellectual atmosphere of the Dutch capital continued to be decidedly
liberal and Locke was given a chance to study and write without the
slightest interference on the part of the authorities. He was an
industrious fellow and during the four years of his exile he composed
that famous “Letter on Tolerance” which makes him one of the heroes of
our little history. In this letter (which under the criticism of his
opponents grew into three letters) he flatly denied that the state had
the right to interfere with religion. The state, as Locke saw it (and
in this he was borne out by a fellow exile, a Frenchman by the name of
Pierre Bayle, who was living in Rotterdam at that time composing his
incredibly learned one-man encyclopedia), the state was merely a sort
of protective organization which a certain number of people had created
and continued to maintain for their mutual benefit and safety. Why such
an organization should presume to dictate what the individual citizens
should believe and what not—that was something which Locke and his
disciples failed to understand. The state did not undertake to tell them
what to eat or drink. Why should it force them to visit one church and
keep away from another?
The seventeenth century, as a result of the half-hearted victory of
Protestantism, was an era of strange religious compromises.
The peace of Westphalia which was supposed to make an end to all
religious warfare had laid down the principle that “all subjects
shall follow the religion of their ruler.” Hence in one six-by-nine
principality all citizens were Lutherans (because the local grand duke
was a Lutheran) and in the next they were all Catholics (because the
local baron happened to be a Catholic).
“If,” so Locke reasoned, “the State has the right to dictate to the
people concerning the future weal of their souls, then one-half of the
people are foreordained to perdition, for since both religions cannot
possibly be true (according to article I of their own catechisms) it
follows that those who are born on one side of a boundary line are bound
for Heaven and those who are born on the other side are bound for Hell
and in this way the geographical accident of birth decides one’s future
salvation.”
That Locke did not include Catholics in his scheme of tolerance is
regrettable, but understandable. To the average Britisher of the
seventeenth century Catholicism was not a form of religious conviction
but a political party which had never ceased to plot against the safety
of the English state, which had built Armadas and had bought barrels of
gun-powder with which to destroy the parliament of a supposedly friendly
nation.
Hence Locke refused to his Catholic opponents those rights which he was
willing to grant to the heathen in his colonies and asked that they
continue to be excluded from His Majesty’s domains, but solely on the
ground of their dangerous political activities and not because they
professed a different faith.
One had to go back almost sixteen centuries to hear such sentiments. Then
a Roman emperor had laid down the famous principle that religion was an
affair between the individual man and his God and that God was quite
capable of taking care of himself whenever he felt that his dignity had
been injured.
The English people who had lived and prospered through four changes
of government within less than sixty years were inclined to see the
fundamental truth of such an ideal of tolerance based upon common sense.
When William of Orange crossed the North Sea in the year 1688, Locke
followed him on the next ship, which carried the new Queen of England.
Henceforth he lived a quiet and uneventful existence and when he died at
the ripe old age of seventy-two he was known as a respectable author and
no longer feared as a heretic.
Civil war is a terrible thing but it has one great advantage. It clears
the atmosphere.
The political dissensions of the seventeenth century had completely
consumed the superfluous energy of the English nation and while the
citizens of other countries continued to kill each other for the sake
of the Trinity and prenatal damnation, religious persecution in Great
Britain came to an end. Now and then a too presumptuous critic of the
established church, like Daniel Defoe, might come into unpleasant contact
with the law, but the author of “Robinson Crusoe” was pilloried because
he was a humorist rather than an amateur theologian and because the
Anglo-Saxon race, since time immemorial, has felt an inborn suspicion of
irony. Had Defoe written a serious defense of tolerance, he would have
escaped with a reprimand. When he turned his attack upon the tyranny of
the church into a semi-humorous pamphlet entitled “The Shortest Way with
Dissenters,” he showed that he was a vulgar person without a decent sense
of the proprieties and one who deserved no better than the companionship
of the pickpockets of Newgate Prison.
Even then Defoe was fortunate that he had never extended his travels
beyond the confines of the British Isles. For intolerance having been
driven from the mother country had found a most welcome refuge in certain
of the colonies on the other side of the ocean. And this was due not so
much to the character of the people who had moved into these recently
discovered regions as to the fact that the new world offered infinitely
greater economic advantages than the old one.
In England itself, a small island so densely populated that it offered
standing room only to the majority of her people, all business would soon
have come to an end if the people had not been willing to practice the
ancient and honorable rule of “give and take.” But in America, a country
of unknown extent and unbelievable riches, a continent inhabited by a
mere handful of farmers and workmen, no such compromise was necessary.
And so it happened that a small communist settlement on the shores of
Massachusetts Bay could develop into such a stronghold of self-righteous
orthodoxy that the like of it had not been seen since the happy days
when Calvin exercised the functions of Chief of Police and Lord High
Executioner in western Switzerland.
The credit for the first permanent settlement in the chilly regions
of the Charles River usually goes to a small group of people who are
referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers. A Pilgrim, in the usual sense of
the word, is one who “journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious
devotion.” The passengers of the _Mayflower_ were not pilgrims in
that sense of the word. They were English bricklayers and tailors and
cord-wainers and blacksmiths and wheelwrights who had left their country
to escape certain of those hated “poperies” which continued to cling to
the worship in most of the churches around them.
First they had crossed the North Sea and had gone to Holland
where they arrived at a moment of great economic depression. Our
school-books continue to ascribe their desire for further travel to
their unwillingness to let their children learn the Dutch language and
otherwise to see them absorbed by the country of their adoption. It
seems very unlikely, however, that those simple folk were guilty of such
shocking ingratitude and purposely followed a most reprehensible course
of hyphenation. The truth is that most of the time they were forced to
live in the slums, that they found it very difficult to make a living
in an already over-populated country, and that they expected a better
revenue from tobacco planting in America than from wool-carding in
Leiden. Hence to Virginia they sailed, but having been thrown by adverse
currents and bad seamanship upon the shores of Massachusetts, they
decided to stay where they were rather than risk the horrors of another
voyage in their leaky tub.
But although they had now escaped the dangers of drowning and
seasickness, they were still in a highly perilous position. Most of them
came from small cities in the heart of England and had little aptitude
for a life of pioneering. Their communistic ideas were shattered by
the cold, their civic enthusiasm was chilled by the endless gales and
their wives and children were killed by an absence of decent food. And,
finally, the few who survived the first three winters, good-natured
people accustomed to the rough and ready tolerance of the home country,
were entirely swamped by the arrival of thousands of new colonists who
without exception belonged to a sterner and less compromising variety
of Puritan faith and who made Massachusetts what it was to remain for
several centuries, the Geneva on the Charles River.
Hanging on for dear life to their small stretch of land, forever on
the verge of disaster, they felt more than ever inclined to find an
excuse for everything they thought and did within the pages of the Old
Testament. Cut off from polite human society and books, they began to
develop a strange religious psyche of their own. In their own eyes they
had fallen heir to the traditions of Moses and Gideon and soon became
veritable Maccabees to their Indian neighbors of the west. They had
nothing to reconcile them to their lives of hardship and drudgery except
the conviction that they were suffering for the sake of the only true
faith. Hence their conclusion (easily arrived at) that all other people
must be wrong. Hence the brutal treatment of those who failed to share
their own views, who suggested by implication that the Puritan way of
doing and thinking was not the only right way. Hence the exclusion from
their country of all harmless dissenters who were either unmercifully
flogged and then driven into the wilderness or suffered the loss of their
ears and tongues unless they were fortunate enough to find a refuge in
one of the neighboring colonies which belonged to the Swedes and the
Dutch.
No, for the cause of religious freedom or tolerance, this colony
achieved nothing except in that roundabout and involuntary fashion
which is so common in the history of human progress. The very violence
of their religious despotism brought about a reaction in favor of a
more liberal policy. After almost two centuries of ministerial tyranny,
there arose a new generation which was the open and avowed enemy of all
forms of priest-rule, which believed profoundly in the desirability of
the separation of state and church and which looked askance upon the
ancestral admixture of religion and politics.
By a stroke of good luck this development came about very slowly and the
crisis did not occur until the period immediately before the outbreak of
hostilities between Great Britain and her American colonies. As a result,
the Constitution of the United States was written by men who were either
freethinkers or secret enemies of the old-fashioned Calvinism and who
incorporated into this document certain highly modern principles which
have proved of the greatest value in maintaining the peaceful balance of
our republic.
But ere this happened, the new world had experienced a most unexpected
development in the field of tolerance and curiously enough it took place
in a Catholic community, in that part of America now covered by the free
state of Maryland.
The Calverts, who were responsible for this interesting experiment, were
of Flemish origin, but the father had moved to England and had rendered
very distinguished services to the house of Stuart. Originally they had
been Protestants, but George Calvert, private secretary and general
utility man to King James I, had become so utterly disgusted with the
futile theological haggling of his contemporaries that he returned to the
old faith. Good, bad or indifferent, it called black, black and white,
white and did not leave the final settlement of every point of doctrine
to the discretion of a board of semi-literate deacons.
This George Calvert, so it seems, was a man of parts. His back-sliding (a
very serious offense in those days!) did not lose him the favor of his
royal master. On the contrary, he was made Baron Baltimore of Baltimore
and was promised every sort of assistance when he planned to establish a
little colony of his own for the benefit of persecuted Catholics. First,
he tried his luck in Newfoundland. But his settlers were frozen out of
house and home and his Lordship then asked for a few thousand square
miles in Virginia. The Virginians, however, staunchly Episcopalian, would
have naught of such dangerous neighbors and Baltimore then asked for a
slice of that wilderness which lay between Virginia and the Dutch and
Swedish possessions of the north. Ere he received his charter he died.
His son Cecil, however, continued the good work, and in the winter of
1633-1634 two little ships, the _Ark_ and the _Dove_, under command of
Leonard Calvert, brother to George, crossed the ocean, and in March of
1634 they safely landed their passengers on the shores of the Chesapeake
Bay. The new country was called Maryland. This was done in honor of Mary,
daughter of that French king, Henri IV, whose plans for a European League
of Nations had been cut short by the dagger of a crazy monk, and wife
to that English monarch who soon afterwards was to lose his head at the
hands of his Puritan subjects.
This extraordinary colony which did not exterminate its Indian neighbors
and offered equal opportunities to both Catholics and Protestants
passed through many difficult years. First of all it was overrun by
Episcopalians who tried to escape the fierce intolerance of the Puritans
in Massachusetts. Next it was invaded by Puritans who tried to escape the
fierce intolerance of the Episcopalians in Virginia. And the two groups
of fugitives, with the usual arrogance of that sort of people, tried hard
to introduce their own “correct form of worship” into the commonwealth
that had just offered them refuge. As “all disputes which might give rise
to religious passions” were expressly forbidden on Maryland territory,
the older colonists were entirely within their right when they bade both
Episcopalians and Puritans to keep the peace. But soon afterwards war
broke out in the home country between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads
and the Marylanders feared that, no matter who should win, they would
lose their old freedom. Hence, in April of the year 1649 and shortly
after news of the execution of Charles I had reached them, and at the
direct suggestion of Cecil Calvert, they passed their famous Act of
Tolerance which, among other things, contained this excellent passage:
“That since the coercion of conscience in the matter of religion has
often produced very harmful results in those communities in which it
was exercised, for the more tranquil and pacific government in this
province and for the better preservation of mutual love and unity among
its inhabitants, it is hereby decided that nobody in this province
who professes faith in Jesus Christ shall be disturbed, molested or
persecuted in any way for reasons respecting his religion or the free
exercise thereof.”
That such an act could be passed in a country in which the Jesuits
occupied a favorite position shows that the Baltimore family was
possessed of remarkable political ability and of more than ordinary
courage. How profoundly this generous spirit was appreciated by some of
their guests was shown in the same year when a number of Puritan exiles
overthrew the government of Maryland, abolished the Act of Tolerance and
replaced it by an “Act Concerning Religion” of their own which granted
full religious liberty to all those who declared themselves Christians
“with the exception of Catholics and Episcopalians.”
This period of reaction fortunately did not last long. In the year 1660
the Stuarts returned to power and once more the Baltimores reigned in
Maryland.
The next attack upon their policy came from the other side. The
Episcopalians gained a complete victory in the mother country and they
insisted that henceforth their church should be the official church of
all the colonies. The Calverts continued to fight but they found it
impossible to attract new colonists. And so, after a struggle which
lasted another generation, the experiment came to an end.
Protestantism triumphed.
So did intolerance.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE SUN KING
The eighteenth century is usually referred to as an era of despotism. And
in an age which believes in the dogma of democracy, despotism, however
enlightened, is not apt to be regarded as a desirable form of government.
Historians who mean well by the human race are very apt to point the
finger of scorn at that great monarch Louis XIV and ask us to draw our
own conclusions. When this brilliant sovereign came to the throne, he
inherited a country in which the forces of Catholicism and Protestantism
were so evenly balanced that the two parties, after a century of mutual
assassination (with the odds heavily in favor of the Catholics), had at
last concluded a definite peace and had promised to accept each other as
unwelcome but unavoidable neighbors and fellow citizens. The “perpetual
and irrevocable” Edict of Nantes of the year 1598 which contained the
terms of agreement, stated that the Catholic religion was the official
religion of the state but that the Protestants should enjoy complete
liberty of conscience and should not suffer any persecution on account
of their belief. They were furthermore allowed to build churches of
their own and to hold public office. And as a token of good faith,
the Protestants were allowed to hold two hundred fortified cities and
villages within the realm of France.
This, of course, was an impossible arrangement. The Huguenots were no
angels. To leave two hundred of the most prosperous cities and villages
of France in the hands of a political party which was the sworn enemy of
the government was quite as absurd as if we should surrender Chicago and
San Francisco and Philadelphia to the Democrats to make them accept a
Republican administration, or vice versa.
Richelieu, as intelligent a man as ever ruled a country, recognized this.
After a long struggle he deprived the Protestants of their political
power, but although a cardinal by profession, he scrupulously refrained
from any interference with their religious freedom. The Huguenots could
no longer conduct independent diplomatic negotiations with the enemies
of their own country, but otherwise they enjoyed the same privileges as
before and could sing psalms and listen to sermons or not as pleased them.
Mazarin, the next man to rule France in the real sense of the word, had
followed a similar policy. But he died in the year 1661. Then young Louis
XIV personally undertook to rule his domains, and there was an end to the
era of good will.
It seems most unfortunate that when this brilliant if disreputable
Majesty was forced for once in his life into the companionship of decent
people he should have fallen into the clutches of a good woman who was
also a religious fanatic. Françoise d’Aubigné, the widow of a literary
hack by the name of Scarron, had begun her career at the French court
as governess to the seven illegitimate children of Louis XIV and the
Marquise de Montespan. When that lady’s love philtres ceased to have the
desired effect and the King began to show occasional signs of boredom,
it was the governess who stepped into her shoes. Only she was different
from all her predecessors. Before she agreed to move into His Majesty’s
apartments, the Archbishop of Paris had duly solemnized her marriage to
the descendant of Saint Louis.
During the next twenty years the power behind the throne was therefore
in the hands of a woman who was completely dominated by her confessor.
The clergy of France had never forgiven either Richelieu or Mazarin for
their conciliatory attitude towards the Protestants. Now at last they had
a chance to undo the work of these shrewd statesmen and they went to it
with a will. For not only were they the official advisers of the Queen,
but they also became the bankers of the King.
That again is a curious story.
During the last eight centuries the monasteries had accumulated the
greater part of the wealth of France and as they paid no taxes in a
country which suffered perpetually from a depleted treasury, their
surplus wealth was of great importance. And His Majesty, whose glory
was greater than his credit, made a grateful use of this opportunity to
replenish his own coffers and in exchange for certain favors extended
to his clerical supporters he was allowed to borrow as much money as he
wanted.
In this way the different stipulations of the “irrevocable” Edict of
Nantes were one by one revoked. At first the Protestant religion was
not actually forbidden, but life for those who remained faithful to the
Huguenot cause was made exasperatingly uncomfortable. Whole regiments of
dragoons were turned loose upon those provinces where the false doctrines
were supposed to be most strongly entrenched. The soldiers were billeted
among the inhabitants with instructions to make themselves thoroughly
detestable. They ate the food and drank the wine and stole the forks and
spoons and broke the furniture and insulted the wives and daughters of
perfectly harmless citizens and generally behaved as if they were in a
conquered territory. When their poor hosts, in their despair, rushed to
the courts for some form of redress and protection, they were laughed at
for their trouble and were told that they had brought their misfortunes
upon their own heads and knew perfectly well how they could get rid of
their unwelcome guests and at the same time regain the good will of the
government.
A few, a very few, followed this suggestion and allowed themselves to be
baptized by the nearest village priest. But the vast majority of these
simple people remained faithful to the ideals of their childhood. At
last, however, when one after another their churches were closed and
their clergy were sent to the galleys, they began to understand that they
were doomed. Rather than surrender, they decided to go into exile. But
when they reached the frontier, they were told that no one was allowed
to leave the country, that those who were caught in the act were to be
hanged, and that those who aided and abetted such fugitives were liable
to be sent to the galleys for life.
There are apparently certain things which this world will never learn.
From the days of the Pharaohs to those of Lenin, all governments at one
time or another have tried the policy of “closing the frontier” and none
of them has ever been able to score a success.
People who want to get out so badly that they are willing to take all
sorts of risks can invariably find a way. Hundreds of thousands of French
Protestants took to the “underground route” and soon afterwards appeared
in London or Amsterdam or Berlin or Basel. Of course, such fugitives were
not able to carry much ready cash. But they were known everywhere as
honest and hard working merchants and artisans. Their credit was good
and their energy undiminished. After a few years they usually regained
that prosperity which had been their share in the old country and the
home government was deprived of a living economic asset of incalculable
value.
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes was the prelude to the French Revolution.
France had been and still was a very rich country. But commerce and
clericalism have never been able to coöperate.
From the moment that the French government surrendered to petticoats and
cassocks, her fate was sealed. The same pen that decreed the expulsion of
the Huguenots signed the death-warrant of Louis XVI.
CHAPTER XXIV
FREDERICK THE GREAT
The house of Hohenzollern has never been famous for its love of
popular forms of government. But ere the crazy strain of the Bavarian
Wittelsbachs had tainted this sober-minded family of bookkeepers and
overseers, they rendered some very useful service to the cause of
tolerance.
In part this was the result of a practical necessity. The Hohenzollerns
had fallen heir to the poorest part of Europe, a half-populated
wilderness of sand and forests. The Thirty Years War had left them
bankrupt. They needed both men and money to start in business once more
and they set out to get them, regardless of race, creed or previous
condition of servitude.
The father of Frederick the Great, a vulgarian with the manners of a
coal-heaver and the personal tastes of a bartender, could grow quite
tender when he was called upon to meet a delegation of foreign fugitives.
“The more the merrier,” was his motto in all matters pertaining to the
vital statistics of his kingdom and he collected the disinherited of all
nations as carefully as he collected the six-foot-three grenadiers of his
lifeguard.
His son was of a very different caliber, a highly civilized human being
who, having been forbidden by his father to study Latin and French, had
made a speciality of both languages and greatly preferred the prose of
Montaigne to the poetry of Luther and the wisdom of Epictetus of that
of the Minor Prophets. The Old Testament severity of his father (who
ordered the boy’s best friend to be decapitated in front of his window
so as to teach him a lesson in obedience) had not inclined his heart
toward those Judaean ideals of rectitude of which the Lutheran and
Calvinist ministers of his day were apt to speak with such great praise.
He came to regard all religion as a survival of prehistoric fear and
ignorance, a mood of subservience carefully encouraged by a small class
of clever and unscrupulous fellows who knew how to make good use of
their own pre-eminent position by living pleasantly at the expense of
their neighbors. He was interested in Christianity and even more so in
the person of Christ himself, but he approached the subject by way of
Locke and Socinius and as a result he was, in religious matters at least,
a very broad minded person, and could truly boast that in his country
“every one could find salvation after his own fashion.”
This clever saying he made the basis for all his further experiments
along the line of Tolerance. For example, he decreed that all religions
were good as long as those who professed them were upright people who led
decent, law-abiding lives; that therefore all creeds must enjoy equal
rights and the state must never interfere in religious questions, but
must content herself with playing policeman and keeping the peace between
the different denominations. And because he truly believed this, he asked
nothing of his subjects except that they be obedient and faithful and
leave the final judgment of their thoughts and deeds “to Him alone who
knew the conscience of men” and of whom he (the King) did not venture to
form so small an opinion as to believe him to be in need of that human
assistance which imagines that it can further the divine purpose by the
exercise of violence and cruelty.
In all these ideas, Frederick was a couple of centuries ahead of his day.
His contemporaries shook their heads when the king gave his Catholic
subjects a piece of land that they might build themselves a church right
in the heart of his capital. They began to murmur ominous words of
warning when he made himself the protector of the Jesuit order, which
had just been driven out of most Catholic countries, and they definitely
ceased to regard him as a Christian when he claimed that ethics and
religion had nothing to do with each other and that each man could
believe whatever he pleased as long as he paid his taxes and served his
time in the army.
Because at that time they happened to live within the boundaries of
Prussia, these critics held their peace, for His Majesty was a master
of epigram and a witty remark on the margin of a royal rescript could
do strange things to the career of those who in some way or another had
failed to please him.
The fact however remains that it was the head of an unlimited monarchy,
an autocrat of thirty years’ standing, who gave Europe a first taste of
almost complete religious liberty.
In this distant corner of Europe, Protestant and Catholic and Jew and
Turk and Agnostic enjoyed for the first time in their lives equal rights
and equal prerogatives. Those who preferred to wear red coats could not
lord it over their neighbors who preferred to wear green coats, and vice
versa. And the people who went back for their spiritual consolation to
Nicaea were forced to live in peace and amity with others who would as
soon have supped with the Devil as with the Bishop of Rome.
That Frederick was entirely pleased with the outcome of his labors, that
I rather doubt. When he felt his last hour approaching, he sent for his
faithful dogs. They seemed better company in this supreme hour than the
members of “the so-called human race.” (His Majesty was a columnist of no
mean ability.)
And so he died, another Marcus Aurelius who had strayed into the wrong
century and who, like his great predecessor, left a heritage which was
entirely too good for his successors.
CHAPTER XXV
VOLTAIRE
In this day and age we hear a great deal of talk about the nefarious
labors of the press agent and many good people denounce “publicity”
as an invention of the modern devil of success, a new-fangled and
disreputable method of attracting attention to a person or to a cause.
But this complaint is as old as the hills. Events of the past, when
examined without prejudice, completely contradict the popular notion that
publicity is something of recent origin.
The prophets of the Old Testament, both major and minor, were
past-masters in the art of attracting a crowd. Greek history and Roman
history are one long succession of what we people of the journalistic
profession call “publicity stunts.” Some of that publicity was dignified.
A great deal of it was of so patent and blatant a nature that today even
Broadway would refuse to fall for it.
Reformers like Luther and Calvin fully understood the tremendous value of
carefully pre-arranged publicity. And we cannot blame them. They were not
the sort of men who could be happy growing humbly by the side of the road
like the blushing daisies. They were very much in earnest. They wanted
their ideas to live. How could they hope to succeed without attracting a
crowd of followers?
A Thomas à Kempis can become a great moral influence by spending eighty
years in a quiet corner of a monastery, for such long voluntary exile,
if duly advertised (as it was), becomes an excellent selling point and
makes people curious to see the little book which was born of a lifetime
of prayer and meditation. But a Francis of Assisi or a Loyola, who hope
to see some tangible results of their work while they are still on this
planet, must willy-nilly resort to methods now usually associated with a
circus or a new movie star.
Christianity lays great stress upon modesty and praises those who are
humble of spirit. But the sermon which extols these virtues was delivered
under circumstances which have made it a subject of conversation to this
very day.
No wonder that those men and women who were denounced as the arch enemies
of the Church took a leaf out of the Holy Book and resorted to certain
rather obvious methods of publicity when they began their great fight
upon the spiritual tyranny which held the western world in bondage.
I offer this slight explanation because Voltaire, the greatest of all
virtuosos in the field of free advertisement, has very often been blamed
for the way in which he sometimes played upon the tom-tom of public
consciousness. Perhaps he did not always show the best of good taste. But
those whose lives he saved may have felt differently about it.
And furthermore, just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating,
the success or failure of a man like Voltaire should be measured by
the services he actually rendered to his fellow-men and not by his
predilection for certain sorts of dressing-gowns, jokes and wall-paper.
In an outburst of justifiable pride this strange creature once said,
“What of it if I have no scepter? I have got a pen.” And right he was.
He had a pen. Any number of pens. He was the born enemy of the goose
and used more quills than two dozen ordinary writers. He belonged to
that class of literary giants who all alone and under the most adverse
circumstances can turn out as much copy as an entire syndicate of modern
sport writers. He scribbled on the tables of dirty country inns. He
composed endless hexameters in the chilly guest-rooms of lonely country
houses. His scrawls littered the floors of dingy boarding-houses in
Greenwich. He spattered ink upon the carpets of the royal Prussian
residence and used reams of the private stationery which bore the
monogram of the governor of the Bastille. Before he had ceased to play
with a hoop and marbles, Ninon de Lenclos had presented him with a
considerable sum of pocket-money that he might “buy some books,” and
eighty years later, in the self-same town of Paris, we hear him ask for
a pad of foolscap and unlimited coffee that he may finish yet one more
volume before the inevitable hour of darkness and rest.
His tragedies, however, and his stories, his poetry and his treatises
upon philosophy and physics, do not entitle him to an entire chapter of
this book. He wrote no better verses than half a hundred other sonneteers
of that era. As a historian he was both unreliable and dull, while his
ventures in the realm of science were no better than the sort of stuff we
find in the Sunday papers.
But as the brave and unyielding enemy of all that was stupid and narrow
and bigoted and cruel, he wielded an influence which has endured until
the beginning of the Great Civil War of the year 1914.
The age in which he lived was a period of extremes. On the one hand, the
utter selfishness and corruption of a religious, social and economic
system which had long since outlived its usefulness. On the other side,
a large number of eager but overzealous young men and young women ready
to bring about a millennium which was based upon nothing more substantial
than their good intentions. A humorous fate dropped this pale and sickly
son of an inconspicuous notary public into this maelstrom of sharks and
pollywogs, and bade him sink or swim. He preferred to swim and struck
out for shore. The methods he employed during his long struggle with
adverse circumstances were often of a questionable nature. He begged and
flattered and played the clown. But this was in the days before royalties
and literary agents. And let the author who never wrote a potboiler throw
the first stone!
Not that Voltaire would have been greatly worried by a few additional
bricks. During a long and busy life devoted to warfare upon stupidity,
he had experienced too many defeats to worry about such trifles as a
public beating or a couple of well aimed banana peels. But he was a man
of indomitable good cheer. If today he must spend his leisure hours in
His Majesty’s prison, tomorrow he may find himself honored with a high
titulary position at the same court from which he has just been banished.
And if all his life he is obliged to listen to angry village priests
denouncing him as the enemy of the Christian religion, isn’t there
somewhere in a cupboard filled with old love letters that beautiful medal
presented to him by the Pope to prove that he can gain the approbation of
Holy Church as well as her disapproval?
It was all in the day’s work.
Meanwhile he fully intended to enjoy himself hugely and crowd his days
and weeks and months and years with a strange and colorful assortment of
the most variegated experiences.
By birth Voltaire belonged to the better middle class. His father was
what for the lack of a better term we might call a sort of private trust
company. He was the confidential handy-man of a number of rich nobles
and looked after their legal and financial interests. Young Arouet (for
that was the family name) was therefore accustomed to a society a little
better than that of his own people, something which later in life gave
him a great advantage over most of his literary rivals. His mother was
a certain Mademoiselle d’Aumard. She had been a poor girl who did not
bring her husband a cent of dowry. But she was possessed of that small
“d’” which all Frenchmen of the middle classes (and all Europeans in
general and a few Americans in particular) regard with humble awe, and
her husband thought himself pretty lucky to win such a prize. As for the
son, he also basked in the reflected glory of his ennobled grandparents
and as soon as he began to write, he exchanged the plebeian François
Marie Arouet for the more aristocratic François Marie de Voltaire, but
how and where he hit upon this surname is still a good deal of a mystery.
He had a brother and a sister. The sister, who took care of him after
his mother’s death, he loved very sincerely. The brother, on the other
hand, a faithful priest of the Jansenist denomination, full of zeal and
rectitude, bored him to distraction and was one of the reasons why he
spent as little time as possible underneath the paternal shingles.
Father Arouet was no fool and soon discovered that his little “Zozo”
promised to be a handful. Wherefore he sent him to the Jesuits that he
might become versed in Latin hexameters and Spartan discipline. The good
fathers did their best by him. They gave their spindly-legged pupil a
sound training in the rudiments of both the dead and living tongues. But
they found it impossible to eradicate a certain bump of “queerness”
which from the very beginning had set this child apart from the other
scholars.
At the age of seventeen they willingly let him go, and to please his
father, young François then took up the study of the law. Unfortunately
one could not read all day long. There were the long hours of the
lazy evenings. These hours François whiled away either writing funny
little pieces for the local newspapers or reading his latest literary
compositions to his cronies in the nearest coffee-house. Two centuries
ago such a life was generally believed to lead straight to perdition.
Father Arouet fully appreciated the danger his son was running. He went
to one of his many influential friends and obtained for M. François a
position as secretary to the French Legation at the Hague. The Dutch
capital, then as now, was exasperatingly dull. Out of sheer boredom
Voltaire began a love affair with the not particularly attractive
daughter of a terrible old woman who was a society reporter. The lady,
who hoped to marry her darling to a more promising party, rushed to the
French minister and asked him to please remove this dangerous Romeo
before the whole city knew about the scandal. His Excellency had troubles
enough of his own and was not eager for more. He bundled his secretary
into the next stage-coach for Paris and François, without a job, once
more found himself at the mercy of his father.
In this emergency Maître Arouet bethought himself of an expedient which
was often used by such Frenchmen as had a friend at court. He asked and
obtained a “lettre de cachet” and placed his son before the choice of
enforced leisure in a jail or industrious application in a law-school.
The son said that he would prefer the latter and promised that he would
be a model of industry and application. He was as good as his word and
applied himself to the happy life of a free lance pamphleteer with such
industry that the whole town talked about it. This was not according to
the agreement with his papa and the latter was entirely within his rights
when he decided to send his son away from the flesh-pots of the Seine and
packed him off to a friend in the country, where the young man was to
remain for a whole year.
There, with twenty-four hours leisure each day of the week (Sundays
included) Voltaire began the study of letters in all seriousness and
composed the first of his plays. After twelve months of fresh air and a
very healthy monotony, he was allowed to return to the scented atmosphere
of the capital and at once made up for lost time by a series of lampoons
upon the Regent, a nasty old man who deserved all that was said about him
but did not like this publicity the least little bit. Hence, a second
period of exile in the country, followed by more scribbling and at last
a short visit to the Bastille. But prison in those days, that is to say,
prison for young gentlemen of Voltaire’s social prominence, was not a bad
place. One was not allowed to leave the premises but otherwise did pretty
much as one pleased. And it was just what Voltaire needed. A lonely cell
in the heart of Paris gave him a chance to do some serious work. When
he was released, he had finished several plays and these were performed
with such tremendous success that one of them broke all records of the
eighteenth century and ran for forty-five nights in succession.
This brought him some money (which he needed badly) but it also
established his reputation as a wit, a most unfortunate thing for a
young man who still has to make his career. For hereafter he was held
responsible for every joke that enjoyed a few hours’ popularity on
the boulevards and in the coffee-houses. And incidentally it was the
reason why he went to England and took a post-graduate course in liberal
statesmanship.
It happened in the year 1725. Voltaire had (or had not) been funny about
the old but otherwise useless family of de Rohan. The Chevalier de Rohan
felt that his honor had been assailed and that something must be done
about it. Of course, it was impossible for a descendant of the ancient
rulers of Brittany to fight a duel with the son of a notary public and
the Chevalier delegated the work of revenge to his flunkeys.
One night Voltaire was dining with the Duc de Sully, one of his father’s
customers, when he was told that some one wished to speak to him outside.
He went to the door, was fallen upon by the lackeys of my Lord de Rohan
and was given a sound beating. The next day the story was all over the
town. Voltaire, even on his best days, looked like the caricature of
a very ugly little monkey. What with his eyes blackened and his head
bandaged, he was a fit subject for half a dozen popular reviews. Only
something very drastic could save his reputation from an untimely death
at the hands of the comic papers. And as soon as raw beefsteak had done
its work, M. de Voltaire sent his witnesses to M. le Chevalier de Rohan
and began his preparation for mortal combat by an intensive course in
fencing.
Alas! when the morning came for the great fight, Voltaire once more found
himself behind the bars. De Rohan, a cad unto the last, had given the
duel away to the police, and the battling scribe remained in custody
until, provided with a ticket for England, he was sent traveling in
a northwestern direction and was told not to return to France until
requested to do so by His Majesty’s gendarmes.
Four whole years Voltaire spent in and near London. The British kingdom
was not exactly a Paradise, but compared to France, it was a little bit
of Heaven.
A royal scaffold threw its shadow over the land. The thirtieth of January
of the year 1649 was a date remembered by all those in high places. What
had happened to sainted King Charles might (under slightly modified
circumstances) happen to any one else who dared to set himself above
the law. And as for the religion of the country, of course the official
church of the state was supposed to enjoy certain lucrative and agreeable
advantages, but those who preferred to worship elsewhere were left in
peace and the direct influence of the clerical officials upon the affairs
of state was, compared to France, almost negligible. Confessed Atheists
and certain bothersome non-conformists might occasionally succeed in
getting themselves into jail, but to a subject of King Louis XV the
general condition of life in England must have seemed wellnigh perfect.
In 1729, Voltaire returned to France, but although he was permitted to
live in Paris, he rarely availed himself of that privilege. He was like
a scared animal, willing to accept bits of sugar from the hands of his
friends, but forever on the alert and ready to escape at the slightest
sign of danger. He worked very hard. He wrote prodigiously and with a
sublime disregard for dates and facts, and choosing for himself subjects
which ran all the way from Lima, Peru, to Moscow, Russia, he composed a
series of such learned and popular histories, tragedies and comedies that
at the age of forty he was by far the most successful man of letters of
his time.
Followed another episode which was to bring him into contact with a
different kind of civilization.
In distant Prussia, good King Frederick, yawning audibly among the yokels
of his rustic court, sadly pined for the companionship of a few amusing
people. He felt a tremendous admiration for Voltaire and for years he had
tried to induce him to come to Berlin. But to a Frenchman of the year
1750 such a migration seemed like moving into the wilds of Virginia and
it was not until Frederick had repeatedly raised the ante that Voltaire
at last condescended to accept.
He traveled to Berlin and the fight was on. Two such hopeless egotists
as the Prussian king and the French playwright could not possibly hope
to live under one and the same roof without coming to hate each other.
After two years of sublime disagreement, a violent quarrel about nothing
in particular drove Voltaire back to what he felt inclined to call
“civilization.”
But he had learned another useful lesson. Perhaps he was right, and the
French poetry of the Prussian king was atrocious. But His Majesty’s
attitude upon the subject of religious liberty left nothing to be desired
and that was more than could be said of any other European monarch.
And when at the age of almost sixty Voltaire returned to his native
land, he was in no mood to accept the brutal sentences by which the
French courts tried to maintain order without some very scathing words of
protest. All his life he had been greatly angered by man’s unwillingness
to use that divine spark of intelligence which the Lord on the sixth
day of creation had bestowed upon the most sublime product of His
handiwork. He (Voltaire) hated and loathed stupidity in every shape, form
and manner. The “infamous enemy” against whom he directed most of his
anger and whom, Cato-like, he was forever threatening to demolish, this
“infamous enemy” was nothing more or less than the lazy stupidity of the
mass of the people who refused to think for themselves as long as they
had enough to eat and to drink and a place to sleep.
From the days of his earliest childhood he had felt himself pursued by a
gigantic machine which seemed to move through sheer force of lethargy and
combined the cruelty of Huitzilopochtli with the relentless persistency
of Juggernaut. To destroy or at least upset this contraption become the
obsession of his old years, and the French government, to give this
particular devil his due, ably assisted him in his efforts by providing
the world with a choice collection of legal scandals.
The first one occurred in the year 1761.
In the town of Toulouse in the southern part of France there lived a
certain Jean Calas, a shop-keeper and a Protestant. Toulouse had always
been a pious city. No Protestant was there allowed to hold office or
to be a doctor or a lawyer, a bookseller or a midwife. No Catholic was
permitted to keep a Protestant servant. And on August 23rd and 24th
of each year the entire community celebrated the glorious anniversary
of the massacre of St. Bartholomew with a solemn feast of praise and
thanksgiving.
Notwithstanding these many disadvantages, Calas had lived all his life in
complete harmony with his neighbors. One of his sons had turned Catholic,
but the father had continued to be on friendly terms with the boy and
had let it be known that as far as he was concerned, his children were
entirely free to choose whatever religion pleased them best.
But there was a skeleton in the Calas closet. That was Marc Antony, the
oldest son. Marc was an unfortunate fellow. He wanted to be a lawyer but
that career was closed to Protestants. He was a devout Calvinist and
refused to change his creed. The mental conflict had caused an attack
of melancholia and this in time seemed to prey upon the young man’s
mind. He began to entertain his father and mother with long recitations
of Hamlet’s well known soliloquy. He took long solitary walks. To his
friends he often spoke of the superior advantages of suicide.
This went on for some time and then one night, while the family was
entertaining a friend, the poor boy slipped into his father’s storeroom,
took a piece of packing rope and hanged himself from the doorpost.
There his father found him a few hours later, his coat and vest neatly
folded upon the counter.
The family was in despair. In those days the body of a person who had
committed suicide was dragged nude and face downward through the streets
of the town and was hanged on a gibbet outside the gate to be eaten by
the birds.
The Calas were respectable folks and hated to think of such a disgrace.
They stood around and talked of what they ought to do and what they were
going to do until one of the neighbors, hearing the commotion, sent
for the police, and the scandal spreading rapidly, their street was
immediately filled with an angry crowd which loudly clamored for the
death of old Calas “because he had murdered his son to prevent him from
becoming a Catholic.”
In a little town all things are possible and in a provincial nest of
eighteenth century France, with boredom like a black funeral pall hanging
heavily upon the entire community, the most idiotic and fantastic yarns
were given credence with a sigh of profound and eager relief.
The high magistrates, fully aware of their duty under such suspicious
circumstances, at once arrested the entire family, their guests and
their servants and every one who had recently been seen in or near the
Calas home. They dragged their prisoners to the town hall, put them in
irons and threw them into the dungeons provided for the most desperate
criminals. The next day they were examined. All of them told the same
story. How Marc Antony had come into the house in his usual spirits, how
he had left the room, how they thought that he had gone for one of his
solitary walks, etc., etc.
By this time, however, the clergy of the town of Toulouse had taken
a hand in the matter and with their help the dreadful news of this
bloodthirsty Huguenot, who had killed one of his own children because he
was about to return to the true faith, had spread far and wide throughout
the land of Languedoc.
Those familiar with modern methods of detecting crime might think that
the authorities would have spent that day inspecting the scene of the
murder. Marc Antony enjoyed quite a reputation as an athlete. He was
twenty-eight and his father was sixty-three. The chances of the father
having hanged his son from his own doorpost without a struggle were
small indeed. But none of the town councilors bothered about such little
details. They were too busy with the body of the victim. For Marc Antony,
the suicide, had by now assumed the dignity of a martyr and for three
weeks his corpse was kept at the town hall and thereupon it was most
solemnly buried by the White Penitents who for some mysterious reason had
made the defunct Calvinist an ex-officio member of their own order and
who conducted his embalmed remains to the Cathedral with the circumstance
and the pomp usually reserved for an archbishop or an exceedingly rich
patron of the local Basilica.
During these three weeks, from every pulpit in town, the good people of
Toulouse had been urged to bring whatever testimony they could against
the person of Jean Calas and his family and finally, after the case had
been thoroughly thrashed out in the public press, and five months after
the suicide, the trial began.
One of the judges in a moment of great lucidity suggested that the shop
of the old man be visited to see whether such a suicide as he described
would have been possible, but he was overridden and with twelve votes
against one, Calas was sentenced to be tortured and to be broken on the
wheel.
He was taken to the torture room and was hanged by his wrists until his
feet were a meter from the ground. Then his body was stretched until the
limbs were “drawn from their sockets.” (I am copying from the official
report.) As he refused to confess to a crime which he had not committed,
he was then taken down and was forced to swallow such vast quantities of
water that his body had soon “swollen to twice its natural size.” As he
persisted in his diabolical refusal to confess his guilt, he was placed
on a tumbril and was dragged to the place of execution where his arms
and legs were broken in two places by the executioner. During the next
two hours, while he lay helpless on the block, magistrates and priests
continued to bother him with their questions. With incredible courage the
old man continued to proclaim his innocence. Until the chief justice,
exasperated by such obstinate lying, gave him up as a hopeless case and
ordered him to be strangled to death.
The fury of the populace had by this time spent itself and none of the
other members of the family were killed. The widow, deprived of all her
goods, was allowed to go into retirement and starve as best she could in
the company of her faithful maid. As for the children, they were sent to
different convents with the exception of the youngest who had been away
at school at Nîmes at the time of his brother’s suicide and who had
wisely fled to the territory of the sovereign city of Geneva.
The case had attracted a great deal of attention. Voltaire in his castle
of Ferney (conveniently built near the frontier of Switzerland so that a
few minutes’ walk could carry him to foreign ground) heard of it but at
first refused to be interested. He was forever at loggerheads with the
Calvinist ministers of Geneva who regarded his private little theater
which stood within sight of their own city as a direct provocation and
the work of Satan. Hence Voltaire, in one of his supercilious moods,
wrote that he could not work up any enthusiasm for this so-called
Protestant martyr, for if the Catholics were bad, how much worse those
terribly bigoted Huguenots, who boycotted his plays! Besides, it
seemed impossible to him (as to a great many other people) that twelve
supposedly respectable judges would have condemned an innocent man to
such a terrible death without very good reason.
But a few days later the sage of Ferney, who kept open house to all
comers and no questions asked, had a visit from an honest merchant from
Marseilles who had happened to be in Toulouse at the time of the trial
and who was able to give him some first-hand information. Then at last he
began to understand the horror of the crime that had been committed and
from that moment on he could think of nothing else.
There are many sorts of courage, but a special order of merit is reserved
for those rare souls who, practically alone, dare to face the entire
established order of society and who loudly cry for justice when the high
courts of the land have pronounced sentence and when the community at
large has accepted their verdict as equitable and just.
Voltaire well knew the storm that would break if he should dare to
accuse the court of Toulouse of a judicial murder, and he prepared
his case as carefully as if he had been a professional attorney. He
interviewed the Calas boy who had escaped to Geneva. He wrote to every
one who could possibly know something of the inside of the case. He hired
counsel to examine and if possible to correct his own conclusions, lest
his anger and his indignation carry him away. And when he felt sure of
his ground, he opened his campaign.
First of all he induced every man of some influence whom he knew within
the realm of France (and he knew most of them) to write to the Chancellor
of the Kingdom and ask for a revision of the Calas case. Then he set
about to find the widow and as soon as she had been located, he ordered
her to be brought to Paris at his own expense and engaged one of the
best known lawyers to look after her. The spirit of the woman had been
completely broken. She vaguely prayed that she might get her daughters
out of the convent before she died. Beyond that, her hopes did not extend.
Then he got into communication with the other son who was a Catholic,
made it possible for him to escape from his school and to join him in
Geneva. And finally he published all the facts in a short pamphlet
entitled “Original Documents Concerning the Calas Family,” which
consisted of letters written by the survivors of the tragedy and
contained no reference whatsoever to Voltaire himself.
Afterwards, too, during the revision of the case, he remained carefully
behind the scenes, but so well did he handle his publicity campaign that
soon the cause of the Calas family was the cause of all families in all
countries of Europe and that thousands of people everywhere (including
the King of England and the Empress of Russia) contributed to the funds
that were being raised to help the defense.
Eventually Voltaire gained his victory, but not until he had fought one
of the most desperate battle of his entire career.
The throne of France just then was occupied by Louis XV of unsavory
memory. Fortunately his mistress hated the Jesuits and all their works
(including the Church) with a most cordial hatred and was therefore
on the side of Voltaire. But the King loved his ease above all other
things and was greatly annoyed at all the fuss made about an obscure and
dead Protestant. And of course as long as His Majesty refused to sign a
warrant for a new trial, the Chancellor would not take action, and as
long as the Chancellor would not take action, the tribunal of Toulouse
was perfectly safe and so strong did they feel themselves that they
defied public opinion in a most high-handed fashion and refused to let
Voltaire or his lawyers have access to the original documents upon which
they had based their conviction.
During nine terrible months, Voltaire kept up his agitation until finally
in March of the year 1765 the Chancellor ordered the Tribunal of Toulouse
to surrender all the records in the Calas case and moved that there be
a new trial. The widow of Jean Calas and her two daughters, who had at
last been returned to their mother, were present in Versailles when this
decision was made public. A year later the special court which had been
ordered to investigate the appeal reported that Jean Calas had been done
to death for a crime which he had not committed. By herculean efforts the
King was induced to bestow a small gift of money upon the widow and her
children. Furthermore the magistrates who had handled the Calas case were
deprived of their office and it was politely suggested to the people of
Toulouse that such a thing must not happen again.
But although the French government might take a lukewarm view of the
incident, the people of France had been stirred to the very depths of
their outraged souls. And suddenly Voltaire became aware that this was
not the only miscarriage of justice on record, that there were many
others who had suffered as innocently as Calas.
In the year 1760 a Protestant country squire of the neighborhood of
Toulouse had offered the hospitality of his house to a visiting Calvinist
minister. For this hideous crime he had been deprived of his estate and
had been sent to the galleys for life. He must have been a terribly
strong man for thirteen years later he was still alive. Then Voltaire was
told of his plight. He set to work, got the unfortunate man away from
the galleys, brought him to Switzerland where his wife and children were
being supported by public charity and looked after the family until the
crown was induced to surrender a part of the confiscated property and the
family were given permission to return to their deserted homestead.
Next came the case of Chaumont, a poor devil who had been caught at
an open-air meeting of Protestants and who for that crime had been
dispatched to the galleys for an indeterminate period, but who now, at
the intercession of Voltaire, was set free.
These cases, however, were merely a sort of grewsome hors d’œuvre to what
was to follow.
Once more the scene was laid in Languedoc, that long suffering part of
France which after the extermination of the Albigensian and Waldensian
heretics had been left a wilderness of ignorance and bigotry.
In a village near Toulouse there lived an old Protestant by the name of
Sirven, a most respectable citizen who made a living as an expert in
medieval law, a lucrative position at a time when the feudal judicial
system had grown so complicated that ordinary rent-sheets looked like an
income tax blank.
Sirven had three daughters. The youngest was a harmless idiot, much given
to brooding. In March of the year 1764 she left her home. The parents
searched far and wide but found no trace of the child until a few days
later when the bishop of the district informed the father that the girl
had visited him, had expressed a desire to become a nun and was now in a
convent.
Centuries of persecution had successfully broken the spirit of the
Protestants in that part of France. Sirven humbly answered that
everything undoubtedly would be for the best in this worst of all
possible worlds and meekly accepted the inevitable. But in the
unaccustomed atmosphere of the cloister, the poor child had soon lost the
last vestiges of reason and when she began to make a nuisance of herself,
she was returned to her own people. She was then in a state of terrible
mental depression and in such continual horror of voices and spooks that
her parents feared for her life. A short time afterwards she once more
disappeared. Two weeks later her body was fished out of an old well.
At that time Jean Calas was up for trial and the people were in a mood
to believe anything that was said against a Protestant. The Sirvens,
remembering what had just happened to innocent Jean Calas, decided not
to court a similar fate. They fled and after a terrible trip through
the Alps, during which one of their grandchildren froze to death, they
at last reached Switzerland. They had not left a moment too soon. A few
months later, both the father and the mother were found guilty (in their
absence) of the crime of having murdered their child and were ordered
to be hanged. The daughters were condemned to witness the execution of
their parents and thereafter to be banished for life.
A friend of Rousseau brought the case to the notice of Voltaire and as
soon as the Calas affair came to an end, he turned his attention to the
Sirvens. The wife meanwhile had died. Remained the duty of vindicating
the husband. It took exactly seven years to do this. Once again the
tribunal of Toulouse refused to give any information or to surrender
any documents. Once more Voltaire had to beat the tom-tom of publicity
and beg money from Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia and
Poniatowski of Poland before he could force the crown to take an
interest. But finally, in the seventy-eighth year of his own life and in
the eighth year of this interminable lawsuit, the Sirvens were exonerated
and the survivors were allowed to go back to their homes.
So ended the second case.
The third one followed immediately.
In the month of August of the year 1765 in the town of Abbeville, not far
from Amiens, two crucifixes that stood by the side of the road were found
broken to pieces by an unknown hand. Three young boys were suspected
of this sacrilege and orders were given for their arrest. One of them
escaped and went to Prussia. The others were caught. Of these, the older
one, a certain Chevalier de la Barre, was suspected of being an atheist.
A copy of the Philosophical Dictionary, that famous work to which all the
great leaders of liberal thought had contributed, was found among his
books. This looked very suspicious and the judges decided to look into
the young man’s past. It was true they could not connect him with the
Abbeville case but had he not upon a previous occasion refused to kneel
down and uncover while a religious procession went by?
De la Barre said yes, but he had been in a hurry to catch a stage-coach
and had meant no offense.
Thereupon he was tortured, and being young and bearing the pain less
easily than old Calas, he readily confessed that he had mutilated one
of the two crucifixes and was condemned to death for “impiously and
deliberately walking before the Host without kneeling or uncovering,
singing blasphemous songs, tendering marks of adoration to profane
books,” and other crimes of a similar nature which were supposed to have
indicated a lack of respect for the Church.
The sentence was so barbarous (his tongue was to be torn out with hot
irons, his right hand was to be cut off, and he was to be slowly burned
to death, and all that only a century and a half ago!) that the public
was stirred into several expressions of disapproval. Even if he were
guilty of all the things enumerated in the bill of particulars, one could
not butcher a boy for a drunken prank! Petitions were sent to the King,
ministers were besieged with requests for a respite. But the country was
full of unrest and there must be an example, and de la Barre, having
undergone the same tortures as Calas, was taken to the scaffold, was
decapitated (as a sign of great and particular favor) and his corpse,
together with his Philosophical Dictionary and some volumes by our old
friend Bayle, were publicly burned by the hangman.
It was a day of rejoicing for those who dreaded the ever-growing
influence of the Sozzinis and the Spinozas and the Descartes. It showed
what invariably happened to those ill-guided young men who left the
narrow path between the right and the wrong and followed the leadership
of a group of radical philosophers.
Voltaire heard this and accepted the challenge. He was fast approaching
his eightieth birthday, but he plunged into the case with all his old
zeal and with a brain that burned with a clear white flame of outraged
decency.
De la Barre had been executed for “blasphemy.” First of all, Voltaire
tried to discover whether there existed a law by which people guilty
of that supposed crime could be condemned to death. He could not find
one. Then he asked his lawyer friends. They could not find one. And it
gradually dawned upon the community that the judges in their unholy
eagerness had “invented” this bit of legal fiction to get rid of their
prisoner.
There had been ugly rumors at the time of de la Barre’s execution. The
storm that now arose forced the judges to be very circumspect and the
trial of the third of the youthful prisoners was never finished. As for
de la Barre, he was never vindicated. The review of the case dragged on
for years and when Voltaire died, no decision had as yet been reached.
But the blows which he had struck, if not for tolerance at least against
intolerance, were beginning to tell.
The official acts of terror instigated by gossiping old women and senile
courts came to an end.
Tribunals that have religious axes to grind are only successful when they
can do their work in the dark and are able to surround themselves with
secrecy. The method of attack followed by Voltaire was one against which
such courts had no means of defense.
Voltaire turned on all the lights, hired a voluminous orchestra, invited
the public to attend, and then bade his enemies do their worst.
As a result, they did nothing at all.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA
There are three different schools of statesmanship. The first one teaches
a doctrine which reads somewhat as follows: “Our planet is inhabited by
poor benighted creatures who are unable to think for themselves, who
suffer mental agonies whenever they are obliged to make an independent
decision and who therefore can be led astray by the first ward-heeler
that comes along. Not only is it better for the world at large that these
‘herd people’ be ruled by some one who knows his own mind, but they
themselves, too, are infinitely happier when they do not have to bother
about parliaments and ballot-boxes and can devote all their time to their
work-shops, their children, their flivvers and their vegetable gardens.”
The disciples of this school become emperors, sultans, sachems, sheiks
and archbishops and they rarely regard labor unions as an essential part
of civilization. They work hard and build roads, barracks, cathedrals and
jails.
The adherents of the second school of political thought argue as follows:
“The average man is God’s noblest invention. He is a sovereign in his own
right, unsurpassed in wisdom, prudence and the loftiness of his motives.
He is perfectly capable of looking after his own interests, but those
committees through which he tries to rule the universe are proverbially
slow when it comes to handling delicate affairs of state. Therefore, the
masses ought to leave all executive business to a few trusted friends
who are not hampered by the immediate necessity of making a living and
who can devote all their time to the happiness of the people.”
Needless to say the apostles of this glorious ideal are the logical
candidates for the job of oligarch, dictator, first consul and Lord
protector.
They work hard and build roads and barracks, but the cathedrals they turn
into jails.
But there is a third group of people. They contemplate man with the
sober eye of science and accept him as he is. They appreciate his good
qualities, they understand his limitations. They are convinced from a
long observation of past events that the average citizen, when not under
the influence of passion or self-interest, tries really very hard to do
what is right. But they make themselves no false illusions. They know
that the natural process of growth is exceedingly slow, that it would be
as futile to try and hasten the tides or the seasons as the growth of
human intelligence. They are rarely invited to assume the government of
a state, but whenever they have a chance to put their ideas into action,
they build roads, improve the jails and spend the rest of the available
funds upon schools and universities. For they are such incorrigible
optimists that they believe that education of the right sort will
gradually rid this world of most of its ancient evils and is therefore a
thing that ought to be encouraged at all costs.
And as a final step towards the fulfillment of this ideal, they usually
write an encyclopedia.
Like so many other things that give evidence of great wisdom and profound
patience, the encyclopedia-habit took its origin in China. The Chinese
Emperor K’ang-hi tried to make his subjects happy with an encyclopedia in
five thousand and twenty volumes.
Pliny, who introduced encyclopedias in the west, was contented with
thirty-seven books.
The first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era produced nothing of
the slightest value along this line of enlightenment. A fellow-countryman
of Saint Augustine, the African Felix Capella, wasted a great many years
of his life composing something which he held to be a veritable treasure
house of miscellaneous knowledge. In order that people might the more
easily retain the many interesting facts which he presented to them, he
used poetry. This terrible mass of misinformation was duly learned by
heart by eighteen successive generations of medieval children and was
held by them to be the last word in the fields of literature, music and
science.
Two hundred years later a bishop of Sevilla by the name of Isidore wrote
an entirely new encyclopedia and after that, the output increased at the
regular rate of two for every hundred years. What has become of them
all, I do not know. The book-worm (most useful of domestic animals) has
possibly acted as our deliverer. If all these volumes had been allowed to
survive, there would not be room for anything else on this earth.
When at last during the first half of the eighteenth century, Europe
experienced a tremendous outbreak of intellectual curiosity, the
purveyors of encyclopedias entered into a veritable Paradise. Such books,
then as now, were usually compiled by very poor scholars who could live
on eight dollars a week and whose personal services counted for less
than the money spent upon paper and ink. England especially was a great
country for this sort of literature and so it was quite natural that John
Mills, a Britisher who lived in Paris, should think of translating the
successful “Universal Dictionary” of Ephraim Chambers into the French
language that he might peddle his product among the subjects of good
King Louis and grow rich. For this purpose he associated himself with a
German professor and then approached Lebreton, the king’s printer, to do
the actual publishing. To make a long story short, Lebreton, who saw a
chance to make a small fortune, deliberately swindled his partner and as
soon as he had frozen Mills and the Teuton doctor out of the enterprise,
continued to publish the pirated edition on his own account. He called
the forthcoming work the “Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Universel des Arts
et des Sciences” and issued a series of beautiful prospectuses with such
a tremendous selling appeal that the list of subscribers was soon filled.
Then he hired himself a professor of philosophy in the Collège de France
to act as his editor-in-chief, bought a lot of paper and awaited results.
Unfortunately, the work of writing an encyclopedia did not prove as
simple as Lebreton had thought. The professor produced notes but no
articles, the subscribers loudly clamored for Volume I and everything was
in great disorder.
In this emergency Lebreton remembered that a “Universal Dictionary of
Medicine” which had appeared only a few months before had been very
favorably received. He sent for the editor of this medical handbook and
hired him on the spot. And so it happened that a mere encyclopedia became
the “Encyclopédie.” For the new editor was no one less than Denis Diderot
and the work which was to have been a hack job became one of the most
important contributions of the eighteenth century towards the sum total
of human enlightenment.
Diderot at that time was thirty-seven years old and his life had been
neither easy nor happy. He had refused to do what all respectable young
Frenchmen were supposed to do and go to a university. Instead, as soon
as he could get away from his Jesuit teachers, he had proceeded to Paris
to become a man of letters. After a short period of starvation (acting
upon the principle that two can go hungry just as cheaply as one) he
had married a lady who proved to be a terribly pious woman and an
uncompromising shrew, a combination which is by no means as rare as some
people seem to believe. But as he was obliged to support her, he had been
forced to take all sorts of odd jobs and to compile all sorts of books
from “Inquiries concerning Virtue and Merit” to a rather disreputable
rehash of Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” In his heart, however, this pupil of
Bayle remained faithful to his liberal ideals. Soon the government (after
the fashion of governments during times of stress) discovered that this
inoffensive looking young author maintained grave doubts about the story
of creation as rendered in the first chapter of Genesis and otherwise was
considerable of a heretic. In consequence whereof Diderot was conducted
to the prison of Vincennes and there held under lock and key for almost
three months.
It was after his release from jail that he entered the service of
Lebreton. Diderot was one of the most eloquent men of his time. He saw
the chance of a lifetime in the enterprise of which he was to be the
head. A mere rehash of Chambers’ old material seemed entirely beneath his
dignity. It was an era of tremendous mental activity. Very well! Let the
Encyclopedia of Lebreton contain the latest word upon every conceivable
subject and let the articles be written by the foremost authorities in
every line of human endeavor.
Diderot was so full of enthusiasm that he actually persuaded Lebreton to
give him full command and unlimited time. Then he made up a tentative
list of his coöperators, took a large sheet of foolscap and began, “A:
the first letter of the alphabet, etc., etc.”
Twenty years later he reached the Z and the job was done. Rarely,
however, has a man worked under such tremendous disadvantages. Lebreton
had increased his original capital when he hired Diderot, but he never
paid his editor more than five hundred dollars per year. And as for the
other people who were supposed to lend their assistance, well, we all
know how those things are. They were either busy just then, or they
would do it next month, or they had to go to the country to see their
grandmother. With the result that Diderot was obliged to do most of the
work himself while smarting under the abuse that was heaped upon him by
the officials of both the Church and the State.
Today copies of his Encyclopedia are quite rare. Not because so many
people want them but because so many people are glad to get rid of
them. The book which a century and a half ago was howled down as a
manifestation of a pernicious radicalism reads today like a dull and
harmless tract on the feeding of babies. But to the more conservative
element among the clergy of the eighteenth century, it sounded like a
clarion call of destruction, anarchy, atheism and chaos.
Of course, the usual attempts were made to denounce the editor-in-chief
as an enemy of society and religion, a loose reprobate who believed
neither in God, home or the sanctity of the family ties. But the Paris
of the year 1770 was still an overgrown village where every one knew
every one else. And Diderot, who not only claimed that the purpose of
life was “to do good and to find the truth,” but who actually lived up
to this motto, who kept open house for all those who were hungry, who
labored twenty hours a day for the sake of humanity and asked nothing in
return but a bed, a writing desk and a pad of paper, this simple-minded,
hard-working fellow was so shining an example of those virtues in which
the prelates and the monarchs of that day were so conspicuously lacking,
that it was not easy to attack him from that particular angle. And
so the authorities contented themselves with making his life just as
unpleasant as they possibly could by a continual system of espionage,
by everlastingly snooping around the office, by raiding Diderot’s home,
by confiscating his notes and occasionally by suppressing the work
altogether.
These obstructive methods, however, could not dampen his enthusiasm. At
last the work was finished and the “Encyclopédie” actually accomplished
what Diderot had expected of it—it became the rallying point for all
those who in one way or another felt the spirit of the new age and who
knew that the world was desperately in need of a general overhauling.
It may seem that I have dragged the figure of the editor slightly out of
the true perspective.
Who, after all, was this Denis Diderot, who wore a shabby coat, counted
himself happy when his rich and brilliant friend, the Baron D’Holbach,
invited him to a square meal once a week, and who was more than satisfied
when four thousand copies of his book were actually sold? He lived at the
same time as Rousseau and D’Alembert and Turgot and Helvétius and Volney
and Condorcet and a score of others, all of whom gained a much greater
personal renown than he did. But without the Encyclopédie these good
people would never have been able to exercise the influence they did.
It was more than a book, it was a social and economic program. It told
what the leading minds of the day were actually thinking. It contained a
concrete statement of those ideas that soon were to dominate the entire
world. It was a decisive moment in the history of the human race.
France had reached a point where those who had eyes to see and ears to
hear knew that something drastic must be done to avoid an immediate
catastrophe, while those who had eyes to see and ears to hear yet refused
to use them, maintained with an equal display of stubborn energy that
peace and order could only be maintained by a strict enforcement of a
set of antiquated laws that belonged to the era of the Merovingians. For
the moment, those two parties were so evenly balanced that everything
remained as it had always been and this led to strange complications.
The same France which on one side of the ocean played such a conspicuous
rôle as the defender of liberty and freedom and addressed the most
affectionate letters to Monsieur Georges Washington (who was a Free
Mason) and arranged delightful week-end parties for Monsieur le Ministre,
Benjamin Franklin, who was what his neighbors used to call a “sceptic”
and what we call a plain atheist, this country on the other side of
the broad Atlantic stood revealed as the most vindictive enemy of all
forms of spiritual progress and only showed her sense of democracy in
the complete impartiality with which she condemned both philosopher and
peasant to a life of drudgery and privation.
Eventually all this was changed.
But it was changed in a way which no one had been able to foresee. For
the struggle that was to remove the spiritual and social handicaps of all
those who were born outside the royal purple was not fought by the slaves
themselves. It was the work of a small group of disinterested citizens
whom the Protestants, in their heart of hearts, hated quite as bitterly
as their Catholic oppressors and who could count upon no other reward
than that which is said to await all honest men in Heaven.
The men who during the eighteenth century defended the cause of tolerance
rarely belonged to any particular denomination. For the sake of personal
convenience they sometimes went through certain outward motions of
religious conformity which kept the gendarmes away from their writing
desks. But as far as their inner life was concerned, they might just as
well have lived in Athens in the fourth century B.C. or in China in the
days of Confucius.
They were often most regrettably lacking in a certain reverence for
various things which most of their contemporaries held in great respect
and which they themselves regarded as harmless but childish survivals of
a bygone day.
They took little stock in that ancient national history which the
western world, for some curious reason, had picked out from among all
Babylonian and Assyrian and Egyptian and Hittite and Chaldean records and
had accepted as a guide-book of morals and customs. But true disciples
of their great master, Socrates, they listened only to the inner voice
of their own conscience and regardless of consequences, they lived
fearlessly in a world that had long since been surrendered to the timid.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE INTOLERANCE OF REVOLUTION
The ancient edifice of official glory and unofficial misery known as the
Kingdom of France came crashing down on a memorable evening in the month
of August of the year of grace 1789.
On that hot and sultry night, after a week of increasing emotional fury,
the National Assembly worked itself into a veritable orgy of brotherly
love. Until in a moment of intense excitement the privileged classes
surrendered all those ancient rights and prerogatives which it had taken
them three centuries to acquire and as plain citizens declared themselves
in favor of those theoretical rights of man which henceforth would be the
foundation-stone for all further attempts at popular self-government.
As far as France was concerned, this meant the end of the feudal system.
An aristocracy which is actually composed of the “aristoi,” of the best
of the most enterprising elements of society, which boldly assumes
leadership and shapes the destinies of the common country, has a chance
to survive. A nobility which voluntarily retires from active service and
contents itself with ornamental clerical jobs in diverse departments of
government is only fit to drink tea on Fifth Avenue or run restaurants on
Second.
The old France therefore was dead.
Whether for better or for worse, I do not know.
But it was dead and with it there passed away that most outrageous form
of an invisible government which the Church, ever since the days of
Richelieu, had been able to impose upon the anointed descendants of Saint
Louis.
Verily, now as never before, mankind was given a chance.
Of the enthusiasm which at that period filled the hearts and souls of all
honest men and women, it is needless to speak.
The millennium was close at hand, yea, it had come.
And intolerance among the many other vices inherent in an autocratic form
of government was for good and all to be eradicated from this fair earth.
Allons, enfants de la patrie, the days of tyranny are gone!
And more words to that effect.
Then the curtain went down, society was purged of its many iniquities,
the cards were re-shuffled for a new deal and when it was all over,
behold our old friend Intolerance, wearing a pair of proletarian
pantaloons and his hair brushed à la Robespierre, a-sitting side by side
with the public prosecutor and having the time of his wicked old life.
Ten years ago he had sent people to the scaffold for claiming that
authority maintaining itself solely by the grace of Heaven might
sometimes be in error.
Now he hustled them to their doom for insisting that the will of the
people need not always and invariably be the will of God.
A ghastly joke!
But a joke paid for (after the nature of such popular fancies) with the
blood of a million innocent bystanders.
What I am about to say is unfortunately not very original. One can find
the same idea couched in different if more elegant words in the works of
many of the ancients.
In matters pertaining to man’s inner life there are, and apparently
there always have been, and most likely there always will be two entirely
different varieties of human beings.
A few, by dint of endless study and contemplation and the serious
searching of their immortal souls will be able to arrive at certain
temperate philosophical conclusions which will place them above and
beyond the common worries of mankind.
But the vast majority of the people are not contented with a mild diet of
spiritual “light wines.” They want something with a kick to it, something
that burns on the tongue, that hurts the gullet, that will make them sit
up and take notice. What that “something” is does not matter very much,
provided it comes up to the above-mentioned specifications and is served
in a direct and simple fashion and in unlimited quantities.
This fact seems to have been little understood by historians and
this has led to many and serious disappointments. No sooner has an
outraged populace torn down the stronghold of the past (a fact duly and
enthusiastically reported by the local Herodoti and Taciti), than it
turns mason, carts the ruins of the former citadel to another part of the
city and there remolds them into a new dungeon, every whit as vile and
tyrannical as the old one and used for the same purpose of repression and
terror.
The very moment a number of proud nations have at last succeeded in
throwing off the yoke imposed upon them by an “infallible man” they
accept the dictates of an “infallible book.”
Yea, on the very day when Authority, disguised as a flunkey, is madly
galloping to the frontier, Liberty enters the deserted palace, puts
on the discarded royal raiment and forthwith commits herself to those
selfsame blunders and cruelties which have just driven her predecessor
into exile.
It is all very disheartening, but it is an honest part of our story and
must be told.
No doubt the intentions of those who were directly responsible for the
great French upheaval were of the best. The Declaration of the Rights of
Man had laid down the principle that no citizen should ever be disturbed
in the peaceful pursuit of his ways on account of his opinion, “not even
his religious opinion,” provided that his ideas did not disturb the
public order as laid down by the various decrees and laws.
This however did not mean equal rights for all religious denominations.
The Protestant faith henceforth was to be tolerated, Protestants were not
to be annoyed because they worshiped in a different church from their
Catholic neighbors, but Catholicism remained the official, the “dominant”
Church of the state.
Mirabeau, with his unerring instinct for the essentials of political
life, knew that this far famed concession was only a half-way measure.
But Mirabeau, who was trying to turn a great social cataclysm into a
one-man revolution, died under the effort and many noblemen and bishops,
repenting of their generous gesture of the night of the fourth of August,
were already beginning that policy of obstructionism which was to be of
such fatal consequence to their master the king. And it was not until
two years later in the year 1791 (and exactly two years too late for any
practical purpose) that all religious sects including the Protestants and
the Jews, were placed upon a basis of absolute equality and were declared
to enjoy the same liberty before the law.
From that moment on, the rôles began to be reversed. The constitution
which the representatives of the French people finally bestowed upon
an expectant country insisted that all priests of whatsoever faith
should swear an oath of allegiance to the new form of government and
should regard themselves strictly as servants of the state, like the
school-teachers and postal employees and light-house keepers and customs
officials who were their fellow-citizens.
Pope Pius VI objected. The clerical stipulations of the new constitution
were in direct violation of every solemn agreement that had been
concluded between France and the Holy See since the year 1516. But the
Assembly was in no mood to bother about such little trifles as precedents
and treaties. The clergy must either swear allegiance to this decree
or resign their positions and starve to death. A few bishops and a few
priests accepted what seemed inevitable. They crossed their fingers and
went through the formality of an oath. But by far the greater number,
being honest men, refused to perjure themselves and taking a leaf out
of the book of those Huguenots whom they had persecuted during so many
years, they began to say mass in deserted stables and to give communion
in pigsties, to preach their sermons behind country hedges and to pay
clandestine visits to the homes of their former parishioners in the
middle of the night.
Generally speaking, they fared infinitely better than the Protestants
had done under similar circumstances, for France was too hopelessly
disorganized to take more than very perfunctory measures against the
enemies of her constitution. And as none of them seemed to run the risk
of the galleys, the excellent clerics were soon emboldened to ask that
they, the non-jurors, the “refractory ones” as they were popularly
called, be officially recognized as one of the “tolerated sects” and be
accorded those privileges which during the previous three centuries
they had so persistently refused to grant to their compatriots of the
Calvinist faith.
The situation, for those of us who look back at it from the safe distance
of the year 1925, was not without a certain grim humor. But no definite
decision was taken, for the Assembly soon afterwards fell entirely under
the denomination of the extreme radicals and the treachery of the court,
combined with the stupidity of His Majesty’s foreign allies, caused a
panic which in less than a week spread from the coast of Belgium to the
shores of the Mediterranean and which was responsible for that series of
wholesale assassinations which raged from the second to the seventh of
September of the year 1792.
From that moment on the Revolution was bound to degenerate into a reign
of terror.
The gradual and evolutionary efforts of the philosophers came to naught
when a starving populace began to suspect that their own leaders were
engaged in a gigantic plot to sell the country to the enemy. The
explosion which then followed is common history. That the conduct
of affairs in a crisis of such magnitude is likely to fall into the
hands of unscrupulous and ruthless leaders is a fact with which every
honest student of history is sufficiently familiar. But that the
principal actor in the drama should have been a prig, a model-citizen, a
hundred-percenting paragon of Virtue, that indeed was something which no
one had been able to foresee.
When France began to understand the true nature of her new master, it
was too late, as those who tried in vain to utter their belated words of
warning from the top of a scaffold in the Place de la Concorde could have
testified.
Thus far we have studied all revolutions from the point of view of
politics and economics and social organization. But not until the
historian shall turn psychologist or the psychologist shall turn
historian shall we really be able to explain and understand those dark
forces that shape the destinies of nations in their hour of agony and
travail.
There are those who hold that the world is ruled by sweetness and light.
There are those who maintain that the human race respects only one
thing, brute force. Some hundred years from now, I may be able to make a
choice. This much, however, seems certain to us, that the greatest of all
experiments in our sociological laboratory, the French revolution, was a
noisy apotheosis of violence.
Those who had tried to prepare for a more humane world by way of reason
were either dead or were put to death by the very people whom they had
helped to glory. And with the Voltaires and Diderots and the Turgots
and the Condorcets out of the way, the untutored apostles of the New
Perfection were left the undisputed masters of their country’s fate. What
a ghastly mess they made of their high mission!
During the first period of their rule, victory lay with the out-and-out
enemies of religion, those who had some particular reason to detest the
very symbols of Christianity; those who in some silent and hidden way had
suffered so deeply in the old days of clerical supremacy that the mere
sight of a cassock drove them into a frenzy of hate and that the smell of
incense made them turn pale with long forgotten rage. Together with a few
others who believed that they could disprove the existence of a personal
God with the help of mathematics and chemistry, they set about to destroy
the Church and all her works. A hopeless and at best an ungrateful task
but it is one of the characteristics of revolutionary psychology that the
normal becomes abnormal and the impossible is turned into an every day
occurrence. Hence a paper decree of the Convention abolishing the old
Christian calendar; abolishing all saints’ days; abolishing Christmas and
Easter; abolishing weeks and months and re-dividing the year into periods
of ten days each with a new pagan Sabbath on every tenth. Hence another
paper pronunciamento which abolished the worship of God and left the
universe without a master.
But not for long.
However eloquently explained and defended within the bare rooms of the
Jacobin club, the idea of a limitless and empty void was too repellent to
most citizens to be tolerated for more than a couple of weeks. The old
Deity no longer satisfied the masses. Why not follow the example of Moses
and Mahomet and invent a new one that should suit the demands of the
times?
As a result, behold the Goddess of Reason!
Her exact status was to be defined later. In the meantime a comely
actress, properly garbed in ancient Greek draperies, would fill the bill
perfectly. The lady was found among the dancers of his late Majesty’s
corps de ballet and at the proper hour was most solemnly conducted to the
high altar of Notre Dame, long since deserted by the loyal followers of
an older faith.
As for the blessed Virgin who, during so many centuries, had stood a
tender watch over all those who had bared the wounds of their soul before
the patient eyes of perfect understanding, she too was gone, hastily
hidden by loving hands before she be sent to the limekilns and be turned
into mortar. Her place had been taken by a statue of Liberty, the proud
product of an amateur sculptor and done rather carelessly in white
plaster. But that was not all. Notre Dame had seen other innovations. In
the middle of the choir, four columns and a roof indicated a “Temple
of Philosophy” which upon state occasions was to serve as a throne for
the new dancing divinity. When the poor girl was not holding court and
receiving the worship of her trusted followers, the Temple of Philosophy
harbored a “Torch of Truth” which to the end of all time was to carry
high the burning flame of world enlightenment.
The “end of time” came before another six months.
On the morning of the seventh of May of the year 1794 the French people
were officially informed that God had been reëstablished and that the
immortality of the soul was once more a recognized article of faith. On
the eighth of June, the new Supreme Being (hastily constructed out of the
second-hand material left behind by the late Jean Jacques Rousseau) was
officially presented to his eager disciples.
Robespierre in a new blue waistcoat delivered the address of welcome. He
had reached the highest point of his career. The obscure law clerk from
a third rate country town had become the high priest of the Revolution.
More than that, a poor demented nun by the name of Catherine Théot,
revered by thousands as the true mother of God, had just proclaimed the
forthcoming return of the Messiah and she had even revealed his name.
It was Maximilian Robespierre; the same Maximilian who in a fantastic
uniform of his own designing was proudly dispensing reams of oratory in
which he assured God that from now on all would be well with His little
world.
And to make doubly sure, two days later he passed a law by which those
suspected of treason and heresy (for once more they were held to be the
same, as in the good old days of the Inquisition) were deprived of all
means of defense, a measure so ably conceived that during the next six
weeks more than fourteen hundred people lost their heads beneath the
slanting knife of the guillotine.
The rest of his story is only too well known.
As Robespierre was the perfect incarnation of all he himself held to be
Good (with a capital G) he could, in his quality of a logical fanatic,
not possibly recognize the right of other men, less perfect, to exist on
the same planet with himself. As time went by, his hatred of Evil (with a
capital E) took on such proportions that France was brought to the brink
of depopulation.
Then at last, and driven by fear of their own lives, the enemies of
Virtue struck back and in a short but desperate struggle destroyed this
Terrible Apostle of Rectitude.
Soon afterwards the force of the Revolution had spent itself. The
constitution which the French people then adopted recognized the
existence of different denominations and gave them the same rights
and privileges. Officially at least the Republic washed her hands of
all religion. Those who wished to form a church, a congregation, an
association, were free to do so but they were obliged to support their
own ministers and priests and recognize the superior rights of the state
and the complete freedom of choice of the individual.
Ever since, the Catholics and Protestants in France have lived peacefully
side by side.
It is true that the Church never recognized her defeat, continues to deny
the principle of a division of state and church (see the decree of Pope
Pius IX of December 8th, 1864) and has repeatedly tried to come back
to power by supporting those political parties who hope to upset the
republican form of government and bring back the monarchy or the empire.
But these battles are usually fought in the private parlors of some
minister’s wife, or in the rabbit-shooting-lodge of a retired general
with an ambitious mother-in-law.
They have thus far provided the funny papers with some excellent material
but they are proving themselves increasingly futile.
CHAPTER XXVIII
LESSING
On the twentieth of September of the year 1792 a battle was fought
between the armies of the French Revolution and the armies of the
allied monarchs who had set forth to annihilate the terrible monster of
insurrection.
It was a glorious victory, but not for the allies. Their infantry could
not be employed on the slippery hillsides of the village of Valmy. The
battle therefore consisted of a series of solemn broadsides. The rebels
fired harder and faster than the royalists. Hence the latter were the
first to leave the field. In the evening the allied troops retreated
northward. Among those present at the engagement was a certain Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, aide to the hereditary Prince of Weimar.
Several years afterwards this young man published his memoirs of that
day. While standing ankle-deep in the sticky mud of Lorraine, he had
turned prophet. And he had predicted that after this cannonade, the world
would never be the same. He had been right. On that ever memorable day,
Sovereignty by the grace of God was blown into limbo. The Crusaders of
the Rights of Man did not run like chickens, as they had been expected to
do. They stuck to their guns. And they pushed those guns forward through
valleys and across mountains until they had carried their ideal of
“Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” to the furthermost corners of Europe
and had stabled their horses in every castle and church of the entire
continent.
It is easy enough for us to write that sort of sentence. The
revolutionary leaders have been dead for almost one hundred and fifty
years and we can poke as much fun at them as we like. We can even be
grateful for the many good things which they bestowed upon this world.
But the men and women who lived through those days, who one morning had
gaily danced around the Tree of Liberty and then during the next three
months had been chased like rats through the sewers of their own city,
could not possibly take such a detached view of those problems of civic
upheaval. As soon as they had crept out of their cellars and garrets
and had combed the cobwebs out of their perukes, they began to devise
measures by which to prevent a reoccurrence of so terrible a calamity.
But in order to be successful reactionaries, they must first of all bury
the past. Not a vague past in the broad historical sense of the word but
their own individual “pasts” when they had surreptitiously read the works
of Monsieur de Voltaire and had openly expressed their admiration for
the Encyclopédie. Now the assembled works of Monsieur de Voltaire were
stored away in the attic and those of Monsieur Diderot were sold to the
junk-man. Pamphlets that had been reverently read as the true revelation
of reason were relegated to the coal-bin and in every possible way an
effort was made to cover up the tracks that betrayed a short sojourn in
the realm of liberalism.
Alas, as so often happens in a case like that when all the literary
material has been carefully destroyed, the repentant brotherhood
overlooked one item which was even more important as a telltale of the
popular mind. That was the stage. It was a bit childish on the part of
the generation that had thrown whole cartloads of bouquets at “The
Marriage of Figaro” to claim that they had never for a moment believed
in the possibilities of equal rights for all men, and the people who had
wept over “Nathan the Wise” could never successfully prove that they
had always regarded religious tolerance as a misguided expression of
governmental weakness.
The play and its success were there to convict them of the opposite.
The author of this famous key play to the popular sentiment of the
latter half of the eighteenth century was a German, one Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing. He was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and had studied theology
in the University of Leipzig. But he had felt little inclination for a
religious career and had played hooky so persistently that his father
heard of it, had told him to come home and had placed him before
the choice of immediate resignation from the university or diligent
application as a member of the medical department. Gotthold, who was no
more of a doctor than a clergyman, promised everything that was asked
of him, returned to Leipzig, went surety for some of his beloved actor
friends and upon their subsequent disappearance from town was obliged to
hasten to Wittenberg that he might escape arrest for debt.
His flight meant the beginning of a period of long walks and short meals.
First of all he went to Berlin where he spent several years writing badly
paid articles for a number of theatrical papers. Then he engaged himself
as private secretary to a rich friend who was going to take a trip around
the world. But no sooner had they started than the Seven Years’ war must
break out. The friend, obliged to join his regiment, had taken the first
post-chaise for home and Lessing, once more without a job, found himself
stranded in the city of Leipzig.
But he was of a sociable nature and soon found a new friend in the person
of one Eduard Christian von Kleist, an officer by day and a poet by
night, a sensitive soul who gave the hungry ex-theologian insight into
the new spirit that was slowly coming over this world. But von Kleist was
shot to death in the battle of Kunersdorf and Lessing was driven to such
dire extremes of want that he became a columnist.
Then followed a period as private secretary to the commander of the
fortress of Breslau where the boredom of garrison life was mitigated by a
profound study of the works of Spinoza which then, a hundred years after
the philosopher’s death, were beginning to find their way to foreign
countries.
All this, however, did not settle the problem of the daily Butterbrod.
Lessing was now almost forty years old and wanted a home of his own. His
friends suggested that he be appointed keeper of the Royal Library. But
years before, something had happened that had made Lessing persona non
grata at the Prussian court. During his first visit to Berlin he had made
the acquaintance of Voltaire. The French philosopher was nothing if not
generous and being a person without any idea of “system” he had allowed
the young man to borrow the manuscript of the “Century of Louis XIV,”
then ready for publication. Unfortunately, Lessing, when he hastily left
Berlin, had (entirely by accident) packed the manuscript among his own
belongings. Voltaire, exasperated by the bad coffee and the hard beds
of the penurious Prussian court, immediately cried out that he had been
robbed. The young German had stolen his most important manuscript, the
police must watch the frontier, etc., etc., etc., after the manner of an
excited Frenchman in a foreign country. Within a few days the postman
returned the lost document, but it was accompanied by a letter from
Lessing in which the blunt young Teuton expressed his own ideas of people
who would dare to suspect his honesty.
This storm in a chocolate-pot might have easily been forgotten, but the
eighteenth century was a period when chocolate-pots played a great rôle
in the lives of men and women and Frederick, even after a lapse of almost
twenty years, still loved his pesky French friend and would not hear of
having Lessing at his court.
And so farewell to Berlin and off to Hamburg, where there was rumor of a
newly to be founded national theater. This enterprise came to nothing and
Lessing in his despair accepted the office of librarian to the hereditary
grand duke of Brunswick. The town of Wolfenbüttel which then became
his home was not exactly a metropolis, but the grand-ducal library was
one of the finest in all Germany. It contained more than ten thousand
manuscripts and several of these were of prime importance in the history
of the Reformation.
Boredom of course is the main incentive to scandal mongering and gossip.
In Wolfenbüttel a former art critic, columnist and dramatic essayist was
by this very fact a highly suspicious person and soon Lessing was once
more in trouble. Not because of anything he had done but on account of
something he was vaguely supposed to have done, to wit: the publication
of a series of articles attacking the orthodox opinions of the old school
of Lutheran theology.
These sermons (for sermons they were) had actually been written by a
former Hamburg minister, but the grand duke of Brunswick, panic stricken
at the prospect of a religious war within his domains, ordered his
librarian to be discreet and keep away from all controversies. Lessing
complied with the wishes of his employer. Nothing, however, had been
said about treating the subject dramatically and so he set to work to
re-valuate his opinions in terms of the stage.
The play which was born out of this small-town rumpus was called “Nathan
the Wise.” The theme was very old and I have mentioned it before in this
book. Lovers of literary antiquities can find it (if Mr. Sumner will
allow them) in Boccaccio’s “Decameron” where it is called the “Sad Story
of the Three Rings” and where it is told as follows:
Once upon a time a Mohammedan prince tried to extract a large sum of
money from one of his Jewish subjects. But as he had no valid reason to
deprive the poor man of his property, he bethought himself of a ruse.
He sent for the victim and having complimented him gracefully upon his
learning and wisdom, he asked him which of the three most widely spread
religions, the Turkish, the Jewish and the Christian, he held to be most
true. The worthy patriarch did not answer the Padishah directly but said,
“Let me, oh great Sultan, tell you a little story. Once upon a time there
was a very rich man who had a beautiful ring and he made a will that
whichever of his sons at the time of his death should be found with that
ring upon his finger should fall heir to all his estates. His son made
a like will. His grandson too, and for centuries the ring changed hands
and all was well. But finally it happened that the owner of the ring
had three sons whom he loved equally well. He simply could not decide
which of the three should own that much valued treasure. So he went to a
goldsmith and ordered him to make two other rings exactly like the one
he had. On his death-bed he sent for his children and gave them each his
blessing and what they supposed was the one and only ring. Of course, as
soon as the father had been buried, the three boys all claimed to be his
heir because they had The Ring. This led to many quarrels and finally
they laid the matter before the Kadi. But as the rings were absolutely
alike, even the judges could not decide which was the right one and so
the case has been dragged on and on and very likely will drag on until
the end of the world. Amen.”
Lessing used this ancient folk-tale to prove his belief that no one
religion possessed a monopoly of the truth, that it was the inner spirit
of man that counted rather than his outward conformity to certain
prescribed rituals and dogmas and that therefore it was the duty of
people to bear with each other in love and friendship and that no one had
the right to set himself upon a high pedestal of self-assured perfection
and say, “I am better than all others because I alone possess the Truth.”
But this idea, much applauded in the year 1778, was no longer popular
with the little princelings who thirty years later returned to salvage
such goods and chattels as had survived the deluge of the Revolution. For
the purpose of regaining their lost prestige, they abjectly surrendered
their lands to the rule of the police-sergeant and expected the clerical
gentlemen who depended upon them for their livelihood to act as a
spiritual militia and help the regular cops to reëstablish law and order.
But whereas the purely political reaction was completely successful, the
attempt to reshape men’s minds after the pattern of fifty years before
ended in failure. And it could not be otherwise. It was true that the
vast majority of the people in all countries were sick and tired of
revolution and unrest, of parliaments and futile speeches and forms of
taxation that had completely ruined commerce and industry. They wanted
peace. Peace at any price. They wanted to do business and sit in their
own front parlors and drink coffee and not be disturbed by the soldiers
billeted upon them and forced to drink an odious extract of oak-leaves.
Provided they could enjoy this blessed state of well-being, they were
willing to put up with certain small inconveniences such as saluting
whoever wore brass buttons, bowing low before every imperial letter-box
and saying “Sir” to every assistant official chimney-sweep.
But this attitude of humble obedience was the result of sheer necessity,
of the need for a short breathing space after the long and tumultuous
years when every new morning brought new uniforms, new political
platforms, new police regulations and new rulers, both of Heaven and
earth. It would be erroneous, however, to conclude from this general air
of subservience, from this loud hurray-ing for the divinely appointed
masters, that the people in their heart of hearts had forgotten the new
doctrines which the drums of Sergeant Le Grand had so merrily beaten into
their heads and hearts.
As their governments, with that moral cynicism inherent in all
reactionary dictatorships, insisted chiefly upon an outward semblance
of decency and order and cared not one whit for the inner spirit, the
average subject enjoyed a fairly wide degree of independence. On Sunday
he went to church with a large Bible under his arm. The rest of the week
he thought as he pleased. Only he held his tongue and kept his private
opinions to himself and aired his views when a careful inspection of the
premises had first assured him that no secret agent was hidden underneath
the sofa or was lurking behind the tile stove. Then however he discussed
the events of the day with great gusto and sadly shook his head when
his duly censored, fumigated and sterilized newspaper told him what new
idiotic measures his masters had taken to assure the peace of the realm
and bring about a return to the status quo of the year of grace 1600.
What his masters were doing was exactly what similar masters with
an imperfect knowledge of the history of human nature under similar
circumstances have been doing ever since the year one. They thought that
they had destroyed free speech when they ordered the removal of the
cracker-barrels from which the speeches that had so severely criticized
their government had been made. And whenever they could, they sent the
offending orators to jail with such stiff sentences (forty, fifty, a
hundred years) that the poor devils gained great renown as martyrs,
whereas in most instances they were scatter-brained idiots who had read a
few books and pamphlets which they had failed to understand.
Warned by this example, the others kept away from the public parks and
did their grumbling in obscure wine shops or in the public lodging houses
of overcrowded cities where they were certain of a discreet audience and
where their influence was infinitely more harmful than it would have been
on a public platform.
There are few things more pathetic in this world than the man upon whom
the Gods in their wisdom have bestowed a little bit of authority and who
is in eternal fear for his official prestige. A king may lose his throne
and may laugh at a misadventure which means a rather amusing interruption
of a life of dull routine. And anyway he is a king, whether he wears
his valet’s brown derby or his grandfather’s crown. But the mayor of a
third rate town, once he has been deprived of his gavel and his badge of
office, is just plain Bill Smith, a ridiculous fellow who gave himself
airs and who is now laughed at for his troubles. Therefore woe unto
him who dares to approach such a potentate pro tem without visible
manifestations of that reverence and worship due to so exalted a human
being.
But those who did not stop at burgomasters, but who openly questioned the
existing order of things in learned tomes and handbooks of geology and
anthropology and economics, fared infinitely worse.
They were instantly and dishonorably deprived of their livelihood. Then
they were exiled from the town in which they had taught their pernicious
doctrines and with their wives and children were left to the charitable
mercies of the neighbors.
This outbreak of the reactionary spirit caused great inconvenience to a
large number of perfectly sincere people who were honestly trying to go
to the root of our many social ills. Time, however, the great laundress,
has long since removed whatever spots the local police magistrates
were able to detect upon the professorial garments of these amiable
scholars. Today, King Frederick William of Prussia is chiefly remembered
because he interfered with the teachings of Emanuel Kant, that dangerous
radical who taught that the maxims of our own actions must be worthy of
being turned into universal laws and whose doctrines, according to the
police reports, appealed only to “beardless youths and idle babblers.”
The Duke of Cumberland has gained lasting notoriety because as King of
Hanover he exiled a certain Jacob Grimm who had signed a protest against
“His Majesty’s unlawful abrogation of the country’s constitution.” And
Metternich has retained a certain notoriety because he extended his
watchful suspicion to the field of music and once censored the music of
Schubert.
Poor old Austria!
Now that it is dead and gone, all the world feels kindly disposed towards
the “gay empire” and forgets that once upon a time it had an active
intellectual life of its own and was something more than an amusing and
well-mannered county-fair with excellent and cheap wine, atrocious cigars
and the most enticing of waltzes, composed and conducted by no one less
than Johann Strauss himself.
We may go even further and state that during the entire eighteenth
century Austria played a very important rôle in the development of the
idea of religious tolerance. Immediately after the Reformation the
Protestants had found a fertile field for their operations in the rich
province between the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains. But this had
changed when Rudolf II became emperor.
This Rudolf was a German version of Spanish Philip, a ruler to whom
treaties made with heretics were of no consequence whatsoever. But
although educated by the Jesuits, he was incurably lazy and this saved
his empire from too drastic a change of policy.
That came when Ferdinand II was chosen emperor. This monarch’s chief
qualification for office was the fact that he alone among all the
Habsburgs was possessed of a few sons. Early during his reign he had
visited the famous House of the Annunciation, bodily moved in the year
1291 by a number of angels from Nazareth to Dalmatia and hence to central
Italy, and there in an outburst of religious fervor he had sworn a dire
oath to make his country one-hundred-percent Catholic.
He had been as good as his word. In the year 1629 Catholicism once more
was proclaimed the official and exclusive faith of Austria and Styria and
Bohemia and Silesia.
Hungary having been meanwhile married into that strange family, which
acquired vast quantities of European real estate with every new wife, an
effort was made to drive the Protestants from their Magyar strongholds.
But backed up by the Transylvanians, who were Unitarians, and by the
Turks, who were heathen, the Hungarians were able to maintain their
independence until the second half of the eighteenth century. And by that
time a great change had taken place in Austria itself.
The Habsburgs were loyal sons of the Church, but at last even their
sluggish brains grew tired of the constant interference with their
affairs on the part of the Popes and they were willing for once to risk a
policy contrary to the wishes of Rome.
In an earlier part of this book I have already told how many medieval
Catholics believed that the organization of the Church was all wrong.
In the days of the martyrs, these critics argued, the Church was a true
democracy ruled by elders and bishops who were appointed by common
consent of all the parishioners. They were willing to concede that the
Bishop of Rome, because he claimed to be the direct successor of the
Apostle Peter, had been entitled to a favorite position in the councils
of the Church, but they insisted that this power had been purely honorary
and that the popes therefore should never have considered themselves
superior to the other bishops and should not have tried to extend their
influence beyond the confines of their own territory.
The popes from their side had fought this idea with all the bulls,
anathemas and excommunications at their disposal and several brave
reformers had lost their lives as a result of their bold agitation for
greater clerical decentralization.
The question had never been definitely settled, and then during
the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea was revived by the
vicar-general of the rich and powerful archbishop of Trier. His name
was Johann von Hontheim, but he is better known by his Latin pseudonym
of Febronius. Hontheim had enjoyed the advantages of a very liberal
education. After a few years spent at the University of Louvain he had
temporarily forsaken his own people and had gone to the University
of Leiden. He got there at a time when that old citadel of undiluted
Calvinism was beginning to be suspected of liberal tendencies. This
suspicion had ripened into open conviction when Professor Gerard Noodt,
a member of the legal faculty, had been allowed to enter the field of
theology and had been permitted to publish a speech in which he had
extolled the ideal of religious tolerance.
His line of reasoning had been ingenious, to say the least.
“God is allpowerful,” so he had said. “God is able to lay down certain
laws of science which hold good for all people at all times and under all
conditions. It follows that it would have been very easy for him, had
he desired to do so, to guide the minds of men in such a fashion that
they all of them should have had the same opinions upon the subject of
religion. We know that He did not do anything of the sort. Therefore, we
act against the express will of God if we try to coerce others by force
to believe that which we ourselves hold to be true.”
Whether Hontheim was directly influenced by Noodt or not, it is hard to
say. But something of that same spirit of Erasmian rationalism can be
found in those works of Hontheim in which he afterwards developed his own
ideas upon the subject of episcopal authority and papal decentralization.
That his books were immediately condemned by Rome (in February of
the year 1764) is of course no more than was to be expected. But it
happened to suit the interests of Maria Theresa to support Hontheim and
Febronianism or Episcopalianism, as the movement which he had started
was called, continued to flourish in Austria and finally took practical
shape in a Patent of Tolerance which Joseph II, the son of Maria Theresa,
bestowed upon his subjects on the thirteenth of October of the year 1781.
Joseph, who was a weak imitation of his mother’s great enemy, Frederick
of Prussia, had a wonderful gift for doing the right thing at the wrong
moment. During the last two hundred years the little children of Austria
had been sent to bed with the threat that the Protestants would get them
if they did not go to sleep at once. To insist that those same infants
henceforth regard their Protestant neighbors (who, as they all knew,
had horns and a long black tail), as their dearly beloved brothers and
sisters was to ask the impossible. All the same, poor, honest, hard
working, blundering Joseph, forever surrounded by a horde of uncles
and aunts and cousins who enjoyed fat incomes as bishops and cardinals
and deaconesses, deserves great credit for this sudden outburst of
courage. He was the first among the Catholic rulers who dared to advocate
tolerance as a desirable and practical possibility of statecraft.
And what he did three months later was even more startling. On the
second of February of the year of grace 1782 he issued his famous
decree concerning the Jews and extended the liberty then only enjoyed
by Protestants and Catholics to a category of people who thus far had
considered themselves fortunate when they were allowed to breathe the
same air as their Christian neighbors.
Right here we ought to stop and let the reader believe that the good work
continued indefinitely and that Austria now became a Paradise for those
who wished to follow the dictates of their own conscience.
I wish it were true. Joseph and a few of his ministers might rise to
a sudden height of common sense, but the Austrian peasant, taught
since time immemorial to regard the Jew as his natural enemy and the
Protestant as a rebel and a renegade, could not possibly overcome that
old and deep-rooted prejudice which told him to regard such people as his
natural enemies.
A century and a half after the promulgation of these excellent Edicts
of Tolerance, the position of those who did not belong to the Catholic
Church was quite as unfavorable as it had been in the sixteenth century.
Theoretically a Jew and a Protestant could hope to become prime ministers
or to be appointed commander-in-chief of the army. And in practice it was
impossible for them to be invited to dinner by the imperial boot-black.
So much for paper decrees.
CHAPTER XXIX
TOM PAINE
Somewhere or other there is a poem to the effect that God moves in a
mysterious way, his wonders to perform.
The truth of this statement is most apparent to those who have studied
the history of the Atlantic seaboard.
During the first half of the seventeenth century the northern part of the
American continent was settled by people who had gone so far in their
devotion to the ideals of the Old Testament that an unsuspecting visitor
might have taken them for followers of Moses, rather than disciples of
the words of Christ. Cut off from the rest of Europe by a very wide and
very stormy and very cold expanse of ocean, these pioneers had set up
a spiritual reign of terror which had culminated in the witch-hunting
orgies of the Mather family.
Now at first sight it seems not very likely that those two reverend
gentlemen could in any way be held responsible for the very tolerant
tendencies which we find expounded with such able vigor in the
Constitution of the United States and in the many documents that were
written immediately before the outbreak of hostilities between England
and her former colonies. Yet such is undoubtedly the case, for the period
of repression of the seventeenth century was so terrible that it was
bound to create a furious reaction in favor of a more liberal point of
view.
This does not mean that all the colonists suddenly sent for the collected
works of Socinius and ceased to frighten little children with stories
about Sodom and Gomorrah. But their leaders were almost without
exception representatives of the new school of thought and with great
ability and tact they infused their own conceptions of tolerance into the
parchment platform upon which the edifice of their new and independent
nation was to be erected.
They might not have been quite so successful if they had been obliged to
deal with one united country. But colonization in the northern part of
America had always been a complicated business. The Swedish Lutherans had
explored part of the territory. The French had sent over some of their
Huguenots. The Dutch Arminians had occupied a large share of the land.
While almost every sort and variety of English sect had at one time or
another tried to found a little Paradise of its own in the wilderness
between the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
This had made for a variety of religious expression and so well had the
different denominations been balanced that in several of the colonies a
crude and rudimentary form of mutual forbearance had been forced upon a
people who under ordinary circumstances would have been forever at each
other’s throats.
This development had been very unwelcome to the reverend gentlemen who
prospered where others quarreled. For years after the advent of the new
spirit of charity they had continued their struggle for the maintenance
of the old ideal of rectitude. They had achieved very little but they had
successfully estranged many of the younger men from a creed which seemed
to have borrowed its conceptions of mercy and kindliness from some of its
more ferocious Indian neighbors.
Fortunately for our country, the men who bore the brunt of battle in the
long struggle for freedom belonged to this small but courageous group of
dissenters.
Ideas travel lightly. Even a little two-masted schooner of eighty
tons can carry enough new notions to upset an entire continent. The
American colonists of the eighteenth century were obliged to do without
sculpture and grand pianos, but they did not lack for books. The more
intelligent among the people in the thirteen colonies began to understand
that there was something astir in the big world, of which they had
never heard anything in their Sunday sermons. The booksellers then
became their prophets. And although they did not officially break away
from the established church and changed little in their outer mode of
life, they showed when the opportunity offered itself that they were
faithful disciples of that old prince of Transylvania, who had refused
to persecute his Unitarian subjects on the ground that the good Lord had
expressly reserved for himself the right to three things: “To be able
to create something out of nothing; to know the future; and to dominate
man’s conscience.”
And when it became necessary to draw up a concrete political and social
program for the future conduct of their country, these brave patriots
incorporated their ideas into the documents in which they placed their
ideals before the high court of public opinion.
It would undoubtedly have horrified the good citizens of Virginia had
they known that some of the oratory to which they listened with such
profound respect was directly inspired by their arch-enemies, the
Libertines. But Thomas Jefferson, their most successful politician, was
himself a man of exceedingly liberal views and when he remarked that
religion could only be regulated by reason and conviction and not by
force or violence; or again, that all men had an equal right to the free
exercise of their religion according to the dictates of their conscience,
he merely repeated what had been thought and written before by Voltaire
and Bayle and Spinoza and Erasmus.
And later when the following heresies were heard: “that no declaration of
faith should be required as a condition of obtaining any public office in
the United States,” or “that Congress should make no law which referred
to the establishment of religion or which prohibited the free exercise
thereof,” the American rebels acquiesced and accepted.
In this way the United States came to be the first country where religion
was definitely separated from politics; the first country where no
candidate for office was forced to show his Sunday School certificate
before he could accept the nomination; the first country in which people
could, as far as the law was concerned, worship or fail to worship as
they pleased.
But here as in Austria (or anywhere else for that matter) the average
man lagged far behind his leaders and was unable to follow them as soon
as they deviated the least little bit from the beaten track. Not only
did many of the states continue to impose certain restrictions upon
those of their subjects who did not belong to the dominant religion, but
the citizens in their private capacity as New Yorkers or Bostonians or
Philadelphians continued to be just as intolerant of those who did not
share their own views as if they had never read a single line of their
own Constitution. All of which was to show itself soon afterwards in the
case of Thomas Paine.
Tom Paine rendered a very great service to the cause of the Americans.
He was the publicity man of the Revolution.
By birth he was an Englishman; by profession, a sailor; by instinct
and training, a rebel. He was forty years old before he visited the
colonies. While on a visit to London he had met Benjamin Franklin and had
received the excellent advice “to go west.” In the year 1774, provided
with letters of introduction from Benjamin himself, he had sailed for
Philadelphia and had helped Richard Bache, the son-in-law of Franklin, to
found a magazine, the “Pennsylvania Gazette.”
Being an inveterate amateur politician, Tom had soon found himself in the
midst of those events that were trying men’s souls. And being possessed
of a singularly well-ordered mind, he had taken hold of the ill-assorted
collection of American grievances and had incorporated them into a
pamphlet, short but sweet, which by a thorough application of “common
sense” should convince the people that the American cause was a just
cause and deserved the hearty coöperation of all loyal patriots.
This little book at once found its way to England and to the continent
where it informed many people for the first time in their lives that
there was such a thing as “an American nation” and that it had an
excellent right, yea, it was its sacred duty to make war upon the mother
country.
As soon as the Revolution was over, Paine went back to Europe to show the
English people the supposed absurdities of the government under which
they lived. It was a time when terrible things were happening along the
banks of the Seine and when respectable Britishers were beginning to look
across the Channel with very serious misgivings.
A certain Edmund Burke had just published his panic-stricken “Reflections
on the French Revolution.” Paine answered with a furious counter-blast of
his own called “The Rights of Man” and as a result the English government
ordered him to be tried for high treason.
Meanwhile his French admirers had elected him to the Convention and
Paine, who did not know a word of French but was an optimist, accepted
the honor and went to Paris. There he lived until he fell under the
suspicion of Robespierre. Knowing that at any moment he might be arrested
and decapitated, he hastily finished a book that was to contain his
philosophy of life. It was called “The Age of Reason.” The first part was
published just before he was taken to prison. The second part was written
during the ten months he spent in jail.
Paine believed that true religion, what he called “the religion of
humanity,” had two enemies, atheism on the one hand and fanaticism on
the other. But when he gave expression to this thought he was attacked
by every one and when he returned to America in 1802 he was treated with
such profound and relentless hatred that his reputation as a “dirty
little atheist” has survived him by more than a century.
It is true that nothing happened to him. He was not hanged or burned or
broken on the wheel. He was merely shunned by all his neighbors, little
boys were encouraged to stick their tongues out at him when he ventured
to leave his home, and at the time of his death he was an embittered and
forgotten man who found relief for his anger in writing foolish political
tracts against the other heroes of the Revolution.
This seems a most unfortunate sequel to a splendid beginning.
But it is typical of something that has repeatedly happened during the
history of the last two thousand years.
As soon as public intolerance has spent its fury, private intolerance
begins.
And lynchings start when official executions have come to an end.
CHAPTER XXX
THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS
Twelve years ago it would have been quite easy to write this book.
The word “Intolerance,” in the minds of most people, was then almost
exclusively identified with the idea of “religious intolerance” and when
an historian wrote that “so and so had been a champion of tolerance” it
was generally accepted that so and so had spent his life fighting the
abuses of the Church and the tyranny of a professional priesthood.
Then came the war.
And much was changed in this world.
Instead of one system of intolerance, we got a dozen.
Instead of one form of cruelty, practiced by man upon his fellow-men, we
got a hundred.
And a society which was just beginning to rid itself of the horrors
of religious bigotry was obliged to put up with the infinitely more
painful manifestations of a paltry form of racial intolerance and social
intolerance and a score of petty forms of intolerance, the existence of
which had not even been suspected a decade ago.
* * * * *
This seems very terrible to many good people who until recently lived in
the happy delusion that progress was a sort of automatic time-piece which
needed no other winding than their occasional approbation.
They sadly shake their heads, whisper “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!”
and mutter disagreeable things about the cussedness of the human race
which goes everlastingly to school, yet always refuses to learn.
Until, in sheer despair, they join the rapidly increasing ranks of our
spiritual defeatists, attach themselves to this or that or the other
religious institution (that they may transfer their own burden to the
back of some one else), and in the most doleful tones acknowledge
themselves beaten and retire from all further participation in the
affairs of their community.
I don’t like such people.
They are not merely cowards.
They are traitors to the future of the human race.
* * * * *
So far so good, but what is the solution, if a solution there be?
Let us be honest with ourselves.
There is not any.
At least not in the eyes of a world which asks for quick results and
expects to settle all difficulties of this earth comfortably and speedily
with the help of a mathematical or medical formula or by an act of
Congress. But those of us who have accustomed ourselves to consider
history in the light of eternity and who know that civilization does not
begin and end with the twentieth century, feel a little more hopeful.
That vicious circle of despair of which we hear so much nowadays (“man
has always been that way,” “man always will be that way,” “the world
never changes,” “things are just about the same as they were four
thousand years ago,”) does not exist.
It is an optical illusion.
The line of progress is often interrupted but if we set aside all
sentimental prejudices and render a sober judgment upon the record of
the last twenty thousand years (the only period about which we possess
more or less concrete information) we notice an indubitable if slow rise
from a condition of almost unspeakable brutality and crudeness to a state
which holds the promise of something infinitely nobler and better than
what has ever gone before and even the ghastly blunder of the Great War
can not shake the firm conviction that this is true.
* * * * *
The human race is possessed of almost incredible vitality.
It has survived theology.
It due time it will survive industrialism.
It has lived through cholera and plague, high heels and blue laws.
It will also learn how to overcome the many spiritual ills which beset
the present generation.
* * * * *
History, chary of revealing her secrets, has thus far taught us one great
lesson.
What the hand of man has done, the hand of man can also undo.
It is a question of courage, and next to courage, of education.
* * * * *
That of course sounds like a platitude. For the last hundred years we
have had “education” driven into our ears until we are sick and tired
of the word and look longingly back to a time when people could neither
read nor write but used their surplus intellectual energy for occasional
moments of independent thinking.
But when I here speak of “education” I do not mean the mere accumulation
of facts which is regarded as the necessary mental ballast of our modern
children. Rather, I have in mind that true understanding of the present
which is born out of a charitable and generous knowledge of the past.
In this book I have tried to prove that intolerance is merely a
manifestation of the protective instinct of the herd.
A group of wolves is intolerant of the wolf that is different (be it
through weakness or strength) from the rest of the pack and invariably
tries to get rid of this offending and unwelcome companion.
A tribe of cannibals is intolerant of the individual who by his
idiosyncrasies threatens to provoke the wrath of the Gods and bring
disaster upon the whole village and brutally relegates him or her to the
wilderness.
The Greek commonwealth can ill afford to harbor within its sacred walls a
citizen who dares to question the very fundaments upon which the success
of the community has been built and in a poor outburst of intolerance
condemns the offending philosopher to the merciful death of poison.
The Roman state cannot possibly hope to survive if a small group of
well-meaning zealots is allowed to play fast and loose with certain laws
which have been held indispensable ever since the days of Romulus, and
much against her own will she is driven into deeds of intolerance which
are entirely at variance with her age-old policy of liberal aloofness.
The Church, spiritual heir to the material dominions of the ancient
Empire, depends for her continued existence upon the absolute and
unquestioning obedience of even the humblest of her subjects and is
driven to such extremes of suppression and cruelty that many people
prefer the ruthlessness of the Turk to the charity of the Christian.
The great insurgents against ecclesiastical tyranny, beset by a thousand
difficulties, can only maintain their rule if they show themselves
intolerant to all spiritual innovations and scientific experiments and in
the name of “Reform” they commit (or rather try to commit) the self-same
mistakes which have just deprived their enemies of most of their former
power and influence.
And so it goes throughout the ages until life, which might be a glorious
adventure, is turned into a horrible experience and all this happens
because human existence so far has been entirely dominated by fear.
* * * * *
For fear, I repeat it, is at the bottom of all intolerance.
No matter what form or shape a persecution may take, it is caused by fear
and its very vehemence is indicative of the degree of anguish experienced
by those who erect the gallows or throw fresh logs upon the funeral pyre.
* * * * *
Once we recognize this fact, the solution of the difficulty immediately
presents itself.
Man, when not under the influence of fear, is strongly inclined to be
righteous and just.
Thus far he has had very few opportunities to practice these two virtues.
But I cannot for the life of me see that this matters overmuch. It is
part of the necessary development of the human race. And that race is
young, hopelessly, almost ridiculously young. To ask that a certain form
of mammal, which began its independent career only a few thousand years
ago should already have acquired those virtues which go only with age and
experience, seems both unreasonable and unfair.
And furthermore, it warps our point of view.
It causes us to be irritated when we should be patient.
It makes us say harsh things where we should only feel pity.
* * * * *
In the last chapters of a book like this, there is a serious temptation
to assume the rôle of the prophet of woe and indulge in a little amateur
preaching.
Heaven forbid!
Life is short and sermons are apt to be long.
And what cannot be said in a hundred words had better never be said at
all.
* * * * *
Our historians are guilty of one great error. They speak of prehistoric
times, they tell us about the Golden Age of Greece and Rome, they talk
nonsense about a supposedly dark period, they compose rhapsodies upon the
tenfold glories of our modern era.
If perchance these learned doctors perceive certain characteristics which
do not seem to fit into the picture they have so prettily put together,
they offer a few humble apologies and mumble something about certain
undesirable qualities which are part of our unfortunate and barbaric
heritage but which in due course of time will disappear, just as the
stage-coach has given way before the railroad engine.
It is all very pretty but it is not true. It may flatter our pride to
believe ourselves heir to the ages. It will be better for our spiritual
health if we know ourselves for what we are—contemporaries of the folks
that lived in caves, neolithic men with cigarettes and Ford cars,
cliff-dwellers who reach their homes in an elevator.
For then and only then shall we be able to make a first step toward that
goal that still lies hidden beyond the vast mountain ranges of the future.
* * * * *
To speak of Golden Ages and Modern Eras and Progress is sheer waste of
time as long as this world is dominated by fear.
To ask for tolerance, as long as intolerance must of need be an integral
part of our law of self-preservation, is little short of a crime.
The day will come when tolerance shall be the rule, when intolerance
shall be a myth like the slaughter of innocent captives, the burning of
widows, the blind worship of a printed page.
It may take ten thousand years, it may take a hundred thousand.
But it will come, and it will follow close upon the first true victory of
which history shall have any record, the triumph of man over his own fear.
_Westport, Connecticut_
_July, 19, 1925_
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