Kitabı oku: «The Roman and the Teuton», sayfa 12

Yes.  Spirit is stronger than flesh.  ‘Meekly bend thy neck, Sicamber!’ said St. Remigius to the great conquering King Clovis, when he stept into the baptismal font—(not ‘Most Gracious Majesty,’ or ‘Illustrious Cæsar,’ or ‘by the grace of God Lord of the Franks,’ but Sicamber, as a missionary might now say Maori, or Caffre,—and yet St. Remigius’s life was in Clovis’s hand then and always),—‘Burn what thou hast adored, and adore what thou hast burned!’  And the terrible Clovis trembled and obeyed.

So does the wild king at the shrine of St. Quemdeusvult.  He takes his bracelet, or his jewel, and offers it civilly enough.  Will the bishop be so good as to inform the great Earl St. Quemdeusvult, that he was not aware of his rights, or even of his name; that perhaps he will deign to accept this jewel, which he took off the neck of a Roman General—that—that on the whole he is willing to make the amende honorable, as far as is consistent with the feelings of a nobleman; and trusts that the saint, being a nobleman too, will be satisfied therewith.

After which, probably, it will appear to the wild king that this bishop is the very man that he wants, the very opposite to himself and his wild riders; a man pure, peaceable, just, and brave; possessed, too, of boundless learning; who can read, write, cipher, and cast nativities; who has a whole room full of books and parchments, and a map of the whole world; who can talk Latin, and perhaps Greek, as well as one of those accursed man-eating Grendels, a Roman lawyer, or a logothete from Ravenna; possessed, too, of boundless supernatural power;—Would the bishop be so good as to help him in his dispute with the Count Boso, about their respective marches in such and such a forest?  If the bishop could only settle that without more fighting, of course he should have his reward.  He would confirm to the saint and his burg all the rights granted by Constantine the Kaiser; and give him moreover all the meadow land in such and such a place, with the mills and fisheries, on service of a dish of trout from the bishop and his successors, whenever he came that way: for the trout there were exceeding good, that he knew.  And so a bargain would be struck, and one of those curious compromises between the spiritual and temporal authorities take root, of which one may read at length in the pages of M. Guizot, or Sir James Stephen.

And after a few years, most probably, the king would express a wish to be baptized, at the instance of his queen who had been won over by the bishop, and had gone down into the font some years before; and he would bid his riders be baptized also; and they would obey, seeing that it could do them no harm, and might do them some good; and they would agree to live more or less according to the laws of God and common humanity; and so one more Christian state would be formed; one more living stone (as it was phrased in those days) built into the great temple of God which was called Christendom.

So the work was done.  Can we devise any better method of doing it?  If not, let us be content that it was done somehow, and believe that wisdom is justified of all her children.

We may object to the fact, that the dom-church and its organization grew up (as was the case in the vast majority of instances) round the body of a saint or martyr; we may smile at the notion of an invisible owner and protector of the soil: but we must not overlook the broad fact, that without that prestige the barbarians would never have been awed into humanity; without that prestige the place would have been swept off the face of the earth, till not one stone stood on another: and he who does not see what a disaster for humanity that would have been, must be ignorant that the civilization of Europe is the child of the towns; and also that our Teutonic forefathers were by profession destroyers of towns, and settlers apart from each other on country freeholds.  Lonely barbarism would have been the fate of Europe, but for the monk who guarded the relics of the saint within the walled burg.

This good work of the Church, in the preservation and even resuscitation of the municipal institutions of the towns, has been discust so well and fully by M. Guizot, M. Sismondi, and Sir James Stephen, that I shall say no more about it, save to recommend you to read what they have written.  I go on to point out to you some other very important facts, which my ideal sketch exemplifies.

The difference between the Clergy and the Teuton conquerors was more than a difference of creed, or of civilization.  It was an actual difference of race.  They were Romans, to whom the Teuton was a savage, speaking a different tongue, obeying different laws, his whole theory of the universe different from the Roman.  And he was, moreover, an enemy and a destroyer.  The Teuton was to them as a Hindoo is to us, with the terrible exception, that the positions were reversed; that the Teuton was not the conquered, but the conqueror.  It is easy for us to feel humanity and Christian charity toward races which we have mastered.  It was not so easy for the Roman priest to feel them toward a race which had mastered him.  His repugnance to the ‘Barbarian’ must have been at first intense.  He never would have conquered it; he never would have become the willing converter of the heathen, had there not been in him the Spirit of God, and firm belief in a Catholic Church, to which all men of all races ought alike to belong.  This true and glorious idea, the only one which has ever been or ever will be able to break down the barriers of race, and the animal antipathy which the natural man has to all who are not of his own kin: this idea was the sole possession of the Roman clergy; and by it they conquered, because it was true, and came from God.

But this very difference of race exposed the clergy to great temptations.  They were the only civilized men left, west of Constantinople.  They looked on the Teuton not as a man, but as a child; to be ruled; to be petted when he did right, punished when he did wrong; and too often cajoled into doing right, and avoiding wrong.  Craft became more and more their usual weapon.  There were great excuses for them.  Their lives and property were in continual danger.  Craft is the natural weapon of the weak against the strong.  It seemed to them, too often, to be not only natural, but spiritual also, and therefore just and right.

Again, the clergy were the only organic remnants of the Roman Empire.  They claimed their privileges and lands as granted to them by past Roman Emperors, under the Roman law.  This fact made it their interest, of course, to perpetuate that Roman law, and to introduce it as far as they could among their conquerors, to the expulsion of the old Teutonic laws; and they succeeded on the whole.  Of that more hereafter.  Observe now, that as their rights dated from times which to the Teutons were pre-historic, their statements could not be checked by conquerors who could not even read.  Thence rose the temptation to forge; to forge legends, charters, dotations, ecclesiastical history of all kinds—an ugly and world-famous instance of which you will hear of hereafter.  To that temptation they yielded more and more as the years rolled on, till their statements on ecclesiastical history became such as no historian can trust, without the most plentiful corroboration.

There were great excuses for them, in this matter, as in others.  They could not but look on the Teuton as—what in fact and law he was—an unjust and intrusive usurper.  They could not but look on their Roman congregations, and on themselves, as what in fact and law they were, the rightful owners of the soil.  They were but defending or recovering their original rights.  Would not the end justify the means?

But more.  Out of this singular position grew a doctrine, which looks to us irrational now, but was by no means so then.  If the Church derived her rights from the extinct Roman Cæsars, how could the Teuton conquerors interfere with those rights?  If she had owed allegiance to Constantine or Theodosius, she certainly owed none to Dietrich, Alboin, or Clovis.  She did not hold their lands of them; and would pay them, if she could avoid it, neither tax nor toll.  She did not recognize the sovereignty of these Teutons as ‘ordained by God.’

Out of this simple political fact grew up vast consequences.  The Teuton king was a heathen or Arian usurper.  He was not a king de jure, in the eyes of the clergy, till he was baptized into the Church, and then lawfully anointed king by the clergy.  Thus the clergy gradually became the makers of kings; and the power of making involved a corresponding power of unmaking, if the king rebelled against the Church, and so cut himself off from Christendom.  At best, he was one of ‘the Princes of this world,’ from whom the Church was free, absolutely in spiritual matters, and in temporal matters, also de jure, and therefore de facto as far as she could be made free.  To keep the possessions of the Church from being touched by profane hands, even that they might contribute to the common needs of the nation, became a sacred duty, a fixed idea, for which the clergy must struggle, anathematize, forge if need be: but also—to do them justice—die if need be as martyrs.  The nations of this world were nothing to them.  The wars of the nations were nothing.  They were the people of God, ‘who dwelt alone, and were not reckoned among the nations;’ their possessions were the inheritance of God: and from this idea, growing (as I have shewn) out of a political fact, arose the extra-national, and too often anti-national position, which the Roman clergy held for many ages, and of which the instinct, at least, lingers among them in many countries.  Out of it arose, too, all after struggles between the temporal and ecclesiastical powers.  Becket, fighting to the death against Henry II., was not, as M. Thierry thinks, the Anglo-Saxon defying the Norman.  He was the representative of the Christian Roman defying the Teuton, on the ground of rights which he believed to have existed while the Teuton was a heathen in the German forests.  Gradually, as the nations of Europe became really nations, within fixed boundaries, and separate Christian organizations, these demands of the Church became intolerable in reason, because unnecessary in fact.  But had there not been in them at the first an instinct of right and justice, they would never have become the fixed idea of the clerical mind; the violation of them the one inexpiable sin; and the defence of them (as may be seen by looking through the Romish Calendar) the most potent qualification for saintship.

Yes.  The clergy believed that idea deeply enough to die for it.  St. Alphege at Canterbury had been, it is said, one of the first advisers of the ignominious payment of the Danegeld: but there was one thing which he would not do.  He would advise the giving up of the money of the nation: but the money of his church he would not give up.  The Danes might thrust him into a filthy dungeon: he would not take the children’s bread and cast it unto the dogs.  They might drag him out into their husting, and threaten him with torture: but to the drunken cry of ‘Gold!  Bishop!  Gold!’ his only answer would be—Not a penny.  He could not rob the poor of Christ.  And when he fell, beaten to death with the bones and horns of the slaughtered oxen, he died in faith; a martyr to the great idea of that day, that the gold of the Church did not belong to the conquerors of this world.

But St. Alphege was an Englishman, and not a Roman.  True in the letter: but not in the spirit.  The priest or monk, by becoming such, more or less renounced his nationality.  It was the object of the Church to make him renounce it utterly; to make him regard himself no longer as Englishman, Frank, Lombard, or Goth: but as the representatives by an hereditary descent, considered all the more real because it was spiritual and not carnal, of the Roman Church; to prevent his being entangled, whether by marriage or otherwise, in the business of this life; out of which would flow nepotism, Simony, and Erastian submission to those sovereigns who ought to be the servants, not the lords of the Church.  For this end no means were too costly.  St. Dunstan, in order to expel the married secular priests, and replace them by Benedictine monks of the Italian order of Monte Casino, convulsed England, drove her into civil war, paralysed her monarchs one after the other, and finally left her exhausted and imbecile, a prey to the invading Northmen: but he had at least done his best to make the royal House of Cerdic, and the nations which obeyed that House, understand that the Church derived its rights not from them, but from Rome.

This hereditary sense of superiority on the part of the clergy may explain and excuse much of their seeming flattery.  The most vicious kings are lauded, if only they have been ‘erga servos Dei benevoli;’ if they have founded monasteries; if they have respected the rights of the Church.  The clergy too often looked on the secular princes as more or less wild beasts, of whom neither common decency, justice, or mercy was to be expected; and they had too often reason enough to do so.  All that could be expected of the kings was, that if they would not regard man, they should at least fear God; which if they did, the proof of ‘divine grace’ on their part was so unexpected, as well as important, that the monk chroniclers praised them heartily and honestly, judging them by what they had, not by what they had not.

Thus alone can one explain such a case as that of the monastic opinion of Dagobert the Second, king of the Franks.  We are told in the same narrative, seemingly without any great sense of incongruity, how he murdered his own relations and guests, and who not?—how he massacred 9000 Bulgars to whom he had given hospitality; how he kept a harem of three queens, and other women so numerous that Fredegarius cannot mention them; and also how, accompanied by his harem, he chanted among the monks of St. Denis; how he founded many rich convents; how he was the friend, or rather pupil, of St. Arnulf of Metz, St. Omer, and above all of St. Eloi—whose story I recommend you to read, charmingly told, in Mr. Maitland’s ‘Dark Ages,’ pp. 81-122.  The three saints were no hypocrites—God forbid!  They were good men and true, to whom had been entrusted the keeping of a wild beast, to be petted and praised whenever it shewed any signs of humanity or obedience.

But woe to the prince, however useful or virtuous in other respects, who laid sacrilegious hands on the goods of the Church.  He might, like Charles Martel, have delivered France from the Pagans on the east, and from the Mussulmen on the south, and have saved Christendom once and for all from the dominion of the Crescent, in that great battle on the plains of Poitiers, where the Arab cavalry (says Isidore of Beja) broke against the immoveable line of Franks, like ‘waves against a wall of ice.’

But if, like Charles Martel, he had dared to demand of the Church taxes and contributions toward the support of his troops, and the salvation both of Church and commonweal, then all his prowess was in vain.  Some monk would surely see him in a vision, as St. Eucherius, Bishop of Orleans, saw Charles Martel (according to the Council of Kiersy), ‘with Cain, Judas, and Caiaphas, thrust into the Stygian whirlpools and Acherontic combustion of the sempiternal Tartarus.’

Those words, which, with slight variations, are a common formula of cursing appended to monastic charters against all who should infringe them, remind us rather of the sixth book of Virgil’s Æneid than of the Holy Scriptures; and explain why Dante naturally chooses that poet as a guide through his Inferno.

The cosmogony from which such an idea was derived was simple enough.  I give, of course, no theological opinion on its correctness: but as professor of Modern History, I am bound to set before you opinions which had the most enormous influence on the history of early Europe.  Unless you keep them in mind, as the fixed and absolute background of all human thought and action for more than 1000 years, you will never be able to understand the doings of European men.

This earth, then, or at least the habitable part of it, was considered as most probably a flat plane.  Below that plane, or in the centre of the earth, was the realm of endless fire.  It could be entered (as by the Welsh knight who went down into St. Patrick’s Purgatory) by certain caves.  By listening at the craters of volcanoes, which were its mouths, the cries of the tortured might be heard in the depths of the earth.

In that ‘Tartarus’ every human being born into the world was doomed to be endlessly burnt alive: only in the Church, ‘extra quam nulla salus,’ was there escape from the common doom.  But to that doom, excommunication, which thrust a man from the pale of the Church, condemned the sinner afresh, with curses the most explicit and most horrible.

The superior clergy, therefore, with whom the anathematizing power lay, believed firmly that they could, proprio motu, upon due cause shewn, cause any man or woman to be burned alive through endless ages.  And what was more, the Teutonic laity, with that intense awe of the unseen which they had brought with them out of the wilderness, believed it likewise, and trembled.  It paralysed the wisest, as well as the fiercest, that belief.  Instead of disgusting the kings of the earth, it gave them over, bound hand and foot by their own guilty consciences, into the dominion of the clergy; and the belief that Charles Martel was damned, only knit (as M. Sismondi well remarks) his descendants the Carlovingians more closely to the Church which possest so terrible a weapon.

Whether they were right or wrong in these beliefs is a question not to be discussed in this chair.  My duty is only to point out to you the universal existence of those beliefs, and the historic fact that they gave the clergy a character supernatural, magical, divine, with a reserve of power before which all trembled, from the beggar to the king; and also, that all struggles between the temporal and spiritual powers, like that between Henry and Becket, can only be seen justly in the light of the practical meaning of that excommunication which Becket so freely employed.  I must also point out to you that so enormous a power (too great for the shoulders of mortal man) was certain to be, and actually was, fearfully abused, not only by its direct exercise, but also by bargaining with men, through indulgences and otherwise, for the remission of that punishment, which the clergy could, if they would, inflict; and worst of all, that out of the whole theory sprang up that system of persecution, in which the worst cruelties of heathen Rome were imitated by Christian priests, on the seemingly irrefragable ground that it was merciful to offenders to save them, or, if not, at least to save others through them, by making them feel for a few hours in this world what they would feel for endless ages in the next.

LECTURE IX—THE MONK A CIVILIZER

Historians are often blamed for writing as if the History of Kings and Princes were the whole history of the world.  ‘Why do you tell us,’ is said, ‘of nothing but the marriages, successions, wars, characters, of a few Royal Races?  We want to know what the people, and not the princes, were like.  History ought to be the history of the masses, and not of kings.’

The only answer to this complaint seems to be, that the defect is unavoidable.  The history of the masses cannot be written, while they have no history; and none will they have, as long as they remain a mass; ere their history begins, individuals, few at first, and more and more numerous as they progress, must rise out of the mass, and become persons, with fixed ideas, determination, conscience, more or less different from their fellows, and thereby leavening and elevating their fellows, that they too may become persons, and men indeed.  Then they will begin to have a common history, issuing out of each man’s struggle to assert his own personality and his own convictions.  Till that point is reached, the history of the masses will be mere statistic concerning their physical well-being or ill-being, which (for the early ages of our race) is unwritten, and therefore undiscoverable.

The early history of the Teutonic race, therefore, is, and must always remain, simply the history of a few great figures.  Of the many of the masses, nothing is said; because there was nothing to say.  They all ate, drank, married, tilled, fought, and died, not altogether brutally, we will hope, but still in a dull monotony, unbroken by any struggle of principles or ideas.  We know that large masses of human beings have so lived in every age, and are living so now—the Tartar hordes, for instance, or the thriving negroes of central Africa: comfortable folk, getting a tolerable living, son after father, for many generations, but certainly not developed enough, or afflicted enough, to have any history.

I believe that the masses, during the early middle age, were very well off; quite as well off as they deserved; that is, earned for themselves.  They lived in a rough way, certainly: but roughness is not discomfort, where the taste has not been educated.  A Red Indian sleeps as well in a wigwam as we in a spring bed; and the Irish babies thrive as well among the peat ashes as on a Brussels carpet.  Man is a very well constructed being, and can live and multiply anywhere, provided he can keep warm, and get pure water and enough to eat.  Indeed, our Teutonic fathers must have been comfortably off, or they could not have multiplied as they did.  Even though their numbers may have been overstated, the fact is patent, that howsoever they were slaughtered down, by the Romans or by each other, they rose again as out of the soil, more numerous than ever.  Again and again you read of a tribe being all but exterminated by the Romans, and in a few years find it bursting over the Pfalzgrab or the Danube, more numerous and terrible than before.  Never believe that a people deprest by cold, ill-feeding, and ill-training, could have conquered Europe in the face of centuries of destructive war.  Those very wars, again, may have helped in the long run the increase of population, and for a reason simple enough, though often overlooked.  War throws land out of cultivation; and when peace returns, the new settlers find the land fallow, and more or less restored to its original fertility; and so begins a period of rapid and prosperous increase.  In no other way can I explain the rate at which nations after the most desolating wars spring up, young and strong again, like the phoenix, from their own funeral pile.  They begin afresh as the tillers of a virgin soil, fattened too often with the ashes of burnt homesteads, and the blood of the slain.

Another element of comfort may have been the fact, that in the rough education of the forest, only the strong and healthy children lived, while the weakly died off young, and so the labour-market, as we should say now, was never overstocked.  This is the case with our own gipsies, and with many savage tribes—the Red Indians, for instance—and accounts for their general healthiness: the unhealthy being all dead, in the first struggle for existence.  But then these gipsies, and the Red Indians, do not increase in numbers, but the contrary; while our forefathers increased rapidly.  On the other hand, we have, at least throughout the middle ages, accounts of such swarms of cripples, lepers, deformed, and other incapable persons, as to make some men believe that there were more of them, in proportion to the population, than there are now.  And it may have been so.  The strongest and healthiest men always going off to be killed in war, the weakliest only would be left at home to breed; and so an unhealthy population might spring up.  And again—and this is a curious fact—as law and order enter a country, so will the proportion of incapables, in body and mind, increase.  In times of war and anarchy, when every one is shifting for himself, only the strongest and shrewdest can stand.  Woe to those who cannot take care of themselves.  The fools and cowards, the weakly and sickly, are killed, starved, neglected, or in other ways brought to grief.  But when law and order come, they protect those who cannot protect themselves, and the fools and cowards, the weakly and sickly, are supported at the public expense, and allowed to increase and multiply as public burdens.  I do not say that this is wrong, Heaven forbid!  I only state the fact.  A government is quite right in defending all alike from the brute competition of nature, whose motto is—Woe to the weak.  To the Church of the middle age is due the preaching and the practice of the great Christian doctrine, that society is bound to protect the weak.  So far the middle age saw: but no further.  For our own times has been reserved the higher and deeper doctrine, that it is the duty of society to make the weak strong; to reform, to cure, and above all, to prevent by education, by sanitary science, by all and every means, the necessity of reforming and of curing.

Science could not do that in the middle age.  But if Science could not do it, Religion would at least try to do the next best thing to it.  The monasteries were the refuges, whither the weak escaped from the competition of the strong.  Thither flocked the poor, the crippled, the orphan, and the widow, all, in fact, who could not fight for themselves.  There they found something like justice, order, pity, help.  Even the fool and the coward, when they went to the convent-door, were not turned away.  The poor half-witted rascal, who had not sense enough to serve the king, might still serve the abbot.  He would be set to drive, plough, or hew wood—possibly by the side of a gentleman, a nobleman, or even a prince—and live under equal law with them; and under, too, a discipline more strict than that of any modern army; and if he would not hew the wood, or drive the bullocks, as he ought, then the abbot would have him flogged soundly till he did; which was better for him, after all, than wandering about to be hooted by the boys, and dying in a ditch at last.

The coward, too—the abbot could make him of use, even though the king could not.  There were, no doubt, in those days, though fewer in number than now, men who could not face physical danger, and the storm of the evil world,—delicate, nervous, imaginative, feminine characters; who, when sent out to battle, would be very likely to run away.  Our forefathers, having no use for such persons, used to put such into a bog-hole, and lay a hurdle over them, in the belief that they would sink to the lowest pool of Hela for ever more.  But the abbot had great use for such.  They could learn to read, write, sing, think; they were often very clever; they might make great scholars; at all events they might make saints.  Whatever they could not do, they could pray.  And the united prayer of those monks, it was then believed, could take heaven by storm, alter the course of the elements, overcome Divine justice, avert from mankind the anger of an offended God.  Whether that belief were right or wrong, people held it; and the man who could not fight with carnal weapons, regained his self-respect, and therefore his virtue, when he found himself fighting, as he held, with spiritual weapons against all the powers of darkness ²⁰.  The first light in which I wish you to look at the old monasteries, is as defences for the weak against the strong.

But what has this to do with what I said at first, as to the masses having no history?  This:—that through these monasteries the masses began first to have a history; because through them they ceased to be masses, and became first, persons and men, and then, gradually, a people.  That last the monasteries could not make them: but they educated them for becoming a people; and in this way.  They brought out, in each man, the sense of individual responsibility.  They taught him, whether warrior or cripple, prince or beggar, that he had an immortal soul, for which each must give like account to God.

Do you not see the effect of that new thought?  Treated as slaves, as things and animals, the many had learnt to consider themselves as things and animals.  And so they had become ‘a mass,’ that is, a mere heap of inorganic units, each of which has no spring of life in itself as distinguished from a whole, a people, which has one bond, uniting each to all.  The ‘masses’ of the French had fallen into that state, before the Revolution of 1793.  The ‘masses’ of our agricultural labourers,—the ‘masses’ of our manufacturing workmen, were fast falling into that state in the days of our grandfathers.  Whether the French masses have risen out of it, remains to be seen.  The English masses, thanks to Almighty God, have risen out of it; and by the very same factor by which the middle-age masses rose—by Religion.  The great Methodist movement of the last century did for our masses, what the monks did for our forefathers in the middle age.  Wesley and Whitfield, and many another noble soul, said to Nailsea colliers, Cornish miners, and all manner of drunken brutalized fellows, living like the beasts that perish,—‘Each of you—thou—and thou—and thou—stand apart and alone before God.  Each has an immortal soul in him, which will be happy or miserable for ever, according to the deeds done in the body.  A whole eternity of shame or of glory lies in you—and you are living like a beast.’  And in proportion as each man heard that word, and took it home to himself, he became a new man, and a true man.  The preachers may have mixed up words with their message with which we may disagree, have appealed to low hopes and fears which we should be ashamed to bring into our calculations;—so did the monks: but they got their work done somehow; and let us thank them, and the old Methodists, and any man who will tell men, in whatever clumsy and rough fashion, that they are not things, and pieces of a mass, but persons, with an everlasting duty, an everlasting right and wrong, an everlasting God in whose presence they stand, and who will judge them according to their works.  True, that is not all that men need to learn.  After they are taught, each apart, that he is a man, they must be taught, how to be an united people: but the individual teaching must come first; and before we hastily blame the individualizing tendencies of the old Evangelical movement, or that of the middle-age monks, let us remember, that if they had not laid the foundation, others could not build thereon.