 |
Project Gutenberg
Australia
a
treasure-trove of literature
treasure found hidden
with no evidence of ownership |
BROWSE the site for other works by this author
(and our other authors) or get HELP Reading, Downloading and Converting files)
or
SEARCH the entire site with
Google Site Search |
Title: Crux Ansata
Author: H.G. Wells
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 1303501h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: Jun 2013
Most recent update: Jun 2013
This eBook was produced by Roy Glashan.
Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.
This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html
To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au
GO TO Project Gutenberg Australia HOME PAGE
Crux Ansata
An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church
by
H.G. Wells
First published by Penguin Books, London, 1943
First US edition: Agora Publishing Co., New York, 1944
TABLE OF CONTENTS
●Introduction
●I. — Why Do We Not Bomb Rome?
●II. — The Development Of The Idea Of
Christendom
●III. — The Essential Weakness Of
Christendom
●IV. — Heresies Are Experiments In Man's
Unsatisfied Search For Truth
●V. — The City of God
●VI. — The Church Salvages Learning
●VII. — Charlemagne
●VIII. — Black Interlude
●IXa. — The Launching Of The Crusades By The
Church
●IXb. — Christendom Marches East
●X. — A Catholic Gentleman of 1440
●XI. — Social Inequality In The 14th And 15th
Centuries
●XII. — The Dawn Of Social Discontent
●XIIIa. — The Mental Atmosphere Before The
Reformation
●XIIIb. — How Henry VIII Became A Protestant
Prince
●XIV. — The Counter-Reformation
●XV. — The Jesuits
●XVI. — The Continual Shrinkage Of The Roman
Catholic Church
●XVII. — The Struggle For Britain
●XVIII. — Shinto Catholicism
●XIX. — Roman Catholicism In America
●XX. — The United Christian Front
●XXI. — The Pretensions And Limitations Of
Pope Pius XII
"Crux Ansata," Agora Publishing Co., New York, 1944
Written at the height of WW2, Crux Ansata (Latin:
"The Cross with a handle") is an uncomprimising attack on Roman Catholicism
and Pope Pius XII. Indeed some will contend that Wells goes too far, but this
book, it must be remembered was part of the war effort. When it was written,
Wells had recently retired from the position of Minister of Allied
Propaganda, but that official retirement did not stop him continuing that
effort.
During those grim days of bombing and terror, many wealthy
people fled London to the safety of country estates. But H.G. Wells refused
to leave London. He knew that shared suffering between the economic classes
was key to the war effort. He would not leave knowing that the poor had no
choice but to stay and he meant to shame his wealthy fellow-Londoners by his
resolve. His front door was blown in several times by German bombs, and even
though he was in his late 70's and ill health, he joined in the regular
patrols of the war-time streets for fires. It was under this sort of duress
that he wrote Crux Ansata.
In Crux, Wells uses his pulpit of public teacher to add fuel
to the fire of British morale. He praises the independant spirit of the
Englishman and denounces the "spreading octopus" of the Church and its
"Shinto alliance." However, the bulk of this book remains a very readable
history of Christianity, not unlike the style of his famous Outline of
History, though it suffers slightly from a forced quality, almost as if he
were tired of reciting. It has occasional long quotes by other authors, but
as was necessitated by the difficulties of war time, it is a short book;
terse and to the point. There are times though when Crux Ansata dwindles into
vagueness, and one gets a brief passing feeling that H.G.'s mental sharpness
was begining to errode. Despite this, however, Crux has its share of powerful
quotes that, in part, save it from being merely a piece of wartime
propoganda.
"Christianity early ceased to be purely prophetic and
creative. It entangled itself with archaic traditions of human sacrifice,
with Mithraic blood-cleansing, with priestcraft as ancient as human society,
and with elaborate doctrines about the structure of the divinity. The gory
entrail-searching forefinger of the Etruscan pontifex maximus
presently overshadowed the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth..." (Crux
Ansata, page 12).
"Even in comparison with Fascism and the Nazi adventure,
Roman Catholicism is a broken and utterly desperate thing, capable only of
malignant mischief in our awakening world" (ibid, page 79).
"Watch a priest in a public conveyance. He is fighting
against disturbing suggestions. He must not look at women lest he think of
sex. He must not look about him, for reality, that is to say the devil, waits
to seduce him on every hand. You see him muttering his protective
incantations, avoiding your eye. He is suppressing "sinful" thoughts"
(ibid, page 113).
I cut the following paragraph from The Times of
October 27th, 1942.
"The air raids on Italy have created the greatest
satisfaction in Malta, which has suffered so much at Axis hands. At least the
Italians now realise what being bombed means and the nature of the suffering
they have so callously inflicted on little Malta since June 12th, 1940, when
they showered their first bombs on what was then an almost defenceless
island.
"As that bombing was intensified, especially since the
Italians asked Germany's help in their vain attempt to reduce Malta, the
people's reaction became violent and expressed itself in two words 'Bomb
Rome', which were written prominently on walls in every locality."
On June 1st, 1942, the enemy bombed Canterbury and as near as possible got
the Archbishop of Canterbury. But what is a mere Protestant Archbishop
against His Holiness the Pope?
In March 1943 Rome was still unbombed.
Now consider the following facts.
We are at war with the Kingdom of Italy, which made a particularly cruel
and stupid attack upon our allies Greece and France; which is the homeland of
Fascism; and whose "Duce" Mussolini begged particularly for the privilege of
assisting in the bombing of London.
There are also Italian troops fighting against our allies the Russians. A
thorough bombing (a la Berlin) of the Italian capital seems not simply
desirable, but necessary. At present a common persuasion that Rome will be
let off lightly by our bombers is leading to a great congestion of the worst
elements. of the Fascist order in and around Rome.
Not only is Rome the source and centre of Fascism, but it has been
the,seat of a Pope, who, as we shall show, has been an open ally of the Nazi-
Fascist-Shinto Axis since his enthronement. He has never raised his voice
against that Axis, he has never denounced the abominable aggressions, murder
and cruelties they have inflicted upon mankind, and the pleas he is now
making for peace and forgiveness are manifestly designed to assist the escape
of these criminals, so that they may presently launch a fresh assault upon
all that is decent in humanity. The Papacy is admittedly in communication
with the Japanese, and maintains in the Vatican an active Japanese
observation post.
No other capital has been spared the brunt of this war.
Why do we not bomb. Rome? Why do we allow these open and declared
antagonists of democratic freedom to entertain their Shinto allies and
organise a pseudo-Catholic destruction of democratic freedom? Why do
we—after all the surprises and treacheries of this war—allow this
open preparation of an internal attack upon the rehabilitation of Europe? The
answer lies in the deliberate blindness of our Foreign Office and opens up a
very serious indictment of the mischievous social disintegration inherent in
contemporary Roman Catholic activities.
LET us tell as compactly as possible certain salient phases
in the history of the Christian organisation that led up to the breach
between the various form of Protestantism and Rome. Like all human
organisations that have played a part through many generations, the career of
the Catholic Church has passed through great fluctuations. It had phases of
vigorous belief in itself and wise leadership; it fell into evil ways and
seemed no better than a dying carcass; it revived, it split. There is no need
for us to explore the early development and variations of Christianity before
it assumed its definite form under the patronage and very definite urgency of
the Emperor Constantine. The recriminations of the early Fathers, their
strange ideas and stranger practices need not concern us here. There were
churches, but there was no single unified Church.
Catholicism as we know it as a definite and formulated belief came into
existence with the formulation of the Nicene Creed. Eusebius gives a curious
account of that strange assemblage at Nicaea, over which the Emperor,
although he was not yet a baptised Christian, presided. It was not his first
council of the Church, for he had already (in 314) presided over.a council at
Arles. He sat in the middle of the Council of Nicaea upon a golden throne,
and, as he had little Greek, we must suppose he was reduced to watching the
countenances and gestures of the debaters, and listening to their
intonations.
The council was a stormy one. When old Arius rose to speak, one, Nicholas
of Myra, struck him in the face, and afterwards many ran out, thrusting their
fingers into their ears in affected horror at the old man's heresies. One is
tempted to imagine the great emperor, deeply anxious for the solidarity of
his empire, firmly resolved to end these divisions, bending towards his
interpreters to ask them the meaning of the uproar.
The views that prevailed at Nicaea are embodied in the Nicene Creed, a
strictly Trinitarian statement, and the Emperor sustained the Trinitarian
position. But afterwards, when Athanasius bore too hardly upon the Arians, he
had him banished from Alexandria; and when the Church at Alexandria would
have excommunicated Arius, he obliged it to readmit him to communion.
A very important thing for us to note is the role played by this emperor
in the unification and fixation of Christendom. Not only was the Council of
Nicaea assembled by Constantine the Great, but all the great councils, the
two at Constantinople (381 and 553), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451), were
called together by the imperial power. And it is very manifest that in much
of the history of Christianity at this time the spirit of Constantine the
Great is as evident as, or more evident than, the spirit of Jesus.
Constantine was a pure autocrat. Autocracy had ousted the last traces of
constitutional government in the days of Aurelian and Diocletian. To the best
of his lights the Emperor was trying to reconstruct the tottering empire
while there was yet time, and he worked, according to those lights, without
any councillors, any public opinion, or any sense of the need of such aids
and checks.
The idea of stamping out all controversy and division, stamping out all
independent thought, by imposing one dogmatic creed upon all believers, is an
altogether autocratic idea, it is the idea of the single-handed man who feels
that to get anything done at all he must be free from opposition and
criticism. The story of the Church after he had consolidated it becomes,
therefore, a history of the violent struggles that were bound to follow upon
his sudden and rough summons to unanimity. From him the Church acquired that
disposition to be authoritative and unquestioned, to develop a centralised
organisation and run parallel with the Roman Empire which still haunts its
mentality.
A second great autocrat who presently emphasised the distinctly
authoritarian character of Catholic Christianity was Theodosius I, Theodosius
the Great (379-395). He handed all the churches to the Trinitarians, forbade
the unorthodox to hold meetings, and overthrew the heathen temples throughout
the empire, and in 390 he caused the great statue of Serapis at Alexandria to
be destroyed. Henceforth there was to be no rivalry, no qualification to the
rigid unity of the Church.
Here we need tell only in the broadest outline of the vast internal
troubles the Church, its indigestions of heresy; of Arians and Paulicians, of
Gnostics and Manichaeans.
The denunciation of heresy came before the creeds in the formative phase
of Christianity. The Christian congregations hadinterests in common in those
days; they had a sort of freemasonry of common interests; their general
theology was Pauline, but they evidently discussed their fundamental
doctrines and documents widely and sometimes acrimoniously. Christian
teaching almost from the outset was a matter for vehement disputation. The
very Gospels are rife with unsettled arguments; the Epistles are
disputations, and the search for truth intensified divergence. The violence
and intolerance of the Nicene Council witnesses to the doctrinal stresses
that had already accumulated in the earlier years, and to the perplexity
confronting the statesmen who wished to pin these warring theologians down to
some dominating statement in the face of this theological Babel.
It is impossible for an intelligent modern student of history not to
sympathise with the underlying idea of the papal court, with the idea of one
universal rule of righteousness keeping the peace of the earth, and not to
recognise the many elements of nobility that entered into the Lateran policy.
Sooner or later mankind must come to one universal peace, unless our race is
to be destroyed by the increasing power of its own destructive inventions;
and that universal peace must needs take the form of a government, that is to
say, a law-sustaining organisation, in the best sense of the word
religious—a government ruling men through the educated co-ordination of
their minds in a common conception of human history and human destiny.
The Catholic Church was the first clearly conscious attempt to provide
such a government in the wor1d. We cannot too earnestly. examine its
deficiencies and inadequacies, for every lesson we can draw from them is
necessarily of the greatest value in forming our ideas of our own
international relationships.
AND first among the things that confront the student is the
intermittence of the efforts of the Church to establish the world-City of
God. The policy of the Church was not whole-heartedly and continuously set
upon that end. Only now and then some fine personality or some group of fine
personalities dominated it in that direction. "The fatherhood of God" that
Jesus of Nazareth preached was overlaid almost from the beginning by the
doctrines and ceremonial traditions of an earlier age, and of an
intellectually inferior type. Christianity early ceased to be purely
prophetic and creative. It entangled itself with archaic traditions of human
sacrifice, with Mithraic blood-cleansing, with priestcraft as ancient as
human society, and with elaborate doctrines about the structure of the
divinity. The gory entrail-searching forefinger of the Etruscan pontifex
maximus presently overshadowed the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth; the mental
complexity of the Alexandrian Greek entangled them. In the jangle of these
incompatibles the Church, trying desperately to get on with its unifying
task, became dogmatic and resorted to arbitrary authority.
Its priests and bishops were more and more men moulded to creeds and
dogmas and set procedures; by the time they became popes they were usually
oldish men, habituated to a politic struggle for immediate ends and no longer
capable of worldwide views. They had forgotten about the Fatherhood of God;
they wanted to see the power of the Church, which was their own power,
dominating men's lives. It 'was just because many of them probably doubted
secretly of the entire soundness of their vast and elaborate doctrinal fabric
that they would brook no discussion of it. They were intolerant of doubts and
questions, not because they were sure of their faith, but because they were
not. The unsatisfied hunger of intelligent men for essential truth seemed to
promise nothing but perpetual divergence.
As the solidarity and dogmatism of the Church hardened, it sloughed off
and persecuted heretical bodies and individuals with increasing energy. The
credulous, naive and worthy Abbot Guibert of Nogent-sous-Coucy, in his
priceless autobiography, gives us the state of affairs in the eleventh
century, and reveals how varied and abundant were both the internal and
external revolts against the hardening authoritarianism that Hildebrand had
implemented.
Abbot Guibert himself is an incipient internal rebel with criticisms of
episcopal and papal corruption that already anticipate the Lollards and
Luther, and the stories he tells of devils diabolical possession and infidel
death-beds, witness to the wide prevalence of scoffing in Christendom even at
that early time.
Yet Abbot Guibert, albeit a potential Protestant, was as completely tied
to the Catholic Church as we are all tied by gravitation to the earth. There
was as yet no means of breaking away. The formulae of separation had still to
be discovered. Scoffers might scoff, but they came to heel on the death-bed.
Four long centuries of mental travail had to intervene before these ties were
broken.
But by the thirteenth century the Church had become morbidly anxious about
the gnawing doubts that might presently lay the whole structure of its
pretensions in ruins. It was hunting everywhere for heretics, as timid old
ladies are said to look under beds and in cupboards. before retiring for the
night.
LET us examine some of the broad problems that were
producing heresies. Chief of the heretical stems was the Manichaean way of
thinking about the conflicts of life.
The Persian teacher Mani was crucified and flayed in the year 277. His way
of representing the struggle between good and evil
was as a struggle between a power of light and a power of darkness
inherent in the universe. All these profound mysteries are necessarily
represented by symbols and poetic expressions, and the ideas of Mani still
find a response in many intellectual temperaments to-day. One may hear
Manichaean doctrines from many Christian pulpits. But the orthodox Catholic
symbol was a different one.
Manichaean ideas spread very widely in Europe, and particularly in
Bulgaria and the south of France. In the south of France the people who held
them were called the Cathars. They arose in Eastern Europe in the ninth
century among the Bulgarians and spread westward. The Bulgarians had recently
become Christian and were affected by dualistic eastern thought. They
insisted upon an excessive sexlessness. They would eat no food that was sex-
begotten—eggs, cheese even, were taboo but they ate fish because they
shared the common belief of the time that fish spawned sexlessly. Their ideas
jarred so little with the essentials of Christianity, that they believed
themselves to be devout Christians. As a body they lived lives of
ostentatious purity in a violent, undisciplined and vicious age. They were
protected by Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand), because their views enforced his
imposition of celibacy upon the clergy (of which we shall tell in Chapter
VII) in the eleventh century. But later their experiments in the search for
truth carried them into open conflict with the consolidating Church. They
resorted to the Bible against the priests. They questioned the doctrinal
soundness of Rome and the orthodox interpretation of the Bible. They thought
Jesus was a rebel against the cruelty of the God of the Old Testament, and
not His harmonious Son, and ultimately they suffered for these divergent
experiments.
Closely associated with the Cathars in the history of heresy are the
Waldenses, the followers of a man called Waldo, who seems to have been
comparatively orthodox in his theology, and less insistent on the "pure"
life, but offensive to the solidarity of the Church because he denounced the
riches and luxury of the higher clergy. Waldo was a rich man who sold all his
possessions in order to preach and teach in poverty. He attracted devoted
followers and for a time he was tolerated by the Church. But his followers
and particularly those in Lombardy, went further. Waldo had translated the
New Testament, including the Revelation, into Provengal, and presently his
disciples were denouncing the Roman Church as the Scarlet Woman of the
Apocalypse. This was enough for the Lateran, and presently we have the
spectacle of Innocent III, after attempts at argument and persuasion, losing,
his temper and preaching a Crusade against these troublesome enquirers. The
story of that crusade is a chapter in history that the Roman Catholic
historians have done their best to obliterate.
Every wandering scoundrel at loose ends was enrolled to carry fire and
sword and rape and every conceivable outrage among the most peaceful subjects
of the King of France, The accounts of the cruelties and abominations of this
crusade are far more terrible to read than any account of Christian
martyrdoms by the pagans, and they have the added horror of being
indisputably true.
Yet they did not extirpate the Waldenses. In remote valleys of Savoy a
remnant survived and lived on, generation after generation, until it was
incorporated with the general movement of the Refoundation and faced and
suffered before the reinvigorated "Roman Catholic Church in the full drive of
the Counter Reformation. Of that we shall tell later.
The intolerance of the narrowing and concentrating Church was not confined
to religious matters. The shrewd, pompous irascible, disillusioned and rather
malignant old men who manifestly constituted the prevailing majority in the
councils of the Church, resented any knowledge but their own knowledge, and
distrusted any thought that they did not correct and control. Any mental
activity but their own struck them as being at least insolent if not
positively wicked. later on they were to have a great struggle upon the
question of, the earth's position in space, and whether it moved round the
sun or not. This was really not the business of the Church at all. She might
very well have left to reason the things that are reason's, but she seems to
have been impelled by an inner necessity to estrange the intellectual
conscience in men.
Had this intolerance sprung from a real intensity of conviction it would
have been bad enough, but it was accompanied by an undisguised contempt for
the mental dignity of the common man that makes it far less acceptable to our
modern ideas. Quite apart from the troubles in Rome itself there was already
manifest in the twelfth century a strong feeling that all was not well with
the spiritual atmosphere. There began movements—movements that nowadays
we should call "revivalist" —within the Church, that implied rather
than uttered a criticism of the sufficiency of her existing methods and
organisation. Men sought fresh forms of righteous living outside the
monasteries and priesthood.
One outstanding figure is that of St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226). This
pleasant young gentleman had a sudden conversion in the midst of a life of
pleasure, and, taking a vow of extreme poverty, gave himself up to an
imitation of the life of,Christ, and to the service of the sick and wretched,
and more particularly to the service of the lepers who then abounded in
Italy.
He was joined by numbers of disciples, and so the first Friars of the
Franciscan Order came into existence. An order of women devotees was set up
beside the original confraternity, and in addition great numbers of men and
women were brought into less formal association. He preached, unmolested by
the Moslems be it noted, in Egypt and Palestine, though the Fifth Crusade was
then in progress. His relations with the Church are still a matter for
discussion. His work had been sanctioned by Pope Innocent III, but while he
was in the East there was a reconstitution of his order, intensifying
discipline and substituting authority for responsive impulse, and as a
consequence of these changes he resigned its headship. To the end he clung
passionately to the ideal of poverty, but he was hardly dead before the order
was holding property through trustees and building a great church and
monastery to his memory at Assisi. The disciplines of the order that were
applied after his death to his immediate associates are scarcely to be
distinguished from a persecution; several of the more conspicuous zealots for
simplicity were scourged, others were imprisoned, one was killed while
attempting to escape, and Brother Bernard, the "first disciple", passed a
year in the woods and hills, hunted like a wild beast.
This struggle within the Franciscan Orr is interesting, because it
foreshadowed the great troubles that were coming to Christendom. All through
the thirteenth century a section of the Franciscans were straining at the
rule of the Church, and in 1318 four of them were burnt alive at Marseilles
as incorrigible heretics. There seems to have been little difference between
the teaching and the spirit of St. Francis and that of Waldo in the twelfth
century, the founder of the massacred but unconquerable sect of Waldenses.
Both were passionately, enthusiastic for the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. But
while Waldo rebelled against the Church, St. Francis did his best to be a
good child of the Church, and his comment on the spirit of official
Christianity was only implicit. But both were instances of an outbreak of
conscience against authority and the ordinary procedure of the Church. And it
is plain that in the second instance, as in the first, the Church scented
rebellion.
A very different character to St. Francis was the Spaniard St. Dominic
(1170-1221), who was, above all things, orthodox. For him the Church was not
orthodox enough. He was a reformer on the Right Wing. He had a passion for
the argumentative conversion of heretics, and he was commissioned by Pope
Innocent III to go and preach to the Albigenses. His work went on side by
side with the fighting and massacres of the crusade. Whom Dominic could not
convert, Innocent's Crusaders slew. Yet his very activities and the
recognition and encouragement of his order by the Pope witness to the rising
tide of discussion and to the persuasion even of the Papacy that force was a
remedy.
In several respects the development of the Black Friars or
Dominicans—the Franciscans were the Grey Friars—shows the Roman
Church at the parting of the ways, committing itself more and more deeply to
a hopeless conflict with the quickening intelligence and courage of mankind.
She whose duty it was to teach, chose to compel. The last discourse of St.
Dominic to the heretics he had sought to convert is preserved to us. It
betrays the fatal exasperation of a man who has lost his faith in the power
of truth because his truth has not prevailed.
"For many years," he said, "I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness,
preaching, praying and weeping. But according to th proverb of my.country,
'Where blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail', we shall rouse
against you princes and prelates, who, alas'! will arm nations and kingdoms
against this land,... and thus blows will avail where blessings and
gentleness have been powerless."[1]
[1] Encyclopaedia Britannica, art. "Dominic".
So the intolerance of the Catholic Church drove steadily
towards its own disruption. Nevertheless for nearly a thousand years the idea
of Christendom sustained a conception of human unity more intimate and far
wider than was ever achieved before.
As early as the fifth century Christianity had already become greater,
sturdier and more enduring than any empire had ever been, because it was
something not merely imposed upon men, but interwoven with their deeper
instinct for righteousness. It reached out far beyond the utmost limits of
the empire, into Armenia, Persia, Abyssinia, Ireland, Germany, India and
Turkestan. It had become something no statesman could ignore.
This widespread freemasonry, which was particularly strong in the towns
and seaports of the collapsing Empire, must have had a very strong appeal to
every political organiser. The Christians were essentially townsmen and
traders. The countrymen were still pagans (pagani = villagers).
"Though made up of widely scattered congregations," says the
Encyclopaedia Britannica in its article on "Church History", "it was
thought of as one body of Christ, one people of God. This ideal unity found
expression in many ways. Intercommunication between the various Christian
communities was very active. Christians upon a journey were always sure of a
warm welcome from their fellow disciples. Messengers and letters were sent
freely from one Church to another. Missionaries and evangelists went
continually from place to place. Documents of various kinds, including
gospels and apostolic epistles, circulated widely. Thus in various ways the
feeling of unity found expression,, and the development of widely separated
parts of Christendom conformed more or less closely to a common type."
Ideas of worldly rule by this spreading and ramifying Church were indeed
already prevalent in the fourth century. Christianity was becoming political.
Saint Augustine, a native of Hippo in North Africa, who wrote between 354 and
430, gave expression to the political idea of the' Church in his book, The
City of God. The City of God leads the mind very directly towards the
possibility of making the world into a theological and organised Kingdom of
Heaven.. The city, as Augustine puts it, is "a spiritual society of the
predestined faithful, but the step from that to a political application was
not a very wide one. The Church was to be the ruler of the world over all
nations, the divinely-led ruling power over a great league of terrestrial
states.
Subsequently these ideas developed into a definite political theory and
policy. As the barbarian races settled and became Christian, the Pope began
to claim an overlordship of their Kings. In a few centuries the Pope had
become in Latin Catholic theory, and to a certain extent in practice, the
high priest, censor, judge and divine monarch of Christendom; his influence,
as we have noted, extended far beyond the utmost range of the old empire. For
more than a thousand years this idea of the unity of Christendom, of
Christendom as a sort of vast Amphictyony, whose members even in wartime were
restrained from many extremities by the idea of a common brotherhood and a
common loyalty to the Church, dominated Europe. The history of Europe from
the fifth century onward to the fifteenth is very largely the history of the
failure of this great idea of a divinely ordained and righteous world
government to realise itself in practice.
IF the dark disorders of the decline and fall of the Roman
Empire, the newly organised Catholic Church played an important role in the
preservation of learning and social ideas. St. Benedict and Cassiodorus in
particular set themselves to the salvage of books and teaching, and among
their immediate followers was one of the first great Popes, Gregory the
Great. In those days the local Christian priest was often too ignorant,to
understand the Latin phrases he mumbled and muttered at his services.
Gregory's educational energy corrected that. He restored the priests' Latin.
So that later the Catholic Church retained its widespread solidarity in spite
of the most extraordinary happenings in Rome. It would no doubt have
preferred to keep its Latin language without the Latin classics, but their
use was unavoidable if the language was to be steadied and sustained.
St. Benedict was born at Spoleto in Italy, a young man of good family. The
shadow of the times fell upon him, he conceived a disgust for the evil in
life, and, like Buddha a thousand years before him, he took to the religious
life and set no limit to his austerities. Fifty miles from Rome is Subiaco,
and there at the end of a gorge of the Anio, beneath a jungle growth of weeds
and bushes, rose a deserted palace built by the Emperor Nero, overlooking an
artificial lake that had been made in those days of departed prosperity by
damming back the waters of the river. Here with a hair shirt as his chief
possession, Benedict took up his quarters in a cave in the high southward-
looking cliff that overhangs the stream, in so inaccessible a position tat
his food had to be lowered to him on a cord by a faithful admirer. Three
years he lived here, and his fame spread as Buddha's did, as a great saint
and teacher.
Presently we find him no longer engaged in self-torment, but controlling a
group of twelve monasteries, the resort of a great number of people. Youths
are brought to him to be educated, and the whole character of his life has
ceased to be ascetic.
From Subiaco he removed to Monte Cassino, half-way between Rome and
Naples, a. lonely and beautiful mountain in the midst of a great circle of
majestic heights. Here, it is interesting to note that in the sixth century
A.D. he found a temple of Apollo and a sacred grove, and the countryside
still worshipping at this shrine. His first labours had to be missionary
labours, and with difficulty he persuaded the simple pagans to demolish their
temple and cut down their grove. The establishment upon Monte Cassino became
a famous and powerful centre within the lifetime of its founder. Mixed up
with the imbecile inventions of marvel-loving monks about demons exorcised,
disciples walking on the water, and dead children restored to life, we can
still detect something of the real spirit of Benedict. Particularly
significant are the stories that represent him as discouraging extreme
mortification. He sent a damping message to a solitary who had invented a new
degree in saintliness by chaining himself to a rock in a narrow cave.﹃Break
thy chain,﹄said Benedict, "for he true servant of God is chained not to
rocks by iron, but to righteousness by Christ."
Next to the discouragement of solitary self-torture, Benedict insisted
upon hard work. Through the legends shine the clear indications of the
trouble made by his patrician students and disciples who found themselves
obliged to toil instead of leading lives of leisurely austerity under the
ministrations of the lowerclass brethren.
A third remarkable thing about Benedict was his political influence. He
set himself to reconcile Goths and Italians, and it is clear that Totila, his
Gothic king, came to him for counsel and was greatly influenced by him. When
Totila retook Naples from the Greeks, the Goths protected the women from
insult and treated even the captured soldiers with humanity. Belisarius,
Justinian's general, had taken the same place ten years previously, and had
celebrated his triumph by a general massacre.
Now the monastic organisation of Benedict was a very great beginning in
the Western world. One of his prominent followers was Pope Gregory the Great
(540-604), the first monk to become Pope (590); he was one of the most
capable and energetic of the Popes, sending successful missions to the
unconverted, and particularly to' the Anglo-Saxons. He rules in Rome like an
independent king, organising armies, making treaties. To his influence is due
the imposition of the Benedictine rule upon nearly the whole of Latin
monasticism.
Gregory the Great ruled in Rome like an independent king organising
armies, making treaties. It was he who saw two fair captives from Britain,
and, having asked whence they came and being told they were Angles, said they
might be angels—non Angli sed Angeli—rather than Angles if
they had the Faith. He made it his special business to send missionaries to
England. This is a high water mark in the chequered history of the Roman
Church. From Gregory I it passes into a phase of decadence not only at Rome
but throughout its entire sphere of influence.
AN interesting amateur in theology who was destined to drive
a wedge into the solidarity of the Christian system was the Emperor
Charlemagne, Charles the Great, the friend and ally of King Alfred of Wessex.
The wedge was unpremeditated. The learned, investing history with the
undeserved dignity their scholarly minds craved, have endowed Charles with an
almost inhuman foresight. He was the son of Pepin, who had been Mayor of the
Palace to the last of the Merovingia Kings, and, on the strength of his being
de facto King, he appealed to the Pope to transfer the Crown to his
head. This the Pope did. Everywhere in Europe the ascendant rulers seized
upon Christianity as a unifying force to cement their conquests. Christianity
became a banner for aggressive chiefs—as it did in Uganda in Africa in
the bloody days before that country was annexed to the British Empire.
Charlemagne was most simply and enthusiastically Christian, and his
disposition to sins of the flesh, to a certain domestic laxity—he is
accused among other things of incestuous relations with his
daughters—merely sharpened his redeeming zeal for the Church. An
aggressive Church had long since decided that sins of the flesh are venal
sins when weighed against unorthodoxy, and he was able to offer up vast
hecatombs of conquered pagans to appease the more and more complaisant
Catholic Church. He insisted on their becoming Christians, and to refuse
baptism or to retract after baptism were equally crimes punishable by death.
After he was crowned Emperor he obliged every male subject over the age of
twelve to renew his oath of allegiance and undertake to be not simply a good
subject but a good Christian.
A new Pope, Leo III, in 795, made Charlemagne Emperor. Hitherto the court
at Byzantium had possessed a certain Indefinite authority over the Pope.
Strong emperors like Justinian had bullied the Popes and obliged them to
visit Constantinople; weak emperors had annoyed them ineffectively. The idea
of a breach, both secular and religious, with Constantinople had long been
entertained at the Lateran, and in the Frankish power there seemed to be just
the support that was necessary if Constantinople was to be defied.
So upon his accession Leo III sent the keys of the tomb of St. Peter and a
banner to Charlemagne as the symbols of his sovereignty in Rome as King of
Italy. Very soon the Pope had to appeal to the protection he had chosen. He
was unpopular in Rome; he was attacked and ill-treated in the streets during
a procession, and obliged to fly to Germany (799). Eginhard says his eyes
were gouged out and his tongue cut off. He seems, however, to have had both
eyes and tongue again a year later. Charlemagne brought him back to Rome and
reinstated him (800).
Then occurred a very important scene. On Christmas Day in the year 800, as
Charles was rising from prayer in the Church of St. Peter, the Pope, who had
everything in readiness, clapped a crown upon his head and hailed him Caesar
and Augustus. There was great popular applause. But Eginhard, the friend and
biographer of Charlemagne, says that the new Emperor was by no means pleased
by this coup of Pope Leo's. If he had known this was to happen, he said, "he
would have not entered the Church, great festival though it was."
No doubt he had been thinking and talking of making himself Emperor, but
he had evidently not intended that the Pope should make him Emperor. He had
had some idea of marrying the Empress Irene, who at that time reigned in
Constantinople, and so becoming monarch of both Eastern and Western Empires.
But now he was obliged to accept the title in the manner that Leo had
adopted, as a gift from the Pope, and in a way that estranged Constantinople
and secured the separation of Rome from the Byzantine Church.
At first Byzantium was unwilling to recognise the imperial title of
Charlemagne. But in 811 a great disaster fell upon the Byzantine Empire. The
pagan Bulgarians, under their prince Krum, defeated and destroyed the armies
of the Emperor Nicephorus, whose skull became a drinking cup for Krum. The
great pat of the Balkan peninsula was conquered by these people. After this
misfortune Byzantium was in no position to dispute this revival of the empire
in the West, and in 812 Charlemagne was formally recognised by Byzantine
envoys as Emperor and Augustus.
The defunct Western Empire rose again as the "Holy Roman Empire". While
.its military strength lay north of the Alps, its centre of authority was
Rome. It was from the beginning a divided thing, a claim and an argument
rather than a necessary reality. The good German sword was always clattering
over the Alps into Italy, and missions and legates toiling over in the
reverse direction. But the Germans never could hold Italy permanently,
because they could not stand the malaria that the ruined, neglected,
undrained country fostered. And in Rome, as well as in several other of the
cities of Italy, there smouldered a more ancient tradition, the tradition of
the aristocratic republic, hostile to both Emperor and Pope.
In spite of the fact that we have a.life of him written by his
contemporary, Eginhard, the character and personality of Charlemagne are
difficult to visualise. Eginhard was a poor writer; he gives many
particulars, but not the particulars that make a living figure. Charlemagne,
he says, was a tall man, with a rather feeble voice; and he had bright eyes
and a long nose. "The top of his head was round," whatever that may mean, and
his hair was "white". Possibly that means he was a blond. He had a thick,
rather short neck, and "his belly too prominent". He wore a tunic with a
silver border, and gartered hose. He had a blue cloak, and was always girt
with his sword, hilt and belt being of gold and silver.
He was a man of great animation and his abundant love affairs did not
interfere at all with his incessant military and political labours He took
much exercise was fond of pomp and religious ceremonies, and gave generously.
He was a man of considerable intellectual enterprise, with a self-confident
vanity rather after the fashion of William II, the ex-German Emperor, who
died at Doorn so unimpressively the other day.
His mental activities are interesting, and they serve as a sample of the
intellectuality of the time. Probably he could read; at meals he "listened to
music or reading, but he never acquired the art of writing; "he used," says
Eginhard,﹃to keep his writing book and tablets under his pillow, that when
he had leisure he might practise his hand in forming letters, but he made
little progress in an art begun too late in life.﹄He certainly displayed a
hunger for knowledge, and he took pains to attract men of learning to his
Court.
These learned men were, of course, clergymen, there being no other learned
men then in the world and naturally they gave a strongly clerical tinge to
the information they imparted. At his Court, which was usually at Aix-la-
Chapelle or Mayence, he whiled away the winter season by a curious
institution called his "school", in which he and his erudite associates
affected to lay aside all thoughts of worldly position, assumed names taken
from the classical writers or from Holy Writ, and discoursed upon learning
and theology. Charlemagne himself was "David". He developed a considerable
knowledge of theology, and it is to him that we must ascribe the proposal to
add the words filioque to the Nicene Creed—an addition that
finally split the Latin and Greek Churches asunder. But it is more than
doubtful whether he had any such separation in mind. He wanted to add a word
or so to the Creed, just as the Emperor William II wanted to leave his mark
on the German language and German books, and he took up this filioque
idea, which was originally a Spanish innovation. Pope Leo discreetly opposed
it. When it was accepted centuries later, it was probably accepted with the
deliberate intention of enforcing the widening breach between Latin and
Byzantine Christendom.
The filioque point is a subtle one, and a word or so of explanation may
not seem amiss to those who are uninstructed theologically. Latin Christendom
believes now that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son; Greek
and Eastern Christians, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father,
without any mention of the Son. The latter attitude seems to incline a little
towards the Arian point of view. The Catholic belief is that the Father and
the Son have always existed together, world without end; the Greek orthodox
idea is tainted by a very human disposition to think fathers ought to be at
least a little senior to their sons. The reader must go to his own religious
teachers for precise instruction upon this point.
The disposition of men in positions of supreme educational authority in a
community, to direct thought into some particular channel by which their
existence may be made the more memorable, is not uncommon: The Emperor
William, for instance, helped to make the Germans a people apart, and did
much for the spectacle-makers of Germany, by using his influence to sustain
the heavy Teutonic black letter and insisting upon the rejection of alien
words and roots from the good old German vocabulary. "Telephone" for instance
was anathema, and "Fernsprecher" was substituted; and wireless became
"drahtlos". So nationalism in Germany achieved the same end as the
resistance of English stupidity to orthographic changes, and made the
language difficult for and repulsive to foreigners.
The normal speech of Charlemagne was Frankish. He may have understood
Latin, more particularly if it was used with consideration, but he could have
had no opportunity of Greek. He made a collection of old German songs and
tales, but these were destroyed by his son and successor, Louis the Pious,
because of their paganism.
FOR a very long time the hold of the Emperors and the Popes
upon the City of Rome was a very insecure one. Many of the surviving
patrician families and also the Roman mob claimed the most conflicting
privileges in the election and removal of the Popes, the German Emperor
claimed similar rights, and on the other hand the popes would assert their
rights to depose and excommunicate emperors. In this confusion popes
multiplied, even a layman, John XIX, was made pope, and there were
overlapping popes inconsiderable abundance. In 1045 there were three popes
struggling in Rome, the notoriously vicious Benedict IX, Sylvester III and
Gregory VI. Gregory VI bought the Papacy from Benedict, who subsequently went
back on his bargain.
Hildebrand became Pope Gregory VII. He succeeded Pope Alexander, who,
under his inspiration, had been attempting to reform and consolidate the
Church organisation. He imposed celibacy on the clergy and so cut them off
from family and social ties. It consolidated the Church but it dehumanised
the Church. Hildebrand fought a long fight with the Emperor Henry IV. Henry
deposed him and Gregory deposed and excommunicated the Emperor, who repented
and did penance at Canossa. Afterwards Henry regretted his humiliation and
created an Anti-Pope, Clement III. He besieged Gregory who held out in the
Castle of St. Angelo. Robert Guiscard, a Norman freebooter, whom Pope
Nicholas n had made "Duke of Apulia and Calabria and future Lord of Sicily by
the Grace of God and St. Peter", came to the rescue, drove out the Emperor
and Anti-Pope and incidentally sacked Rome. After which Gregory went off
under the protection of the Normans and died at Salerno, a hated and unhappy
man, a good and great-spirited man defeated by the uncontrollable
complexities of life.
So the story of schisms and conflicts runs on through the records of the
Church. Many of the popes fought for power for the vilest ends, but we do
such men as Gregory VII and Urban II (the Pope of the First Crusade) the
grossest injustice if we ignore the fact that behind this barbaric struggle
for power there could be long views and disinterested aims. Conformity to the
concepts of Christendom or a merely brutal life impulse were the alternative
guides between which men had to choose in the atmosphere of that period. Men
"sinned" violently and defiantly and yet were superstitiously
afraid.Death-beds generally reeked with penitence, abject confessions and
pious bequests. It is difficult for a modern mind to imagine how much in that
age of confusion men could believe, and how little dignity, coherence and
criticism there was in their beliefs.
How far things could go with the weak, the vicious and the insolent is
shown by one phase in the history of Rome at this time, an almost
indescribable phase. The decay of the Empire of Charlemagne had left the Pope
unsupported, he was threatened by Byzantium and by the Saracens (who had
taken Sicily), and face to face with the unruly nobles of Rome. Among the
most powerful of these nobles were two women. Theodora and Marozia, mother
and daughter,[1] who in succession held that same Castle of St. Angelo, which
Theophylact, the patrician husband of Theodora, had seized together with most
of the temporal power of the Pope. These two women were as bold, unscrupulous
and dissolute as any male prince of the time could have been, and they are
abused by masculine historians as though they were ten times worse. Marozia
seized and imprisoned Pope John X (928), who speedily died under her hands.
Her mother, Theodora, had been his mistress. Marozia subsequently made her
illegitimate son Pope, under the title of John XI.
[1] Gibbon mentions a second Theodora, the sister of
Marozia.
After him her grandson, John XII, filled the chair of St. Peter. Gibbon's
account of the manners and morals of John XII is suffused with blushes and
takes refuge at last beneath a veil of Latin footnotes. This Pope, John XII,
was finally degraded by the German Emperor Otto, scion of a new dynasty that
had ousted the Carlovingians, who came over the Alps and down into Italy to
be crowned in 962. Harsh critics of the Church call this phase in its history
the pornocracy.
That "pornocracy" sounds much more awful for the Catholic Church than was
the reality. It has very little controversial weight if our criticism is to
be just. It was a purely Roman scandal, and the Faithful throughout
Christendom probably never heard a word about this "pornocratic" phase. They
went about their simple religious duties as they had been taught. It was not
an age of easy travel, and practically nobody in the tenth century went to
Rome or heard what was happening there. That sort of stress was to come
later.
IN this brief history of the complex effort of the human
mind and will to secure some mastery over its internal and external
perplexities, the Crusades, and particularly the First Crusade, demand our
particular attention. The First Crusade displays "Christendom" at its maximum
effectiveness as a consolidating and justifying idea, and it shows also how
the essential instability of the Roman leadership and the ideological
freakishness of Charlemagne combined with the inherent self-seeking and
confusion in the human .mind at large; to defeat every ostensible
purpose of this great eastward drive. Every ostensible purpose. But the
reaction of the mingling of ideas and purposes hat ensued had unforeseen
consequences in the disintegration of Christendom that was presently to
ensue.
The Crusades were the direct work of the Church. It had been consolidating
itself slowly fro the uncertainties of the earlier Dark Ages. The
establishment of clerical celibacy in the ninth and tenth centuries was
isolating it from the social mass, and the retreat from the passionate side
of life to monasticism dotted the western world with centres of industrious
husbandry, which availed themselves of the protection of the developing
feudal organisation and provided retreats from which men of considerably
riper years emerged as ministers, councillors, educators. Becket was about
fifty when he was killed, Anselm lived to be seventy-five, Lanfranc's age is
uncertain, but it was somewhere about eighty. No wonder they carried weight
in a generally puerile world.
A man is as old as his arteries, we say nowadays, but the key to a real
and authoritative old age for these divines of the Dark Ages was probably the
inherited soundness of their teeth. Those whose teeth decayed ceased to speak
with dignity and authority. There was no dentistry except extraction..
"Benefit of clergy", which worked out at last as a convenient mitigation
of harsh penal laws, arose out of the claim of the consolidating Church to
take clerics out of the hands of the temporal power and deal with them in its
own fashion. But the monasteries were only aggressive when they dared; they
were not immune from local disorders and had to be steered with discretion.
There was incessant bickering, robbery and warfare, and intermittent local
famine, and the standard of life rose and fell here and there and from time
to time.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the civilisation of Western Europe
probably displayed far less social insecurity and inequality, and far less
gross brutality, than in the succeeding period. There were regions and phases
of comparative health and vitality. But such phases meant the accumulation of
lootable resources, and opened the way to conceptions of conquest upon a
larger and more lucrative scale. The Norman Conquest of England was a
considerable achievement for that age. The tradition of the Roman Empire, the
tradition of great and rich cities to the south-east, still haunted men's
imaginations and did much to prepare them for the greater adventure of the
Crusades.
The older and wiser heads who were consolidating a renascent Latin Church
in the tenth and eleventh centuries were struggling against the incessant
bickering warfare of the times. The Church then was something very different
from Pope Pacelli's Church of to-day. In its reawakened eleventh-century
form, under the direction of that greatest of papal statesmen, Pope Gregory
VII (Hildebrand), it was the most civilised and civilising thing in the
Western world. It was at its best. Not only the Roman Church as we know it,
but all the Protestant sects, are derived from it. It had tried various
expedients to put a truce upon local violence, and it seized upon the Turkish
ill-treatment of pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre as an incentive. These Turks
had smashed the Byzantine armies and driven them out of Asia Minor. They sat
down in Nicaea, opposite Byzantium itself. In this extremity Alexis Comnenus,
the Byzantine Emperor, appealed to Pope Gregory VII for help, and the
Latin-speaking West responded promptly and vigorously. Both the Western
Empire and the Church saw plainly before it the subjugation of the Eastern
world by the West.
THE incitement to crusade aroused a stupenpdous and varied
response. It released all the latent unifying forces that had accumulated
about the idea of Christendom.
In the beginning of the seventh century we saw Western Europe as a chaos
of social and political fragments, with no common idea nor hope, a system
shattered almost to a dust of self-seeking individuals. Now, at the close of
the eleventh century, we discover a common belief, a linking idea, to which
men may devote themselves, and by which they can co-operate together in a
universal enterprise. We realise that, in spite of much weakness and
intellectual and moral unsoundness, to this extent the Christian Church had
worked. We are able to measure the evil phases of tenth-century Rome,
the scandals, the filthiness, the murders and violence, at their proper value
by the scale of this fact. No doubt, not only in Rome itself, but all over
Christendom, there had been many lazy, evil and foolish ecclesiastics, but it
is manifest that in spite of them a task of teaching and co-ordination had
been accomplished by a great multitude of right-living priests and monks and
nuns. A new and greater amphictyony, the amphictyony of Christianity, had
come into the world, and it had been built by thousands of these anonymous
faithful lives.
And the response to the appeal of Urban II was not confined only to what
we should call educated people. It was not simply knights and princes who
were willing to go crusading. Side by side with the figure of Urban we must
put that of Peter the Hermit, a type novel to Europe, albeit a little
reminiscent of the Hebrew prophets. This man appeared preaching the crusade
to the common people. He told a story—whether truthful or untruthful
hardly matters in this connection—of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, of
the wanton destruction at the Holy Sepulchre by the Seljuk Turks, who took it
somewhen about l075—the chronology of this period is still very
vague—and of the exactions, brutalities and deliberate cruelties now
practised upon the Christian pilgrims.to the Holy Places. Barefooted, clad in
a coarse garment, riding on an ass and bearing a huge cross, this man
travelled about France and Germany, and everywhere harangued vast crowds in
church or street or market-place.
Here for the first time we discover the masses of Europe with a common
idea. Here is a collective response of indignation to the story of a remote
wrong, a swift realisation of a common cause by rich and poor alike. You
cannot imagine that happening in the Empire of Augustus Cregar, or, indeed,
in any previous state in the world's history. Something of the kind might
perhaps have been possible in the far smaller world of Hellas, or in Arabia
before Islam. But this movement affected nations, kingdoms, tongues and
peoples. We are dealing with something new that has come into the world.
From the first this flaming enthusiasm was mixed with baser elements.
There was the cold and calculated scheme of the free and ambitious Latin
Church to subdue and replace the Byzantine Church; there was the freebooting
instinct of the Normans, now tearing Italy to pieces, which turned readily
enough to a new and richer world of plunder; and there was something in the
multitude who now turned their faces east, something deeper than love in the
human composition, namely, fear-born hate, that the impassioned appeals of
the propagandists and the exaggeration of the horrors and cruelties of the
infidel had fanned into flame.
And still other forces were at work; the intolerant Seljuks and the
intolerant Fatimites lay now an impassable barrier across the eastward trade
of Genoa and Venice that had hitherto flowed through Baghdad, Aleppo and
Egypt. Unless Constantinople and the Black Sea route were to monopolise
Eastern trade altogether, they must force open these closed channels.
Moreover, in 1094 and 1095 there had been a pestilence and famine from the
Scheldt to Bohemia, and there was great social disorganisation.
"No wonder," wrote Mr. Ernest Barker, "that a stream of emigration set
towards the East, such as would in modern times flow towards a newly
discovered goldfield—a stream carrying in its turbid waters much
refuse: tramps and bankrupts, camp-followers and hucksters, fugitive monks
and escaped villeins, and marked by the same motley grouping, the same fever
of life, the same alternations of affluence and beggary, which mark the rush
for a goldfield to-day."
But these were secondary contributory causes. The fact of predominant
interest to the historian of mankind is this will to crusade suddenly
revealed as a new mass possibility in human affairs.
The first forces to move eastward were great crowds of undisciplined
people rather than armies, and they sought to make their way by the valley of
the Danube, and thence southward to Constantinople. This has been called the
"people's crusade". Never before in the whole history of the world had there
been such a spectacle as these masses of practically leaderless people moved
by an idea. It was a very crude idea. When they got among foreigners, they
did not realise they were not already among the infidel. Two great mobs, the
advance guard of the expedition, committed such excesses in Hungary, where
the language was incomprehensible to them, that they were massacred. A third
host began with a great pogrom of the Jews in the Rhineland, and this
multitude was also destroyed in Hungary. Two other swarms under Peter himself
reached Constantinople, to the astonishment and dismay of the Emperor
Alexius. They looted and committed outrages, until he shipped them across the
Bosphorus, to be massacred rather than defeated by the Seljuks (1096).
This first unhappy appearance of the "people" as people in modern European
history was followed in 1097 by the organised forces of the First Crusade.
They came by diverse routes from France, Normandy, Flanders, England,
Southern Italy and Sicily and the will and power of them were the Normans.
They crossed the Bosphorus and captured Nicaea, which Alexius snatched away
from them before they could loot it.
Then they went to Antioch, which they took after nearly a year's siege.
Then they defeated a great relieving army from Mosul.
A large part of the crusaders remained in Antioch, a smaller force under
Godfrey of Bouillon went on to Jerusalem. To quote Barker again: "After a
little more than.a month's siege, the city was finally captured (July 15th,
1099). The slaughter was terrible; the blood of the conquered ran down the
streets, until men splashed in blood as they rode. At nightfall, 'sobbing for
excess of joy', the crusaders came to the Sepulchre from their treading of
the winepress, and put their blood-stained hands together in prayer. So, on
that day of triumph, the First Crusade came to an end."
The authority of the Patriarch of Jerusalem was at once seized upon by the
Latin clergy with the expedition, and the Orthodox Christians found
themselves in rather a worse case under Latin rule than under the Turk. There
were already Latin principalities established at Antioch and Edessa, and
between these various courts and kings began a struggle for ascendancy. There
was an unsuccessful attempt to make Jerusalem a property of the Pope. These
are complications beyond our present scope.
Let us quote, however, a characteristic passage from Gibbon, to show the
drift of events:
"In a style less grave than that of history, I should
perhaps compare the Emperor Alexius to the jackal, who is said to follow the
steps and devour the leavings of the lion. Whatever had been his fears and
toils in the passage of the First Crusade, they were amply recompensed by the
subsequent benefits which he derived from the exploits of the Franks. His
dexterity and vigilance secured their first conquest of Nicaea, and from this
threatening station the Turks were compelled to evacuate the neighbourhood of
Constantinople.
"While the Crusaders, with blind valour, advanced into the
midland countries of Asia, the crafty Greek improved the favourable occasion
when the emirs of the sea coast were recalled to the standard of the Sultan.
The Turks were driven from the islands of Rhodes and Chios; the cities of
Ephesus and Smyrna, of Sardes, Philadelphia and Laodicea, were restored to
the empire, which Alexius enlarged from the Hellespont to the banks of the
Maeander and the rocky shores of Pamphylia. The churches resumed their
splendour; the towns were rebuilt and fortified; and the desert country was
peopled with colonies of Christians, who were gently removed from the more
distant and dangerous frontier.
"In these paternal cares we may forgive Alexius if he forgot
the deliverance of the holy sepulchre; but by the Lains he was stigmatised
with the foul reproach of treason and desertion. They had sworn obedience and
fidelity to his throne; but he had promised to assist their enterprise in
person, or, at least, with his troops and treasures; his base retreat
dissolved all their old gains; and the sword, which had been the instrument
of their victory, was the pledge and title of their just independence. It
does not appear that the emperor attempted to revive his obsolete claims over
the kingdom of Jerusalem, but the borders of Cilicia and Syria were more
recent in his possession and more accessible to his arms. The great army of
the crusaders was annihilated or dispersed; the principality of Antioch was
left without a head, by the surprise and captivity of Bohemond; his ransom
had oppressed him with a heavy debt; and his Norman followers were
insufficient to repel the hostilities of the Greeks and Turks.
"In this distress, Bohemond embraced a magnanimous
resolution, of leaving the defence of Antioch to his kinsman, the faithful
Tancred; of arming the West against the Byzantine Empire, and of executing
the design which he inherited from the lessons and example of his father
Guiscard. His embarkation was clandestine; and if we may credit a tale of the
Princess Anna, he passed the hostile sea closely secreted in a coffin. (Anna
Conpena adds that, to complete the imitation, he was shut up with a dead
cock; and condescends to wonder how the barbarian could endure the
confinement and putrefaction. This absurd tale is unknown to the
Latins.)..."
So Gibbon, caustic but veracious, detesting Roman and Byzantine with an
impartial detestation, bears his witness.
It was in this widening conflict of the Latin and the Greek that that
theological freak of Charlemagne, the filioque clause, became important
politically.
We have traced the growth of this idea of a religious government of
Christendom—and through Christendom of mankind—and we have shown
how naturally and how necessarily, because of the tradition of world empire,
it found a centre at Rome. The Pope of Rome was the only Western patriarch;
he was the religious head of a vast region in which the ruling tongue was
Latin; the other patriarchs of the Orthodox Church spoke Greek and so were
inaudible throughout his domains;, and the two words filioque, which had been
added to the Latin creed, now split off the Byzantine Christians by one of
those impalpable and elusive doctrinal points upon which there is no
reconciliation. (The final rupture was in 1054.)
The broad reality of the Crusades was that all the surplus energy of the
West, in a passion of greed, piety and virtuous indignation, poured down upon
the far more sophisticated Levant and returned with a thousand hitherto
unheard-of things. Most of the rank and file were killed off ("The men were
splendid"), but the knights and noblemen who returned with their retinues
came back with silk and velvet, dyes and chain armour, and cravings and
conceptions of luxury that had been submerged in the minds of western men
since the collapse of the Roman Empire.
LET us now sketch the face and quality of human life in
Europe at that time, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We must clear
our minds of the popular persuasion that the people who went to and fro in
the towns and villages we inherit were very much like the people who walk
about our streets to-day, except that they wore different costumes. That is a
complete delusion. There was no such fancy dress ball. These
fifteenth-century people were, on the average, twenty years younger, they
were less healthy looking, and they stank quite abominably. The barbarism of
the period was not primitive. It had arisen out of the decadence of a
preceding social order. The great public baths of the Roman tradition had
faded out of the crumbling social edifice. Not only are we misled by the
natural anthropomorphism, so to speak, that makes us image the crowds in the
past essentially like the crowds of to-day, but we are also misled by the
pictures and records which misrepresent the spectacle of the times.
The printed book had still to dawn upon the world, and whatever record was
made of the show of things was kept by monkish chroniclers employed by the
Princes and Potentates of the time. These keepers of the records sat and
toiled to make their manuscripts as bright and pleasing to their employers as
possible. So that our vision of that time is magically illuminated by their
art. A reeking slum of human indignity is lit up by the flattering brightness
of the subservient chronicler and the blazons of heraldry, and it is only
when we subject them to a closer scrutiny that we are able to grasp the
squalid facts of human life during that period.
Then as no the world had its own loveliness, sunrise and sunset, the
glorious onset of spring, the golden autumn, the white frost flowers upon the
branches, but the dyes and fabrics of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
clothing in Christendom had none of the gilt and shining pigmentation of the
illuminator. Clothing must have been still crude in colour and stale and
dirty in substance. The normal span of life was brief and men were flimsier.
We find the arm our of our ancestors too small and tight for even puny men
to-day. But then, one may ask, was it worn by real grown-up men? These people
were often married at thirteen, they were warriors and leaders in their later
teens; they became cruel old satyrs at six-and-thirty. In fact they never
grew up either physically or mentally. They lived in a world of witless
lordship and puerile melodrama.
From this disillusioning digression upon the brilliance in the fifteenth
century, we can turn to one exceptionally "brilliant" young man, Gilles de
Rais, a type of his time, of whose life we have by various accidents an
exceptionally full record. He was married to a rich heiress at sixteen after
two earlier attempts to make a match for him (the earliest at thirteen) had
fallen through. He was a boy not only of exceptional energy but of
exceptional gifts. He patronised music. He illuminated and bound books. And
from the outset he was what people call "unbalanced".
Some people may be disposed to account for his peculiar aberrations by
saying he just "went mad". But madness is as pitiless and consistent a
process as anything else that can happen, the sequence of ideas in those we
call insane is as inevitable, you can find their origins and their
associations, and nowadays when we are all out of harmony with our conditions
of survival, to say merely that he "went mad" does not even put him outside
the pale of normal experience. Exceptionally wealthy at the outset, his
mental liveliness made him a spendthrift. Like many youngsters born rich, he
could not imagine being hard up until he was. He liked to give extravagant
entertainments, mysteries and moralities. From first to last he was a good
Catholic, conscientiously and unfeignedly religious. But for that he might
never have been hung. He dabbled in alchemy and the black arts; there was no
Monte Carlo for him in those days and no turf—and he tried to make up
for his magic by extravagant charity and special masses.
All this is the behaviour of an uncontrolled upper-form schoolboy with a
belief in his luck, an uncritical piety of the "Onward Christian Soldiers"
type, and an unanalysed disposition to torment fags. It must be cited to
place him definitely in relation to our own minds, but not in any way as a
condonation of what he did. He was cruel; by all our standards he was
hideously cruel; he delighted in the tormenting of children; and the points
best worth discussing about him here are, first, whether he was an
exceptional sinner, or whether his crimes were the outcome of a mental
disposition that has always been operative since that wretched congestion of
mankind which is called civilisation began; and secondly, and more
important for our present purpose, how far the religious beliefs and
practices of Catholic Christendom in the fifteenth century really condemned
his abominations.
The Christians before the days of Constantine the Great had stood out
valiantly against the cruelties of the arena and for the practical
brotherhood of man, but was the Church still doing so when Gilles de Rais was
a great nobleman? The records tell that he was hung for the torture and
murder of 140 children to which he confessed, in the year 1440. He had
committed sacrilege and infringed clerical immunity by entering the Church of
St. Etienne de Mer Morte just after Mass and dragging out a certain Jean de
Ferron who was kneeling there in prayer. This precipitated the hostility and
suspicion that was accumulating against him. As a sequel to this outrage he
was arrested and cited before the Bishop of Nantes on various charges, of
which sacrilege and heresy were the chief and these murders a scondary issue,
A parallel enquiry was made by Pierre de l'Htpital, President of the Breton
parlement, by whose sentence he was finally condemned. His piety and
abject confession saved him from torture, of which he probably went in
profound dread because of the fascination it had for him.
He was hung, "housell'd, appointed, anel'd", more fortunate than Hamlet's
father, and his body was saved from being burnt by "four or five dames and
demoiselles of great estate", who removed his body from the flames of the
pyre built so that he would fall into it. Manifestly they thought no great
evil of what he had done. His two associates had no such social standing, and
their bodies were burnt. This, I understand, will cause them considerable
trouble at the Resurrection from which the aristocratic Gilles will be
exempt.
He began life brilliantly and honourably. He must have seemed a splendid
young man to the world about him, and by every current standard he was
splendid. He was a close ally and supporter of Joan of Arc, with whom he
fought side by side at Orleans and later at Jargeau and Patay. He carried out
the coronation of Charles VII at Reims, and he was made marichal of France
upon that important occasion.
This riddle of condonation of social inequality and cruelty confronts us
at every stage of the long "Martyrdom of Man". Man is evidently an animal
which will fight, and on occasion fight desperately, but which prefers to
fight at an advantage. He has been readier to use moderation and make
concessions when fighting against his quasi-equals than against those who are
altogether helpless, and always he has shown little or no regard for his
inferiors, the rank and file, still less for the feeble folk who get in his
militant way. When a scorched earth policy had to be undertaken, or if they
were Jews or infidels, they counted for nothing at all.
The Merchant of Venice, the dullest play perhaps produced by the
Shakespeare group, exhibits an internal struggle between a liberal-minded and
a prejudiced element in the group of players which vamped up that
fundamentally dreary story of hate against hate. The struggle between these
two elements goes on in every human grouping, not only between one man and
another, but between what we are apt to call a man's better self and his
lower nature between his sense of righteousness and his even more deeply
rooted prejudices. It runs through the entire Christian story, and our case
against the Catholic Church is that, albeit it originated in a passionate
assertion of the conception. of brotherly equality, it relapsed steadily from
the broad nobility of its beginnings and passed over at last almost
completely to the side of persecution and the pleasures of cruelty.
BY the onset of the fifteenth century, the generally
youthful population of Christendom had achieved its maximum complex of human
inequality, and displayed an intricacy of social stratification that only
caste-ridden India could excel. If one turns over the pictures of those
admirable compilations, M.A. Racinet's Le Costume Historique, or,
still better, Adolf Rosenberg's Geschichte des Kostums, one can see
the whole process of an incoherent barbarism passing visibly into an
intensely sophisticated social structure, with an ever widening gap between
class and class, in the course of three centuries. The common people still go
half naked, or they wear skins and have rude puttees wrapped bout their
feet.
So the mass remains; but presently intermediate strata appear. Below the
strenuous magnificence of the nobility' and gentry appear craftsmen
subserving the expanding needs of their superiors. Upper servants appear, and
attendants made passable in their appearances and even wearing liveries.
Nobody catered for the ordinary man's clothing. He wore old cast-off
stuff. Even to-day there is still a great market for cast-off clothes. Right
down to the meddle nineteenth century "Paddy" was wearing inappropriate
second-hands. His tail coat and deboshed top-hat was part of the fun the
English made of him. Below the level of gentility nobody thought of catering
for the lower-class body or the lower-class home. I am now nearly
seventy-seven and I was brought up in a home in which everything, carpets,
beds and all, except for a muslin curtain or so, had been bought at sales. It
was an indignant philanthropist at Plymouth without any thought of gain who
resolved to make furniture that would meet the needs of the poor home,
lower-middle-class chiefly. He blundered into a fortune and launched
Shoolbred's, Maple's, Heal's and all the rest of them on their vast
prosperous careers. In the period of Gilles de Rais, no "inferior" dared
enjoy anything until it had done its service at the rich man's table. To
everyone in the world, this seemed altogether natural. Meanly and dirtily
dressed, ill-nourished, ill-housed and despised; that was the lot of the
vulgar. Witness our "myriad-minded" Shakespeare. How some one in that
"myriad" could despise their "greasy caps" and mock their poor efforts to
imitate and propitiate their betters!
Dirt and mutual contempt, smothered resentments and cringing
acquiescences. Such was social reality in the fifteenth century, in which
Gilles de Rais lived, insanitary finery above brooding over great squalour.
Such was the social atmosphere of the supreme disruptive phase in
Christendom.
Even when one scrutinises the sort of thing the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries esteemed finery, there is a cheapness of invention and a factor of
animal assertion that jars upon the dignity and reservations of our maturer
minds. The cod-piece, often formidably enlarged, witnesses to the sexual
obsessions of these adolescent ancestors of ours, and suggests the
graffiti of the public urinal which releases the awakening minds of
contemporary youth.
Apart from that, aspect of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the
costume of the middling sort displays a resort to pinking, puffing, slashing,
legs of different colours and the like feeble devices.
Somewhen about this time there came a wave of better taste—I think
out of Central Asia. It came with playing cards. The pinking and puffing and
slashing, the silly long-toed shoes ad so forth, presently vanished before
its influence— for a time. The court cards of the normal pack
foreshadow the dress of the seventeenth century. This wave of better taste
did not come with the returning Crusaders, but by some more northern route,
about which I am equally curious and ignorant. With its onset a certain
sobriety imposed itself upon the costume of the intermediate classes. Their
superiors soon returned to the ruffs and bejewelled embroidery. Their
inferiors remained squalid. As they are to this day.
Now it happened that two very considerable stresses in the
common way of living in Europe occurred in the middle fourteenth century. At
first they had little to do with each other or with the religious development
of Christendom. Later they were to revolutionise it altogether. They both
came from the East. One was the Black Death; the other was the manufacture of
paper and the obvious possibility it brought with it of printing uniform
books from movable type. The one made labour dear; the other made books and
knowledge cheap. The first, as we shall see, launched socialism upon the
world; the second liberated the critical intelligence of mankind. Hitherto
the subjugation of the common people had been an easy matter. There were
plenty of them, and if they would not work for the Lord of the Manor or his
sub-tenants, they could freeze and starve. Then came deliverance out of the
East and found a ready soil in the filthy towns and dirty villages of the
mediaeval countryside, the Great Pestilence.
Never was there such a pestilence. It came and it returned. It well nigh
blotted out mankind. More than half of the three or four millions who formed
the population of England were swept away. There were no hands to till the
soil; there were none left who could drive the straying cattle out of the
fields and corn.
For the first time in the history of Christendom there followed a struggle
between property and the worker. Property, in accordance with its age-long
established ideology, could find no better way of dealing with the universal
distress than to assert that the workers must toil very much harder. The
propertied classes of the desolation after the Black Death tried to tie such
workers as there were to their jobs, by forbidding migration, fixing wages
below starvation level, and so forth, and being very implacable about it
all.
The vague indignation of popular common sense found expression in the
preaching of one whom the courtly Froissart called "a mad priest of Kent",
John Ball.
"Good people," cried the preacher, "things will never go well in England
so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be villeins and
gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? On
what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all
came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or
prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for
them by our toil that they spend in their pride? They are clothed in velvet
and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags.
They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we oat-cake and straw, and
water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour,
the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that
these men hold their state."
And so to the plain challenge of
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
the French Jacquerie was simultaneous and all of a piece
with the primordial socialism of John Ball. At that time Kent and the
south-east of England were far more closely linked with the north-east of
France in thought and social life than with the lands behind either region.
There were parallel movements in Flanders, and especially Ghent and Bruges
and Ypres. The Ghent weavers were the stoutest.﹃For six years, despite
amazing vicissitudes, they held their own against the prince, the nobles and
all 'good folk who had anything to lose'﹄(Henri Pirenne, A History of
Europe).
How Wat Tyler was murdered; how later on John Ball was executed in the
sight of Richard lI; how that tragic and inglorious king lied and cheated his
way out of the Peasant Revolt; how the people trusted him and were massacred
for their touching disposition to accept the word of a gentleman; and how,
after a phase of alleviation, due to the fact that the more they were
butchered the rarer they became, they increased and multiplied and were
economically debased once more; all that is to be found in any history.
But the spirit of that Kentish revolt did not die; it remained as an
insubordination that presently, with the translation and presently the
printing and cheapening of the Bible and the downward extension of literacy
that ensued, developed into religious recalcitrance, into nonconformity and
dissent, into radicalism and at last into lucid world socialism, against
which tradition, the old idea of lord over inferior as the natural structure
of society, never completely reinstated itself.
IT must be understood that it was from within the body of
the Catholic Church that the destruction of its own unity came. It was men in
holy orders striving to be good Christians who began to question the methods
and disciplines of the Church. The Reformation came out of the heart of the
Church. It was the subtle and obstinate Wycliffe who denied
Transubstantiation and split off a living and progressive Protestantism from
an ever more reactionary Church, who had the Bible translated into the vulgar
tongue, and, together with his pupil, Jan Huss, begot the Reformation.
The spirit of Protestantism sprang from men who took their unquestioning
Catholic faith with such seriousness that they could not but protest against
the evil things they beheld about them. In the less critical eleventh
century, in the days when Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII) was bracing up the
solidarity of the Church by insisting on priestly celibacy and the complete
detachment from normal human living that this involved, there had been an
extraordinary willingness to believe the Catholic priesthood good and wise.
Relatively it was wiser and better in those days. Great powers beyond her
spiritual functions had been entrusted to the Church, and very extraordinary
freedoms. The tragedy of the Church is that she put her spiritual influence
to evil ends and abused her freedoms without measure.
The Pope was the supreme lawgiver of Christendom, and his court at Rome
the final and decisive court of appeal. The Church levied taxes; it had not
only vast properties and a great income from fees, but it imposed a tax of a
tenth, the tithe, upon its subjects. It did not call for this as a pious
benefaction; it demanded it as a right. Steadily more and more of the
nation's property fell into the dead hand (Mortmain) of the Church and paid
its tribute to St. Peter. The clergy, on the other hand, claimed exemption
from lay taxation.
This attempt to trade upon their peculiar prestige and evade their share
in fiscal burdens was certainly one considerable factor in the growing
dissatisfaction with the clergy. Apart from any question of justice, it was
impolitic. It made taxes seem ten times more burthensome to those who had to
pay. It made everyone resent the immunities of the Church.
And a still more extravagant and unwise claim made by the Church was the
claim to the power of dispensation. It did not interpret right and wrong now;
it was above right and wrong and it could make wrong right and right wrong.
The Pope in many instances set aside the laws of the Church in individual
cases; he allowed cousins to marry, permitted a man to have two wives,
released men from vows. The Church's crowning folly in the sixteenth century
was the sale of indulgence whereby the sufferings of the soul in purgatory
could be commuted for money payment.
By the dawn of the sixteenth century, the Church, blindly and rashly, had
come to a final parting of the ways. The force of protest, that is to say of
Protestantism, was gathering against it, and the alternatives, whether it
would modernise or whether it would .dogmatise or fight, were before it. It
chose to fight and tyrannise.
Before the thirteenth century it had been customary for the Pope to make
occasional inquests or enquiries into heresy in this region or that, but
Innocent III found in the Dominicans a powerful instrument of suppression.
The Inquisition was organised as a standing enquiry under their direction and
with fire and torture the Church set itself, through this instrument, to
assail and weaken the human conscience in which its sole hope of world
dominion resided. Before the thirteenth century the penalty of death had been
inflicted but rarely upon heretics and unbelievers. Now in a hundred
market-places in Europe the dignitaries of the Church watched the blackened
bodies of its antagonist, for the most part poor and insignificant people,
burn and sink pitifully, and their own great mission to mankind burn and sink
with them into dust and ashes.
Chaucer, one of the most typical and commanding figures in English
literature, in his Canterbury Tales, gives incidentally and inadvertently a
picture of the state of opinion about the Church on the very eve of the
impending Reformation. We have a company of pilgrims going to
Canterbury—for a pilgrimage was then the only way of taking a holiday
in comparative security and they are all, like Chaucer himself, nominally
good Catholics. They are, so to speak, provisionally Catholics, there being
no alternative. Except the enthusiasm of Lollardry. Yet their critical
contempt for the methods and exactions of the Church is plain and outspoken,
and the two most contemptible figures in his vivid album are two clerical
officials, the summoner and the pardoner.
It is our misfortune that his contribution to EnglIsh literature is
practically unreadable in its original form. The language was not yet fixed
and it underwent profound changes afar his death in 1400. It was fixed by the
translation of the Bible an the literary activities of the later Tudor
period, and now the ordinary reader of English can read him comfortably only
in such I modernisations as that of J.U. Nicolson.
Chaucer was nearly sixty in 1400 and yet death took him by surprise and
only a third of the writings he was collecting under the title of the
Canterbury Tales had been assembled. Yet even so, they witness to his amazing
versatility and have distinctive English qualities that were afterwards to
reappear in the humorist in Shakespeare, in Fielding, in Dickens and a host
of lesser story tellers down to such contemporary writers as Christopher
Morley, and which are manifest in equal measure in no other literature.
All of them display that keen interest in individual facts and that
distaste for dogmatic and enthusiastic final judgments which has
characterised English thought and literature from its beginning. This
sceptical mentality, which is so manifest in the English make-up, ranges fro
a sort of obstinate, stupid and conservative unteachableness to a profound
and explicit perception of the unreality of appearances, and the
impossibility of ultimate solutions. There is every type of intermediate
mentality in the English world, but they possess a family likeness. The
British oaf and the British genius are born brothers.
This innate disposition to regard all existence as experimental and to
distrust and reject the glib profundities of the religious "mystic" is
incomprehensible to many Indian minds. Their objection finds typical
expression in Shakespeare through Eastern Eyes by Mr. Ranjee G. Shahani,
B.A., D.Litt., which has somehow got on to my reading desk. For "Shakespeare"
we may substitute the Englishman.
Mr. Ranjee G. Shahani is oblivious to the obvious probability of a mixed
origin for Shakespeare's plays, and he finds a confession of faith in any
utterance of any character in any of them, and, regardless of the entirely
provisional nature of language and of all human symbols, he lets loose at
this sample Western with a voluminous smoke screen of pretentious gabble.
This sort of thing:
"An Indian would say that Shakespeare had not probed far
enough into the human soul and the Over-Soul we call God. Now the Oriental
thinker is profoundly concerned not only in understanding these principles
but in finding a relation between them. The fundamental thought of the
Upanishads—writings containing the most occult and mystical ideas of
the Hindus—consists in the recognition of the oneness of the Brahman
and Atman, of God and the Soul. This is also the quintessential principle of
the Vedanta system. 'Who could breathe who could exist,' declares the Kena
Upanishad, 'if there were not the bliss of Brahma within the ether of his
heart?' Sir Edwin Arnold rightly gauges the Indian spirit when he says that
though inconceivable to the mind, this all comprehensive Being is still a
necessity of true thought, and veritable beyond every other conception of
reality'.
"The Hindu dharma declares that man does not live by his
appetites alone: he must live by his life of spirit also. Moksha is the goal
indicated. Moksha is freedom from the perpetuity of incarnation. It is in the
end the union of the finite with the Infinite—the merging of the
individual soul with the illimitable ocean. In other words, this is the
nirvana of the Buddha....
"To the Oriental mind, religious mysticism is a sheer joy.
The entire literature of India is steeped in this element. But when the
Indian turns to Shakespeare he finds that this mystic quality is utterly
absent... .
"Devotees of East and West declare that no joy transcends
that which is derived from mystical experience. Roumi, Kabir, Meister
Eckhart, Swedenborg, St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, and many others, all
bear witness to the same effect. Surely, there is nothing finer or higher for
man than to know what, 'in the last analysis, holds the universe together.'
This is the question that Faust asks himself, and so does every mystic. For
Vivekananda, as for Ramakrishna, his master, 'the knowledge of Brahma is the
ultimate end, the highest destiny of man'...
"Mr. Middleton Murry, in harmony with the ancients,
considers the poet as a vates sacer, bearing a direct message from
God....
"'The poetry of mysticism,' says Miss Evelyn Underhill,
'might be defined on the one hand as a temperamental reaction to the vision
of Reality; on the other, as a form of prophecy. As it is the special
vocation of the mystical consciousness to mediate between two orders, going
out in loving adoration towards God and coming home to tell. the secrets of
Eternity to other men; so the artistic self-expression of this consciousness
has also a double character. It is love-poetry, but love-poetry, which is
often written with a missionary intention.'
"The Indian fails to find anything of this kind in
Shakespeare. His poetry is not an outburst of ecstasy and exaltation. We
discover this combination in the Persian mystics, in the Sufi poets, in a few
Western bards, and in the Christian saints. We also detect this fusion in
Kabir. Let us listen to one of his poems translated by the united efforts of
Rabindranath Tagore and Miss Evelyn Underhill:
Tell me, O Swan, your ancient tale.
From what land do you come, O Swan?
To what shore will you fly?
Where would you take your rest, O Swan,
And what do you seek?
Even this morning, O Swan, awake, arise, follow me!
There is a land where no doubt nor sorrow have rule:
Where the terror of Death is no more.
There the woods of spring are a-bloom,
And the fragrant scent "He is I" is borne on the wind:
There the bee of the heart is deeply immersed,
And desires no other joy.
From Songs of Kabir. Translated by
Rabindranath Tagore, 1916
In the presence of this sort of ecstasy the broad stream of creative
literature in England from Chaucer to the present day unites in making loud
rude sceptical noises.
The first story in the Chaucer portfolio is the Knight's story of Palamon
and Arcite, a lengthy and dignified story after the Italian, of an exalted
nobility and chastity. Next to that, as this time it is no translation, and
as it were a relief from that, the drunken miller tells his obscene story of
how the carpenter was cuckolded and mocked by Nicholas the clerk and how
Absalom the parish priest was mocked and disgusted.
Whereupon the reeve is moved to tell of the outrageous cuckolding of a
miller, and the cook begins brightly with a spendthrift gentleman who "had a
wife that kept, for countenance, a shop and whored to gain her sustenance",
or, to quote the original, "hadde a wyf that heeld for contenance a
shoppe, and swyved for hir sustenance". But this fragment of life ends
abruptly. It was never finished.
The sailor follows and tells the story of a mercenary woman and her
passion for a monk, of which the moral is, "Invite no more monks to your
house or inn", and then comes Madame Eglantine, the prioress, who tells a
horrifying invention about the murder of a boy in a "Jewry" through which
Christian boys were unwisely allowed to pass, and how, being murdered and
buried, he still sang on to reveal his fate. That Madame Eglantine, we are
told in the Prologue,
...was so charitable and piteous
That she would weep if she but saw a mouse
Caught in a trap, though it were dead or bled.
She had some little dogs, too, that she fed
On roasted flesh, or milk, or fine white bread.
But sore she'd weep if one of them were dead,
Or if men smote it with a rod to smart:
For pity ruled her, and her tender heart."
And this is the piteous way in which she deals with the Jews:
With torture and with shameful death each one,
The provost did these cursed Hebrew serve
Who of the murder knew, and that anon;
From justice to the villains he'd not swerve.
Evil shall have what evil does deserve.
And therefore, with wild horses; did he draw,
And after hang, their bodies, all by law."
And how she recalls the alleged "Ritual Murder" of Hugh of Lincoln:
O you young Hugh of Lincoln, slain also
By cursed Jews, as is well known to all,
Since it was but a little while ago,
Pray you for us, sinful and weak, who call
That, of His Mercy, God will still let fall
Something of grace, and mercy multiply,
For reverence of His Mother dear on high. Amen.
Chaucer himself is then called upon, and produces Sir Thopas, a cheerful
burlesque of the old-fashioned romantic stories, until the host implores him
in extremely foul language to discontinue. Whereupon he turns about and tells
a tale of Melibeus and the wisdom and goodness of forgiving. Here the
Lollards get a passing word from the sailor, "impatient at their zeal".
"I smell a Lollard in the wind;" quoth he.
"Ho, good men!" said our host, "no hearken me;
Wait but a bit, for God's high passion do,
For we shall have a sermon ere we're through;
This Lollard here will preach to us somewhat."
"Nay, by my father's soul, that he shall not!"
Replied the sailor.『Here he shall not preach,
Nor comment on the gospels here, nor teach.
We all believe in the great God,』said he,
"But he would sow among us difficulty,
Or sprinkle cockles in our good clean corn."
In this promiscuous careless fashion the great portfolio spills its varied
contents. The Wife of Bath, a companion piece to Mistress Quickly, and almost
as great a figure of comedy, comes upon the scene....
So we sample the state of mind of England on the very eve of the
Reformation. The melange of intense amusement at individual character, with
parody and gross laughter, is possible only because of the entire absence of
any urgent positive convictions. And as it was in the beginning, so it is
with English thought and art to this day.
Langland, who wrote The Vision of Piers Plowman, was a contemporary
of Chaucer. His manuscript was recopied with variations and additions and
passed from hand to hand. It witnesses to the same state of corruption and
indifference on the part of those who ruled over the Church as does Chaucer,
but its criticism of abuses is far bitterer. While Chaucer is essentially
irreligious, Langland is a theologian, and, though he believes himself to be
an entirely orthodox Christian, his doctrine is substantially a sort of
Calvinistic Humanitarianism. His "Christ" is Everyman, the common man at your
elbow. In the fourteenth century, recurrent epidemics, local famines, and
storms of violence seemed to be in the natural order of things. Everyone was
at least intermittently ill and most people were by our modern standards
under-vitalised. News soaked about the world haphazard, was distorted or
evaporated. The Black Death, the revolt of John Ball and the men of Kent, are
ignored by both Chaucer and Langland, nor had they the slightest knowledge of
Roger Bacon's vision of the possibilities of mental release and human
welfare. Yet, unaware of each other and each after his fashion, such
Englishmen were feeling their way out of the mental darkness of the mediaeval
world.
Not only the moral but the intellectual prestige of Rome was fading in the
growing light of the times. Wycliffe (1320-1384) was a learned doctor at
Oxford; for a time he was Master of Balliol; and he held various livings in
the Church. Quite late in his life he began a series of outspoken criticisms
of the corruption of the clergy and the unwisdom of the Church.
Be organised a number of poor priests, the Wycliffites, to spread his
ideas throughout England; and in order that people should judge between the
Church and himself, he had the Bible translated into English.
He was a more learned and far abler man than either St. Francis or St.
Dominic. He had supporters in high places and a great following among the
people; and though Rome raged against him and ordered his imprisonment, he
died a free man, still administering the sacraments as parish priest of
Lutterworth.
The black and ancient spirit that was leading the Church to its
destruction would not let his bones rest in his grave. By a decree of the
Council of Constance, in 1415, his remains were ordered to be dug up and
burnt, an order which was carried out, at the command of Pope Martin V, by
Bishop Fleming in 1428. This desecration was not the act of some isolated
fanatic; it was the official act of this Church we now indict.
All through four centuries of dwindling prestige, Rome, with a sort of
senile obstinacy, persisted in its encroachments upon both the princes and
peoples of Christendom, and still it was blind to the vulnerability of its
own position in the face of the forces it was provoking against itself. The
princes realised more and more clearly the huge proportion of wealth in the
Mortmain and the ever-growing tribute they paid without compensation to Rome.
They lose their trust in ecclesiastical. statesmen with a foot in either
camp; and looked about them for more complaisant ministers. The people mocked
at the all too frequent scandals in the convents and monasteries and at the
worldliness of the higher ecclesiastics. Rome remained blind to the
development of an upper and nether millstone about itself, and still stuck to
its ever narrower and ever more exacting claims. The smouldering fire blazed
up at last in open rebellion, the Reformation.
The Reformation had a threefold aspect. The Princes' Reformation wanted to
stop the flow of money to Rome, and seize the moral authority, the
educational power and the material possessions of the Church within their
dominions; the Reformation, according to the people, sought to make
Christianity a power against the unrighteousness of the rich and powerul; and
a movement of Reformation within the Church, of which St. Francis of Assisi
was the precursor, sought to restore the unifying virtue of the Church, and,
through its virtue, its power.
The Princes had no intention of releasing the judgments of their subjects,
more particularly when it took on the quality, as we should now say, of a
revolutionary popular socialism.
They sought merely to oust the papal influence and establish national
churches dependent upon themselves. As England, Scotland, Sweden, Norway,
Denmark, North Germany and Bohemia broke away from the Roman communion, the
princes and their ministers showed the utmost solicitude to keep the movement
under control. Just as much Reformation as would sever the link with Rome
they permitted. Anything beyond that, any dangerous break towards the
primitive teachings of Jesus or the crude direct interpretation of the Bible,
they resisted. The Established Church of England is one of the most typical
and successful of the resulting compromises, still sacramental and
sacerdotal.
The popular Reformation was very different and its spirit and quality
varied from country to country. The wide spiritual upheavals of the time were
at once more honest, more confused, more enduring, and less immediately
successful than the reforms of the princes. Very few religious-spirited men
had the daring to break away or the effrontery to confess that they had
broken away from all authoritative teaching, and that they were now relying
entirely upon their own minds and consciences. That required a very high
intellectual courage. The general drift of the common man in this period in
Europe was to set up his new acquisition, the Bible, as a counter-authority
to the Church. This was the case with the great leader of German
Protestantism, Martin Luther (1483-1546).
All over Germany, and, indeed, all over Western Europe, there were now men
spelling over the black-letter pages of the newly-translated and printed
Bible, over the Book of Leviticus and the Song of Solomon and the Revelation
of St. John the Divine—strange and perplexing books—quite as much
as over the simple and inspiring record of Jesus in the Gospels. Naturally,
they produced grotesque interpretations. It is surprising that they were not
stranger and grotesquer. But the bulk of these new Bible students took what
their consciences approved from the Bible, squared it to their sense of human
right and dignity, and ignored its riddles and contradictions.
The strangest of these outbreaks of social and religious revolt occurred
in Germany. It had a certain parallelism with the social and religious
outbreak in Western Europe two centuries before. The religious disturbances
were releasing men's criticism of social inequality, but now, instead of
being illiterate believers in the established Christian story of the world,
as they were told it in church, they had a storm of open doctrinal discussion
about them and the Bible to puzzle over for themselves. The impulse, as ever,
was to assume the entire corruption of the Roman Church, and to revert to a
conception of an early Christianity when the faithful had their goods in
common and the only rule for the true believer was the inner light in his
conscience under the guidance of God. The Anabaptists (from
Anabaptismo, which means to re-baptise, because they denied the
validity of infant baptism) seized upon the town of Munster and set
themselves to establish there a new Kingdom of God upon earth.
The inner light and an indigestion of Bible and speculative theology
produced amazing results. Bockhold, a tailor, better known in history as John
of Leyden, inspired by dreams and visions, ruled the town. Like Hitler, he
was mentally unbalanced and he dominated his associates by his frenzied
vehemence. They did not gainsay him, they followed his example. He changed
the name of Munster to Zion and declared himself the successor of King David.
He restored polygamy, which as a matter of fact never has disappeared from
Christendom so far as those who have had the means to practise it are
concerned. He himself had four wives, one of whom he beheaded in the
market-place with his own hand. For no recorded reason. For a year, says my
authority, Munster was "a scene of unbridled profligacy", which means in
effect that people did not draw the blinds. Then the town was stormed, and
outraged social order tortured John and his leading associates with great
ingenuity, finally executing and exposing their mangled bodies. So this
German essay in social and religious revolution ended, and the masses were
brought to heel. They had gone farther and fared worse than the populace of
any other country.
All over Europe, a living and very active residuum of Protestants remained
who declined to have their religion made over for them by their princes. They
were a medley of sects, having nothing in common but their resistance to
authoritative religion, whether of the Pope or of the State. In Germany,
after the Anabaptist collapse, popular nonconformity was or the most part
stamped out by the princes; in Great Britain dissent remained sober, powerful
and various. Many of the differences in the behaviour of the German, and the
British peoples may be traceable to the relative suppression of free judgment
in Germany at this time.
Most, but not all, of these Nonconformists and Dissenters held to the
Bible as a divinely inspired and authoritative guide. This was a strategic
rather than an abiding position, and the modern drift of Nonconformity has
been onward away from this original Bibliolatry towards a mitigated and
sentimentalised recognition of the bare teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Beyond the range of nonconformity, beyond the range of professed Christianity
at all, there was also now a great and growing mass of equalitarian belief
and altruistic impulse, which released a smouldering innate sense of justice
in the human make-up.
THE motives of the princes and the feelings of the masses
fluctuated through the period of the Reformation very widely. Personal
factors came into play. Henry VIII of England began his reign as a devout
Roman Catholic. He wrote against heresy and was rewarded by the Pope with the
title of Defender of the Faith. "Fid. Def." is still on the obverse of
many British coins. England seemed saved for Rome. Then his attention strayed
from his wife Catherine of Aragon to a livelier young woman called Anne
Boleyn, and, because the Church would not set aside his marriage and leave
him free to marry this new mistress, he went over (carrying England with him)
to the Protestant side.
Yet Rome had been very obliging to Henry in the matter of his marriage.
Catherine of Aragon was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, the
Ferdinand and Isabella of Columbus and the conquest of Granada, and she was
married to Arthur, the elder brother of Henry, in 1501. Both bride and
bridegroom were then sixteen years old. They were childless, and Prince
Arthur died in the following year. But the papal policy, which was then
hostile to France, dictated a close association between Spain and England,
and, with a complete disregard of its own teachings, the Holy See granted a
dispensation to allow her to marry Henry. The dispensation was granted in
1503, but the young prince showed no great appetite for the lady, and the
actual union only occurred six years later.
Catherine was plain to look upon, thick-set and irritatingly pious,
obstinate and well-educated. During that interval Henry's youthful passions
had found an outlet elsewhere, and he had an illegitimate son. Henry, whom he
afterwards made Duke of Richmond. Catherine, poor young woman, had a dull
time meanwhile. This tepid marriage of policy produced six children all of
whom died in infancy or were stillborn, except one daughter, Mary, and
popular opinion attributed this to the divine resentment against incest, with
which idea Henry was only too disposed to agree, as his weariness with
Catherine increased. He developed conscientious scruples over that papal
dispensation and betrayed a disposition to legitimise his bastard the Duke of
Richmond, to whom he gave precedence not only over all the peers of the realm
but over Catherine's daughter Mary.
Here was a problem which evoked all the intricate insincerity of the Roman
system. It had swallowed that dispensation from its own doctrine. Could it
now regurgitate?
The great and ingenious Cardinal Wolsey suggested a quiet little suit
against the King for incest, to release him from his bonds. There was much
coming and going of the perplexed learned, of University doctors and papal
legates. A divorce was out of the question if the dispensation and marriage
were invalid; then plainly the King was free, and the subsequent negotiations
turned upon that point. The more fervently the King wanted his Anne Boleyn,
the more convinced he was that he had been living in mortal sin with
Catherine. A considerable amount of pride and obstinacy in Catherine's
make-up frustrated the Church in its efforts to get her to retire to a
nunnery and cease her resistance to the annulment. The Church veered round to
her side. Pope Clement issued a brief forbidding the King to make a second
marriage and commanding him to restore Catherine's connubial rights. And so
Henry broke with Rome and England came down on the Protestant side.
THE Reformation had caught the Church of Rome in a state of
lax internal discipline, exasperating aggression and intolerance and
blindness to the drift of worldly events. But her prestige was still very
great, there were multitudes of the perplexed but still obedient Faithful,
and the self-seeking princes and influential owners of property felt a deeper
menace of popular release and criticism beneath the Reformation.
The Roman Catholic Church, no longer the Catholic Church, woke up to the
realities of her position, to the threat of complete destruction at no very
distant date unless she organised herself to resist.
The Reformation, the expropriation of the monastic properties and the
revolt against the ascendancy of Rome, lasted for less than a century, and
then it was overtaken by the Counter Reformation of the alarmed and awakened
Roman Church. It was a belated awakening, and its history unfolds the same
record, on an intensified scale of confused motives, levity of purpose,
obstinate insistence upon freakish doctrinal points, the fear of death that
arises from belief in an incalculable future life and in a pitilessly
vindictive deity, amenable only to the magic of orthodox formulae, which
hitherto had confused and had now split Christendom.
The Counter Reformation fell back upon the ideal of Christendom as an
obedient family of nations under the parental guidance of the Pope. In
France, where the issue was fought out very typically, the Church directed
the reaction to a revival of the tradition of Joan of Arc, the associate of
that abominable torturer of children, Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France, and
adopted as its symbol and banner the double cross of Lorraine— the
banner and symbol to-day of Charles de Gaulle, that strange protege of the
British Foreign Office. The Holy League (La Sainte Ligue) organised the
Counter-Reformation under that symbol. There was a phase of attempted
compromise broken by the Roman Catholics, who murdered a number of Huguenots
assembled for divine worship in a barn at Poissy. A fluctuating civil war
ensued, Treaties of peace were made when no peace was possible. Coligny,
outstanding Huguenot leader, was assassinated and matters culminated in the
massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve (August 1572).
The initiative for the crime rests with Catherine de Medici. Disquieted by
the growing influence of Admiral Coligny, who against her wishes was
endeavouring to draw Charles IX into a war with Spain, she resolved to have
him murdered. The first attempt failed, however, and Catherine then
determined to massacre all the Huguenot leaders. She got Coligny in the
general bag. The massacre began on August 24, St. Bartholomew's Day, at
daybreak, and continued in Paris till September 17th. From Pans, it spread to
the provinces. The Duc de Longueville in Picardy, Chabot-Charny (son of
Admiral Chabot) at Dijon, the Comte de Matignon (1525-97) in Normandy and
other provincial governors refused to authorise the massacres. Frangois
Hotman estimates the number killed in the whole of France at 50,000.
Catherine de Medici received the congratulations of all the Catholic powers,
and Pope Gregory XIII commanded bonfires to be lighted and a medal to be
struck.
A sturdy remnant of Huguenots remained and was able to hold out against
the murder policy of the pontiff. He had rejoiced too soon. Sufficient
Protestants had survived for an effective rally. Many of them, like Conde and
Henry IV of Navarre, escaped that night of murder by a precipitate and quite
temporary conversion to Catholicism.
This Henry IV is an outstanding figure in this history, and one very
typical of the times. He was of Protestant upbringing and throughout his life
his soundly Protestant bias was manifest. He was a wit and a rake and he
suffered from, and was evidently greatly entertained by, the temptations
natural to an exceptionally "charming" person. When he found the Holy League
strongly established in Paris against him, he took the wind out of its
intolerant sails by becoming a Catholic himself. "Paris," he jested,﹃was
well worth a Mass.﹄But he saw to it that the Huguenots got something like
active protection from another St. Bartholomew's Eve by the Edict of Nantes,
and the protective vigilance of his great minister Sully gave the common
people roads, canals, industries and a "fowl in the pot" on Sunday for every
peasant.
The Edict of Nantes was revoked by King Louis XIV. He was the Most
Christian King and eldest son of the Church, ruler not only of the bodies of
his subjects but of their souls. He felt himself called upon to establish the
unity of the faith and to repel with the hand of orthodoxy all Dissenters,
Huguenots, Jansenists and Quietists. The Huguenots had long enjoyed freedom
of worship and had prospered conspicuously in th fields of industry,
agriculture and commerce. The Compagnie Saint-Sacrament resented these
immunities, and through its influence between 1661 and 1685 the Huguenots
were exposed to increasingly heavy penalties and successfully excluded from
States-General, the diplomatic service, and the municipalities, and deprived
of their hospitals, colleges, academies and schools. Fines proving
inadequate, soldiers were quartered upon the recalcitrant by Louvois and
encouraged to behave with the utmost brutality (the dragonnades) until at
last Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes altogether (1685), as being out of
date and no longer necessary in a re-unified France, re-unified largely by
massacre. There followed on the part of the Huguenots an emigration en masse,
to the great benefit of the trade and industries of London.
Still later came the revolt of the Camisards and its savage suppression
and a civil war in the Cevennes, which held the Royal Armies in check from
1703 to 1711, at a time when the kingdom was threatened with invasion. So it
was that the true Church defended itself, reckless even of the safety of the
state which sustained it.
In 1665 one of these Roman Catholic massacres of Protestants was in
progress in Savoy. For a considerable period a remnant of the Waldenses had
escaped the pious murder storms that were eliminating French Protestantism,
under the protection of the Duke of Savoy, but he was so ill advised as to
respond to the solicitations of the Church and join in the fun of massacre.
He killed a lot, but those who escaped into the mountains sent an appeal to
England. England was then in a phase of extreme protestantism under the
protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. A National fast was ordered, #40,000 was
collected for the immediate relief of the victims, and immediate hostilities
from the sea were threatened. So high had the Protestant regime raised the
prestige of the country that the Duke collapsed at once. The occasion was
made memorable by Milton, whose indignant sonnet is one of the greatest in
the language. It runs as follows:
Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold;
Ev'n them who kept Thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones,
Forget not: in Thy book record their groans,
Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that roll'd
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; there from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learn'd Thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
Milton is one of the strongest figures English Protestantism has ever
produced, a combination of colossal learning, religious independence and a
passion for outspoken truth and rational action, strange to controversialists
upon whatever side in those days of conflict. He had manifest weaknesses. He
had so great a regard for his personal appearance that he preferred to go
blind rather than wear spectacles. But he could anticipate our modern ideas
by such wisdom as this:
"... as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who
kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a
good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God as it were, in the eye.
Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good. book is the precious
life-blood of a master- spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a
life beyond life. 'Tis true no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there
is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a
rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should
be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labours of
public men, how spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in
books; since we see a kind of homicide may thus be committed; sometimes a
kind of martyrdom; and if it extended to the whole impression, a kind of
massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life,
but strikes at that ethereal and soft essence, the breath of reason itself;
slays an immortality rather than a life....
"Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or
nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not
unapplicable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good
nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad
books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to
discover, to confute, to forewarn and to illustrate.... Good and evil, we
know, in the field of this world, grow up together almost inseparably; and
the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of
evil, and in so many cunning resmblances hardly to be discerned, that those
confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull
out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed....
"Lords and Commons of England! consider what nation it is
whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors; a nation not slow and dull,
but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit; acute to invent, subtile and
sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point that human capacity
can soar to....
"Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play
upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and
prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who
ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?..."
That was written nearly three centuries ago. Yet still the obedient Roman
Catholic wears his blinkers and the Nazis celebrated their accession to power
ten years ago by a great burning of books.
About eighty years before Milton was born, a new wave of zealotry, the
development of the Jesuit organisation, the "Society of Jesus", had occurred
in Spain and marked a further stage in the moral deterioration of the dying
yet obstinately aggressive Roman Church.
THE founder of the Jesuits was a tough and gallant young
Spaniard named Inigo Lopez de Recalde of Loyola. Loyola was his place of
origin and there, until his vow of poverty, .he had an estate. He was clever
and dexterous and inspired by a passion for pluck, hardihood and rather showy
glory. His love affairs were frequent, free and picturesque. In 1521 the
French took the town of Pampeluna, in Spain, from the Emperor Charles V, and
Ignatius was one of the defenders. His legs were smashed by a cannon ball,
and he ws taken prisoner. One leg was badly set and had to be broken again,
and these painful and complex operations nearly cost him his life. He
received the last sacraments. In the night, thereafter, he began to mend, and
presently he was convalescent but facing the prospect of a life in which he
would perhaps always be a cripple.
His thoughts turned to the adventure of religion. Sometimes he would think
of a certain great lady, and how, in spite of his broken state, he might yet
win her admiration by some amazing deed; and sometimes he would think of
being in some especial and personal way the Knight of Christ. In the midst of
these confusions, one night as he lay awake, he tells us, a new great lady
claimed his attention; he had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary carrying
the Infant Christ in her arms.﹃lmmediately a loating seized him for the
former deeds of his life.﹄He resolved to give up all further thoughts of
earthly women, and to lead a life of absolute chastity and devotion to the
Mother of God. He projected great pilgrimages and a monastic life.
His method of taking his vows marks him the countryman of Don Quixote. He
had regained his strength, and he was riding out into the world rather
aimlessly, a penniless soldier of fortune with little but his arms and the
mule on which he rode when he fell in with a Moor. They went on together and
talked and presently disputed about religion. The Moor was the
better-educated man; he had the best of the argument, he said offensive
things about the Virgin Mary that were difficult to answer, and parted
triumphantly. The young Knight of Our Lady was boiling with shame and
indignation. He hesitated whether he should go after the Moor and kill him or
pursue the pilgrimage he had in mind. At a fork in the road he left things to
his mule, which spared the Moor.
He came to the Benedictine Abbey of Montserrat near Manresa, and here he
imitated that peerless hero of medireval romance, Amadis de Gaul, and kept an
all-night vigil before the Altar of the Blessed Virgin. He presented his mule
to the abbey, he gave his worldly clothes to a beggar, laid his sword and
dagger upon the altar, and clothed himself in a rough sackcloth garment and
hempen shoes. He then took him to a neighbouring hospice and give himself up
to scourgings and austerities. For a whole week he fasted absolutely. Thence
he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
For some years he wandered, consumed with the idea of founding a new order
of religious knighthood, but not knowing how to set about the enterprise. He
enlisted other enthusiasts, but like himself they were zealous and indignant
young men. At first they even lacked a priest in the company who could
officiate for them. Loyola became more and more aware of his own illiteracy,
and the Inquisition, which was beginning to take an interest in his
proceedings, forbade him to attempt to teach others until he had spent at
least four years in study. It seems to have been very doubtful about him.
His idea was essentially an idea of a fighting company; the Church, he
realised, was now carrying on a defensive war and needed a fighting force
which would fight with the unquestioning obedience of disciplined soldiers
and with an the methods of strategy, surprise and camouflage that
belligerence involves. Everywhere there was doubt and challenge. A Moor could
talk openly in Spain. Luther had burnt a papal bull of excommunication a year
or so before. It never entered into Loyola's head that there might be an
adequate reason for these denials and repudiation. If such a thought had come
to him he would have rejected it with horror. The world was in rebellion
against the Faith, and that rebellion has to be stamped out by every means in
his power.
Just as for soldiers of the old type the Army is everything, so in the new
fighting force the society had to be everything; blind uncritical obedience
to orders was the Society's first law, it was a complete surrender of
individual thought and judgment, an entire abandonment of freedom. In a
letter to his followers at Coimbra he declared that the general of the order
stands in the place of God, without reference to his personal wisdom, piety
or discretion; that any obedience which falls short of making the superior's
will one's own, in inward affection as well as in outward effect, is lax and
imperfect; that going beyond the letter of command, even in things abstractly
good and ptaiseworthy, is disobedience, and that the﹃sacrifice of the
intellect﹄is the third and greatest grade of obedience, well pleasing to
God, when the inferior not only wills what the superior wills, but thinks
what he thinks, submitting to his judgment, so far as it is possible for the
will to influence and lead.
The formula of the final Jesuit vow, after a series of preparatory stages
extending over years, runs as follows: "I promise to Almighty God, before His
Virgin Mother and the whole heavenly host, and to all standing by; and to
thee, Reverend Father General of the Society of Jesus, holding the place of
God, and to thy successors, Perpetual Poverty, Chastity and Obedience; and
according to it a peculiar care in the education of boys according to the
form contained in the Apostolic Letters of the Society of Jesus and in its
Constitution."
Ignatius himself laid down thy role that an inferior was bound to make all
necessary representations to his superior so as to guide him in imposing a
precept of obedience. When a superior knows the views, of his inferior and
still commands, it is because he is aware of other sides of the question
which appear of greater importance than those that the inferior has brought
forward. The Jesuits were to find their principal work in the world and in
direct and immediate contact with mankind. To seek spiritual perfection in
retired life of contemplation and prayer did not seem to Ignatius to be the
best way of reforming the evils which had brought about the revolt from Rome.
He with drew his followers from this sort of retirement, except as a mere
temporary preparation for later activity; he made habitual intercourse with
the world a prime duty; and to this end he rigidly suppressed all such
external peculiarities of dress or rule as tended to put obstacles in the way
of his followers acting freely as emissaries, agents or missionaries in the
most various places and circumstances. The Jesuit had no home; the whole
world was his parish. Mobility and cosmopolitanism were of the very essence
of the Society.
Their work had to be propaganda; teaching and the insinuation by every
possible means of the authority and policy of the Church. Their teaching work
was indisputably good for the times. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it:
"At a time when primary or even secondary education had in most places become
a mere effete and pedantic adherence to obsolete methods, they were bold
enough to innovate, both in system and, material. They not merely taught and
catechised in a new, fresh and attractive manner, besides establishing free
schools of good quality, but provided new school books for their pupils which
were an enormous advance on those they found in use; so that for nearly three
centuries the Jesuits were accounted the best schoolmasters in Europe, as
they confessedly were in France until their forcible suppression in 1901.
Francis Bacon succinctly gives his opinion of the Jesuit teaching in these
words: 'As for the pedagogical part, the shortest rule would be, Consult the
schools of the Jesuits; for nothing better has been put in practice.' De
Aug mentis, vi. 4.
"Again, when most of the continental clergy had sunk more or
less, into the moral and intellectual slough which is pictured for us in the
writings of Erasmus and the Epistolae obscurorum virorum the Jesuits
won back respect for the clerical calling by their personal culture and the
unimpeachable purity of their lives. These qualities they have carefully
maintained; and probably no large body of men in the world has kept up, on
the whole, an equally high average of intelligene an conduct... It is in the
mission field, however, that their achievements have been most remarkable.
Whether toiling among the teemmg millions in Hindustan and China, labouring
among the Hurons and Iroquois of North America, governing and civilising the
natives of Brazil and Paraguay in the missions and 'reductions', or
ministering, at the hourly risk of his life, to his feIlow Catholics in
England under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, the Jesuit appears alike devoted,
indefatigable, cheerful and worthy of hearty admiration and respect."
Unfortunately for the world the Jesuits have never been able to keep clear
of politics. It was against their written professions, if these are, to be
taken seriously, but it was manifestly among their inevitable temptations.
They had their share, direct or indirect, in embroiling states, concocting
conspiracies and kindling wars. They had a large share in fanning the flames
of political hatred against the Huguenots under the last two Valois kings;
they plotted obstinately against England in thereign of Elizabeth; their
share in the Thirty Years' War and in the religious miseries of Bohemia is
indisputable. Their influence in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and
the expulsion of the Protestants from France is manifest. The ruin of the
Stuart cause under James II, and the establishment of the Protestant
succession was due largely to their clumsy meddling. In a number of cases
where the evidence against them is defective, it is at least an unfortunate
coincidence that there is always direct proof of some Jesuit having been in
communication with the actual agents engaged.
Gradually the reputation of the Jesuit as a dangerous zealot with an
inordinate appetite for power increased. In France the Jesuits joined if they
did not originate the league against Henry of Navarre; absolution was refused
by them to those who would not join in the Guise rebellion. The assassination
of Henry III in the interests of the league and the wounding of Henry IV in
1594 by Chastel, a pupil of theirs, revealed the quality of their
disposition. In England the political schemings of Parsons were no small
factors in the odium which fell on the Society at large; and his
determination to capture the English Catholics as an appanage of the Society
was an object lesson to the rest of Europe of a restless ambition and lust of
domination which were to find many imitators. A general congregation of the
Society in 1594 passed a decree forbidding its members to participate in
public affairs; a decree there was evidently no disposition to enforce.
Parsons was allowed to keep on with his work, and other Jesuits in France for
many years directed affairs of state. In 1605 took place in England the
Gunpowder Plot, in which Henry Garnet, the supenor of the Society in England,
was implicated. That the
Jesuits were the direct instigators of the plot there is no evidence but
they were in close touch with the conspirators, of whose designs Garnet had a
general knowledge. There is now no reasonable doubt that he and other Jesuits
were legally accessories, and that the condemnation of Garnet as a traitor
was substantially just.
Their hostility to the Huguenots forced on the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes in 1685, and their war against their Jansenist opponents did not cease
till the very walls of Port Royal were demolished in 1710, even to tbe very
abbey church itself, and the bodies of the dead taken with every mark of
insult from their graves and literally flung to the dogs to devour. Their
Japanese mission vanished in blood in 1651; and though many Jesuits died with
their converts bravely as martyrs for the Faith, it is impossible to acquit
them of extreme political provocation.
We need not expand this, indictment further. Almost every country in
Europe except England had at one time or another been provoked to expel the
Jesuits, and, as we shall show presently, their obdurate persistence in evil-
doing continues to this day. They are to-day the most active front of the
Roman Catholic residuum.
FOR it is now only a residuum. The number of practising
Roman Catholics is enormously exaggerated. Steadily throughout this black
record of its aggressive intolerance, the Roman Catholic Church has exuded
and persecuted vitality and contracted into the actively malignant and still
dwindling body it is to-day. Joseph McCabe has made a vigorous examination of
its numerical claims.
McCabe is one of the most able and interesting and learned of all anti-
Catholic writers, and, like all the most thorough-going reformers in the
past, he sprang from the bosom of the Church. He began life with a soundly
Roman Catholic up-bringing; he was born in 1867. he was a Franciscan monk at
sixteen, a priest at twenty-three, Professor of Scholastic Philosophy for
four years, and then Rector of Buckingham College. His clerical tide, which
he has ceased to use, is the Very Reverend Father Antony. He broke away from
the Church in 1896 and he married three years later. One might describe him
as the ultimate Protestant, that is to say he has no scrap of religious
belief left in him; he has long since realised that whatever Being may
sustain this universe it can have nothing in common with the vain and
vindictive Bogy which priestcraft has elaborated to scare and subjugate
mankind. He writes with an erudition and an amount of knowledge that put him
by himself as the most capable critic the papal system has ever had. I shall
venture to cite his extremely disrespectful account of a Roman Conclave later
in this chapter. But first I will avail myself of a little tract of his on
the Black International (Second Series, No. 13), to sustain my statement of
the shrinkage of the Roman remnant of Christendom.
The number of Roman Catholics in the world claimed by Catholic
authorities, he points out, varies astonishingly. A Catholic expert in the
new Encyclopaedia Americana gives 294,583,000, the (British) Catholic
Directory gives 398,277,000. "Every priest," says McCabet "makes an annual
report to his bishops—I have assisted in this job—and these
reports provide national totals which are forwarded to Rome. Two things,
amongst others, are reported: how many Catholics in the loose
sense—i.e. baptised persons—there are in the parish and,
particularly, how many of them are real Catholics as testified by attendance
at Church on Sundays and the number of confessions at Easter. But neither
local prelates nor the Vatican ever publish these results. The nearest
approach to an official international annual is Orbis Catholicus, and it
gives no world-total; though if you add up the statements for each country
the total runs to about 350,000,000.
"The sum-total is usually compiled by an entirely dishonest method, but
even professors of sociology who include the Churches as socially valuable
agencies never condemn this. Countries which, from geographical or historical
conditions, never accepted tbe Reformation are still called Catholic
countries, and the whole population is usually included in the Catholic total
or only from 1 to 5 per cent. is allowed for Protestants, Jews,
and—though they generally form the largest body—sceptics. These
countries (France and its colonies, Italy, Spain and its former colonies,
Portugal and its colonies Spanish America, and generally Austria) with a
total population of more than 200,000,000 make the bulk of the Catholic
figure. For other countnes the figures are equally fantastic. The Catholic
writer in the Encyclopaedia Americana gives 11,000,000 to Russia where no
Catholic claims more than 3,000,000 and there are now certainly not 300,000;
39,000,000 to Austria and Hungary, which have had for a quarter of a century
a total (mixed) population of only 15,000,000: 24,000,000 to Germany where
the Church is in ruins: 35,000,000 to France; which is at least five times
too much.
"In examining these figures we must clearly undersstand the conditions.
What is a Catholic or a member of the Roman Church? The Canon Law is simple
and peremptory: everybody who once received Catholic baptism' (McCabe, inter
alia!). "American Catholic writers are uneasy about this arrogant theory of
their Church that you cannot secede from it, and they are shifty and evasive
in defining what they mean when they claim that there are more than
20,000,000 Catholics in the United States. In a fantastic—Catholics
call it a scientific— work, Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? (1925),
Fr. G. Shaugnessy says that by Catholic he means one who has received
Catholic baptism, marries in the Church and has his children baptised, and at
death receives the last sacraments. He at once admits that the third
condition is 'rather theoretical'—he is perfectly aware that it is not
taken into account— and he ought to know, and probably does know, that
Irish, Italian and other Catholics commonly marry in the Church and allow the
mothers or relatives to have— the children baptised though they have
definitely abandoned it, From questions given in Moore's Will America become
Catholic? (1931) it appears that in Catholic periodicals Fr. Shaugnessy, a
professor at a Catholic college, is accustomed to give the usual definition
of a Catholic: one who was baptised in infancy. This is the strict law of the
Church, and it is the guiding principle of the priests who compile the
parochial statistics from which the national and world-totals are
compiled."
I will not go on with McCabe's contemptuous analysis. He emerges with a
possible maximum of 180 million Catholics, including a large proportion of
children (50 millions) and illiterates, probably 100 millions, in the whole
world population of 2,000 millions. The Pope, he says, certainly has not more
than 50 million subjects upon this planet who can write their own names. And
all over the world where statistics are still available, the number of
Catholic criminals and prostitutes is out of all proportion to their numbers
in the general population.
The Very Reverend Father Antony writes with a ruthless confidence in his
knowledge that I cannot emulate.
"His well-known History of the Popes (Watts &
Co., 1939) is a classic which every student of religious history must study,
but when it comes to controversy a certain restraint falls from him, and so,
since I wish to make this book as unaggressive as possible, I will quote only
one other of his more controversial (Black International Tracts, Second
Series, No. 11)."
"Three times," says he, "since 1900, the voters have put at
the head of their Church (a world-wide business with an income of hundreds of
millions of dollars a year at its central office alone) a man who would have
failed to run a $3,000 store. I have just read fifteen Catholic
books—British, French, Italian and German—on them and I ought to
know them....
"Let us consider the Papal election (Conclave) in itself...
. The theory you probably know. Sixty or seventy cardinals elect the Pope.
They are locked and carpentered in a special part of the Vatican palace,
where each now has a suite of rooms—in the old days when they were all
locked in a chapel day and night for weeks the odour was not one of
sanctity—until one of the rival candidates gets two-thirds of the
votes. There is much praying to the Holy Ghost for guidance, but they still
have to be locked in and watched lest they also consult profane persons
outside....
"In practice the Conclave is much more human than the
theory. Ever since the Church of Rome became rich in the fourth century there
has been a spirited struggle for the control of the treasury. As early as 366
more than 160 of the supporters of the rival candidates had to be buried, and
as late as 1492 the 'butcher's bill' was more than 200. The struggle is now
more refined; though when the Pope says his first Mass he still has nobles at
hand to take the first sip of the wine and see that it has not been
poisoned.
"A feverish intrigue warms Rome before a Pope's death.
Broadly there are two schools of cardinals: the 'zealots'—think of the
hairy hill-men of Kentucky who roar out the hymn 'Old-Fashioned Religion'-and
the 'politicals' or practical men. There are generally four or five cardinals
who fancy their chances and carry the bets of the Romans, and they canvass
the voters of the rival schools and let it be known that they are grateful to
supporters. Each party selects one champion, and they enter the Conclave with
the Holy Ghost on their lips and the name of a candidate in their pockets...
.
"They pray and talk for an hour or two and then take a vote
(written). The two favourites are bound to have; perhaps, a third of the
votes each, and the nibbling at each other's parties and the neutrals begins.
There is still generally a deadlock and they turn to the string of 'also
ran'. A few colourless outsiders are tried until one gets the two-thirds
vote. He is generally advanced in age or an invalid, so that the struggle may
be resumed in a few years. The lucky man who at last gets the required
majority murmurs 'I am not worthy' and—because a Pope was once taken
seriously when he said this—makes for the pontifical robes, which are
waiting (in three sizes). Then they take him out on the balcony to show to
the public. The historical record of these Conclaves by Petrucelli, della
Gattina beats the history of Tammany for clean fun.
"An Italian Catholic priest, G. Berthelet (Storia e
Rivilazioni sul Conclave, 1904) says of the election of the 'great' Leo
XIII:
"'If Pius IX had foreseen the election of Leo XIII he would
have excommunicated him, but if Leo XIII had foreseen that at his death the
cardinals would vote for Giuseppe Sarto, he would have excommunicated the lot
of them.'
"Sarto, Archbishop of Venice, was a good old man of peasant
origin. His sister kept the village pub. He loved to talk broad Venetian with
a countryman and shock the more starchy cardinals. But what else could the
poor voters do? For years Cardinal Rampolla, the ablest of them, a lean
black- visaged lynx-eyed schemer like the present Pope, had worked for the
position. The candidate of the zealots was Gatti... As that very sober and
weighty French newspaper Le Temps said in its account of this
Conclave: 'The Holy Ghost was clearly making for the French candidate
(Rampolla) but the Triplice (Triple Alliance) headed him off....'
Such is the "Catholic atmosphere" in Rome to-day, and such is the present
phase of the disintegration of the Christendom of our ancestors. Even in
comparison with Fascism and the Nazi adventure Roman Catholicism is a broken
and utterly desperate thing, capable only of malignant mischief in our
awakening world. The Pope is now only the head of about fifty millions of
semi- literates scattered about the planet, trailing after them a blind
entirely ignorant multitude of "Faithful"; a following of ignorant men, women
and children that does not exceed at the outside 120 millions all told.
With that the Pope sets himself to hold back and frustrate the secular
modernisation of the world.
THE scheme of this analysis of Roman Catholicism would be
incomplete without a few notes to remind the reader of the curious conflict
that has been waged from the Reformation onward by the Roman Catholic Church
in order to recover its ascendancy over Britain.
None of the British mixture of peoples 'can be described as passionately
religious. None of them indeed seem to be passionate in any respect. They
have as little liking and sympathy for the crime passionel as they
have for the wild-eyed devotee in a manifest hair shirt. One can write a sort
of cento of their pet phrases. Their weakness and their greatest danger at
the present time is their disposition to be "reasonable' to let bygones be
bygones, not to cry over spilt milk, to live and let live, and believe that
all other people in the world have a similarly reasonable equable
temperament. They will fight for points, "play the game", and they have to be
smacked good and hard and spat upon and generally insulted before they can be
induced to fight all out. They are rather pleased to lose every battle but
the last, "muddle through" and then make a "good humoured" settlement that
loses the peace. They are bad allies for weaker peoples because of these
trustful settlements they will make. Leave them alone, don't rouse them, and
you may steal the keys of the safe. Many Englishmen think it is bad form to
count their change, and they detest cash registers. But when they realise
they have been cheated and have got something they didn't bargain for, they
may explode dangerously.
Maybe it is the Gulf Stream or something geographical that makes them like
this, maybe it is the fact that living, so to speak, at the end of Europe, so
that for centuries, until America came into the world, every sort o.f man
came to England and nobody wet away, they are o so mixed a strain that they
believe nothing decidedly. Compromise and lack of emphasis is in their
nature.
If I wanted to brag about the English people; if I were briefed for that
purpose and had no way of evading so uncongenial a task, I should certainly
associate this disposition to indifference in religious and social dogmas
with the very exceptional share they have had in the inspiration and early
organisation of scientific research.
They are disposed to put a note of interrogation to every positive
assertion, because they have a profound sense of the present imperfections of
language and every sort of symbol and statement. They feel that things may be
so to a certain extent and yet not quite so. They realise that our minds are
at their best extremely imperfect implements. Continually we seem to be
approaching truth, but every actuality we conquer opens up fresh questions.
This approach to truth goes on unendingly, and every generation has its
achievements and its fresh stimulus to further growth. That is not simply the
disposition of the scientifically trained Englishman; it corresponds to
something like an instinct in the common sort of people. They detest all
precise and binding and conclusive statement; they feel something wrong about
it, and they despise dogmatic enthusiasm. They invented the word "humbug" and
they are far less patriotic than the naturalised alien. When they are
vigorous they are insubordinate and derisive, and when they are devitalised
they are apathetic and unconvinced.
Equable. So the British are now and so they have always been. I have noted
how England became Protestant. Would she have remained Catholic but for Anne
Boleyn? That is not so certain. Protestantism leaves' them at their ease in
many ways, but, as we have seen throughout this study, the Papacy has never
been able to refrain from provocation. It has never let Anglo-Saxons sleep.
By its very nature it has to encroach until some sort of explosion
occurs..
We have given a brief account of heresies in Chapter IV. The British have
never started an aggressive heresy. But they have resented being pushed
about. They have jeered at and criticised the pretensions of the Church, they
have questioned and questioned that, destructively, but they have never begun
the struggle. The Church made a dogma of Transubstantiation.
Wycliffe put a query against it that split the Church in twain, but he
remained in the Church to his death. The majority of the Canterbury Pilgrims,
as we have noted in Chapter XIIIa, are easy-going mockers. You cannot tell
whether that composite person, Shakespeare, was a Catholic or a Protestant
or, like his Macbeth, an out-and-out atheist. All three went to the making of
him. The official English Reformation ended in that remarkable compromise,
the Established Church and the Thirty-nine Articles, which was just Catholic
enough to give the Papacy and the Jesuits hope for quiet reinstatement. Then,
just as the handcuffs were on again and the gag nearly fixed, came the
inevitable awakening and explosion.
The history of England since the Reformation could be written as a
recurrent and generally combined attack of the Roman Catholic Church and the
totalitarian state (of which perhaps Hobbes' Leviathan is the completest
expression and the Divine Right of Kings the political claim) upon the
common- sense agnosticism and individualism of the English people. Always it
is the same story of a renewed assault, apparent success and then
explosion.
In the phase of Puritanism that followed the passing of the Elizabethans
we find the English in an unsuspicious phase, leading the lives they were
disposed to live, and feeling no threat to their way of life. In J. R.
Green's Short History of the English People, we find a portrait sketch
of Colonel Hutchinson, one of, the Regicides, which I will quote with a few
abridgments.
"With the close of the Elizabethan age, indeed, the
intellectual freedom which had marked it faded insensibly away: the bold
philosophical speculations which Sidney had caught from Bruno, and which had
brought on Marlowe and Raleigh the charge of atheism, died, like her own
religious indifference, with the Queen. But the lighter and more elegant
sides of the Elizabethan culture harmonised well enough with the temper of
the Puritan gentleman.
"The figure of Colonel Hutchinson, one of the Regicides,
stands out from his wife's canvas with the grace and coding of a portrait by
Vandyck. She dwells on the personal beauty which distinguished his youth, on
'his teeth even and white as the purest ivory', 'his hair of brown, very
thickset in his youth, softer than the finest silk, cuding with great loose
rings at the ends.' Serious as was his temper in graver matters, the young
squire of Owthorpe was fond of hawking, and piqued himself on his skill in
dancing and. fence. His artistic taste showed itself in a critical love of
painting, sculpture and all liberal arts' as well as in the pleasure he took
in his gardens, in planting groves and walks and forest trees.'
"His life was orderly and methodical, sparing of diet and of
self- indulgence; he rose early, he never was at any time idle, and hated to
see anyone else so'. The new sobriety and self-restraint marked itself even
in his change of dress. The gorgeous colours and Jewels of the Renascence
disappeared. Colonel Hutchinson 'left off very early the wearing of anything
that was costly, yet in his plainest negligent habit appeared very much a
gentleman'.
"The loss of colour and variety in life was compensated by
solid gains. Greatest among these was the new conception of social equality.
Their common brotherhood in Christ annihilated that overpowering sense of
social distinctions which characterised the age of Elizabeth. The proudest
noble recognised a spiritual equality in the poorest 'saint'. It was felt
even more in the new dignity and self-respect with which the consciousness of
their 'calling' invested the classes beneath the rank of the gentry....
"It is in a Puritan of the middle class that we find the
fullest and noblest expression of the new influence which was leavening the
temper of the time. John Milton is not only the highest, but the completest
type of Puritanism. He was born when it began to exercise a direct power over
English politics and English religion; he died when its effort to mould them
into its own shape was over, and it had sunk again into one of the many
influences to which we owe our English character. His earlier verse, the
pamphlets of his riper years, the epics of his age, mark with a singular
precision three great stages in his history. His youth shows that much of the
gaiety, the poetic ease, the intellectual culture of the Renascence lingered
in a Puritan home. Scrivener and 'precisian' as his father was, he was a
skilled musician; and the boy inherited his father's skill on lute and
organ....
"In spite of the war between playwright and precisian, a
Puritan youth in Milton's days could still avow his love of the stage, 'if
Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest ,Shakespeare, Fancy's child, warble
his native woodnotes wild'. He could gather from the 'masques and antique
pageantry' of the courtrevel hints for his own Comus and Arcades. Nor does
any shadow of the coming struggle against the Church disturb the young
scholar's reverie, as he wanders beneath 'the high embowed roof, with antique
pillars massy proof, and storied windows richly dight, casting a dim
religious light', or as he hears 'the pealing organ blow to the full-voiced
choir below, in service high and anthem clear'. His enjoyment of the gaiety
of life stands in bright contrast with the gloom and sternness which strife
and persecution fostered in the later Puritanism. In spite of what he
described as 'a certain reservedness of natural disposition' which shrank
from 'festivities and jests, in which I acknowledge my faculty to be very
slight the young singer could still enjoy the 'jest and youthful jollity' of
the world around him, its 'quips and cranks and wanton wiles'; he could look
pleasantly on 'at the village fair, 'where the jocund rebecks sound to many a
youth and many a maid, dancing in the chequered shade.'
"There was nothing ascetic in his look, in his slender,
vigorous frame, his face full of a delicate yet serious beauty, the rich
brown hair which clustered over his brow.... He drank in an ideal chivalry
from Spenser, but his religion and purity disdained the outer pledge on which
chivalry built up its fabric of honour. 'Every free and gentle spirit,' said
Milton, 'without that oath, ought to be a knight'. It was with this temper
that he passed from his London school, St. Paul's, to Christ's College at
Cambridge, and it was this temper that he preserved throughout his University
career."
But we have already drawn very generously upon Milton in this book. Even
before the death of Queen Elizabeth Papal aggression was already provoking
anger in the country.
"Single-handed, unsupported by any of the statesmen or
divines about her, the Queen had forced on the warring religions a sort of
armed truce. The main principles of the Reformation were accepted, but the
zeal of the ultra- reformers was held at bay. The Bible was left open,
private discussion was unrestrained, but the warfare of pulpit against pulpit
was silenced by the licensing of preachers. Outer conformity, attendance at
the common prayer, was exacted from all; but the changes in ritual, by which
the zealots of Geneva gave prominence to the radical features of the
religious change which was passing over the country, were resisted. While
England was struggling for existence, this balanced attitude of the Crown
reflected faithfully enough the balanced attitude of the nation; but with the
declaration of war by the Papacy in the Bull of Deposition the movement in
favour of a more pronounced Protestantism gathered a new strength. Unhappily
the Queen clung obstinately to her system of compromise, weakened and broken
as it was. With the religious enthusiasm which was growing up around her she
had no sympathy whatever. Her passion was for moderation, her aim was simply
civil order; and both order and moderation were threatened by the knot of
clerical bigots who gathered under the banner of Presbyterianism. Bigotry was
rousing counter- bigotry. Of these bigots of the left Thomas Cartwright was
the chief. He had studied at Geneva; he returned with a fanatical faith in
Calvinism, and in the system of Church government which Calvin had devised;
and as Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge he used to the full the
opportunities which his chair gave him of propagating his opinions. No leader
of a religious party ever deserved less of after sympathy than Cartwright. He
was unquestionably learned and devout, but his disposition was that of a
mediaeval inquisitor. The relics of the old ritual, the cross in baptism, the
surplice, the giving of a ring in marriage, were to him not merely
distasteful, as they were to the Puritans at large, they were idolatrous and
the mark of the beast."
Cartwright cut no ice, as the saying goes, with the English people. The
spirit of Calvinistic Presbyterianism excluded all toleration of practice or
belief.
As Milton, most modern-spirited of Protestants, put it:
"New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large."
"To the ordinary English Protestant," says J. R. Green, "no
innovation in faith or worship was of small account, if it tended in the
direction of Rome. The peril was too great to admit of tolerance or
moderation....
"We see the Puritan temper already in the Millenary Petition
(as it was called), which was presented to James the First on his accession
by some eight hundred clergymen, about one-tenth of the whole number in his
realm. It asked for no change in the government or organisation of the
Church, but for a reform of its courts, the removal of superstitious usages
from the Book of Common Prayer, the disuse of lessons from the apocryphal
books of Scripture, a more rigorous observance of Sundays, and the provision
and training of preaching ministers. Even statesmen who had little sympathy
with the religious spirit about them pleaded for the purchase of religious
and national union by ecclesiastical reforms. 'Why,' asked Francis Bacon,
'should the civil state be purged and restored by good and wholesome laws
made every three years in Parliament assembled, devising remedies as fast as
time breedeth mischief, and contrariwise the ecclesiastical state still
continue upon the dregs of time, and receive no alteration these forty-five
years or more?' A general expectation, in fact, prevailed that, now the
Queen's opposition was removed, something would be done. Unhappily her
successor proved equally resolute against all changes in Church matters.
"No sovereign could have jarred more utterly against the
conception of an English ruler which had grown up under Plantagenet or Tudor
than James the First. His big head, his slobbering tongue, his quilted
clothes, his rickety legs, stood out in as grotesque a contrast with all that
men recalled of Henry or Elizabeth as his rhodomontade, as his want of
personal dignity, his buffoonery, his coarseness of speech, his pedantry and
cowardice. Underneath this ridiculous exterior, however, lay much natural
ability, a scholar with a considerable fund of shrewdness, mother-wit and
ready repartee. His reading, especially in theological matters, was
extensive; and he was a voluminous author on subjects which ranged from
predestination to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, in
the phrase of Henry the Fourth, 'the wisest fool in Christendom'. He had the
temper of a pedant, a pedant's conceit, a pedant's love of theories, and a
pedant's inability to bring his theories into any relation with actual facts.
All might have gone well had he confined himself to speculations about
witchcraft, about predestination, about the noxiousness of smoking.
"Unhappily for England and for his successor, he clung yet
more passionately to theories of government which contained within them the
seeds of a death-struggle between his people and the Crown. Even before his
accession to the English throne, he had formulated his theory of rule in a
work on The True Law of Free Monarchy; and announced that, 'although a good
King will frame his actions to be according to law, yet he is not bound
thereto, but of his own will and for example-giving to his subjects'. With
the Tudor statesmen who used the phrase, 'an absolute King' or 'an absolute
Monarchy' meant a sovereign or rule complete in themselves, and independent
of all foreign or Papal interference. James chose to regard the words as
implying the monarch's freedom from all control by law or from responsibility
to anything but his own royal will.
"The King's theory was soon as the Divine Right of Kings to
become a doctrine which bishops preached from the pulpit Convocation in its
book of Canons denounced as a fatal error the assertion that 'all civil
power, jurisdiction and authority were first derived from the people and
disordered multitude and either is originally still in them or else is
deduced by their consent naturally from them; and is not God's ordinance
originally descending upon Him and depending upon Him'.
"Cowell, a civilian followed up the discoveries of
Convocation by an announcement that 'the King is above the law by his
absolute power, and that 'notwithstanding his oath he may alter and suspend
any particular law that seemeth hurtful to the public estate'. The book was
suppressed on the remonstrance of the House of Commons, but the party of
passive obedience grew fast. A few years before the death of James; the
University of Oxford decreed solemnly that 'it was in no case lawful for
subjects to make use of force against their princes, or to appear offensively
or defensively in the field against them.' 'As it is atheism and blasphemy to
dispute what God can do' said James in a speech delivered in the Star
Chamber, 'so it is presumption and a high contempt in a subject to dispute
what a King can do, or to say that a King cannot do this or that.'"
Among the King's most ardent supporters and intellectual associates was
John Donne the poet who began his career as an amorist of the most brilliant
type and commemorated it in deathless verse fell deeply in love, eloped and
became a faithful husband had twelve annual children of whom he buried five
and when his wife died under the strain devoted himself to ill-health and his
poetical gift. The King found Donne's erudition greater than his own and his
belief in Divine Right very sustaining. James persuaded him to take Holy
Orders which he had hitherto declined, and made him Dean of St. Paul's, the
first of a long series of distinguished Deans. Whether Donne preferred his
Majesty to his Maker is by no means clear. Donne killed himself when in the
worst of health by insisting upon making his personal attendance upon his
Royal Master and preaching this customary Lenten sermon.
The peculiar temperamental perversion that handed over Donne's worshipful
monarch to a series of youthful male "favourites", of which the Duke of
Buckingham was the chief, and the attempts to marry the Prince of Wales to a
Spanish Catholic Princess, intensified the general uneasiness. There is no
need to detail the "romantic" visit of Buckingham and Prince Charles to
Madrid. That adventure ended in failure. The return of the Prince "was the
signal for a burst of national joy. All London was alight with bonfires, in
her joy at the failure of the Spanish match, and of the collapse, humiliating
as it was, of the policy which had so long trailed English honour at the
chariotwheels of Spain."
There followed an understanding with France and the marriage of Charles I
(who had succeeded to the throne) to Henrietta, the sister of the French
King.
"It was suspected, and suspicion was soon to be changed into
certainty, that in spite of his pledge to make no religious concessions,
Charles had promised on his marriage to relax the penal laws against
Catholics, and that a foreign power had again been given the right of
intermeddling in the civil affairs of the realm. It was men with Catholic
leanings whom Charles seemed disposed to favour. Bishop Laud was recognised
as the centre of that varied opposition to Puritanism, whose members were
loosely grouped under the name of Arminians; and Laud became the King's
adviser in ecclesiastical matters. With Laud at its head the new party grew
in boldness as well as numbers. It naturally sought shelter for its religious
opinions by exalting the power of the Crown. A court favourite, Montague,
ventured to slight the Reformed Churches of the continent in favour of the
Church of Rome, and to advocate as the faith of the Church the very doctrines
rejected by the Calvinists. The temper of the Commons on religious matters
was clear to every observer. 'Whatever mention does break forth of the fears
or dangers in religion, and the increase of Popery,' wrote a member who was
noting the proceedings of the House, 'their affections are much
stirred.'"
Buckingham was murdered in 1628, amidst regrettable rejoicings on the part
of the London mob, Laud became Bishop of London in the same year, and the
Puritan emigration which laid the foundation of New England became an
organised movement. (The Mayflower had sailed from Holland in
1620.)
All through the reign of Charles I, the encroachments of monarchical
absolutism and of both Roman and Anglican Catholicism continued, and at every
challenge the hostility of the mass of English people to these encroachments
was manifest. When, after the failure of a reactionary Army Plot Charles I,
to save his own skin, betrayed his chief supporter, Strafford the whole
country rejoiced.
"Strafford died as he had lived. His friends warned him of
the vast multitude gathered before the Tower to witness his fall. 'I know how
to look death in the face, and the people too,' he answered proudly. 'I thank
God I am no more afraid of death, but as cheerfully put off my doublet at
this time as ever I did when I went to bed.' As the axe fell, the silence of
the great multitude was broken by a universal shout of joy. The streets
blazed with bonfires. The bells clashed out from every steeple. 'Many,' says
an observer, 'that came to town to see the execution rode in triumph back,
waving their hats, and with all expressions of joy through every town they
went, crying "His head is off! His head is off!"'"
Strafford had prepared an army to support the King in Ireland. Now that
army was headless.
"The disbanded soldiers he had raised spread over the
country, and stirred the smouldering disaffection into a flame. A conspiracy,
organised with wonderful power and secrecy, burst forth in Ulster, where the
confiscation of the Settlement had never been forgiven, and spread like
wildfire over the centre and west of the island. Dublin was saved by a mere
chance. In the open country the work of murder went on unchecked. Thousands
of English people perished, and rumour doubled and trebled the number. Tales
of horror and outrage came day after day over the Irish Channel. Sworn
depositions told how husbands were cut to pieces in presence of their wives,
their children's brains dashed out before their faces, their daughters
brutally violated and driven out naked to perish frozen in the woods.
"'Some,' says May, 'were burned on set purpose, others
drowned for sport or pastime, and if they swam kept from landing with poles,
or shot, or murdered in the water many were buried quick, and some set into
the earth breast-high ,and there left to famish.' The revolt was unlike any
earlier rising in its religious character. No longer was it a struggle, as of
old, of Celt against Saxon, but of Catholic against Protestant. The Papists
within the Pale joined hands in it with the wilderness outside the
Pale...."
So the story runs on. The Civil War was fought to a finish and Charles
being a shameless cheat and lIar was finally beheaded for a hitherto
unheard-of crime, treason to the people. Then came the Restoration and a
phase of uncertain loyalty until fresh Jesuit activities roused the popular
distrust again. There was a real plot, but also there was a bogus plot
invented by a scoundrel, Titus Oates. This "Popish Plot", mingling reality
and imagination, produced the usual response from the populace. It became
manifest that James, Duke of York, the King's brother and successor, was
involved in a projected restoration of the papal rule in England.
Never had the French alliance seemed so full of danger to English
irreligion. Europe had long been trembling at the ambition of Louis XIV; it
was trembling now at his bigotry. He declared war at this moment upon
religious freedom by revoking the Edict of Nantes, the measure by which Henry
the Fourth after his abandonment of Protestantism secured toleration and the
free exercise of their worship for his Protestant subjects. It had been
respected by Richelieu even in his victory over the Huguenots, and only
lightly tampered with by Mazarin. But from the beginning of his reign. Louis
had resolved to set aside its provisions, and his revocation of it in 1685
was only the natural close of a progressive system of persecution. The
Revocation was followed by outrages more cruel than even the bloodshed of
Alva. Dragoons were quartered on Protestant families and given the utmost
freedom of outrage, women were flung from their sick-beds into the streets,
children were torn from their mothers' arms to be brought up in Catholicism,
ministers were sent to the galleys.
In spite of the royal edicts, which forbade emigration to the victims of
these horrible atrocities, a hundred thousand Protestants fled over the
borders, and Holland, Switzerland, the Palatinate, were filled with French
exiles. Thousands found refuge in England, and their industry founded in the
fields east of London the silk trade of Spitalfields. But while the English
people beheld these events with horror, James drew from them new hopes. In
defiance of the law, he filled fresh regiments with Catholic officers. He met
the Parliament with a haughty declaration that whether legal or no his grant
of commissions to Catholics must not be questioned, and with a demand for
supplies for his new troops. Loyal as was the temper of the Houses, their
alarm for the Reformed Religion and their dread of a standing army was yet
stronger than their loyalty. The Commons, by a majority of a single vote,
deferred the grant of supplies until grievances were redressed, and demanded
in I their address the recall of the illegal commissions. The Lords took a
bolder tone; and the protest of the bishops against any infringement of the
Test Act was backed by the eloquence of Halifax. Both Houses were at once
prorogued. An ambassador, the Earl of Castlemaine, was sent to implore the
Pope's blessing on these proceedings.
"Catholics were admitted into civil and military offices
without stint, and four Catholic peers were sworn as members of the Privy
Council. The laws which forbade the presence of Catholic priests in the
realm, or the open exercise of Catholic worship, were set at nought. A
gorgeous chapel was opened in the palace of St. James for the use of the
King. Carmelites, Benedictines, Franciscans appeared in their religious garb
in the streets of London, and the Jesuits set up a crowded school in the
Savoy."
The manifest popular "discontent at these acts would have startled a wiser
man into prudence, but James prided himself on an obstinacy which never gave
way; and a riot which took place on the opening of a fresh Catholic chapel in
the City was followed by the establishment of a camp of thirteen thousand men
at Hounslow to overawe the capital.
"James clung to the hope of finding a compliant Parliament,
from which he might win a repeal of the Test Act. In face of the dogged
opposition of the country the elections had been adjourned; and a renewed
Declaration of Indulgence was intended as an appeal to the nation at large.
At its close he promised to summon a Parliament in November, and he called on
the electors to choose such members as would bring to a successful end the
policy he had begun. It was in this character of a royal appeal that he
ordered every clergyman to read the declaration during divine service on two
successive Sundays. Little time was given for deliberation, but little time
was needed. The clergy refused almost to a man to be the instruments of their
own humiliation. The Declaration was read in only four of the London
churches, and in these the congregation flocked out of church at the first
words of it. Nearly all of the country clergy refused to obey the royal
orders. The Bishops went with the rest of the clergy.
"A few days before the appointed Sunday Archbishop Sancroft
called his suffragans together, and the six who were able to appear at
Lambeth signed a temperate protest to the King, in which they declined to
publish an illegal DeclaratIon. 'It is a standard of rebellion,' James
exclaimed as the Primate presented the paper; and the resistance of the
clergy was no sooner announced to him than he determined to wreak his
vengeance on the prelates who had signed the protest. He ordered the
Ecclesiastical Commissioners to deprive them of their sees, but in this
matter even the Commissioners shrank from obeying him. The Chancellor, Lord
Jeffreys, advised a prosecution for libel as an easier mode of punishment;
and the bishops, who refused to give bail, were committed on this charge to
the Tower. They passed to their prison amidst the shouts of a great
multitude, the sentinels knelt for their blessing as they entered its gates,
and the soldiers of the garrison drank their healths. So threatening was the
temper of the nation that his ministers pressed James to give way. But his
obstinacy grew with the danger. 'Indulgence,' he said, 'ruined my father';
and on the 29th of June the bishops appeared as criminals at the bar of the
King's Bench. The jury had been packed, the judges were mere tools of the
Crown, but judges and jury were alike overawed by the indignation of the
people at large. No sooner had the foreman of the jury uttered the words 'Not
guilty' than a roar of applause burst from the crowd, and horsemen spurred
along every road to carry over the country the news of the acquittal."
The last militant act of King James as the skies blackened over him was to
bring over drafts from the Catholic army Tyrconnell had raised for him. This
produced among other things one of the best marching tunes in the British
Army, "Lilliburlero". It was immensely popular. It was sung throughout the
country. The tune is said to have been based upon an old Irish lullaby, but
the words seem to have been put together in a pretended Irish brogue by
Thomas Lord Wharton, and the air was made into what it still is, the most
savagely thunderous and popular of British marching tunes, by no less a
composer than Henry Purcell. He published and fathered it as a﹃New Irish
Tune﹄in 1689 in his Music's Handmaid.
There are endless versions of the words. People improvised and altered as
it passed like a wind through the country. The general burthen ran very much
after this fashion:
"Ho! brother Teague, do you hear the decree?
Lilliburlero, bullen a-la,
That we are to have a new Deputy,
Lilliburlero, bullen a-la.
Lero lero, lilliburlero, lero, lero, bullen a-la.
Ho! by Saint Tyburn, it is the Talbot;
Lilliburlero, bullen a-la.
And he shall cut the Englishman's throat.
Lilliburlero, bullen a-la.
Lero lero, lilliiburlero, lero, lero, bullen a-la.
"Though by my soul the English do prate,
The law's on their side and Christ knows what.
"But if dispensation shall come from the Pope,
We'll hang Magna Carta and them in a rope...
"All in France have taken a swear
That they will have no Protestant heir...
(This easily became "No Protestants there".)
"There was an old prophecy found in a bog
That we shall be ruled by an ass and a dog."
("Dog" was Wharton's word, but the popular voice speedily changed it to
"hog".)
"And now is this prophecy coming to pass,
(Overwhelming Crescendo.)
For Talbot's the hog and James is the ass."
Fantastically bitter doggerel, put it released the accumulating resentment
of the country at the threatened return of Roman Catholic domination.
Thereafter came the "Glorious Revolution", which ultimately established
the Protestant succession in England, confirmed the exclusion of Roman
Catholics from the universities and public office, and relaxed the suspicions
of the general public. The danger was felt to be over. The habitual torpor of
the English mind in the face of theology supervened.
So far I have been following Green's Short History of the English
People. But now I have to resort to other authorities. The name of Lord
George Gordon and the story of the "No Popery" riots of 1780 came back to me,
and I searched Green in vain. I turned up my copy of Barnaby Rudge.
Dickens caricatures the whole affair. To him they are shameful riots,
"begotten of intolerance and persecution". "However imperfectly," he writes,
"those disturbances are set forth in the following pages, they are
impartially painted by one who has no sympathy with the Romish Church, though
he acknowledges, as most men do, some esteemed friends among the followers of
its creed."
Crabbe saw these riots which J. R. Green ignores and describes them in his
Journal to his beloved "Mira", that is to say Sally Elmy, who later on became
his wife. The mob, he says, was a mixture of very various elements.﹃Quiet
and decent﹄he describes it at Westminster, but the storming of the keeper's
house at the Old Bailey and the jail delivery of convicted felons evidently
frightened him. They released all the debtors also, and Newgate was an open
house for all to come and go. A formidable contingent of criminals from the
slums started burning and looting. "About ten or twelve of the mob getting to
the top of the debtors' prison, whilst it was burning, to halloo, they
appeared rolled in black smoke mixed with sudden bursts of fire— like
Milton's infernals, who were as familiar with flame as with each other. On
comparing notes with my neighbours, I find I saw but a small part of the
mischief. They say Lord Mansfield's house is now in flames."
But J. R. Green has not a word to say about these troubles. Like Dickens,
he was saturated with the amiable liberalism of the Gladstonian phase in
English thought. The leopard had changed its spots and everything was
different.
Manifestly these excellent liberals thought that Popery had ceased to be a
danger to the liberties of the English people. I suggest that in this matter
the instincts of that eighteenth-century London crowd were sounder than his
uncritical toleration.
The Oxford Counter Revolution is best dealt with by James Anthony Froude,
in a study under that title, and in his Nemesis of Faith. His
History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish
Armada is also, by the by, a frank and vivid piece of history from the
Protestant point of view. The reader will find only a hostile appreciation of
him in Mr. Garvin's lamentable Encyclopaedia Britannica manifestly
written by a Roman Catholic who remains characteristically and discreetly
anonymous. A timely appreciation by A. L. Rowse in the New Statesman
of March 20th, 1943, sweeps away these insinuations.
"Of all the great Victorians Froude, it seems to me, is the
writer least estimated at his proper worth and most worth while reviving.
There is so much in him that should appeal to our age; in many ways he had
more affinities with the twentieth century than with the nineteenth: the
strain of scepticism in him for one thing, the historian's relativism that
made him see all religions as myths and men's philosophies as
rationalisations of their interests and desires... And what a magnificent
writer; what a stylist! So infinitely better than Carlyle, to whom he
deferred, like the rest of the I am not so sure that in addition to writing
better, he had not more to Carlyle had. Give me Froude every time: a better
historian, a better writer, a more sceptical, a more subtle,
intelligence...
"He was read. He held people's attention. He had admirers if
few defenders and no followers. He was a lonely figure, at the same time as
he was much sought after, and a distinguished person in society....
"... his troubles began with his first books, and persisted
to the last. The Nemesis of Faith is chiefly known for having been publicly
burnt by the Sub-Rector of his college at Oxford when Froude was a young
Fellow. It is deserving of attention on more serious grounds and for its own
sake. Its subject is the ferment of thought about the foundations of faith
stirred up by the Oxford Movement, the dilemma of belief which was such a
critical issue to sensitive minds in the mid-nineteenth century and
especially to those brought up in a clerical environment like Froude, whose
livelihood and career were involved in it."
I have been watching the current "effort to subjugate this easy-going,
profoundly sceptical country to the Roman Catholic Church with a lively
interest. The process has been systematic and impudent to the point of
incredibility. I only realise how much has been attempted now that it is past
its climax. In the same way one did not realise the gravity of the Blitzkrieg
until the climax was past. There has been a Catholic Blitzkrieg upon Britain
during the immense stresses of the war. The one remaining vestige of
Protestant England has been the Protestant Succession. By releasing the Crown
from that Protestant oathand that might easily have been arranged in the name
of "freedom of worship"—that last obstacle would have been removed.
For four war years Great Britain officially has been behaving like a
Catholic country determined to emerge from a deplorable past. The Rev.
So-and-So, S.J., and the Very Venerable So-and-So, S.J., have had a
disproportionately large share of our broadcasting time. Non-Christian voices
have been relatively inaudible although the great majority of peoples in the
British Empire do not profess to be Christians.
The teaching of the Roman Catholic Church puts the Faith before any other
social or political consideration, and the Roman Catholics in any country and
under any form of government constitute an essentially alien body. The over-
confident liberalism of the early nineteenth century enfranchised this body
of outlanders, believing it would in some mysterious manner play the game of
mutual toleration which seemed so natural to the essentially sceptical and
secular liberal mentality. Nothing of the sort ensued. Steadily,
persistently, the Catholic Church has worked for the destruction of that very
liberalism which restored it to political influence. Persecuting relentlessly
where it was in the ascendant, and canting about individual liberty of
conscience wherever it was faced by a modern organisation of society, this
mental cancer has spread itself back to destroy the health and hope of our
modern world.
There is something in this Roman Catholic business that sends me back to
Coleridge's Christabel. The reader may remember how a mysterious
maiden, Geraldine, came to Christabel and sought her protection, and how
Christabel sheltered her in spite of a series of creepy intimations that all
was not right with the visitant.
"And Geraldine...
Softly gathering up her train,
That o'er her right arm fell again;
And folded her arms across her chest,
And couched her head upon her breast;
And looked askance at Christabel—
Jesu, Maria, shield her well!
"A snake's dull eye blinks dull and shy;
And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head,
Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye,
And with something of malice, and more of dread,
At Christabel she looked askance!—
One moment—and the sight was fled!
But Christabel in dizzy trance
Stumbling on the unsteady ground..."
"Again she saw that bosom old,
Again she felt that bosom cold..."
As this present world war goes on, and even if there is some sort of
temporary half peace before it degene1fates into a tangle of minor wars, it
will become plainer and plainer that it is no longer a geographically
determined warfare of governments, nations and peoples, but the world-wide
struggle of our species of release itself from the strangling octopus of
Catholic Christianity. Everywhere the Church extends its tentacles and fights
to prolong the Martyrdom of Man. Through St. Cyr and de Gaullism it assails
the fine liberal tradition of France; it dominates the policy of the British
War Office and Foreign Office, and through these the B.B.C. and the press; by
a disciplined Catholic vote, a casting vote in endless elections and a
sustained organisation of menace and boycott, it silences the frank
discussion of its influence in America. It works counter both to the old
nationalisms that broke away from it at the Reformation and to the emergence
of a scientifically guided world commonweal from the initial experiment of
Russian communism. Like an octopus it has no creative impulse but only an
instinct to survive. In Ireland, Spain, Italy, reactionary France, North and
South America, Japan, and wherever it can stretch a tentacle, it seeks allies
in every element that is socially base that will help it to continue its
struggle against the awakening liberalism of the "United Democracies", as "it
is our hopeful custom to call them.
Here are extracts from an article by Katharine Hayden Salter, in the
(American) Churchman of January 15th, 1943.
"The October 5th (1942) issue of a Toledo newspaper carried
the following statement as a news item:
"Monsignor Sheen, associate professor of philosophy in
Catholic University, Washington, D.C., and director of the Catholic Hour
radio programme, spoke on The Crisis of Christendom, in a meeting
sponsored by the Mary Manse Alumnae Association. He said:
"'We are living at the end of an era, ushered in by the
Protestant Revolt 400 years ago—a revolt that denied authority, so that
as a result we have been living without God, we have tossed Him out of His
own world.' Monsignor Sheen called the war a judgment on the way man has
lived, and said that victory will be ours only on condition that we
repent.
"Simon and Schuster have recently brought out a book, The
Catholic Pattern by Thomas Woodlock. It is built around exactly the same
thesis—that the cause of this war is the Reformation, the 'Revolt' the
'metaphysical heresy' of having left the Catholic Church. 'It is an assault
on the entire Protestant wor1d; and it insists that the Declaration of
Independence itself (written by Thomas Jefferson, a deist and 'heretic' if
ever there was one, so far as Catholic dogma is concerned) was engendered by
the Catholic Pattern....
"In the February 11th, 1928, issue of America, an
important Jesuit publication, Charles J. Mullaly, S.J., states the case
fully. Let me quote a bit from it. Father Mullaly describes in detail the
workings of a Catholic boycott, thought up by his fellow Jesuits of an
earlier day and carried through, in 1913, in Washington, D.C., when a
newspaper tried to investigate conditions in a Catholic home for wayward
girls. He describes the total boycott, dutifully carried through by the laity
and clergy, without a hitch— save one object of Catholic scorn—'a
weak-kneed Catholic advertiser who declared that he did not believe in mixing
business and religion!' Then Father Mullaly proudly says: 'The forty per
cent. loss of circulation now meant also a forty per cent. fall in the rates
for advertising'.... The 'slogan was sounding through Washington,﹃Do not buy
any paper that insults the Catholic religion, and do not buy from any store
that advertises in such a paper.﹄The lesson was a lasting one.'...
"'History often repeats itself. Since some secular magazines
and newspapers now believe, as this Washington editor believed in 1913, that
it pays to insult the Catholic Church and to foster religious controversy,
why cannot Catholics in every city let the history of this counter-attack
repeat itself for them? They fan follow the example of the Catholics in
Washington, in 1913....
"'The lessons learned in Washington in 1913 may briefly be
summed up as follows:
"'1. Do not attack a magazine or newspaper through its
editorial departments but act through its business office.
"'2. When a magazine or newspaper is attacking your
religion, write to the business manager and inform him that you will not buy
the offending periodical again, and mean it....
"'If Catholics follow the example of the Catholics in
Washington in 1913, we shall soon decisively answer the question which the
editors of some secular periodicals are now asking themselves: DOES IT PAY TO
INSULT CATHOLICS?'"
That is the language and technique of this last Catholic offensive. Are
decent Protestants to emulate this foul fighting, are we to demand of our
grocer and bookseller whether he is a Catholic and boycott him if he is, or
would it not be better to restore the alien status of the whole organisation?
Plainly the moral for us to-day is the moral of Chaucer's sailor six long
centuries ago. "Invite no more monks to your house or inn."
To propitiate the Roman Catholic organisation with political office or
power is like establishing friendly relations with an area sneak by handing
him the family silver.
POPE PIUS XII, the open enemy of everything creative and
reconstructive in the world, was first educated in the Gregorian University
and Roman Seminary, figured professorially in the Academy of Noble
Ecclesiastics, was Archbishop of Sardes, 1917, when he tried to persuade the
Kaiser to make a moderate peace, developed his political ideas as Papal
Nuncia in Bavaria and Germany, and so forth. Having tied himself irrevocably
to the Axis, he had to accept, and he accepted all too readily, the
assimilation for mutual assistance of Shintoism and Catholicism.
How far that assimilation has gone let this passage from Professor Karl
Adam's The Spirit of Catholicism bear witness.
"We Catholics," says this. authoritative exponent of Roman
Catholic orthodoxy, "acknowledge readily, without any shame, nay with pride,
that Catholicism cannot be identified simply and wholly with primitive
Christianity, nor even with the Gospel of Christ, in the same way that the
great oak cannot be identified with the tiny acorn. There is no mechanical
identity, but an organic identity. And we go further and say that thousands
of years hence Catholicism will probably be even richer, more luxuriant, more
manifold in dogma, morals, law and worship, than the Catholicism of the
present day. A religious historian of the fifth millennium A.D. will without
difficulty discover in Catholicism conceptions and forms and practices which
will drive from India, China and Japan, and he will have to recognise a far
more obvious 'complex of opposites'. It is quite true, Catholicism is a union
of contraries. But 'contraries are not contradictions'... The Gospel of
Christ would have been no living gospel, and the seed which He scattered no
living seed, if it had remained ever the tiny seed of A.D. 33, and not struck
root, and had not assimilated foreign matter, and had not by the help of this
foreign matter grown up into a tree, so that the birds of the air dwell in
its branches."
It is interesting to consider these "conceptions, forms and practices"
that the Roman Catholic Church, as Professor Karl Adam expounds it, is now
incorporating.
Mr. A. Morgan Young has recently published an admirable summary of them
(The Rise of a Pagan State, 1939). He gives his sources for whatever
statements he makes, so that the interested reader can get his book and
verify and expand what is stated here.
The basis of Shinto is the Kojiki, a compilation of the eighth century
A.D. It is readable in its entirety only by scholars, its language being far
more remote from the Japanese of to-day than eighth-century Anglo-Saxon would
be from current English. For various reasons only portions of it have been
modernised for general use. It begins with a sort of storm of gods neither
made nor begotten but passing away. From this tumult emerge two highly sexual
figures, Izanagi and Izanami, who might be described in Hollywood language as
male and female "sex appeal". They respond to each other with tremendous
vigour, begetting gods and islands and at last a Fire God who burns up his
mother Izanami. But by this time Izanagi is so set on procreation that
everything about him procreates; he throws off his clothes and they become
sea gods and land gods. Finally he produces the Sun Goddess from his left
eye, the Moon God from his right eye and the headlong Susa-no-o by blowing
his nose. After which he seems to have retired and the Sun Goddess and
Susa-no-o occupy the stage.
After various remarkable adventures, no doubt of the greatest spiritual
significance and full of lessons for the true believer, Susa-no-o meets a
formidable damsel-devouring dragon with eight heads and other alarming
accessories, intoxicates the beast with saki, kills it and cuts it up. But
one of the tails resists and breaks his sword, because a better sword is
hidden in it. This he presents to his sister the Sun Goddess. It lies to-day,
thickly swathed in brocade, in the Family Shrine of the Imperial House in
Tokyo. It is one of the Three Sacred Treasures, the sword, the mirror and the
jewel, which the Sun Goddess transmitted to the divine Emperors, the living
Gods of Japan.
To the Catholic mind, accustomed to a widely different system of myths and
absurdities, this reads like monstrous nonsense. It is wiser not to say that
in Japan. For example, Dr. Inoue Tetsujiro, a loyal but liberal-minded
Shintoist ventured to doubt the, authenticity of the Three Sacred Treasures.
He was denounced, his publisher penalised, and he was expelled from the
Imperial University. Later on, while attending the memorial service of a
friend, he was set upon by a gang of pious ruffians and beaten so that one
eye was destroyed. No one was punished for this outrage, which indeed is only
one sample among many of the spirit of renascent Shintoism. It is quite good
form to jump at a man who uses a phrase or makes a gesture that seems lacking
in piety, and stab him. It is like those fierce old colonels in England who
assault people for not standing stiff to "God Save the King". It is the very
spirit of the Trinitarians at Nicaea.
The great assimilation prophesied by Professor Karl Adam has already
begun. The crude early Christians, still in the "acorn" phase, preferred
martyrdom to burning a pinch of incense to the Roman God-Emperors, but the
Roman Catholic Church of to-day has already established friendly relations
with the Shinto faith, and the Japanese Catholic bows in the Shinto temples
in acquiescence to the local supremacy of the Emperor-Divinity over the
Vatican.
There will be no Roman Catholic Church at all in the fifth millennium
A.D., or it would be amusing to speculate how the successors of Professor
Karl Adam, long before then, would have plaited into the Trinity that God of
Male Sex Appeal from whose left eye sprang the Sun Goddess, while he blew
Susa-no-o, the dragon-slaying Susa-no-o, from his nose.
SUCH is Catholicism as it is understood by Pope Pacelli and
Japan. But the spirit of Roman Catholicism as one finds it in America is very
different from that. Roman Catholics in America are influential because of
their solid vote at elections, but for all that the American Roman Catholic
does not like to hear—and to the best of his ability will not
hear—of the Vatican-Japanese alliance. If he is one of the well-trained
faithful he just pretends it isn't there. And we may counterbalance some of
what has gone before by a word or so from a much saner type of Roman
Catholic, Mr. Joseph Dinneen, who recently wrote, and wrote very ably, an
account of this Axis pontiff from the standpoint of an American
journalist.
His frontispiece is a portrait of Pope Pacelli, under which we read these
singular words:﹃Bishop of Rome, Patriarch of the West, Supreme Pontiff of
the Universal Church.﹄I do not know how far Mr. Dinneen endorses this
inscription. But in his Preface he tells very disarmingly of how it struck
him when he learnt that Pius X was an inveterate cigar smoker and he realised
that "Popes are human". He says:
"The doctrine of infallibility always puzzles my Protestant
friends. The answer to the question on this in the Catholic catechism is:
'The Church teaches infallibly when it speaks through the Pope and the
bishops, united in general council, or through the Pope alone when he
proclaims to the faithful a doctrine of faith or morals.' Like a good many
other Catholics, I have often been told by smug friends that my intellect is
necessarily limited and bounded by my obedience to the Pope, and I shrug my
shoulders and turn away, because I realise no amount of argument can convince
them that I can be happy in my religion, believe in its tenets and teachings
implicitly, and still think for myself in matters temporal; that the foreign
policy of the Secretary of State at the Vatican, for instance, is a temporal
matter, and I can disagree with the position of the Church in Spain, and
still be a good Catholic and receive the sacraments."
That is good, plain American Catholicism. And there is not a word of truth
in it. It is out of date. It is almost pre-Reformation stuff. It should be
distinguished as Old Catholicism. It is not. the Catholicism of an ever more
desperately aggressive Papacy....
For many men who were once good Catholics, the doctrine of infallibility
was a turning-point.
On matters of Church history Dr. G. G. Coulton is a patient, unrelenting,
trustworthy guide, and no one interested in the fatal concentration of power
in the hands of the Pope since 1870 should fail to read him: In his book,
Papal Infallibility (1932), he shows how such historical authorities
as Lord Acton for example were driven into open opposition by that dogma.
Acton was himself a Catholic, the one outstanding historian the Church can
claim in modern times, yet he wrote of this doctrine with sorrowful prophetic
insight: "Erected originally as an impregnable fortress against advancing
liberalism it seems more likely now to prove an ineluctable death-trap. ' For
the moment, indeed, it might have seemed to justify the Roman Church
completely in all her actions; but now, more and more clearly, we see that
she needs to summon up all the memories of her past prestige, and all the
resources of her elaborate bureaucracy, and all her disciplinary severity, in
order to put a colourable face upon this doctrine, so strange both from the
historical and from the philosophical point of view."
Here is a more emphatic statement from the same source. Lord Acton is
writing to the Catholic historian Lady Blennerhasset:
"The accomplices of the Old Man of the Mountains (the classic assassins of
history) picked off individual victims, but the Papacy contrived murder and
massacre on the largest and also on the most cruel and inhuman scale. They
were not only wholesale assassins, but they also made the principle of
assassination a law of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation"
(Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton, 1917, Vol. i, p.
55).
From 1820 to 1860 at least 300,000 unarmed men, women and even children
died in massacres, on the scaffold, or in pestilential jails for claiming
what we now consider human rights.
"The more Catholic the country, indeed, the more savage were the torture
and bloodshed. The Kingdom of the Sicilies (Italy and Sicily) witnessed the
longest and vilest reaction. General Coletta claims that there were 200,000
victims from 1790 to 1830 and his Neapolitan successor claims 250,000 in the
next thirty ears; and as late as 1860 the brutality of the oppression shocked
all Europe. These figures are uncertain, since it is very difficult to
compile them, and in the case of Italy they include a percentage of armed
rebels, but after a severe enquiry I find that at least 300,000 men and women
and children perished in Italy, Spain and Portugal. In the Pope's own
kingdom, with a population of about 3,000,000, many thousands died by
execution, in massacres, or in jails of an incredibly cruel character. The
savagery of the clerical-royalists and the foul character of most of the
monarchs are described in the Cambridge Modern History and all
authoritative manuals....
"One other point must be made. The social order which was
protected by this brutality was as inefficient as it was unjust, and it was
at its worst in the Pope's own States. On this all authorities are agreed.
Lady Blennerhasset approvingly quotes in the Cambridge Modern History
(x, 164) the reflection of Father Lamennais, on visiting Rome, that it was
'the most hideous sewer that ever offended the eye of man'." (A History of
the Popes, by Joseph McCabe. Watts, London, 1939.)
Dinneen tells a delightful anecdote of the American Cardinal Gibbons
returning from the election of Pius XI. He was asked—manifestly by an
American—what he thought of papal infallibility. He reflected. "Well,"
he said, with a twinkle, "he called me Jibbons."
Very plainly American Catholicism is bound to inflict some uncomfortable
gymnastics on our Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Pontiff. We godless people carry on our
intellectual warfare for converts and subsidies against the Catholicism of
Dinneen, but I, for one, doubt very greatly whether in his heart Dinneen's
distrust of Pius XII varies very widely from mine.
Now in the face of the military alliance and dependence of the﹃United
Nations﹄upon the magnificent morale of the Russian and Chinese peoples, we
have this Axis Pope clamouring for a bitter conflict against something
"Unchristian" called "Bolshevisation", which will destroy every decent thing
in existence, superiors and inferiors, the family—the Catholics are
always very great on the family—and dividends.
BEFORE me as I write is a very interesting document. It
opens up the grave question for all who profess themselves Christians, to
consider exactly what, in the face of that document, they mean by that
profession. It was published in 1938, and it is headed United Christian
Front. The chairman of this United
Christian Front is that Captain Archibald Ramsay who, with Mosley, was
interned on the outbreak of the war. His Vice-Chairman and Treasurer was the
late Sir Henry Lunn, a sound Tory, who, like sir Samuel Hoare, believed that
the adventurer Franco was "a Christian gentleman"..
Another member of this United Christian Front was—or is for I do not
know how far it still exists as an active body—that steadfast defender
of his investments against the quite imaginary excessive proliferation of the
non-investing classes, Dean Inge. I dealt with his peculiarities in a little
Penguin book, The Commonsense of War and Peace, and Inge has never
replied to my challenge. But here is Sir Henry Lunn defending the Dean
against the Bishop of Chelmsford for quoting him as saying: "one-quarter of
the priests and nuns in Spain have been murdered, some of them after horrid
torture". The Bishop, it seems, had written that this was not so, and had
quoted the Vatican Osservatore Romano, which could hardly be regarded
as an anti-Catholic publication, for claiming only 6,000, out of Dean Inge's
quarter of 106,743. But that 6,000, says Sir Henry, refers only to secular
priests, implying rather than asserting that the Dean was telling the awful
truth. Poor Sir Henry wasted his subtleties. Back comes the Dean with
this:
"The Bishop of Chelmsford misquotes me as saying that one-
quarter of the nuns in Spain have been murdered. I said nothing of the kind.
Many have been killed; but the Bishop's proteges were more often content to
strip them naked and violate them.
"It is really rather horrible to find a Bishop championing
men who, acing on instructions from Moscow to exterminate the middle class,
have slaughtered, at a low estimate, 200,000 helpless and harmless people,
and whose avowed object is to extirpate the Christian faith in the country of
St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross.
"There is abundance of well-documented evidence for those
minority, I fear, who wish to know the truth."
No documented evidence was adduced, because no documentary evidence can be
adduced.
I will not pillory the odd collection of names that rallied about Captain
Archibald Ramsay in 1938, for some of them may have come to see the error of
their ways since that year. The point to note is the intense fear of Moscow
and the frantic disposition to get together with anyone professing to be
pro-Christian, even with Franco and his Moslem blackamoors against this
dreaded new thing in the world. Ramsay, Mosley, Mussolini, Dean Inge, the
King of Italy, de Gaulle, Pitain (not the gallant French aviator but the old
man of Vichy), and at the apex of the pyramid this Shinto Catholic Pope, Pius
XII! What a motley crew it is! United only in one thing, and that is fear and
hatred of a sane scientific equalitarian order in the world. How far are we
people of the new order going to let such people waste the new-born hope of
mankind?
The latest drive to rally "Believers" is an amalgamation of two
organisations. Its sole objective, so far as I can find an understandable
objective, is to drive every honest teacher of history or science out of our
schools. Then our people's minds can be bunged up with mud thoroughly and
finally. 'The first and most formidable is a Roman Catholic organisation
called The Sword of the Spirit. The second is called Religion and Life, and
it seems to be largely under the sway of Mr. T. S. Eliot. Roman Catholicism
preserves a strong tradition of cannibalism, and I can give a good guess who
will live longest on this conjoint raft. It will be amusing to watch its
gyrations.
The programme is extremely vague about the relations of the Primate of all
England and the Primate of England and Cardinal Hinsley and the Moderator of
the Free Church Federal Council, to the raft and each other. Out of
consideration for His Holiness, there is no arrangement for beating off
sharks and the Japanese, who are also, as we have seen, deeply religious
people. What seems to me a serious practical oversight is that there is no
provision against poaching. You know these gentlemen will poach. There will
be suspicions and denunciations.
I can imagine the scene: the whispering silence of these holy men and then
a sudden outcry.﹃Here! whose orphan are you stealing? He comes under my
grant!﹄Confusion on the raft and a splash. Commotion among the sharks.
Unanimity is restored only by the appearance of a drifting biological
experimental station chock-full of dangerous books about reality and truth.
If it hits against the raft, it may send the whole crazy accumulation to the
bottom. "All hands to the sweeps!" For a time after this﹃Crisis for
Christianity﹄the United Christian Front is restored.
I am deriding organised High Church and Catholic Christianity, and I would
like to make it plain that in doing so I am not disregarding what I might
call the necessity of many minds, perhaps most young minds, feel for
something one can express by such phrases as "the fatherhood of God" and "the
kingdom of heaven within us". That is the need the Roman Catholic Church
trades upon and betrays.
To return to that typical Pope, Pope Pius XII. It is
necessary to insist upon his profound ignorance and mental inferiority. Most
of us are still living in the old traditions of society, we honour and obey
those who are put in authority over us, and it shocks us profoundly to hear
that kings and ministers and particularly the Roman Catholic hierarchy are
necessarily much more ignorant than a great and increasing multitude of quite
common men. But let us consider the peculiar limitations to which these
priests are subjected. They have been set aside from the common sanity of
mankind from their youth up.
In the atmosphere in which Pius XII was educated, what chance had he to
acquire even the most general ideas about modern biology or modern thought?
Life is too short for knowledge anyhow, but consider how much of his brief
candle has guttered to waste.
Deduct, for example, from his natural allowance of years and days the time
consumed by the services of the Church. Every day there is a round of
ceremonies he must perform. How many hours they consume I do not know, but
they must mean a considerable moiety, and, apart from that, there are the
priestly duties of the confessional, the arrangements of fasts and festivals.
They do not leave him much time for extraneous reading. A common British or
American out-of-work living on the dole and reeding the abundant literature
of an ordinary public library, can, if he has the curiosity, acquire a
knowledge of modern biology and modern thought and modern ways of life,
incomparably greater than the equipment of any Pope who has ever lived. The
out-of-work has the advantage of a considerable and growing mass of digested
biological thought and fact upon which scientific enquirers have spent a
succession of lifetimes—which he can read without restriction. Even if
the Pope had been free to read modern scientific literature in such scraps of
time as were available for that purpose, he would still be a relatively
ignorant man. But a Catholic priest is not free to read what he likes. His
reading and thinking are elaborately controlled and rationed. The Church is
so essentially out of harmony with reality and the truth of things, and is so
aware of it, that it has had to train its priests from the outset to shut
their eyes, to close their ears.
Watch a priest in a public conveyance. He is fighting against disturbing
suggestions. He must not look at women lest he think of sex. He must not look
about him, for reality, that is to say the devil, waits to seduce him on
every hand. You see him muttering his protective incantations, avoiding your
eye. He is suppressing "sinful" thoughts.
That type is the binding material of the Church. The appeal of sex is as
natural to a young male as eating. Its suppression is a defiance of
everything for which a healthy male exists. So that in the priestly mind we
deal with something frustrated and secretly resentful, something sexually as
well as intellectually malignant. And this applies, through all the glamour
of his vestments, incense and so forth, to the Pope, as to any other member
of the hierarchy. We are dealing with ideas left over from the Dark Ages, in
the brains of a being at once puerile, perverted and malignant. Pius XII,
when we strip him down to reality, showed himself as unreal and ignorant as
Hitler. Possibly more so. Both have been incoherent and headlong men, whom
chance has made figure-heads for the undisciplined foolishness of this dying
age. The mere fact that a man by accident and misdirection can trail a vast
trace of bloodshed and bitter suffering about the world does not make him any
the greater or wiser. Before mankind gets rid of it, the Papacy may be
drowning our hopes for the coming generation in a welter of blood—in an
attempt to achieve a final world-wide St. Bartholomew's Eve—and it will
not add an inch to his stature nor alter the fact that the Pope, any Pope, is
necessarily an ill-educated and foolish obstacle, a nucleus of base
resistance, heir to the tradition of Roman Catholicism in its last stage of
poisonous decay, in the way to a better order in the world.
THE END
This site is full of FREE ebooks - Project Gutenberg Australia